Coming Undone

Rachael Ray Is Easy, Bouillon Cubes Are Hard

When I got home this afternoon, no one else was there. So I decided to throw together dinner for the family. Opting for ease and speed, I chose to improvise with some boneless skinless chicken breasts we had in the freezer. I don’t know what to call the result. It is too thick to be soup. Chicken vegetable stew, maybe.

My stew was conceived by first caramelizing some chopped onions and crushed garlic in butter. Then I threw in 7 or 8 chopped up chicken breasts. Dumped in some sea salt and black pepper and Tex Joy® steak seasoning. Then while the chicken was browning I made a broth of water, a can of cream of chicken soup, and some corn starch. Once the chicken pieces were browned, I dumped in the broth, and about half a bag of frozen mixed vegetables. Then I let the whole thing simmer for awhile, and made a pot of rice.

It is nothing that would make the Food Network™, more like one of those Rachael Ray 30-minute meals that end up taking an hour and fifteen minutes to prepare in the real world. But it came out okay, I guess. No one turned their nose up at it.

During the preparation, after I had mixed the chicken breasts with my cream of chicken based broth, I decided the stew wasn’t quite chicken-y enough, so I grabbed two or three chicken bouillon cubes to add in there, too.

Now, I don’t get too worked up about small things, normally. But one that that has always pissed me off, I was reminded, is the bouillon industry standard method of wrapping their cubes. As best I can tell, a bouillon cube is a pressed-together conglomeration of dehydrated broth granules, basically the size of a sugar cube. Once formed it is wrapped tightly in a plastic-backed tinfoil wrapper, more or less in the manner of a gift-wrapped box. But some sort of light adhesive must be involved, because if you have ever tried to open a bouillon cube while cooking, you know it is a royal pain in the ass. The cube often begins to deteriorate as you attempt to unwrap it. So you stand over the pot while unwrapping so the loose granules will fall into your broth. But, if you are like me, you have never actually unwrapped a bouillon cube with the wrapper intact at the end. I usually start off by patiently pulling up the tabs on the sides with a fingernail, but pretty soon I lose my patience and start pulling the wrapper apart. If I am standing over the pot, there is a good chance I am not only dropping loose bouillon granules into my stew, but little pieces of tinfoil wrapper, too. So I am forced to unwrap on the side, and end up with as much as ¼ of my cube as granulated broth dust on the countertop and floor.

Goddamn it! We can take detailed, perfectly clear pictures of the surface of Mars and beam them back to Earth, in real time. We can do ten gazillion calculations a second on a chip the size of a granule of dried chicken broth. But we cannot come up with a better method of wrapping a bouillon cube? Has the American public educational system fallen so far that our engineers think a bouillon cube wrapper is a perfectly functional design, as is? I’ll bet those bastards never have to come home and throw together a meal for four in less than forty-five minutes.

Of course, neither does Rachael Ray. And I am sure she has some overworked, brow-beaten assistant unwrap her bouillon cubes for her, prior to her show. That is how the hell she can put together a meal that takes most of us an hour-plus in less than thirty minutes.

I used to wonder who it was that designed the bouillon cube wrapper. I still don’t know, but I think he or she was also called in to spearhead music CD packaging, the only current consumer product to rival the bouillon cube in difficulty of use and in causing me to throw things, and curse. Meantime, I suppose I will have to organize a letter-writing campaign to try and get bouillon cube wrappers modified. Now I just have to find fifty or so other souls who are as concerned about this as I am. Or five, maybe.

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