Letting the Monkey Out to Play

Or, Of Chicken Feet And Cow Tongue.


Oh, how I've been a busy little monkey.

Upon realizing that I would be dead inside two years if I stayed in Florida, I said a puddly goodbye to Jimmy the Hapkido Chef and The Red Firebug, packed my shit, and hauled ass the hell on back to Oregon.

I stopped for a blurry and sleep deprived few days in Portland, said hello to some people who didn't want to see me, said hello to some people who did, and then trundled on to Eugene.

I landed on a Thursday, enrolled in college on a Friday, dropped off twenty some odd resumes on a Monday and Tuesday, went to Seattle for Thanksgiving with my son on a Wednesday, got back on a Friday...

My oh my how I've been productive, rising at seven in the morning, greeting the day bright eyed and bushy tailed, a can-do go-gettum attitude.

So tonight I'm getting shellacked, because the monkey wants out to play, and until I let him, he'll scratch at the patina of civilization I have inside my skull with a rusty nail until I punch someone.

I found myself staring at a checker at the market and thinking that if she didn't get off her phone and sell me beer, I was going to damage her in ways that would make even her nearest and dearest need barf bags when they saw the medical nightmare of tubes, siphons, pumps, breathers, and fluid processors that the last miserable days of her life had become.

So now I'm going to write about chicken feet and cow tongue, and why you should eat them.

When making a chicken soup, most people don't have access to large amounts of chicken bones to make a base stock with, instead relying on bases and cubes of bullion. The sad fact of the matter is that most chicken today is purchased boneless and skinless, which reduces a great many options you have for learning all the wonderful things you can do with a whole carcass. One of the great satisfactions in life (for me) is taking a whole chicken and breaking that fucker down into breasts, thighs, wings, pulling out the guts to make gravy with, frying the skin for cracklings, or throwing it into stock for a richer flavor, but one thing you just can't get, even if you buy the whole chicken from your supermarket, is chicken feet.

You usually have to go to a butcher or specialty meat shop, but they're worth it. You see, when you make a soup, most of the time it's thickened with a roux or corn starch, but when you make a stock with (well washed) chicken feet, and you let it go about its slow bubbling for hours, the gelatin in the feet breaks down and begins making a clear, naturally thickened, and extremely rich stock. If you have every made jello, you know that when gelatin is heated, it becomes liquid, but a thick liquid. If you take your stock made with chicken feet and refrigerate it, tah-da! Chicken flavored jello. Delicious.

Also, when you're sick, this naturally thick, viscous, rich stock makes the ultimate comfort food for homemade chicken soup.

Now that you've made really good chicken soup and chicken stock, get a mirepoix together (that's celery, onions, and carrots,) and brown the fuckers in a saute pan. The browning action is called the Milliard Reaction, otherwise known as caramelization, and it is the formation of a natural crust of sugar on the surface of your veggies. This sugar makes the flavor of the vegetables richer.

Now, through your browned mirepoix in a pyrex baking dish, cover it with some beef stock, some red wine, throw in some peppercorns and rosemary and plop a great fucking huge cow tongue in the center of the dish. The stock and wine should only be about an inch and a half to two inches deep, leaving the top two thirds of the cow tongue out of the liquid.

Cow tongue? Oh yes, cow tongue. Now, the cow tongue has very fine hairs on it, so you don't want to sear it off before you begin the cooking, or it will taste burnt. All you want to do is cover the whole dish tightly with saran wrap, then aluminum foil, and cook it on the lowest temperature your oven has for about oh...put it in when you leave for work, come home on your lunch break, check the level of liquid, recover it with wrap and foil, and it will be ready for dinner.

You see, for being such a huge chunk of tough ass muscle, the cow tongue and all of its connective tissue will begin breaking down when cooked at 200 for eight hours, the liquid will reduce to a delicious thick sauce, for straining and pouring over the meltingly tender tongue and whatever sort of potatoes you choose to pair it with.

I like garlic whipped mash potatoes made from red potatoes.

Congratulations, you now have a delicious chicken soup first course, and for mains you have braised tongue of beef with rosemary red wine sauce and garlic whipped mash potatoes. If you're a sick fuck, dessert will be chicken flavored jello.

My monkey is much happier now.

Review of some old shit. New naked pictures = new posts.

