Only a mad dog or a fool would try to cook a Rutabaga

Some things were never meant to be cooked in the first place, let alone eaten by human beings. Lava rock, steel girders, ship's hulls, Bradley tanks, rutabagas.

I swear to you here and now. If I ever, in my remaining time on this earth, attempt to cook another damned rutabaga, you have my permission-no my earnest plea-to call the local white coats and put me away forever. I would deserve it.

I now know why growers put 3 inch thick coats of wax on the things. Rutabagas are required to survive for a full five to ten years on the supermarket produce shelves before some unwitting fool who has suffered brain damage sufficient to lead them to conclude that he could conceivably be able to cook one of them might happen by!

There are more than six hundred lunatics confined to triple padded cells in mental institutions in this country right now-doomed to spend their final days reflecting on what they might have otherwise done with their lives-only because they unwittingly stumbled into the fool's game of trying to cook a rutabaga. The suicide rate in Forest Grove Oregon is TEN TIMES that of the national average. Why? Forest Grove Oregon is the rutabaga capital of the world!

If I'd had the common sense to look up the world "rutabaga" in the dictionary, I would never have even come near one of the damned things, let alone try to cook it! It's defined as a Swedish turnip or "Swede" and get this! -according to the Advanced Rutabaga Studies Institute, the Swedish people feed the things to cattle! Never use the term "Dumb Swede" in my presence-ever again!

I started trying to cook a rutabaga at 8:30 this morning. I finally finished cooking a rutabaga at 4:15 this afternoon.

In the interim I boiled it for a full three hours before I finally managed to make a microscopic dent in it's Kevlar coating with a brasion bit, sliced open my middle index finger and shattered a 4 inch thick cutting board trying to create a slit wide enough to wedge in a tempered steel chisel with a ball peen hammer.

My only decent off day for a full month was totally devoted to trying to cook a rutabaga. I missed two NCAA tournament games, 3 phone calls from clients, an Easter greeting from a friend that I hadn't heard from in more than a decade and my afternoon nap. All because I was fool enough to try and cook something that was never, ever, on God's green earth intended to be cooked or eaten in the first place-a damned rutabaga.

Alexander the Great conquered the known universe; Pericles led Greece into the golden age, Isaac Newton discovered gravity, Columbus the new world, Einstein the theory of the universe. Brilliant people, wonderful leaders and thinkers, icons for the rest of us to pattern our lives after. And I'm willing to bet my last busted chisel and skinned knuckle that not a single one of these people was ever suicidally depressed to the point that they would even consider attempting to cook a rutabaga. If historians or archaeologists ever uncovered sufficient evidence to prove that, at some time in their lives, they had even entertained such an insane notion they would be laughed out any possible sympathetic recognition of their deeds, no matter the matter the magnitude of their contributions to the recorded history of the world.

Would it surprise you to learn that the only Egyptian, Greek and Roman temples still standing were constructed by replacing sand stone and mortar with rutabagas? Not me brother!

Fools, knaves, lunatics and blithering idiots try to cook to rutabagas. Try to name one single person worth half way favorable reference in the annals of recorded time who has ever once owned up to trying to cook a rutabaga. You can't because it never happened!

So how did it taste you ask?

There simply was no taste-none whatever. The leathery residue that was bonded to the bottom of the pan after hours of boiling, broiling, baking, frying, steaming, braising and microwaving resembled congealed orange sterno that had been standing open since the Depression. Put salt on it and you taste salt. Add sugar and you taste salt and sugar.

I could have saved a full day's hard labor and might have possibly even salvaged a reasonable degree of my sanity if I'd simply spent the time, as the Swedes learned centuries ago, picking through a herd of Holsteins to try and locate one with mad cow disease that had advanced to the point that it might conceivably attempt to eat the damned thing...

"It is the act of a madman to pursue impossibilities."
Marcus Aurelius