Why I’m Afraid of Pears
Sep 11th, 2008 by Marilyn
I’ll be traveling through airports in the morning, sucking down Starbucks and looking for a decent snack – so the Scrambled Egg winner must wait, and will be announced Friday night. Just think – that adorable little whisk, the perfect kitchen bling, could be yours! But first, since I’ll be on the move tomorrow, we’re having a Friday Flashback.
I chose today’s flashback to honor the many readers who stumble onto Simmer just because they Googled something like this:
“stench coming from dishwasher”
“odor inside dish machine”
“kitchen smells real bad gross like dead thing”
“crap is something in my dishwasher??”
So, let me get this straight – stench sufferers turn to Google, and this is what they get? I’d ask for a refund. From February 28, 2008, let’s take another look at my problems with pears.
———-
Why I’m Afraid of Pears
from February 28, 2008
It’s true.
I’m a little afraid of the most painterly fruit – and all this M-Word talk has brought sweet paranoia tumbling back like three baskets of lovely but rotten green ones.
Why, you say? What kind of sane, grown woman can’t admire a shiny pear?
Well. Let’s hop to another time, years ago, when Josie was but a rosy-cheeked toddler and I ran a dessert company, The Happy Ending, out of our 1929 home. I’d had the county health department inspect my cleaner-than-restaurant kitchen, and we’d made some necessary modifications to operate on the level.
One thing we installed was an industrial, high-heat dishwasher with a powerful food grinder. It felt solid, official. It could quietly chew a whole rump roast, were I to casually toss one in. And that thought comforted me as I went about my busy business. It was serious equipment, and I considered the machine a stainless steel shield, my protector in the new worlds of motherhood and business.
I worked in our tiny kitchen, which doubled as catering center and family feeder. On any given day you’d see the fruits of both labors: stacked butter cookie trays cooling in the sun room, Josie’s favorite sweet potatoes browning in the oven, hazelnut mocha cakes on the dining room table.
Josie also loved pears, and snacked on them in every form – raw, roasted, pureed and, depending on the day’s work, poached in red wine and vanilla bean-specked. One hotel client required weekly deliveries of pear-and-almond tarts – so it was a lot of fruit. And I spent many hours prepping at my little butcher block table, with one eye on Josie, cheerfully tumbling over 50-pound flour bags while I peeled, cored, poached, sliced, diced and tarted up a veritable orchard of pears.
There was an odd, controlled chaos between the ganache and the Legos, the snack bowls and meringues, but my kitchen was clean, so clean. So clean that on the day I noticed a slight odor coming from the dishwasher, I was thrown.
“It smells,” I told my husband.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“He said it’s fine,” I’d repeat to Josie, who giggled. Funny daddy. “It SMELLS , but it’s fine. Ugh.”
In 24 hours the faint off-odor had become a mild stench. I would hold my breath and crack the dishwasher door for a jam-and-slam; that is, jam in the plate, slam the door and run. Later, I’d exhale in the hallway. Then Greg started to come around.
“Yes,” he pronounced one night, two days later, “it smells.”
O Merciful Olfactory Gods! If we can arrive at the golden spot where we agree that something smells, that smell will surely be found. I had seen nothing yet. I’d furtively rattled and prodded the racks, but could not find the source. When the insistent green cloud started spreading out for real, I got bold.
Armed with a flashlight, I swung open the dishwasher door. Oh! Should have had a gas mask. But I went in.
The rotting smell of – of what, of what, a thousand trout guts? old jockstraps in ammonia? – hit me in the face as I swept light toward the back. The smell got stronger, and I saw the shadowy outline of a chunk – pears, I thought – down toward the bottom. Blinded, perhaps by stench and the fact that I was crouched in a wet dark corner of my dishwasher, I did the unthinkable. I reached.
And poked it, with my finger, and in a frozen instant knew that it was not a pear. Not pear, not pear, not pear! I yanked away fast, whacking my head as I backed out, cartoon stars around my head and the sprayer arm spinning, dirty water dripping on me and the slimy, unknown chunk.
I grabbed the closest tool, cooking tongs. Summoning every breath of calm, I turned the flashlight back towards what I now knew was death, death in the dishwasher, a dishwasher death chunk.