Since I’ve been pretty consistently sober from the time of my arrival in the land of hot dirt, I’ve re-established sleeping patterns I haven’t had in years. I now remember the original allure of drugs and alcohol, and how they became less of a crutch and more of a peg leg for me over time. It was less something I used to support myself with and more of a part of my day-to-day functioning. You see, ever since I was a little kid I’ve had really terrifying nightmares. As I’ve grown older I think that the nightmares are neat when I wake up... after about fifteen minutes of calming-down time. The conjured imagery of my brain impresses me: sinister, macabre, and outright disgusting. That is, the nightmares impress me after I’ve woken up screaming and calm down and get a chance to reflect on what my brain-movie was doing. The great relief of mind-altering chemicals, for me, was dreamless sleep. Even though I never felt very rested after the first couple of months of being drunk every night, at least the dreams were kept to a dull roar. I’d still wake up by punching myself in the face if I was dreaming of fighting, or come lunging across the room at my housemate with a knife if I was startled awake (still sorry about that, Sage!), or sit upright, panicking, from some weird nightmare. But by and large I slept soundly – if too long and uneasily – when wasted out of my head. Also, when under the heavy influence of chemicals, I could fall asleep when I needed (read = was drunk enough) to. When I undergo extended periods of sobriety, I lay awake thinking, talking with myself, or just trying to fend off sleep. So I made an uneasy truce with my brain: I would bludgeon it into submission with booze, and it wouldn’t bug me with too many nightmares. As an added bonus, the emotionally distancing qualities of drugs and booze would allow my to analyze, store, and reflect on my dreams as though they were neat cinema. None of this is an excuse or a justification for my love of strong drink, just a set-up for what comes next. Here's the short explanation of how it came to pass that I got on the liquor wagon: nightmares were killed by drinking, I increased my drinking, my body developed a tolerance for booze, and pretty soon my body was dependent on booze for sleep. Then I moved to Arizona and quit drinking. You see, I’m a social drinker at heart. I will and have drunk alone, but that was always to combat the dreams and insomnia and loneliness. Now, having made the conscious decision to move to a state thousands of miles from my friends and family, I can embrace the isolation because I chose it. And, along with choosing that, I decided to have a go at remembering how to sleep without knocking myself unconscious with chemicals. Because, you see, the nightmares come from the places inside of me that I tap for creativity, inspiration, and imagination. It became a question of dealing with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and the brutally vivid nightmares, or just trying to kill all of it in a tide of alcohol and drugs. For years, I tried to walk that uneasy truce. To still be creative enough that I felt satisfied with life, but to damp the unquiet things that live in my head enough so that I could sleep. Unfortunately, I feel I made the wrong decision in retrospect. If my brain has something to get out, then I should lance it like a boil. I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge, and not facing the dreams and brain-sketches head-on really isn’t my style, so I’ve just dealt with it, and tried to embrace it. Make it work for me. For years I’ve kept these locked in a cage in my head, sedating them, drugging them, and, unfortunately, like these things do, they grew large and fierce in the dark places of my brain. I used to try and stay awake until dawn, because, don’t you know, the bogeyman only comes out when it’s dark. Now I’m paying the piper. I let these dreams fester in my head, keeping them hungry and not letting them feed. I reach, sometimes, when I wake up, for a beer or a bottle of whiskey, just a touch, mind you, to help me back to sleep, because I really can’t tell you there are no monsters in my closet until I see it during the day, when the shadows don’t have any corners to play in. Welcome to my brain. Here are my nightmares, now that they’ve gotten out of their cages. Like a kid locked in the basement, once he gets out, the only thing to do is throw his ass all the way out the house and tell him you didn’t want him in the first place. He isn’t welcome back. I’m lying in bed with a girl, who is curled up facing the wall. I am on my back looking at the ceiling. I was asleep, but for some reason I’m awake now. Across the room from the foot of the bed is a closet, and it’s totally dark in the closet, but I know something is in there. Slowly, a hand moves out of the closet, onto the ceiling. It the hand of a little girl, covered in dirt. Then, another one comes out onto the ceiling, followed by a head and neck. She starts moving across the ceiling pushing herself with her palms and heels, she is face down, keeping her torso close her ‘floor’ and she is wearing a dirty white nightgown that I can see her legs moving under, but as she moves further and further into the room, the