Celebrity Snackdown: Grilled Cheese

Antoni Porowski vs Jamie Oliver

The music is obnoxious, if you can get past that or mute it, Jamie Oliver has a fantastic idea that I'm going to steal. I meant to say "use." And he cracks me up with "I'd be happy to serve this to the queen." I say that too about ordinary things. But I say it because I have no respect for royalty and he says it because he calls the outside pan-fried cheese a "crown." (It bends upward like a crown.)

Only 158 comments on YouTube, most complain that Porowski cooked a melt not a cheese sandwich. They're disappointed there are not two cheese sandwiches to compare. One commenter said, "They should have shown Alton Brown's grilled cheese sandwich."

Fine.

Brown makes some good points but nobody is going to do this unless their grill is already set up. The sandwich is famous because it is easy to make, not because it's cooked on an actual grill and not because it's overly complicated with additional steps. Five million seven hundred thousand views, with over three thousand comments, viewers miss Good Eats, and they're charmed by what Brown's thirteen year-old daughter says.

This style is useless to me as open flame grills are disallowed downtown.

About downtown prohibition on grills. You can have an electric one if you want. But those fairly miss the point.

A friend likes to refurbish houses. This guy is strange to begin with. It's a hobby. He doesn't need additional income. But boy, does this bring additional income. He likes driving around and looking at houses, and he knows more about current homes for sale than most real estate agents do. He likes spending weekends going into them and examining them. He likes expensive houses. And he's lived in the most fabulous places around town that you can imagine, and however bad they are when he moves into them, he has a real knack for stripping them down to essentials and highlighting the things that make them outstanding.

He amazes the h-e-double paint roller extension sticks out of me. Large expansive wooden floors with plant pot water damage in front of broad windows, stripped and stained to new brilliance. Large brick interior walls cleaned up and adorned with huge framed posters hung very low at eye level that turn a place into a museum. Back yard overgrown bushes cleared out and stripped to bare sticks with foliage like tightly groomed poodles. Oceans of camel-colored tight carpet with luxurious padding that bring large rooms to unified conceptualization making luxuriously large areas appear even larger. The house directly across from Washington High School looks small set back from the street, but once inside, the whole place opens up to palatial dimensions. I loved going over to that place. And it's only one place out of several he's owned around town that I've seen.

Another place on Pearl Street on Capitol Hill was once owned by a well-known Colorado artist who painted in the basement suspended in a sling flicking paint onto oversized canvas spread out on the floor. He was very old and died there. He had painted a mural of an outdoor Colorado scene onto an exterior wall in the small back yard. A very good one, actually. Inside there was an elevator attached to the very broad staircase that curved around, apparent upon entering the house. I was in my 20's when my friend bought the house and we all made fun of the elevator. For the need for an elevator. For the slowness of it. We bounded up the stairs like cattle laughing at the elevator. It just seemed hilarious to us.

I wonder if I'd use it today and think the speed of it just fine. Those are very large steps.

The place is huge.

And oddly, there is a highrise apartment right next to it.

And another behind it.

The outside view is not great.

He spent a fortune remodeling the kitchen, and adding a new porch and patio deck to the back. It was a lot of physical work that he did himself.

"Why do you even do this?"

"I like it. It's fun."

"You're out of your goddamn mind."

Refurbishing one house was enough for me. Enough hard work and distress to last a lifetime. Put me off houses altogether. Because the upkeep never stops. Just because you put in an automatic sprinkler system doesn't mean you get out of yard maintenance. Things happen underground that forces you to maintain the system and make fixes each year. The lawn mowing service blasts through the heads, for example and there you are making repairs, year after year after year.

Then something dramatic happened.

The very day that work was finished on the new roof to the new addition at the back of the house off the kitchen, a woman who lived in the highrise next to his house lit up her patio grill. Live embers from the grill blew off from her patio and landed on his spanking new roof and burned down his new patio and his new kitchen. All his work for that summer went up in smoke the day that he finished it. And he told me all this with a laugh.

I was distraught just hearing the story. It was a beautiful new kitchen and an outstanding porch and patio, and a gorgeous but small back yard.

The woman was so traumatized, so unable to handle the damage she caused that she flew off to Florida to run away and hide, to distance herself from the catastrophe of her own making. To put distance between herself and her victims. To make communication impossible. She couldn't even be spoken to. That's how some people handle things. They don't. They run away instead.

"Aren't you upset?"

"Sure. I guess. For awhile. But things happen." He laughed again.

It was all covered by insurance obviously but I'd still be devastated. To him it was all just another chance to remodel again. Soon enough it's all fixed up again and he's out of the place and into another project elsewhere in town, another fabulous home way, WAY, WAY too big for one guy, but an excellent place to show off and to host a few parties.

The new place had a crap back yard dominated by a brick retaining wall holding back a steep hill that would dump runoff directly onto broad flatstone patio and threaten the foundation of the home. By the time he was done clearing out the poorly designed planting, the random bushes and weak scraggly trees, overgrown vines and tangled mess, and poorly thought out, poorly placed random perennials, he made the whole area into simplified gorgeous botanic garden. And the interior was transformed to the most elegant place I've ever seen. The dark red solid wood cabinetry looked like simple rosewood walls, not paneling, just simple wooden walls, but touch them in places and the doors spring open to beautiful cabinets such as bookcases holding stacks of white porcelain dishes such as you see in a high end china shop. Inside all of his houses look like nobody lives there. Like the whole place is for show, each towel hanging as maid service in hotels, and not for actual everyday living. Not a sock out of place.

I told another friend, "He cannot possibly keep the place this spotless all the time."

"Oh, I'm certain he does."

It takes a huge degree of neurosis for that. That right there describes a seriously damaged personality.

It's a philosophy that I do not fully understand. It's too much seriously hard work for it to be any real fun. But I must say, he's got an incredibly good eye for possibilities, the best that I've seen, even on television, and a very developed sense for value. When it comes to real estate, he's a savant actuary. He sees the end at the beginning, he sees possibility balanced against necessary work, actual time required, not imagined idealized time, cost of repairs, and profit within future market. And he sees all that in an instant, better than the professionals do that we watch on t.v. who are always surprised by unexpected difficulties as part of the drama, but nothing so unexpected as embers flying off highrise balconies next door.