MacArthur Park

I tried to make my own croûtons today. It was a fucking disaster. Here is my recipe for how to destroy an afternoon, and fuck up a Caesar salad:

Ingredients

• 2-3 pieces of dry or stale bread
• Oregano
• Black pepper
• Salt
• 3 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves of crushed garlic
• 1 seemingly boundless, but ready-to-pop-like-a-dirigible sense of optimism

Method

• Preheat oven to 200 C (400 F).
• Trim crusts from the bread then cut into small cubes -- or if you want: rectangular prisms.
• Put the olive oil and crushed garlic in a bowl. Add bread. Season with a pinch of salt, add black pepper and oregano as desired. Mix well.
• Place the garlic and oil laden croûtons on a baking tray and cook for ten minutes.

Hypothetically speaking, which one of these steps would you think is the hardest (for me) to complete successfully? Don't answer right away. You might think it's the third task, which encompasses a number of minor steps and multiple ingredients, but that would be incorrect. Instead, look closely at the last one. For some reason, I interpreted this as:

• Place the garlic croûtons on a baking tray, put the tray in the oven, fire up a joint, and go out to the patio for a few minutes to enjoy the warm breeze and afternoon sun. Soak it in, man. Then, if you feel your throat's a little dry, go into the kitchen for a drink of water only to find black smoke pouring out of the oven like the smokestacks at a steel factory, and panic, and open the oven door to face a wall of searing heat and a conflagration of burning oil and bread. After removing the charred remains from the oven, cough a few times, throw out the wasted croûtons with a sense of shame and disgust, and pity yourself while tasting foul black carbon in the back of your throat. Squint and cry from the smoke in your eyes.

Now, obviously I read that last step incorrectly and I felt pretty dumb about the whole episode. Nevertheless, as the smoke the in kitchen cleared, I took a sip of water -- as my throat was still a little dry -- and faced my surroundings. I realized I still had a preheated oven, and all the ingredients at the ready. And damn it, a Caesar salad isn't the same without croûtons. I dismissed the antecedent "incident" as a mere hiccup and started anew. The phoenix of salads ingredients reborn, I mixed the ingredients in the still oily bowl and plopped down the croûtons on the rejuvenated and warm baking sheet. As I triumphantly threw the tray into the oven I remembered: ten minutes.

I walked out of the smoky kitchen and again on to the patio; in the fresh summer air, I reflected thoughtfully. I found myself surprised at having overcome such immediate and thorough failure, with an equally immediate and thorough sense of back-on-the-horseosity. (I have been known to threaten suicide in the face of lesser adversities.) I was encouraged. I felt light. I also felt a little thirsty. And as I returned to the kitchen to get myself a drink of water, I found black smoke pouring out of the oven. I rushed to the stove, threw open the oven door and unleashed a flurry of obscenities; I was not oblivious to the sense of poetic comeuppance with which my words echoed back from the oven's small metal interior, intermingled with face-melting heat and smoke.

I was 0-2 and I didn't try again. I ate my Caesar salad with extra bacon bits as petty compensation for my dual-blunder. It wasn't the same.