nightgown stays attached to the darkness in the closet: growing as though it is some sort of umbilicus. I know she was buried under the closet and dug her way out of her grave. She has long black hair and is wearing some sort of collar, and she has very dark eyes. I cannot move at all, except my eyes to watch her crawl across the ceiling. She looks a lot like the little girl from “The Ring.” The girl next to me is still sleeping, and I know that the girl on the ceiling is coming for her, and that she can’t see me for some reason. As she reaches the wall that leads down to where the girl and me are sleeping, she flips over and starts crawling down, head first, on her belly. At first I think she is smiling, but the dark area around her mouth is blood, and I notice that she is not wearing a collar, it is actually a ligature strangulation mark. She was strangled so strongly that the rope cut through her windpipe, and I hear a clotted whistling sound as she moves. She isn’t breathing; it’s just the bellows-like contraction and expansion of her chest as she moves forcing air in and out of the throat wound. Apparently, so much blood was forced into her head while she was being strangled that her eyes filled with blood and popped. They bulge out of her head like ruptured black hardboiled eggs and run down her face. That’s why I thought she had very dark eyes. By now, she is right above the bed, and crawls onto the girl I am sleeping next to. She still can’t see me, and I still can’t move. At first, I think she is going to kiss the girl I’m sleeping next to, but then I see her tongue come out of her mouth and it’s about two feet long. It goes into the mouth of the girl I’m sleeping next to, and she dies. Then, I see the tongue rap up around her eyeball from behind and suck it back into her head. I realize the little girl is taking the eyeballs of the girl who I am sleeping next to so she can use them for her own, and once she has them in her head, she will be able to see me and then kill me. Then I wake up. I am walking home, and an old bum starts following me. It’s cold out, and he’s wearing a heavy puffy jacket, but no pants or shoes. He is smiling hugely and unsettlingly, and his eyes roll around crazily in his head. I think he is giggling. Poor circulation has caused blood to pool in his feet, and they have turned black. When he walks, scabs and sores open on his feet and maggots come out of the rotten flesh (my brain and me thank you for that one, Kelly). He is emaciated, from what I can see, like a concentration camp victim: all knobs and bones and jutting tendons. He is covered in sores. Where his penis should be looks like it was destroyed by frostbite: just a blue-black mass of ruined flesh, slowly seeping blood and pus down his legs. I try and hurry back to my house, but when I look over my shoulder, he has closed the distance between me by about half. I see that his feet are actually hands at the end of his legs, with many-knuckled fingers easily a foot and a half in length. His arms hang down to almost his knees, with similar hands: really long fingers swollen and black. The fingernails on his hands and leg-hands are black and mostly ruined to the quick. It looks like he has been clawing at something, because the flesh at the ends of his fingers is torn to shreds and leaving trails of blood on the ground where he walks and drips. I hurry on towards my house, and get to the door, and check to see if he is still following me. He is now almost within arms reach of me, and I see that he isn’t smiling at all, but that his lips have rotted off and his teeth are almost two inches long. There is flesh sticking out from some of the gaps in his teeth and I know that he ate everyone I lived with, and that he’s waiting for me. His eyes are almost totally pupils the size of baseballs, rolling slowly in their sockets, never looking right at me. Pus runs down his face like tears from his eyes. I go inside, shutting the door right as he’s reaching for me. I look for the people I live with. They are all dead in the basement, but I don’t find them there, I just know that is where they are. I go to bed, lie down, and look out the window and don’t see anything. The old man is gone. I roll over, with my back to the window and hear something. I look out the window again and the old man is RIGHT THERE OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, smearing blood and gore on the window by pressing his spidery hands up against it, rubbing his ruined lips and teeth against the glass and never looking right at me with his rolling crazy eyes. So, those where some dreams I’ve had over the last couple of nights. Like I said, they scare the shit out of me when I’m having them, but on later reflection, I think the visuals are neat in a George Ramero / John Carpenter sort of way. Falling asleep for me now is kind of like climbing into a boxing ring against an opponent I can’t beat. I don’t have to win, but it’s my brain. I can fight it to a draw, come out bloody and scarred, but at least I didn’t run. I just got to fall asleep, sometime, when time is running a turtle race against the dawn, and know that I’m going to wake up again. Sunday, October 17, 2004. 11:15 AM [1 comment ] | [Link to this blog entry]

