My friend Onna informed me some time ago she actually was bored one day and ordered a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie after seeing an informercial on televion. She said it sat on her kitchen counter for a few years, and she never used it. I took it off her hands, and she even shipped it all the way from L.A. That was very kind of her. It was a gesture of sorts for all the times she’d drove down (when I lived in San Diego) and I’d make her tom yum soup. I suppose she could have found a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, but that’s besides the point.

As you can see, she wasn’t lying—she hadn’t even bothered to turn it on.

The Showtime came with these handling gloves, which doubles as safety equipment if happen to work in the field of asbestos removal.

Here’s the timing guidelines. I figured I would follow these in the spirit of the original infomercial ¹.

The chicken turned out pretty well. It was slathered in a paste made from pureed garlic and shallots, smoked paprika, lemon juice, olive oil, thyme, sea salt, pepper.

What I did next was create a slurry to marinade a lovely leg of lamb I purchased from Costco. Now, this was Australian lamb, which is the lamb they sell at Costco. I have no clue to the provenance of this lamb. I was not friends with it, we did not play cribbage together on Sunday afternoons or spoon while watching You’ve Got Mail on the USA Network. I don’t know if this lamb led an honorable life building miniature windmill power farms, or what it scored on the SATs, or even if the animal was properly instructed in the practices of bikram yoga.

Since it was Australian lamb, I assume it wasn’t local.

My slurry consisted of a shitload of garlic, a few branches of rosemary from my bush, coarse sea salt, coarse black pepper, olive oil, the juice of a lemon, a few splashes of red wine vinegar and…Maggi! All of the solid ingredients were mashed together in a mortar, followed by the liquid components.

I used this insanely phallic injection device provided by the Ronco corporation to inject the marinade deep into the flesh. I then lathered the remaining marinade all over the roast. It was all very distrubing.

I put it back in the fridge to chill for a few hours while I drank and pondered the enormity of what I was about to do.

Let’s roll, bitches.

The thing has a switch for rotating that operates independently of the heating unit. The heating unit tends to get really, really fucking majorly hot. It needs to constantly rotate. If the rotary pauses mid-rotation and sits still for more than even a couple minutes, it will really sear the flesh. You’ll think—like I did originally—that you’ll be fine by just “setting and forgetting”, however, with as much concentrated heat being given off, you’ll have to kill the heat continually and set it to rotation-only in order to not burn your roast’s exterior.

After I constantly reset the rotation/heat, I realized I really wasn’t “forgetting” after “setting”, and thus a general distrust of Ronco Enterprises began to foment within the paranoid back alleys of my mind. Could their cook time guidelines also be misadvertised? It wasn’t as if there was an internal temperature guage that I could monitor—the Showtime is binary. Either really fucking hot, or off. And I was already an hour or more in. I tried looking for my meat thermometer. Why didn’t I find that before I started? I pulled the roast and let it sit.

As you can see, it came out well-done. A ruined piece of post-consumer waste recycled cardboard. I’m not going be the fall guy for this shit. I watched the infomercial.

Fuck you, Ron Popeil. You’re an asshole. If I ever witness your sorry botoxed template around my neck of the woods, I’ll bust a fucking cap in your ass.

¹The fine print in the user’s manual actually informs you that you should monitor the unit when you’re cooking it. But the entire informercial was based on the catch phrase, “Set it and forget it!”. Throughout the course of the entire hour, Ron Popeil himself continually compels the crowd to chant this incantation over and over. He pumps the crowd into a mad frenzy, each member whipped into an agitated froth, and cultivates such a shaman-like persona you’d think he was a method actor cast in an Oliver Stone movie.