The catfish that almost killed me

In writing this blog it’s tempting to only recount the successes, to post only photos of the beautiful finished dishes and regale you, gentle reader, with semi-authoritative recipes.

In short, it’s easy to make cooking look easy.

But cooking is not easy. Nor is it safe.

There are the everyday, ordinary debacles. Biscuits that look beautiful, but upon tasting lack a key ingredient: salt. Believe me, one teaspoon of salt makes a big difference to eight biscuits.

The four-hour artisanal bread recipe that rose twice on the counter but collapsed entirely in the oven.

The sound of the juice of 15 lemons — wrestled by hand out of each citrus skin to make the perfect lemonade — cascading down the sink drain. I knocked over the bowl while reaching for a strainer.

Of course, there are also the spectacular saves. The moment, just before I slid the German chocolate cake in the oven, when I realized I had forgotten the baking powder. Later, no one noticed I’d stirred it, not “into the dry mixture” as the cookbook commanded, but straight into the batter with a fork.

More than once, however, I’ve shrugged at my horrified wife and said, “It was only on fire for a minute.”

One time I did myself serious harm.

“Hmm. This needed stitches. Is there some reason you didn’t go to the emergency room?” the doctor asked me, one eyebrow cocked high on his forehead.

“Uh. Well. It was 2 a.m. It stopped bleeding eventually. My health insurance charges a $100 copay.”

“Hmm.”

I didn’t tell him I’d been slicing a watermelon, for fun, in the small hours of the morning because it was my birthday and my present that year was a professional electric knife sharpener.

For hours I had honed each blade, sliding my entire set of mismatched cutlery through the diamond grinders again and again. I could literally use them to shave the hair off my forearms.

I had taken particular pains with the 8-inch chef’s knife, the workhorse of my kitchen. I had to test it.

I opened the fridge. There, a huge watermelon, picked two days ago at a farm not 40 miles from my house. It had been cooling in the crisper. Perfect. I thought.

It took only a second. One wrong move. A tiny slip. The knife thudded against flesh, butterflying my left pointer finger like a jumbo shrimp.

Blood erupted, spreading over my hand, dripping onto the flesh of that beautiful fruit — a fruit as red as the blue language issuing from my mouth as I tried to staunch the flow.

It did stop bleeding eventually. You can barely see the scar now.

Another time, I could have died.

It was a Saturday in 1996, late summer, when I’d just returned from two weeks in my own culinary mecca, New Orleans.

I could still feel the rough planks of the Decatur Street boardwalk scraping my bare legs as I sat down to lunch — my naked feet in the Mississippi River, a cold Barq’s root beer warming between my thighs, my teeth in a Central Grocery muffuletta. I hummed through the flavors of olive and vinegar and cured meat to the tunes of the city’s best jazz players serenading me from the riverboats.

I didn’t have the money to eat in the fine restaurants, although I did splurge on a 7-course Creole breakfast at Brennan’s that included my first taste of turtle soup.

No, mostly my girlfriend and I stuck to the little places, the shops where the locals ate their red beans and rice, their oyster or alligator po’ boy, or the gargantuan-bigger-than-a-human-head-and-twice-as-good-looking-muffuletta. It’s as popular with locals as with tourists. And cheap, too.

We’d had a torrid affair, the Big Easy and I. And I was still deeply in love. Back home, I was bored with burgers. Sick of chicken.

That’s when I saw the catfish in the Kroger seafood case.

And that’s why, later that day, my Chinese neighbor ran up the stairs screaming “Fire department! Fire department!” in heavily accented English.

It had started out fine.

I got out my grandmother’s cast iron frying pan and the blackened catfish recipe in a little cookbook printed on glorified index cards I’d bought in some French Quarter tourist trap.

I put the pan on the burner and turned it to high. I washed and dried the whiter-than-white catfish fillet, then dredged one side in a potent spice mixture.

The pan started what sounded like this odd, internal dance with itself. It wasn’t quite popping and cracking, but something strangely molecular was going on. This pan was seriously hot.

I heard a devilish hiss as cold butter hit hot, black iron. I managed to slide in the fish before the kitchen filled with smoke.

Suddenly, I couldn’t see around the tiny room. Thick, gray clouds billowed from from the open window. My lungs seemed paralyzed. I needed to cough but couldn’t summon the air.

I ran to the next room towards the sliding glass door that led to the balcony and oxygen.

The lock, broken for weeks, jammed.

The living room was filling with smoke. Then I heard my neighbor. Blindly, I followed the sound of his fist on the front door.

I came spluttering out. After a few rattling breaths, I finally stopped coughing and looked into his frightened eyes.

“That damned catfish almost killed me,” I said.

“Fire department?” he asked, more calmly this time.

“No, I’m just an idiot,” I answered.

He seemed to understand.

Tags: Brennan's restaurant, Central Grocery, cooking mistakes, German chocolate cake, muffuletta, New Orleans, po' boy sanekedwiches, red beans and rice