Archives: 12/21/2004: I DIDN’T WANT THIS TO BE A BLOG, BUT I DON’T HAVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS 12/12/2004: CONTEST TIME! 12/05/2004: “HOLD DOWN THE FORT, KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING, AND IF WE’RE NOT BACK IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, CALL THE PRESIDENT.” 12/01/2004: “This is important, damn it” 11/21/2004: “This I know Is Truth” 10/31/2004: Haiku For You 10/24/2004: Fun With Christian Theology. 10/17/2004: “The Uneasy Truce In My Brain” 10/10/2004: “Scumbags” 10/03/2004: “PRESS RELEASE”

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Yum, vodka.

So there’s down and out and then there’s drinking Skol vodka alone on a Saturday night the week after your roommate’s wife had a miscarriage and you know he’s pissed at you because you passed out on the porch last night and you’re waking up every motherfucking goddamn morning realizing you have a goal in life and every step you take is getting you no where near closer to it, you have no friends, no lover, and you live in Florida.

Skol vodka, by the way, is what the collective ass juices of the entire soviet nation tasted like while the where under Stalins’ rule.

Also, I’m depressed.

Not my proudest moment.

I won a fight with a girl.

Not the most auspicious start to a story, I know, but bear with me.

You see, we had been knocking back shots at a bar, and she thought she was pretty tough, drinking whisky, smoking, and talking of wanting to train-hop like a well seasoned hobo. She thought she could take on someone who outweighed, outreached, and had fought more than she had.

So, we went outside, I took off my jacket, she took off hers, and threw her arms out in the “come on!” fight stance you see in so many jock beat-down street fights.

And I popped her in the nose. Just a short jab, but enough to start the blood flowing and double her up. I could have punched her in the back of the neck and sent her to the ground, but I figured the lesson had been learned.

I hit first, I didn’t posture, I didn’t wait, and I didn’t fight fair. I hate getting hit, so I fought to win straight out of the gate, and I fought dirty. She thought we were going to have some sort of clear signal that the fight had started, and we did have one. The signal was a punch to the nose.

This was also the signal that the fight had stopped.

So I won.

Not something to be proud of, except that I taught her a valuable lesson.

There is absolutely no reason to fight if you can just win.

And all you have to do to win is to fight first and fight dirty. Don’t wait for the posturing, the posing, the kung fu stances, the shit talking. Someone pokes you in the chest and says something about your mother? Don’t say anything about their mother.

Grab their finger and break it, while using your other hand to push their chin back. Step behind their leg with yours, follow them to the ground while holding their broken finger, and punch them in the throat.

Repeatedly.

Over, and over, and over again.

For variety, you can also punch them in the groin.

They won’t say anything else about your mother.

Someone grabs your lapels or shirt collar? Use your hands to push their elbows skyward until they break, and hit them in the nose with your forehead. Broken elbows and noses tend to end things quickly.

Groin kicks, eyeball gouges, biting; hell, if it works, use it.

Fighting is not glamorous. It’s dangerous, it hurts like hell (even if you win,) and nothing good ever comes out of it. But, if you hurt less than the other guy (or girl,) then give yourself a pat on the back.

Fighting sucks. It’s a bad idea with broken knuckles thrown in.

But, if you find that push had come to shove, don’t shove. Aim for the crotch, break bones, and keep going until they won’t get up again until the ambulance has arrived.

Anything else is just a dick flexing contest, and that has got to be the dumbest reason to fight, ever.

Hell is other people, paradise is a lonely place.

If hell is other people, then paradise is a lonely place

Or

The last kid picked for baseball.

The restaurant I work for is having a party tomorrow. The owners’ parents are throwing it for the owner, who’s getting married. The owners’ mom invited me. She can’t remember my name, but she told me to come.

No one else asked. Not the waitress I fooled around with, not the owner, not the angry drunken pantry cook (who has invited me drinking and who does not want to go,) not the owner.

Not one person asked if I was going except the owners’ mother.

Flash back to being a little kid, when my best friends’ parents ran a home for retards. We didn’t play on the playground; we played way out by the fence: out past the soccer field, out past the baseball diamonds, where all the other kids who were running and playing tag and chase-the-boys and every other fucking thing looked the size of ants.

Sometimes, when it got bad enough, I’d stare at an ant hill and envy the little fuckers. Sure, I could understand that they were preprogrammed drones, but they were preprogrammed drones moving about purposefully, interacting with one another, getting along, and doing something I’d never experienced.

Being part of something. You see, I never got invited to parties back then unless the kids’ mom invited everyone in his grade or something.

