I am thoroughly convinced that people who submit recipes to these websites like allrecipes.com or myrecipes.com add in an obscure ingredient or two just to mess with those infrequent cookers like myself. You can always tell who we are because you can see us marching up and down the spice aisle for an hour and a half, scratching our heads and wondering how awful the meal could really be without that half teaspoon of tarragon. And seriously, what the fuck is fennel? All I want to do is make a good homemade mac and cheese and my ingredient list looks like I’m dabbling in chemical warfare. I don’t want to make a WMD. I just want to eat! Insanity.

And why didn’t I ask someone for help? I’m stubborn, I guess. When driving, I have no real qualms about asking for directions when I am lost. But I don’t feel like the guys who designed roads added superfluous cul de sacs and dead ends just to please their sadistic nature. All it is is spice. Fifteen, maybe twenty rows of spice. It can’t be that hard. Just go one row at a time and eventually you’ll find what you are looking for. Unless…

Prepared mustard. That’s what this recipe called for. Prepared mustard. I know of only two kinds of mustard — ground mustard and mustard mustard. One I don’t use for anything; the other is used in conjunction with raw onions to beautify my hot dogs at ballparks. Prepared mustard I don’t know. So, I’m in the spice aisle looking up and down, left and right. Minutes are ticking by. Other people find their spices so swiftly, they don’t even have to stop their carts as they deftly swipe them off the shelf. Lucky them. Me? I gotta find prepared mustard. Five minutes, ten minutes. I walk away and find the elbow macaroni. I go down another aisle and get the Velveeta. But that damn prepared mustard is still lingering uncrossed on my list. Head back to the spice aisle — the most conceited, mocking aisle in the store. Prepared mustard. What the hell is that? And more importantly, where the hell is it?? Finally, I say screw it. I pick up some ground mustard and figure when I toss it into the dish, it will be considered prepared.

Of course, later I look up prepared mustard on the web and find out it is nothing more than regular mustard. That’s it. Could be Dijon or the kind of mustard you get at the ballpark. It’s just mustard. Why couldn’t the asshole who wrote the recipe just say that — JUST MUSTARD? Or am I the asshole for not knowing any better?

Seriously, though, I think I’m right on this one. I mean, if I went to the ballpark and got a hot dog and asked the guy where I could get some prepared mustard, I’m pretty sure he would stare at me for a second then point in the direction of the condiment stand and say, “We ain’t got no prepared mustard. But we got packets of mustard over there.” At which point I would know how ridiculous I sounded, and I would just decide that instead of looking like a snob asking for some rare condiment that isn’t rare at all, I would just go with the craziness of it all.

“Oh…well I guess packets will do. But…can I smoke that?”
“What?”
“And if I rub it on my nipples, will I be able to do multiplication?”
“Mister, I don’t know what kind of mustard you usually get, but we ain’t got no nipple rubbin’ mustard. What’s multiplication?”

Apparently, my dream sequence concession stand guy is a backwoods ignoramous. Not sure why.

Anyway, my point is, don’t make it harder than it has to be, professional recipe writers of the world. Take into consideration poor schlubs like me. If that microscopic sliver of saffron isn’t really needed in the recipe, take it out! No one will know the difference except for other professionals and they will revel in the fact that they could make the dish better by adding that one thing that seems to be missing. So we all win! I say this because from now on, if I come across some rare ingredient or some dumbly named ingredient like “prepared water”, I’m going to substitute it with the one ingredient that is bountiful, easy to find and easily recognized by even the most unsophisticated of palates.

Dirt.