We've been out driving looking at lights (to a chorus of Entropy Girl's "oh, wow! wow!"), the kids have been bathed and tucked into their new Christmas PJs (reindeer for the Boy Wonder, snowglobes for Entropy Girl), the Night Before Christmas has been read and the babes are snuggled into their beds after one last check of the Norad Santa tracking radar. As I type this I am nibbling on a carrot trying to make the best reindeer-esque teethmarks I can and being sure to leave as many crumbs as respectable on the cookie plate. The stockings are filled, the presents wrapped and piled precariously below the tree, leaving ample room for train tracks and one slightly too curious cat.
Sleep in heavenly peace.
I don't think I ever told you about the Worst Dinner I Ever Made. No, really, it was. Even Brainiac, who has endless tolerance for the worst of my offerings, shudders when he remembers.
It went like this: We were living in Binghamton, New York during the crazy and extreme winter of 1994/95, an unhappy situation. I was out of work and spent entire days dreaming up dinner menus and shopping for the supplies to prepare them at my first-ever Wegmans (a relationship that has since become an obsession). Anyway, on this particular day I had a raging head cold and decided that I would make a chicken soup the recipe for which I had come across in one or another of the many magazines I read. What's better for a cold than chicken soup, right? It's practically canon.
I had a chicken with which I could made a delicious savory broth, and I also ample supplies of carrots, chick peas, rotini, paprika and dried thyme - the remainder of the princple ingredients. And so I set about making broth and then the soup. I even cooked the rotini separately so that it would not become mushy and gummy in the soup while I was waiting Brainiac's return. So I cooked and tasted, cooked and tasted, producing the most wonderful, succulent, herb-scented chicken soup one could ever desire.
Brainiac ate precisely two spoons-ful, earning an evening's worth of my wrath. Why, I stood over that stove All. DAMNED. DAY. Was he not grateful? It's 10 degrees outside, any other man would be thrilled to come home to...blah blah, it wasn't pretty. I ate three bowls of soup just to show him.
Several days later I was casting about for lunch and came upon the leftover. Yum! I heated it up and sat down with a book to enjoy the remainder of my masterpiece.
You know the punchline, right? It was utterly inedible. In the haze of congestion and cold medications I used waaaaaaaay too much thyme and waaaaay too much salt and waaaaay too much paprika. Of course Brainiac couldn't possibly have eaten it, the soup was totally nauseating. And the poor dear didn't even tell me.
Yesterday I felt the beginnings of a cold that, so far at least, is promising to be a doozy. Ever mindful of the Lesson of the Chicken Soup, I very cautiously prepared tonight's dinner, a variation on coq au vin purportedly derived from the recipe that the Sainted Julia herself once used. Luckily, the dish doesn't call for too much ancillary seasoning, it's pretty much brown the meat, dump the stuff, simmer. Foolproof, even through a Nyquil mist.
Start by cooking about 1/2 cup diced bacon in a wide-bottomed stockpot (Julia's recipe called for lardons, something described as boiled bacon - but I am not Julia, nor Julie Powell, for that matter, and I say to heck with it). Remove the browned bacon, leaving the fat in the pan. Brown four good-sized chicken thighs and a couple legs (I removed the skin from the thighs)in the bacon fat. When nicely browned on all sides, season and add a cup of diced onion, cook until onions are translucent. Sprinkle the onions and chicken parts with two to three tablespoons of flour, stirring and turning the chicken so that the flour is distributed throughout. Remove the pan from heat and add 1/2 a cup of any non-sweet red wine you happen to have lying around, a cup or so of beef broth, two tablespoons of tomato paste and the cooked bacon. Cover and gently simmer over low heat for 20-25 minutes.
We ate this wonderful, warming dish with egg noodles to sop up the extra gravy and steamed broccoli. Brainiac, rightfully suspicious of anything I cook while sick with a cold, ate two helpings.