In middle school, as my brother started going crazy, it got even more fun. Being poor growing up, I’d always worn whatever happened to be around. Between elementary school and middle school, I shot up from little kid size to pretty much my full height. It helped a lot having an insane older brother, not having developed any social skills or friends, being in a new school, and being physically much different than all of my peers.

I went from being isolated to actively mocked and ostracized.

I started fighting a lot, drinking a lot, hanging out with older kids, getting weird haircuts, I started fitting in with people who were so fucked up they couldn’t tell who they were hanging out with. I never got invited to parties; I just went until someone noticed that an eleven year old was doing a keg stand.

In high school, I started hanging out with smart older kids. They smoked pot and had philosophical conversations. I was their pet punk. I was angrier, drunker, faster to say whatever cut through the bullshit. I fought more; I came to school missing skin on my knuckles.

I had thrown in the ‘getting picked first for baseball hat’ as I came to think of it.

Fuck it, if I’m going to be outside, I’m going way out. All the way out, if I can find a way, and I’m going to burn this whole place down when I find the exit.

Not particularly a healthy way to think, but what the hell, I was a teenager. It’s not a healthy age to be.

I grew up. I refined my technique. Things clicked. I didn’t want to be out, I wanted to be above. I worked hard. I eschewed friends. I moved fast, hit hard. Things refined themselves.

It got better. I got better. I got good. I got above.

I’m still outside, out by the fence, looking back, but fuck it. I’ve got talent. I’ve got drive. I’ve got a soul made of brass.

I got promoted de facto. I got promoted for real. I got recognized; I got up, and held my head up.

I moved up. I got people. They said it’s lonely at the top, but it’s not so bad.

Shit cohered. I found drive. My people got taught. My people got better. I got included in the ranks of people doing a good job. I didn’t get invited to any parties, but I didn’t need too. I had pride in the fact that I wasn’t like them. I was better than them, and I was pushing them to be better, and they pushed themselves hard to be better, because they wanted to be like me.

Shit de-cohered. Things fell apart. No one wanted to be like me. They thought they did, but they couldn’t see inside, where the cogs were grinding and the gears needed oil. The winning streak went on for too long. Things went sideways.

And then, now, working here in god forsaken Fort Meyers, Florida, I am working on a kitchen line again. I’m not the boss, or even the boss’ right hand man, I’m supposed to be part of a well oiled machine, and no one gets my jokes, and the waiters are afraid of me, and someone’s mom has to invite me to the party.

I know it’s just one more thing to get above, but sometimes I just envy the anthill.

And sometimes, when I’m looking down on all those little ants, I want to just fucking annihilate the thing, just as payback for all these long years of getting picked last for baseball.

The part that hurts is just being close enough to know that I wanted in. The part that hates is knowing not now, not ever, will I get in, and that I learned to hate that anthill just to deal with the fact that hell is other people, and paradise is a place that’s way out by the fence, and it’s lonely.

When cooking eggs, get a nonstick skillet of approximately 3” radius for every egg you want to cook. Put 2 oz of clarified butter for each egg in the pan, and turn the heat onto medium. Put your finger in the butter. When you are starting to get uncomfortable with the amount of heat in the pan, remove your finger and wait another thirty seconds or so. Crack your eggs into the pan. If they start to bubble, your pan is too hot. The water in the egg is boiling through the whites, causing craters, and your egg will wind up looking like a Martian landscape. The water needs to evaporate, not boil. They egg should start to go from clear to cloudy to white smoothly. This is the proteins denaturing, contracting like rubber bands in reverse. This is why overcooked eggs are very bouncy.

Let the white cook about a third to halfway through. You should have three “layers” to the egg: the lowest is the broadest layer, then the slightly higher plateau of egg white surrounding the yolk, then the yolk itself. The egg should be submerged to just over the lowest layer in hot butter.

You may notice that the egg is sticking to the pan, even though it’s a nonstick skillet. Turn the heat up higher. You want to blast it a little at this point in time, because the water stuck in the egg white at the bottom of the pan will steam and burst it loose from the pan, so it is floating in the butter.

Grab a spoon, tilt the pan so that the hot butter pools on one side of the pan, and start spooning hot butter over the yolk and remaining white until cooked to desired doneness.

Lift the egg out of the pan with a slotted spatula, so all the excess butter remains in the pan.

Now you have a beautiful and delicious egg.

P.S. Do not salt an egg before you cook it. If you’ve ever killed a slug with salt, you will know what happens to an egg. Salt it after you cook it, so the flavor comes out, but the texture is unchanged.

