He’s dark, stands three-foot-four, and is the answer to every woman’s prayers.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the Masterbuilt Pro Electric Smoker. Load it up with a whole turkey or chicken, pork loin, pot roast, a side of beef, or whatever your heart desires, add woodchips—hickory for a bacon flavor, apple or cherry wood as a sweet delicate—and out it comes, bursting with flavor that will leave every taste bud begging for more.
But that’s not why I love our smoker so. For all care, everything could come out tasting like the ashtray on Lindsay Lohan’s nightstand, and I’d still love it all the same.
The real reason behind my infatuation? Plain and simple, Doug loves to cook with it.
Let me backtrack. If there’s one point in the day I despise the most, it’s late afternoon when I’m looking hopelessly into the abyss of our refrigerator wondering, “What kind of concoction am I going to attempt pass off as dinner tonight?” It’s not that I’m a horrible cook, but after five years of serving short, picky critics who wrinkle their noses and push away their plates after a day of slave labor in the kitchen, any drop of enthusiasm I’ve ever had in the culinary department has been sapped.
I feel like since we moved into our house in 2003, the only room I’ve seen is the kitchen. It is there that I do the planning. The marinading. The chopping. The frying. The baking. The simmering. The arranging. The wrapping. And alas, the never-ending cleaning. A day of standing over a hot stove amidst our yellow walls and countertops leaves me feeling sun stroked. If someone told me to leave my kitchen and never return, I’d be happier than Martha Stewart emerging from prison.
Before we got married, Doug cooked—and unlike me, he’s naturally good at it. It seemed like every time he threw something on the grill, it magically tasted like something out of a five-star restaurant. I’d always wanted to marry a chef—or at least, someone who would be willing to feed me night after night. And at first, it looked pretty promising. But then a funny thing happened. We got married, and suddenly, I found myself wearing the chef’s hat. Eventually, his cooking fizzled out altogether.
Until we got the smoker. Now, he’s happily taking day trips to the Meat House and gathering his ingredients like an artist selecting colors for his palette. He takes home his pickings and brines them in salt and sugar, soaks the woodchips, then fills up the water pan. He experiments, adding apple juice, herbs and spices, marinades, a splash of beer. He spends the day hovering over it like a mother with her newborn baby, checking its thermometer, adding coals or more water here and there, rotating the meat, watching the fat drip into the catch bowl beneath his savory masterpiece.
Tonight, I was getting a glass out of a cabinet, turned and nearly collided with him as he tended to a soup he was making from the smoky remains of a turkey. Seconds later, I walked into his path and knocked his new favorite gadget—the flavor injector—out of his hand, when he snapped the seven words I’ve been longing to hear for the past decade: “Will you get out of my kitchen?”
And so, it is done. What God has joined together between me and the Masterbuilt Pro, let no man put asunder.