It went like this: We were living in Binghamton, New York during the crazy and extreme winter of 1994/95, an unhappy situation. I was out of work and spent entire days dreaming up dinner menus and shopping for the supplies to prepare them at my first-ever Wegmans (a relationship that has since become an obsession). Anyway, on this particular day I had a raging head cold and decided that I would make a chicken soup the recipe for which I had come across in one or another of the many magazines I read. What's better for a cold than chicken soup, right? It's practically canon.
I had a chicken with which I could made a delicious savory broth, and I also ample supplies of carrots, chick peas, rotini, paprika and dried thyme - the remainder of the princple ingredients. And so I set about making broth and then the soup. I even cooked the rotini separately so that it would not become mushy and gummy in the soup while I was waiting Brainiac's return. So I cooked and tasted, cooked and tasted, producing the most wonderful, succulent, herb-scented chicken soup one could ever desire.
Brainiac ate precisely two spoons-ful, earning an evening's worth of my wrath. Why, I stood over that stove All. DAMNED. DAY. Was he not grateful? It's 10 degrees outside, any other man would be thrilled to come home to...blah blah, it wasn't pretty. I ate three bowls of soup just to show him.
Several days later I was casting about for lunch and came upon the leftover. Yum! I heated it up and sat down with a book to enjoy the remainder of my masterpiece.
You know the punchline, right? It was utterly inedible. In the haze of congestion and cold medications I used waaaaaaaay too much thyme and waaaaay too much salt and waaaaay too much paprika. Of course Brainiac couldn't possibly have eaten it, the soup was totally nauseating. And the poor dear didn't even tell me.
Yesterday I felt the beginnings of a cold that, so far at least, is promising to be a doozy. Ever mindful of the Lesson of the Chicken Soup, I very cautiously prepared tonight's dinner, a variation on coq au vin purportedly derived from the recipe that the Sainted Julia herself once used. Luckily, the dish doesn't call for too much ancillary seasoning, it's pretty much brown the meat, dump the stuff, simmer. Foolproof, even through a Nyquil mist.
Start by cooking about 1/2 cup diced bacon in a wide-bottomed stockpot (Julia's recipe called for lardons, something described as boiled bacon - but I am not Julia, nor Julie Powell, for that matter, and I say to heck with it). Remove the browned bacon, leaving the fat in the pan. Brown four good-sized chicken thighs and a couple legs (I removed the skin from the thighs)in the bacon fat. When nicely browned on all sides, season and add a cup of diced onion, cook until onions are translucent. Sprinkle the onions and chicken parts with two to three tablespoons of flour, stirring and turning the chicken so that the flour is distributed throughout. Remove the pan from heat and add 1/2 a cup of any non-sweet red wine you happen to have lying around, a cup or so of beef broth, two tablespoons of tomato paste and the cooked bacon. Cover and gently simmer over low heat for 20-25 minutes.
We ate this wonderful, warming dish with egg noodles to sop up the extra gravy and steamed broccoli. Brainiac, rightfully suspicious of anything I cook while sick with a cold, ate two helpings.
This year's Christmas cookie round-up:
1) Toba Garrett's Butter Cookies in heart and star shapes, decorated liberally with green and red sugar sprinkles, cinnamon red hots and non-pareils.
2) Gingerbread from Christmas Baking with SusieJ. This year, for the first time ever in my cookie baking career, gingerbread cookies will take the shape of actual gingerbread men. I bought a great copper cutter from World Market, prompting Brainiac to demand to know if cookie cutters "always cost this much." Men.
3) Holly Cookies, because no holiday is complete without at least a little marshmallow.
4) Pizelles, the anise kind, although without seeds. Maybe some chocolate, too.
5) Chocolate chip, from the back of the package and with a little Da Vinci Hazelnut syrup.
6) Thumbprints, with candied cherries - the old version.
7) Chocolate Crinkles, because they're festive, fun and easy.
These are the cookies that say "Christmas" to me, the absence of which I'd miss. Sure, if supplied with endless free time I might delve into marzipan (which I adore), tea cakes, or even those peanut butter cookies garnished with chocolate kisses. For now, though, this is enough. My house smells wonderful, my counters are a mess, my sweater is covered in flour and I am happy.
