Dinner Or Disaster

I'm a fan of Chris Lester. Not only is he a talented writer and podcaster, a wonderful voice actor, and an all-around awesome dude, but also apparently he's also a mad scientist in the kitchen.

In his latest blog entry, he shared the stream-of-consciousness that went into the creation of a recent meal.

I love the spontaneity of [cooking]. I love the feeling of spur-of-the-moment genius, using resources at hand to accomplish an unexpected goal — like sauteing veggies in the rendered fat of the bird that I’m in the process of cooking. If I’d *planned* that, I’d just be an educated cook following a procedure ... but since I came to it on the spur of the moment, seizing on the combination of theoretical knowledge and serendipitous opportunity, I got to feel like something else:

A Mad Scientist.

I realized, as I was eating my latest creation, that Mad Scientists haven’t gone away in the modern era; we’ve just relegated them to culinary science, because that’s the one area where we can afford that kind of off-the-wall experimentation and inspired lunacy. Today’s Mad Scientist is the guy on Iron Chef who gets handed a tank full of lobsters and has to come up with four different dishes AND A DESSERT that all use those creepy little things in different ways. Genius in action, but safely confined to a realm where it can’t really do any harm.

Well Chris, in the immortal words of somebody else's uncle, Allez cuisine! Furthermore, also remember, that unlike the case of Frankenstein's (Frahnk-en-steen's?) monster, in cooking we can safely say, "Fire GOOD!"