I moved in, half-secure that whatever it might be, it was, at least, not moving.
There, stuck between a stainless steel ring and the wet nether regions of the grinder, was a mangled piece of…well, in shaky light, I could just make out a pointy grayish shape, with a small round…oh my god, ear…and then…an eye. A tiny black bead of an eye, unmoving and staring straight at me.
I should have expired. I should have dropped cold right there on my kitchen floor, but instead I reached in with the tongs. In my career, these particular metal tongs had lovingly browned coq au vin. They had turned peppery steaks on the grill and set roast ginger carrots on the plate, but not that day.
That day, guided by shaking hands, they would perform the ultimate service – a service no kitchen tool ever wants to perform. Today, they would scrape out the remains of – now clearly visible in kitchen daylight – a waterlogged, festering, three-day old mouse head.
I had poked naked finger into the squishy cranium of a dead mouse. Not pear, I thought, why could it not have been a rotting pear?
Both head and tongs were thrown into a bag, and then tied in another bag, then frantically stuffed in the trash. I sanitized the dishwasher five times and washed my hands for a week, and threw out the trash can too. If I could replace my finger, I would.
I shed no tears for the mouse’s end, only for my tainted finger and the heroically lost tongs. My dishwasher-shield was just doing its job; he’d scampered into death on his own accord. But…pears. So sure was I that the death chunk was pear that even today, it’s hard to separate visions of soaked, torn rodent head from a nicely peeled Bartlett.
I might overlook it, sliced in greens with walnuts, blue cheese and vinaigrette. But no poaching. If that fruit is in a soft state, a state most people adore and are pleased to eat with creme anglaise, that’s when I check out.
My fellow diners won’t see it at the table, but inside, while they feast on dessert, I’ll be doing a full-body shudder, remembering the cold, cold surprise of wet, beady-eyed, furry not-pear.
[...] been together and NOW you gotta break em apart?!?! It really prickles my pears (with apologies to Marilyn, who has pear issues of her [...]
Shiver….now I too will have nightmares about pears.
Ew.
Ok – that’s pretty darn gross, but….I haven’t laughed that hard in a while! I will somehow have to scrub my brain from the pear, mouse connection now. Ick.
Last Friday I was in various airports, trying unsuccessfully to find a Starbucks–or anything remotely caffeinated, at 5 a.m. but that’s not my point.
Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy reading Simmer. Sadly, I no longer live in the Midwest, visited Lawrence only once many years ago, and do not even cook these days, but your delightful column reminds me of all those good things! Your reminences of our shared hometown, Chicago, the shots of oh-so-lovely Paris, your house in progress, and most of all, your kitchen adventures, are just terrific. You did inspire me to make Key Lime pie for friends which they loved. I also tried the chocolate dipped pecans with sea salt sprinklings but ate them all in a single day! Too bad for them, but lucky me!
Hope you continue doing this…Even though I’m living in the South, I feel like you’re a friend next door..albeit one who is far more interesting and talented and funny than my real neighbors. (shh..don’t let on that I said that. There are such nice people here, really! Even if they do think a dinner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and cherry Jello with fruit cocktail, followed by Bible readings, constitutes a great evening.)
this post pretty much put me off EVERYTHING for the day.
for the day, mind you.
if it had not been so hysterical (in every sense of the word),
it may have put me off everything for a week.
(you touched it?????)
OK, come on…let’s all sing together…
Greasey grimey gopher guts,
mutilated monkey meat,
little dirty birdie feet,
french fried eyeballs swimming in a pool of blood,
– and I’m without a spoon!
—-
Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Mutilated monkey meat
Petrefied porpose puss
great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts
and me without a spoon
—-
Scab sandwich puss on top
Monkey vomit, camel snot
Parrot eyeballs dipped in glue
Scab sandwich just for you!
—-
(I remember the first part as basically the same)
then ….All wrapped up in all-purpose porpoise pus
and me without my spoon
- but I got my straw (followed loud slurpy noise)
—-
great green gobs of greasy grimey gopher guts,
itty bitty birdie feet,
big fat monkey meat,
luke warm pidgeon puke,
and I forgot my spoon.
