Chris Vannoy

I’ve been diving deeper and deeper into a cooking rabbit hole over the last several years, and it really accelerated this year after a work colleague asked me “What do you do for fun?” and I couldn’t think of an answer and blurted out “Cooking”.

And here we are. I’m going to ramble a bit in the hopes that this is interesting to somebody - even if it’s me a year from now when I can shake my head ruefully at how silly I was.

Today’s a light day for me. For dinner, I’m making roasted asparagus, twice baked potatoes, and a pair of sous vide, bone-in pork chops. I’ll probably throw in a pan sauce of some sort as well.

The first two of those are familiar: The asparagus is a family favorite and the twice baked potatoes I made on a whim a few weeks back and everybody liked them.

The sous vide is still a new appliance for me. I made a turkey roulade for Christmas with it, and the turkey turned out perfectly moist, but I couldn’t effectively sear that big a mass. I’ve also made a chipotle chicken sort of thing in it for tacos which was fine I guess.

The setup

Lately, I’ve been setting up our largest cutting board over a towel on one end of our kitchen island as a work station for all my prep work.

I keep my chef’s knife next to the board and a bowl for scraps nearby.

I also have a black cross-strapped (rather than one that ties behind your neck) apron to keep my clothes clean - or really, to give me a place to wipe my hands when I’m in a hurry.

If my family’s out, I’ll bring down my Bluetooth speaker and crank up some classic punk or heavy industrial while I prep and cook. If they’re home (like the are today), I’ll just use the iPhone speaker and keep it to something clean.

As I’ve cooked more and more, I’ve learned the importance of prep work - or mise en place. I look at the recipes I’m cooking and get all the ingredients ready before anything starts cooking (an exception today might be throwing potatoes in the oven to bake while I prep the rest).

I’ve also become a huge believer that you can’t have enough towels (we’re pushing twenty flour sack towels now) or enough bowls.

The other adjustment I’ve made over time is to make sure the dishwasher is empty (or at least dirty with room) and all hand-wash dishes are clean and put away before I start. I generate a lot of dirty dishes and need some out of the way place to put them - having an empty dishwasher works great for that (and makes later cleanup significantly easier).

With all of that out of the way …

The prep

Like I said, today is pretty light.

I need to poke some holes in some potatoes before chucking them into the oven for an hour.

I need to mince some garlic for the asparagus, some more for the pan sauce, plus peel a clove for the chops. Aside: I didn’t grow up with actual garlic being a thing. It’s been one of the earliest and best revelations once I started trying to cook more seriously.

I need to trim the particularly woody ends from the asparagus.

I need to cut up a green onion.

I’ll need ½ cup of buttermilk, a 1/3 cup of sour cream, and a ¼ of butter for the potatoes.

After that, it’s time to season the chops with salt and pepper and get them into a plastic bag. I didn’t feel like dragging out the vacuum sealer for this, and ziploc bags work fine using the water displacement technique.

Now, it’s time to plug in the immersion circulator and let it come up to temp - 147 degrees.

The cook

Once it’s at temp, it’s time to drop in the chops and wait an hour.

Meanwhile, the potatoes are done with the first bake. Time to let them cool a bit before ripping their guts out and mashing them to bits while adding all the other stuff (bacon bits! cheddar cheese! that dairy I mentioned earlier!)

Then it’s back into the oven for 20 minutes or so.

The asparagus gets put on a baking sheet, doused in olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper and sprinkled with the minced garlic (aside: this is good with Parmesan cheese, too). They’ll go in the oven after the potatoes, but it doesn’t hurt to get it prepped now.

The potatoes come out, and then I crank to oven to 450 degrees before throwing in the asparagus.

Meanwhile, the chops’ time in the water bath is up.

I get a pan heating to medium-high on the stove, while I taken them out of their bag (save the juice) and pat them dry with paper towels.

A little vegetable oil in the pan, and in go the chops to sear - including the edges.

Add a knob of butter and baste the chops with it a bit until everything looks crispy.

Set those on the cutting board to slice in a few minutes.

Pull the asparagus, turn off the oven.

