Cooking Things: November 2008 Archives

So I made the gingerbread of Mordor. And it was duly admired and gobbled, and it sent out its mysterious power unto all those who came into contact with it. That being that you may be full to the brim already, even with much gingerbreadness, and yet, lo the gingerbread will still call to you and make you sup again of its deep brandy-laced goodness.

Lordy.

The other Thanksgivingy treats were also thus duly consumed - yea, overconsumed.

And then came I once more onto my bicyclette, and we did (he and me) (he being the bicyclette) make our way homewards unto our own hood, there to take a shower and sit dully upon the couch, thinking upon the many faux pas we may have committed while imbibing too much wine and wishing for things we cannot have.

Okay, the bike probably didn't make any gaffes whatsoever. But I, well, that is another story.

Enh. So what. Big deal.

The thing about holidays, you see, is that there's all this pressure to feel a prescribed way on a given day. Lovey-dovey on Valentine's Day, saintly on Xmas, spooky-playful on Halloween, gracious to our moms on mother's day, and thankful on thanksgiving.

And yet, I often don't feel that way on that day. I might feel that way on a completely other day - I'm sure on Arbor Day I felt perfectly thankful, but today I am nursing a big ol' grudge against fate, and I am sour. And then to have to hide that, channel it into some semblance of cheer laced with dark humor, well, it doesn't always work.

I didn't even know that was what I was doing until after the coffee took effect. Again, oh well. This is one of those days when I can't cobble together an articulate or entertaining post, and I think that whether there's some deeper meaning to all this whirlwind or not, I simply don't care to iron it out into neat little rows.

All I know is this: I'm very, very thirsty for some reason.

Meanwhile back here at Frustration Central, our heroine was tearing up the joint looking for an outlet, and I don't mean electrical. Or maybe I do.

Chemical, anyway.

I thought about callously using the blonde to take the edge off, but he's so not what I really want that I don't think that idea will fly.

Kitwich keeps looking at me as if I've lost my mind (she can apparently read it, so she ought to know when it's gone missing). Really, honestly, I am not quite rational. I am incensed, impassioned, insomniac, immolating, infuriated, insatiable, incitable, inflammatory, infatuated, intoxicated, intolerably intensely incandescent, incendiary, and moving towards insurrectionary.

What I am not is indifferent, impervious, intertwined, invulnerable, insensate, impassive, immured, inured, immovable, indurate, incorruptible, or imperturbable.

I am, on the other hand, possessed of both a vocabulary and a dictionary.

Sigh.

Now I have to make gingerbread. With brandy-vanilla sauce. Here's hoping I don't end up swimming my way out of the brandy bottle.

I'd wanted to post this last night but my ftp client was misbehaving, which sounds rather like I'm a dominatrix and had an unruly man show up for a little f+t=p.

You fill in the blanks.

Anyway, what I did instead of that last night was make soup. Soup is one of those elemental things that brings me back to myself when I am feeling far away. In this case, the personal drift was caused by not being able to eat the things I normally eat, by a week of having to live like some kind of 1950s bourgeois teenager being fed peanut butter and grape jelly on white bread by his beaproned mother.

Yuck.

So I gathered the entire contents of the vegetable drawer - a single giant rutabaga (seriously, it had to be eight inches tall), a passel of white baby turnips, three sturdy carrots, a handful of yellow fingerlings (potatoes), two celery roots, and a small beautiful bunch of kale - and made them into white bean soup.

While I was at it, I made stock from the ends and peels for next time.

The whole pot of soup is now in the fridge, a much-larger quantity than I have tupperware for, and probably more than I can eat in a week, even if I have it for both lunch and dinner. But damn, I needed to do that. I also need to bake some bread, a thing which I've not yet done in this apartment, though I've lived here for a few years.

But I have this friend with a bread fetish, and...he keeps nudging me about it. You should have seen the look on his face when he found out that I can bake bread. It was as if I'd told him I know how to shape the very clouds of the sky with my bare hands. (Well, I can do that, too, but it's a story for another time.)

Stayed up way too late last night, obsessing.

Again, you fill in the blanks. I tell ya, the blog, it writes itself some days.