——
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Walkin’ down the dirty street
Mutilated monkey meat
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
And I forgot my spoon!
——
Great big gobs of greasy, grimey gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat,
Toasted little birdie’s feet,
French fried eyeballs swimming in a pool of blood –
And I forgot my spoon!
—
Great green globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts
Chopped-up monkeys’ feet
Assasinated birdy’s beak
French-fried eyeballs smoked in a bloody pot
That’s what [insert taunted person's name here] is made of.
—–
Great big gobs of greasy grimey golpher guts
Hairy little piggies’ feet
Mutilated monkey’s meat
All cobbed off with ventilated vulture’s vomit
And I forgot my spoon
I for got my spoon
I forgot my spoon
Great big gobs of Greasy grimey golpher guts
and I forgot my spoon
—
all that joy was copied from here:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/3225/Traditional/Greasy_Grimey_Gopher_Guts.txt
Well that’s just weird! I was roaming around your site yesterday and this was the post I read last. Because after a story like that well. . . I was feeling very queasy and had to go lie down! LOL.
And I know that stench. Shudder! Gag! We had an old house with a partialy dugout basement. Where the mice came in. Did you know that mouse poison doesn’t actually dry up mice the way they say? First they decompose in a very smelly way. All along the ledge filled with boxes and stufff. So, since you don’t know what the smell is, you put fabric softener sheets out, hoping to mask the smell which continues for weeks and weeks. One day you move out. As you remove the contents of the basement you begin to discover flattened mouse carcasses. Under boxes, in your christmas ornaments, in your spare, unused freezer!!
All I can say is. . .I’m sure glad I moved! And that I never touched a squishy dead head!
I know this may sound odd, but thank you for your mouse tale (tail). I had the same smell, the same find two weeks ago and would have liked to keep it a personal tragedy but I had company,….. which when they come take over my kitchen to make recipes they have discovered since the last visit,….back to point….they followed the smell and I have lived with my private pain but now with your help its a shared experience.
OMG, I am horrified and nauseated…but a great story and fabulously (is that a word?) told!
Oh my. I have the willies now!
It’s just like when you get food poisoning. You can’t go near the food that made you ill for at least a year. The memory alone is enough to make you queasy. I guess the same thing happened to you with the pears, though in a different way. Here’s hoping you get over your pear-phobia in the near future. Pears truly are wonderful, and you deserve to be able to really enjoy them.
Blech. just blech.. But it was much easier to read than the post I read the other day (including pictures..) of a man and a brush with a chain saw. That was realllllyy blechy.
I’m okay with pears though.
I don’t like pears either, but only because of the grainy texture in my mouth that happens as soon as I bite into one. That feeling in my mouth — Yuck, I can’t even go there. If I’d thought that mouse head was a pear – I wouldn’t go their either!!
Renovation Therapy – What a hoot!!
Can you see me shuddering??? We had a mouse nest under our dishwasher in my old kitchen. Freaked me out. And me, a person who lives in the country — where I have both mice and pear trees. Guess which one I’d rather have? I feel your pain, Marilyn.
EEEWWW, YUCK! The smell alone would have made me hurl! You’re a lot braver soul than I am I would have screamed and ran after touching it!
Interesting story and I totally can see why you don’t like pears!
~ingrid
well, my day can only go downhill from here. i don’t think i’ve ever laughed so much so early.
and i’ll never look at a pear the same way again.
That is one of the funniest , yet at the same time, horrifying, posts I have ever read. I am sorry, but I would have to move!
Wow, that is nasty. I’m glad I’ve never had to deal with dead rodents in my kitchen.
Oh. My. God. OhmyGod!
Marilyn, compadre, you are such a talented writer. So glad I am at your blog (even though, or especially because I SUCK at cooking). I’m bookmarking you.
Do you ever do special recipes for kitchen idiots?
Laurie: tiny little words can’t express how delighted I am to see you here. Been a long time, my friend – since Behavioral Science class! – and glad to see you’re behaving well.
I too can be a kitchen idiot – just a highly controlled one.
*shudders* and I liked pears…
Oh. My. Gawd. *Love* your site, but SO wish I hadn’t read that post–Eeeeuuw!!