Life With A Werewolf

Old Werewolf Family Recipe

          Occasionally, I would like an alarm. Something set up above the stove that only goes off when it senses a concoction of aromas and spices. This alarm warn us to sneak out of the house before it’s too late, to push our cars to the edge of the town and drive to the nearest drive-thru as fast as our wheels can take us before we get wrapped up in another ‘werewolf meal’.

          Crash is an interesting person. His sensitive nose has come in handy on multiple occasions, whether it’s a shortcut for us to play the “is this bad” game with leftovers, or to sense when we have pests before they even make their presence known. It’s an overall boon to us. However, there are times when we have to remind him that yes, despite him having a human side, our tastes do sometimes differ from his, and, just because it smells like it goes together, doesn’t mean he should do it!

          It was his night to cook. I was glad, cause after the entire gnome business, I was out of commission for a few days while my body recovered. That is a sad side effect of things. I get injured and my body takes longer to recover these days than it used to. With enough massaging, stretching, and exercises that make me feel like I’m closer to ninety than forty, I can usually get life back into my leg, hip, back, and feet so I can feel somewhat normal again.

          With Crash’s skills around the stove, we had an expectation. We figured we would get his version of Italian. He’d tell us “It’s Sicilian, I swear,” with that smirk that told us it wasn’t. We’d roll our eyes and just go, ‘sure, Crash’. It was usually good though, so we didn’t complain. Sometimes we’d get southern cooking which is what he’s better at, or some European concoction that would work but be a little weird to our taste buds. I have nothing against mushroom risotto per se, but I’m American. My taste buds are American. I enjoy a good cheeseburger or burrito a lot more than I do a risotto anything.

          Credit where credit is do though. Crash’s concoction, whatever it was, was tasty. Weird, but tasty. It was an almost stewed green and black mass that used to be vegetables of some kind. I think there was a meat in it? But I’m not sure. All I’m sure of it wasn’t a cheeseburger, burrito, or a risotto of any kind. Crash attempted to pass it off as ‘werewolf cuisine’. He stood next to the stove, proud of his creation, a smug grin on his face. “Old werewolf family recipe,” he said. I was sitting at the table, and Kris was standing in one doorway to the kitchen, Zack was in the other. We all gave him a leery look when he said it.

          Kris frowned at the concoction in the pan. “No it’s not,” he said.

          “Sure it is,” Crash said, grinning wider.

          “Is this your usual ‘I threw a bunch of crap in a pan and called it an old werewolf family recipe’ sort of old werewolf family recipe,” he asked.

          Crash began giggling and blushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

          It’s not like he hasn’t done this sort of thing before. As they went back and forth, I remembered an incident a few months ago with a dish he called an ‘old werewolf family recipe’ that I called ‘ground brown.’ There was vegetables in it. There was ground meat in it. That’s as much as I really recall. It was spicy though, so I ate it. The rest of the guys wouldn’t touch it. Not that I blamed them. But, it wasn’t terrible. I’ve had worse. After all, I’ve eaten at a Ryan’s Buffet in the 00s.

          I could tease him about it, but it’s not like I’ve been perfect in the kitchen. There was the time I attempted to make home-made chili, and grabbed the jar of cayenne powder instead of chili powder. Now, if you’re familiar with the basic chili recipe, it requires two tablespoons full of chili powder. But chili powder itself isn’t terribly spicy. It needs that flavorful, earthy flavor of cumin to give it heat, at least in my experience. However, cayenne powder is a lot hotter than chili.

          How much hotter? Well, I’m glad you asked. If your recipe calls for, say two table spoons of chili powder which, based on my haphazard searching, is around 15,000 SHU, then you substitute cayenne for it, which is usually somewhere between two and four times hotter than that, instead of having a nice mild bowl of chili, you’ll have a dish that will be guaranteed to give you blisters when you taste test it. It will leave you running and screaming through the kitchen in desperate pain as you try to grab milk, soda, water, whatever is cold to take the fill your mouth with. I won’t say, if after this accident, whether I ended up drinking ketchup straight from the bottle or not. I will say that the guys have never let me live that one down, and I’m permanently banned from ever making chili again. Though, I have used that chili recipe as a threat.

          Green mush had at least a better appearance than ground brown. The flavor wasn’t terrible. It was, however, strange. Garlic, pepper, some other spices mixed in, with a look that reminded me less of werewolves, and more of a school lunch room from the eighties and nineties where you were never quite certain what was going to be on your plate, you just knew that if it wasn’t the square pizza, it probably wasn’t going to taste good.

          The more I think about it though, the more I believe I’m starting to get the gist of this ‘old werewolf family recipe’ gag. I honestly don’t think he’s lying. Well, not completely, anyway. Werewolves do have a much more sensitive nose than we do. Perhaps in the course of cooking, he was taught to use his nose to compliment certain flavors that maybe very mellow in the food itself. A zucchini is a zucchini is a zucchini, to a point. But if one plant happened to get a couple doses of someone’s spilled soda out in the field, then perhaps it’s produce comes out sweeter than the other. Not sweeter to us, but perhaps to him. Then if that happens, maybe Crash happens to buy it at a market one day, takes it home, and then uses his ‘old werewolf family recipe’ – I.E. if the plant smells just a hair sweeter, you put more garlic on it to enhance...well something. I’m not sure.

          Crash could of course just be winging it and messing with all of us. It’s not like he hasn’t done this before. Remember when I asked for classic ‘werewolf’ music from his culture, and instead I got all sorts of rock and metal songs about werewolves? I got what I asked for technically, though not what I meant.

          It would be classic Crash to tease us with this stuff. Making food that was, albeit edible, but just this side of strange enough to make us go ‘what in the world’ one more time with that confused look on our faces. The same reason that dads like to make those corny jokes or mom’s will occasionally break out the baby photos when you bring that special significant other over, or tell those embarrassing stories.

          You have to actually love someone at least somewhat, to subtly torture them in such ways. Crash could be doing this to tease us, to give us that mild torture that can only come from true family. I’d like to believe that, and in some ways I do. We are our own unique blend of family, but we’re family. All survivors of sorts of one way or another glued together with time and circumstances. Bonded together with the blood and scars between us.

          But, I really do think he does it cause he enjoys the taste. Enjoys teasing us, and at times doesn’t have the time or occasionally the cash to go out and get something better. After all, just because he’s a werewolf doesn’t mean he’s immune to being worn out from working nights, then days. Or days then nights. Or literally running from one side of the county to the other and back again for the sake of one case of his or another. We all get dog-tired sometimes and literally want to do nothing more than just hit a drive thru, go home, and veg in front of the television watching something with corny jokes and mindless violence.

          He has the unfortunate side effect of being, well, a werewolf. So, hitting a drive thru in the morning after one of his night shifts isn’t all that possible. No, not even if he hit up Mitch’s place of business.

          So, I don’t really blame Crash for getting creative and crazy on the occasional recipe. Whether it’s the strange concoction he calls Italian, or the ground brown, or the creative ways to have vegetables, it’s understandable that he will occasionally put on his culinary thinking cap and create a strange new recipe that some would think God never intended to exist. If it doesn’t taste terrible, I’ll still eat it. After all, I was in the military. But still, I’d rather have that alarm.