I’ve said before that I don’t want Chainsaw Buffet to turn into a “job� or “commitment� (aside from a commitment to quality of sorts) to anyone, so what I am about to say may sound strange. In fact, it just might have you thinking that the old Chef has gone straight out of his gourd and run screaming off the cliffs of insanity, where he will spend the rest of his days babbling nonsensically in a nice padded cell wearing one of those white coats that lets you hug yourself all day long. Or perhaps you already thought that a long time ago, and this comes as no big shock to you. At any rate, here goes:
I am making Chainsaw Buffet my job and making a commitment to write one article for this site a day for one month.
“But Chef!� you might cry, “you’re unemployed! Isn’t making writing for a not-very-serious and downright small and unknown web site your job kind of like cheating?� Indeed it would be, if I was making it my job in order to impress people or to try to make money at it (not that the Buffet turns a profit for any of us, much to the consternation of our Maitre d’, who was planning on using his share of the ill-gotten gains to start a shelter for wayward Star Wars fans left homeless after being kicked out of their parents’ basements).
It would be, were that the case. I am, however, making this my “job� (in a sense) not because I expect to get paid for it, but for myself. You see, the Chef is currently somewhat less than fully employed and has a bit of spare time on his hands. In fact, I have been almost without direction (not to turn this into one of those whiny, boring dear-diary blog sites that few people read and even fewer want to read). So, rather than spend my days looking at porn and finding ways to creatively destroy my liver, I decided to do something almost as useful as looking at porn – writing for here. My life needs some structure and good habits in addition to the bad (and the Chef does indeed have his bad habits, even discounting the ones involving feeding the Grillmaster’s cats to the Chef’s pet python).
Life demands structure, my life no less than anyone else’s. The Chef may revel in chaos, but he also understands that you must have a regular routine or you never get anything done. So this will be my routine, sitting down each day to write articles for this inane little site. Whether or not they actually get posted the same day I write them is irrelevant (since they won’t, because as of this writing the Maitre d’ is still not finished setting up the site – work, code monkey slave, work!), but you, dear reader, should rest assured that I am being honest with you and yourself when I say that I wrote this series at the rate of one article per day. Thirty articles in thirty days, if you like.
By now you’re probably wondering just what unsavory ingredients will be going into the Chef’s thirty-day casserole of articles (okay, now we’ve gotten the horribly-overdone food jokes out of the way). The answer at this point is, “a little of this, a little of that.� This will be like everything else I write for Chainsaw Buffet – anything and everything that may catch my interest. The only real difference is the rate at which I’m writing (and your assignment for tonight is, given that the Chef writes 1,000 words per day for 30 days, calculate the momentary velocity of his fingers on the keyboard at t = 2.5 days).
So…here we go. Article number one:
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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