It’s the Pitts: The Burn Unit

by Lee Pitts

I hate to admit this, but of the 11 books I’ve written, the second-best seller was a cookbook – and I can’t cook. 

Oh sure, I can push the buttons on a microwave, and I know my way around a can opener. I know the recipe for ice cubes, and I’m quite good at making them. 

I can make Campbell’s soup, and it only boils over the pan about half the time. There are even some frozen dinners I can make without the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms going off. 

I burn the salad and can never adjust the toaster right, and this is why we keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. 

If I try anything more complicated, even the hogs we raise wouldn’t eat it. 

Having said all of this, there are people who have eaten my cooking and have gone on to lead normal and mostly healthy lives.

I should know how to cook because my mom was a great cook, but I think I inherited my grandma’s cooking gene. She was a very talented singer and musician, but she never learned how to cook from her mother because they had a live-in maid who did all of the cooking. 

So, grandma always burned the bacon until it became elemental carbon, and this is why we called her kitchen the “burn unit.” 

Her biscuits were known far and wide as “sinkers,” and she had to get help lifting them out of the oven. The white gravy she made for chicken fried steak tasted like the library paste you ate in kindergarten. You had two choices of how you wanted your eggs – black or brown. 

At grandma’s house, we prayed AFTER the meal, asking God to not let us all die from food poisoning. Her cooking was the reason grandpa was so thin he had to run through a shower twice to get wet.

As for me, for 33 years now I can hardly eat anything, and I eat the exact same thing every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For 10 years of my life, I lived on cans of Ensure. I think it destroyed all of my taste buds, and this is why my cooking always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Now I live mostly on potatoes, noodles and soup, so learning how to cook would be a huge waste of time. 

However, there was a time 50 years ago I wanted to learn how to be a cook, because in reading the want-ads, I learned being a cook on a ranch paid more than being a cowboy. But I guarantee if I went out with the chuckwagon as a cookie it would have been known as the “upchuck wagon.”

Not knowing how to cook became a real problem for me in college when I shared an apartment with three other roommates and each of us had to take one week a month cooking supper. 

After the first meal I prepared, one roommate sent his food back, another staggered and collapsed on the couch and yet another spent the night in the bathroom with my Hamburger Helper heaving out both ends. Even the garbage disposal got ulcers. 

So, we all agreed I would trade and do dishes for two weeks a month and leave the cooking to the guys who actually knew how to do it.

As a kid I often had to make my own lunch, and my favorite recipe was a minute steak covered with Hormel chili beans. 

I also made a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich, although my wife says instead of a “PBJ,” mine was actually a “PBBJ” because I made it with peanut butter on one piece of bread, jelly on the other and both sides slathered with butter. This horrifies my wife, who says using butter on a PBJ is akin to putting ketchup on vanilla ice cream. 

I absolutely love brownies, but I could never make them because it requires cracking open an egg and I hate eggs. Actually, my “I Hate Chicken Cookbook” should have been called the “I Hate Eggs Cookbook.” 

Just the thought of someone breaking open the yellow yolk of an egg over a perfectly good pancake or mixing it in with delicious hashbrowns is enough to send me into cardiac arrest or anaphylactic shock.