The screen blinks again. Same tableau as before, but without the statue.
“Now let me explain,” Tommy says.
“You better,” says Timmy.
“Those WorkPellets in the jar there are special WorkPellets. That is to say that I made them special. I laid each one of them out on a cookie pan, and droppered one single drop of vinegar onto each one, and let them stay there on that cookie pan, soaking up that vinegar for one whole night. Then what I did was, I put them back in the jar. Took just a few minutes. Now, these cures in this pail here have been eating vinegar’d WorkPellets like these for three whole weeks.”
“Did they like them?” Timmy says.
“How the heck should I know! But they didn’t seem to mind. Their rear ejections were pretty normal, maybe a little more egg-shaped there than spherical, and the bubblegum-type scent was more maybe cherry- than grape-flavored bubblegum scent, but that’s the price we gotta pay I guess.”
“The price for to make them taste like meat?”
“Part of the price.”
“What’s the rest of the price, Dad?”
“Well the rest of the price can only be costed out in terms of man-hours on the job, which so far is just some minutes unless we’re gonna count those three weeks of waiting, and then the next couple steps are also just minutes, even though there’s four hours of waiting, so.”
“You’re confusing me!”
“Maybe that’s why they called him Confucius, huh?”
“Yeah!”
“Anyway, next step here is simple. Throw the cures in the slow cooker. Go on there, Tim.”
Tommy removes the lid of the Crock-Pot, sets it down on the island. Timmy holds the pail of Curios above the Crock-Pot and turns the pail over. We hear faint painsinging.
“Good job, kiddo. Now, next step is we’re gonna mix vinegar with water in a ratio of one vinegars to ten waters, and we’re gonna put that mixture into the slow cooker here. Now, reason I’m giving you a ratio instead of a volume is because here’s the tricky part, okay? But it’s actually not that tricky, so don’t go and worry your head off about it ha-ha. First, you want to make sure the Curios are standing up inside your slow cooker, there. And what you want to do is pour enough of the mixture into the slow cooker that it reaches just to the necks of the shortest cure when it’s standing up.”
“The top of its neck or the bottom of its neck, Dad?”
“That’s a great question and the answer is: doesn’t make a difference. Top of the neck, bottom of the neck, middle of the neck—to the neck is all. Of the shortest one. Relax and have fun with it. The only main thing is not to drown the Curios. So different slow cookers have different sizes and etcetera, so make your mixture—where’s mine? there it is [Tommy reaches offscreen left and grabs a plastic, two-gallon milk jug marked “VINAGIR WATER”]—and now, bring that camera on in here…”
Overhead zoom on the Crock-Pot’s interior. All six Curios are on their feet, looking upward, directly at the camera. One of them holds its elbow and softly painsings. Soon, another one widens its eyes and points up and to its left as the vinegar water comes splashing down from that direction, and we hear Tommy, offscreen, saying, “Now, you just pour it right in. There.”
The cures flee to the farther side of the Crock-Pot and press together. A couple, on the way, catch splashes in their eyes, and they wink and painsing and rub at the affected eyes with the backs of their hands. When the liquid reaches the neck of the shortest cure—one of those thats eyes were splashed—the camera zooms out.
Same tableau as before, though Timmy is leaning forward, looking down into the pot.
“Next comes the cayenne,” Tommy says. “As regular viewers of this program are well aware by this point in time, I like to keep things spicy. All Kamanskis do. Isn’t that right there, Timmy?”
“Huh?” says Timmy, looking up from the Crock-Pot.
“I was saying how we liked to keep things pretty spicy in this neck of the woods.”
“We do,” says Timmy. “We like to keep things spicy.”
“So I’m gonna go ahead, now,” says Tommy, “and sprinkle about two tablespoons of cayenne pepper in there, making sure, while I do so, to get at least half of what I’m sprinkling, right onto the Curios. Now, you might be more delicate than the typical Kamanski, and so you might want to use less pepper than I do. Totally your call. But I strongly, strongly suggest you get a bunch of it, however much you use, right on top of the Curios because it’s important they start inhaling it.”
Tommy unscrews the lid of the cayenne pepper shaker, dips a tablespoon into it, does as he’s just described. More painsongs arise, and multiple sneezes. Tommy sets the lid back onto the Crock-Pot.
“Now I’m gonna set this bad boy up to cook on low heat for four hours. And we’re almost there.”
“We’ve gotta wait four hours!?” Timmy says, as Tommy sets the dial on the Crock-Pot.
“Yeah,” says Tommy, “but that four hours can be fun. Before it gets fun, though, I just want to give the viewers a brief preview of what’s coming up. First off, in just two hours, we’re gonna go ahead and stir the pot a little. And then, after another two hours, that’s when we’ll ladle the little gizmos outta the pot, take them to the open flame as promised. And real quick, here, I just want to explain briefly the science behind the Kamanski method here because I’m sure there are some people out there who are gonna want to try to rush things and they should know they can’t cause rushing things won’t work in this situation here. You need to slow cook for four hours on low heat because you don’t want to like shock these Curios to death. You want them to slowly weaken and slowly drown. You want them to inhale and swallow this vinegar water and pepper and send the stuff all throughout their bodies so it can do its work on their organs and their muscles and whatever else—I’m not a doctor—but for all of that to happen to a successful degree, they need to kind of nod off, start swallowing and inhaling, and then wake back up and try to fight off the end, and succeed a little, and then nod off again and repeat the process, hopefully at least a few times. If you heat them up too fast, they’re just gonna dact and the peppery vinegar water won’t ever get to pump through their veins via being carried in their blood like it will if you do it our way. Got it? I think you do. Now, I should also not fail to not neglect to mention that there’s an alternative method for prepping Curios for barbecue that our viewers might have heard about, and that method is to chop the limbs and the heads off the cures and just marinate the torsos in the same mixture we’re using in our slow cooker here for a couple of hours. And that is totally, a hundred percent legitimate. If what you want is some barbecued Curio torsos. Which we Kamanskis…don’t want. We want barbecued head-on Curio because that, my friends, is just a much superior form of cuisine with more classy textures and a subtler variety of visual presentation possibilities to take advantage of at the end there when you’re plating. But like I said also when I was talking about the cayenne: your call. This isn’t some kind of my-way-or-the-highway-type situation. This is a way to have fun with your family and enjoy some seriously good eats. And speaking of having fun, what should we do for the next four hours, there, Timmy?”