The Coconut Head: Perfect Hamburger - Controlling or Not Controlling?

October 12, 2008

Perfect Hamburger - Controlling or Not Controlling?

Chris openly claims that besides the 4 ancient inventions, the communist culture has other two major contributions to the human civilization – one, although arguable, the Chinese food; two, a bunch of control freaks. Why? He takes the quest for consistency and perfection as controlling.

He is convinced that I am obsessed – calories-intake of my food, flat sheet on the bed, evenly layered sandwiches,… Unfortunately, my preference for perfection and consistently of all forms renders me as controlling.

I have painstakingly noticed the differences between Chris and me. Even in the very way that we made our respective peanut butter sandwiches in fact symbolized our approaches to life.

How I made my sandwich? - took two pieces of perfectly toasted high-fiber, low-carb, and high-protein multi-grain bread, put a thin layer of the peanut butter on one piece of the toast, evenly, not too thick, not too thin, just perfect.

How Chris made his sandwich? - took one piece of bread and jam a slab of peanut butter in the middle, folded another piece of bread on top of it, smashed the two pieces together. The peanut butter unsurprisingly jutted out at random locations. Some peanut butter coming out from the edge of the sandwich? No problem, stick his finger to get the extra and licked the finger right there. Peanut butter on a dirty finger? Tastier than ever! Do you need to toast your bread? Why bother?!

I like mine because it’s completely consistent! Every bite is exactly the same. In my mind, his approach is mostly haphazard. The bottom line is that less work means better food. But, as always, Chris romanticizes things. This time he believes that his sandwich-making creates variety and characters.

In the end, Chris tolerates my "illness". He not only does not force me to eat his hunchback-at-Nostradamus sandwich, he sometimes even plays along with my “freaky” habit.

So, we made this perfect hamburger yesterday. While I was taking my time to make the beef flat and square, the same size as the bread, mixing three different color of tomatoes for color-matching, he was getting the grill ready, drinking his lime-tonic water and occasionally taking pictures of my food and me upon request.

Of course, what I was doing is beyond his comprehension. After I asked him to transport the perfectly-shaped and spiced-meat onto the grill, I could sense he was cursing inside “WTF is this?!” (The picture as below is the evidence. :)

A side note – In Chris’ book, it’s a whole different game to handle hot Chinese food vs. hot Chinese chicks. Therefore, the Chinese food might marginally be a contribution to the world civilization.

先把超瘦的牛肉馅用甙面杖隔着锡箔纸甙平。然后加很多的新鲜黑胡椒粉。