Add some garlic and then the pork juices from the bath to the pan to deglaze and reduce. A splash of apple cider vinegar. Finish by mounting the sauce with some butter and checking for seasoning.

Plate everything up …

The result

The pork looked amazing, but ended up pretty tough. Most of the family didn’t finish, and I think I’m going to need to experiment a lot more with this sous vide machine because it’s hit or miss on delivering what I expect. The pan sauce also didn’t work … I likely needed to empty to fat from the pan before adding the juice and trying to make a sauce.

Meanwhile, that was about the best batch of asparagus I’ve made in a while and I think everybody went back for seconds of the twice-baked potatoes.

Regardless, tomorrow I’m firing things up again to make stuff for my lunches (mashed cauliflower and roasted broccoli to go with some freezer turkey meatloaf) and a batch of chicken and broccoli mac and cheese for dinner with the kids.

But I’ll save you those gory details …

While reading Brent Simmon’s blog post on his New Years resolution to better channel his anger, it struck me that I’ve been struggling with similar misdirected (and frequently swallowed) anger over the last three years.

It’s also been getting worse. I find myself tipping quickly into anger, then hiding most of it and instead directing into being curt, short and a smart-ass. My family and coworkers might disagree on how well I’ve been hiding it, mind you.

A lot of it - for me especially - comes down to a lack of control. I tend to anger when I expect something to be some particular way and then it isn’t.

Tellingly, the angriest I’ve been in my life was one November night in 2016. We’re talking shouting and banging my car hood and steering wheel angry.

So much of what I’ve been expecting from the outside world is so fundamentally broken that there’s a base level of anger already there since that day.

And now, when something at work doesn’t work the way I expect it to, or my kids don’t do something I expect them to do, or when I realize my wife didn’t empty the dishwasher when I went to bed early last night, I feel this flash of anger - when it really shouldn’t be there.

Work stuff happens because something didn’t get communicated properly and stuff is hard.

My kids have autism and stuff is hard.

My wife had a long day yesterday and didn’t know I was expecting the dishwasher to be empty this morning. It also wasn’t a big deal and I did it instead.

Often, that anger is also self-directed … angry at all the things I’m not doing. This anger’s not really justified either.

These are all just flashes of anger, rarely expressed or escaping from my brain … but they’re there and they’ve been coming more frequently.

And I’m finding that just writing this down is helping more than a little. Admitting that I’ve spent much of the last three years kinda angry all the time is helping.

The other things that have helped include cooking (it’s one reason I’ve been falling deeper and deeper into that particular rabbit hole recently), drinking (alone), sleeping, being alone … all things that allow me to either tune out the world or to exert some level of control.

When I’m alone, I’m in control of what I do - like writing a blog post, for instance.

When I’m cooking, I’m in control.

When I’m in control, the anger fades.

It’s early in 2020, and the world spins further out of control … but I’m going to continue to find avenues where I can have at least the illusion of control, some hard center of certainty in the midst of all the madness and anger to come.

In the just passed (observed) decade I:

• Had a second kid.
• Found out both kids are on the Autism Spectrum.
• Went into massive medical debt getting them therapy.
• Had five jobs - plus a wee bit of freelancing.
• Got fired for the first time.
• Started a ridiculous quest - to see a home game at every FBS football school.
• Tried and failed to build my own company at least three times (maybe more if we count landing pages).
• Had the two most rewarding jobs of my career (in two very different ways).
• Lost contact with a lot of friends and family.
• Grew to love Indianapolis and become frustrated with Indiana.
• Quit smoking after doing so pretty regularly since college.

As I look forward to the next (observed) decade:

• I’ll get to see those kids graduate high school and start college (or get darn close). OMFG.
• I’ll try to teach those kids to drive.
• I intend to make a lot more progress on my quest.
• Sometime in there, that debt load should clear - at least I surely hope so.
• As my kids get older, it should get easier to keep up with folks.
• Do what I can to improve Indy - even if it’s just picking up litter.
• Cook a lot more.
• Travel a lot more.
• Double down on the good stuff, the stuff I like, and try to minimize the stuff I don’t.
• Screw up just as much stuff - if not more - than I did the last ten years.