There are three things I keep doing even though I`m not very good at them: writing, cooking and golf. (OK, four. But we`ll put the fourth to one side, for another column and another Citizen.)
If I could do nothing but work on those three (four) things all day, every day, I`d be a very happy man. And I find all three share common traits.
They're all time consuming, cruel, frustrating, and capricious. Each pitilessly punishes incompetance with the burned and the bland; the other and the out-of-bounds; the cliched and cringeworthy.
And yet, despite each disaster or because of them, cooks, hackers and hacks keep volunteering for more pain. That`s because each discipline occasionally rewards even its most incompetant followers with something - be it a buttery steak, a crisp shot, a clever turn of phrase - that allows them to experience the sublime.
And for that brief moment, the aspiring amateur gets to sample a morsel of what the professionals, the geniuses in their field experience in their finest moments.
Recently, thanks to my fiancee`s insatiable hunger for reality television, I`ve been pulled into the show MasterChef, which plays with that amateur/professional contrast.
The premise is pretty simple: 23 aspiring chefs with little formal training are whittled down by a variety of foodie challenges and the withering critique of judges Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianiach until a Master Chef emerges with a $250,000 prize.
Pretty standard pedestrian TV fare, rendered irresitably delicous in its third season because of Christine Ha, a Texan chef who is blind.
Watching her cook is mesmerizing. Elliot, talking to the Huffington Post, points out Ha's blindness forces to lean on her other senses in the kitchen: the sound of sizzling pan, the smell of sweetbreads, and, of course, taste.
But it's still tricky for her. In one episode, she has to cook an apple pie. But baking for her is a complicated ordeal - for most dishes she can constantly taste what she's doing but she can't stick her finger in a pie to check if it's done. It was a sniffles and Kleenex moment when Ramsay scraped a fork over her crust and asked her if she could hear the sound of perfectly caramelized sugar atop an immaculately cooked confection.
It didn't get easier for Ha. One of her rivals, the obnoxious Ryan Umane, got to dictate the terms of another challenge, involving crab. Half of the contestants would cook a live crab and the other half would cook canned crab.
The chefs who received a live crab got a huge advantage - except in the case of Ha. Umane, naturally, gave her a live crab.
Using the logic of reality TV and my latent jerk nature, I thought it was a brilliant piece of gamesmanship. My fiancee gave me one of her I-said-yes-to-this? looks and asked if I wouldn't rather win such a competition with a clean conscience.
Naturally, I replied that sounds like someone who doesn't want $250,000 and the title of Master Chef.
Of course, Ha nailed it, working with bloodied hands to turn the live crab into a jawdropping ceviche (raw seafood marinated in citrus juice and spiced with chili peppers) cocktail with tomato juice. The dish was so beautiful, Ramsay asked her, "Are you really blind" before declaring she cooked like an angel and telling Umane he truly #@$ed up.
I got my own ceviche of I-said-yes-to-this? from the fiancee and an epiphany. The truly inspired move on Umane's part would have been to give Ha the canned crab. If he could see past Ha's blindness, he would have realized giving a chef of her calibre the fresh ingredients was like handing a hitman a bazooka and saying hit me.
The better move, the smarter move, was actually the generous move - give Ha the canned crab, enjoy a little karma and force her to turn processed mush into something edible. Instead, he played the jerk and handed her a inspiring story she whipped up into the divine.
Sadly, I'm not Shakespeare and I can't shake the darling buds of May so I can't give Ha the words to go with the moment. All I've got is a cliche that works with cooking, golf and writing - you get what you put in - and a moral worthy of Aesop: Never give a live crab to a blind girl.