1) Toba Garrett's Butter Cookies in heart and star shapes, decorated liberally with green and red sugar sprinkles, cinnamon red hots and non-pareils.
2) Gingerbread from Christmas Baking with SusieJ. This year, for the first time ever in my cookie baking career, gingerbread cookies will take the shape of actual gingerbread men. I bought a great copper cutter from World Market, prompting Brainiac to demand to know if cookie cutters "always cost this much." Men.
3) Holly Cookies, because no holiday is complete without at least a little marshmallow.
4) Pizelles, the anise kind, although without seeds. Maybe some chocolate, too.
5) Chocolate chip, from the back of the package and with a little Da Vinci Hazelnut syrup.
6) Thumbprints, with candied cherries - the old version.
7) Chocolate Crinkles, because they're festive, fun and easy.
These are the cookies that say "Christmas" to me, the absence of which I'd miss. Sure, if supplied with endless free time I might delve into marzipan (which I adore), tea cakes, or even those peanut butter cookies garnished with chocolate kisses. For now, though, this is enough. My house smells wonderful, my counters are a mess, my sweater is covered in flour and I am happy.
We're at The Other House preparing to leave earlier than expected for Charlottesville - there's an ice storm in the making, apparently, replacing the snow for which we had planned. We're spending the holiday in Virginia because the Boy Wonder has been terribly concerned that Santa won't be able to find us because it's too close to Christmas to be in a new house. Seeing his point completely, we've planned a pre-Christmas week of parties, gingerbread house decorating, cookie baking and carol singing.
I am all kinds of happy because for the first time in months I feel like everything is under control. There was an excellent meeting this morning which brought potentially very good news for the project I'm working on (and enjoying tremendously), work on The Other House is actually progressing much smoother than I had initially thought and my Christmas packages have been mailed. What more can a girl ask for?
So let the ice come. This time tomorrow there'll be a fire burning and I'll be curled up with the cat at my side, tea in hand and reading white papers and drawing process maps while the kids cut snowflakes out of printer paper. Not quite Norman Rockwellian, perhaps, but close enough for me.
I am all kinds of happy because for the first time in months I feel like everything is under control. There was an excellent meeting this morning which brought potentially very good news for the project I'm working on (and enjoying tremendously), work on The Other House is actually progressing much smoother than I had initially thought and my Christmas packages have been mailed. What more can a girl ask for?
So let the ice come. This time tomorrow there'll be a fire burning and I'll be curled up with the cat at my side, tea in hand and reading white papers and drawing process maps while the kids cut snowflakes out of printer paper. Not quite Norman Rockwellian, perhaps, but close enough for me.
Harrowing.
It's the only word that comes close to describing the past six days or so. True, none of us has been lastingly harmed and no blood was shed so perhaps you think me a tad dramatic. No, I say. Any week that involves two children alternating barfy episodes for the entire length of a 250 mile drive (the last of which I marked by pointing out to Braniac, "We're close enough to home that the wet clothes shouldn't be too bad for her and there's no point in changing her again since the car seat is thoroughly soaked in...whatever that is. Just drive.") AND a second 500 mile round trip, rendered pointless by a 6 inch snowfall that was repeatedly and erroneously in my opinion described as a "snow storm" but which canceled the meeting for which I had specifically made the trip AND getting stuck in said snow after the nice man who farms the 50 acres adjacent to what we're now calling "The Other House" plowed the 800-foot drive thereby covering the car with what might have been the entire snowy contents of said drive AND getting sick on the drive back from the second trip with whatever it was that the kids had AND promising and unpromising a friend that I'd babysit for her AND realizing that the guy who is coordinating work on The Other House has ideas about home repair and renovation that depart quite significantly from my own (one word: pressboard), well, I think it could be rightly called harrowing.
There was one quite amusing incident from the first trip that I've been so dying to share. I hope I tell it right, because Brainiac and I cracked each other up referencing the experience for the entire weekend. Really, just too funny. Anyway, we were at Ikea because, as I've mentioned, it's the law to check in with them when moving anywhere within hauling distance. And we're going through obediently following the big blue arrows on the floors and we keep seeing this same man - tall, bald, frowing with a deep furrow between the eyes - who's look of consternation is so encompassing, so total that it's nearly impossible to not notice that this is a man who does not like what he sees. Not at all. At one point, he stood in one of those faux kitchens and sighed, loudly and repeatedly. A fellow shopped asked if he needed any help.