Maybe I should make myself clear.

When I first started this bullshit masquerade of literary knowledge, I was published on a friend of mine website, a.c.r.o.n.y.m.com, or something like that. He edited what I had to say, made it a little less frenetic, a lot more coherent.

No one who didn’t know where to look would ever find it. No one who cared would ever respond to it. It was like the blog in the plastic bubble. Completely immune from anything but positive reviews.

Oops. Guess I started writing again. And I still don’t give a fuck.

Grammar can kiss my ass. Punctuation can blow me. All I want to do is tell you exactly what I think, how I think it, why I think it, and make you laugh (or cry, or react any how,) and get it off my chest.

Last Blog I wrote, I said I know more about food, cooking, kitchens, and restaurant work than any of you, if you’re lucky. Oddly, I had a fellow respond to me and let me know that he, as a matter of fact, knew more about cooking and kitchens than I ever would. Had to clarify that he was not lucky, he was just more retarded than me.

It was not a well received clarification.

You see, my trade sucks. I have hands made of scar tissue, a soul made of brass, and a mouth made of George Carlin’s seven words.

But, go to work tomorrow. Look at that spreadsheet, that program, that caramel macchiato.

And see if you give a fuck.

That’s where I win. I look at every plate of food, I look at every burger, every fucking thing, the way the plate is dressed, what the garnish is, and it inspires passion in me. It lights me on fire inside, I really care.

And that’s the only reason to live: really caring.

Get your ass out there and really care about something, no matter how small it is.

I’M BACK, FUCKSTICKS.

Or
I’M GONE AGAIN, FUCKSTICKS.

So a Portland coworker of mine is bribing me with naked pictures of herself to restart my “blog”.

I hate that word. It sounds like puking.

Not that the naked pictures make me want to puke. Quite the contrary, she is hot, hot, hot. You will not see those pictures of her. I’m the one getting bribed, I get the payoff, and I ain’t sharing, so go fuck y’all selves.

The long and the short of it is that I’m back.

And, of course, by back, I mean three thousand miles away again. This time, my life went totally off the wire and I moved to Fort Myers, Florida. I got dumped, worked for nine months solid with eighteen days off to get a restaurant up and running, two people remembered I still lived in Portland and called me on my birthday (one of those calls was the dumping,) and I know more about food, kitchens, and the restaurant industry than any of you ever will, if you are lucky.

You see, I have a career. I spent my time in Tucson working in a kitchen, because it was what I knew how to do. To move, to scrub, to screen for quality, to throw really fucking hot things at other people and scream at the top of my lungs when they fucked up. How to close up a finger cut to the bone with paper towels and duct tape. When you actually have to call the ambulance, and when that dude is just a pussy.

I found myself, and I’ve noticed a lot of you have shaken off, and that’s not your fault. I just got focused and worked too much and talked too little. I still miss you and think about you. Miss Joe, Mr. Ransom, Austin, Mr. Chris “Rent in Paris Sucks” Brooks, Sierra the Dancing Hungarian. I’m not reaching out in search of communication. We’re all busy fucking people. I have a one hundred and twenty pound pig I’m going to break down tomorrow, and make into ribs, sausage, loins, hocks, and ham. I’m just letting you know that you can come back in if you want too hear how it’s going.

I will talk about the fact that I beat off a lot.

I will talk about food. I will talk about loneliness, anger, and all the stupid shit I have not processed nor will I ever get over.

I will never ever lie.

And to make the best hamburger on earth, get 80/20 ground chuck, freshly ground at a course setting if you can, heat a cast iron skillet up until the oil you add smokes, season it (salt, being absorbent of moisture, enhances flavor. It is a must. Use kosher salt or I will kill you. Use any other seasonings you like,) drop it in, and kill the heat. The heat of the cast iron is residual, and will caramelize the sugars in the meat on the exterior, making a perfectly brown and delicious crisp exterior that will hold any condiments you feel like adding and you don’t need any more heat. Let the meat cook until just the top is still red. Pull the meat onto a paper towel and let it rest. Resting meat allows the juice (flavor) to redistribute. Meat under heat acts like a bicep doing a curl: all the blood flows to the center. Do NOT flip the burger. While the meat is resting (5 minutes), reheat the skillet until really fucking hot again. Drop the burger, raw side down, onto the skillet. Checking occasionally, wait until you have the same brown crunchy top on both sides.

Add to a bun and enjoy.

Any questions?