Deep fried hamburgers: When two worlds collide

Among the battles we experience here in our home, there is one constant fight that I am most positive will never be resolved. I am speaking, of course, of the battle of the television.
Naturally my children fight over which cartoon to watch or on special occasions, which movie to occupy their brains for the following hour and a half. This is no surprise. But it is the fight between my husband I and that has come to a nasty, greasy head.
He is a hunter. And every fall and spring when the game go in season, he will grab the remote and flip directly to some outdoor channel to watch yet another hunting show. In case you are not familiar with these hunting shows, let me tell you exactly what happens in every episode.
No matter the game or the season, in each show there will be a man with a goatee or at the very least, a mustache, sitting in full camouflage, whispering into a camera for a full half an hour. At the end of the show, guess what! He successfully gets the deer/turkey/whatever. Every time! I tell you, it’s downright amazing.
Meanwhile, he will tell you that I am a foodie. No matter if I’m hungry or not, I will turn on the food channel and watch yet another cooking show. He will tell you, if you don’t know how these shows work, that in every episode of every show, someone prepares a bunch of different foods. Surprisingly enough, they get it all done in a half an hour. And guess what! It’s delicious. Every time! I tell you, it’s downright amazing.
So here we are, two very different people living with one very singular television. Each of us has our own path to entertainment bliss, and it is when those paths cross that our world as we know it goes off-kilter, gets thrown out of balance, and frankly, affects our very well-being.
One day I left the food channel on while I was busy putzing around the house and my husband walked in to a show that tours the country looking for good food in small diners. This particular episode was displaying a cheeseburger that someone had battered and deep-fried. (I know somewhere a reader’s mouth just started to water…)
I don’t know if it was the juicy hamburger or the lure of the hot oil, but my husband sat glued to the television without changing the channel. One look at that fried hunk of meat and when the show was over, he ran to the pantry to dig through the top shelves to find the rarely-used Fry Daddy Jr. that we acquired at least seven years ago and has only been used once in the “let’s try to fry a Twinkie fiasco of 2001.”
And like the skilled hunter he is (who has watched many a hunting show), he carefully planned his meal. With the grace of a goateed man in a tree stand, he silently went to finding the ingredients, preparing the burger and the batter, heating the oil, and yes, he actually deep-fried a fully-made cheeseburger.
He will tell you it was delicious. I will tell you that two worlds had collided and provided us with a meal that probably included enough fat to last us through the next few winters.
Not only that, but the emerging of the Fry Daddy even inspired him to make homemade doughnuts for breakfast the next morning, in case we didn’t clog up our arteries enough the night before. I don’t know which was sweeter—the doughnuts sitting rock hard in our bellies or my husband. But I do know that as we sat there and ate them, I grabbed the remote control and turned on the news.