"Any help? Any help?," he bellowed, "Why on earth would you think I need help?" Sir, all 30,000 of us here in the store think you need help, but whatever. We shop on. Finally, at the end of the route and just about heading into the little bistro area Angry Man corrals an Ikea employee and very enthusiastically begins telling him what's wrong with the whole place, "Young man, what kind of store is this? Why is there no inventory? You only have one of every item? How am I to buy anything?" As the hapless clerk struggles to answer Angry Man continues, "And another thing, why are there so few clerks? And why are these pencils so small? I don't understand the names of all the products - why not have names that make sense to your customers? What's this Ukbar?" and on and on. A crowd began to gather - Angry Man was really quite a spectacle - more or less stupefied by his rant. Angry Man finally took a breath and in that split second of time, one of the crowd managed to get a single word in:
"Newbie."
You can't imagine the mirth. The very idea of someone showing up at Ikea and so completely not getting the...I don't know, business model or something and becoming so utterly flustered by it. Well, maybe you had to be there.
It's the only word that comes close to describing the past six days or so. True, none of us has been lastingly harmed and no blood was shed so perhaps you think me a tad dramatic. No, I say. Any week that involves two children alternating barfy episodes for the entire length of a 250 mile drive (the last of which I marked by pointing out to Braniac, "We're close enough to home that the wet clothes shouldn't be too bad for her and there's no point in changing her again since the car seat is thoroughly soaked in...whatever that is. Just drive.") AND a second 500 mile round trip, rendered pointless by a 6 inch snowfall that was repeatedly and erroneously in my opinion described as a "snow storm" but which canceled the meeting for which I had specifically made the trip AND getting stuck in said snow after the nice man who farms the 50 acres adjacent to what we're now calling "The Other House" plowed the 800-foot drive thereby covering the car with what might have been the entire snowy contents of said drive AND getting sick on the drive back from the second trip with whatever it was that the kids had AND promising and unpromising a friend that I'd babysit for her AND realizing that the guy who is coordinating work on The Other House has ideas about home repair and renovation that depart quite significantly from my own (one word: pressboard), well, I think it could be rightly called harrowing.
There was one quite amusing incident from the first trip that I've been so dying to share. I hope I tell it right, because Brainiac and I cracked each other up referencing the experience for the entire weekend. Really, just too funny. Anyway, we were at Ikea because, as I've mentioned, it's the law to check in with them when moving anywhere within hauling distance. And we're going through obediently following the big blue arrows on the floors and we keep seeing this same man - tall, bald, frowing with a deep furrow between the eyes - who's look of consternation is so encompassing, so total that it's nearly impossible to not notice that this is a man who does not like what he sees. Not at all. At one point, he stood in one of those faux kitchens and sighed, loudly and repeatedly. A fellow shopped asked if he needed any help.
"Any help? Any help?," he bellowed, "Why on earth would you think I need help?" Sir, all 30,000 of us here in the store think you need help, but whatever. We shop on. Finally, at the end of the route and just about heading into the little bistro area Angry Man corrals an Ikea employee and very enthusiastically begins telling him what's wrong with the whole place, "Young man, what kind of store is this? Why is there no inventory? You only have one of every item? How am I to buy anything?" As the hapless clerk struggles to answer Angry Man continues, "And another thing, why are there so few clerks? And why are these pencils so small? I don't understand the names of all the products - why not have names that make sense to your customers? What's this Ukbar?" and on and on. A crowd began to gather - Angry Man was really quite a spectacle - more or less stupefied by his rant. Angry Man finally took a breath and in that split second of time, one of the crowd managed to get a single word in:
"Newbie."
You can't imagine the mirth. The very idea of someone showing up at Ikea and so completely not getting the...I don't know, business model or something and becoming so utterly flustered by it. Well, maybe you had to be there.
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