Lion and Magic Boy

So today was Serena’s birthday. I say “was” because for her, it’s over, though she truly doesn’t turn 7 until right…about…..now. That night was pretty memorable, about the way you remember the birth of all your children, and that particular one is emblazoned with the indelible memory of The Ex insisting we stop at McDonald’s on the way to the hospital (this after I’ve waited as long as I could, and after having made dinner for Nathaniel and his big sister Jess who Must Never Be Mentioned Here but who was 16 at the time of Serena’s birth. I, of course, was perhaps 18, being a gentle and delicate flower of 25 now), making the car reek with the malodorous smell of a Filet-O-Fish (IS there anything more disgusting than that on the menu? I ask you) and french fries, none of which were particularly pleasing to me at the time.

But you don’t want to hear Serena’s birth story, at least I’m pretty sure you don’t. Okay, just this one slight detail: it’s definitely the most intense birth I ever had, and at one point I was really into the screaming, as getting into the screaming took me down this nice dark tunnel-place where it was quiet and peaceful and there was nobody screaming in the room and having a damn baby, and then someone kept calling my name, calling me out of that place, and then I opened my eyes to see this face hanging over me, and a nurse said, “Karen, you have to stop screaming because there’s a woman having her first baby right across the hall.”

What.The.Bloody.Hell.Bitch.I’ll.Scream.If.I.Want.To

Was what I wished I had said. Instead, I meekly shut up and endured that goddamn pain in silence.

Bloody bitch.

So! Happy Birthday, Serena!

I am reminded, with my observation above of it still being Serena’s birthday though it is over for her, of starting now a “second shift” for the evening: the children are in bed for the night and this is my time for myself, or rather for the myriad things which I have either put off until now or can’t accomplish with children awake and nearby.

When I was last a working mommy and had an office and a secretary, there was another secretary there named Charlee. Now, anyone with the name Charlee (pronouced “Charlie”) must be thin and wiry, a long-time smoker, sardonic, and has seen it all but keeps it wisely to herself. That would be Charlee. Every day towards 5:00, I could hear her stand up and think about putting her coat on and pushing in her chair, and she’d say with a wry grin, “Time for the second shift!”

It took me a few years, but I finally figured out that she meant that she was headed home to her husband and family to cook, clean, and care for them the way she cared for the men she was secretary to all day.

Which is kind of how I feel, getting the children to bed and then my own work day begins. Again.

As there is absolutely no way to segue from that to COOKIES, I shall simply dive right in. These were concocted a few years ago for an earlier birthday of hers, but now I bring you…SERENA’S BEAUTIFUL BIRTHDAY COOKIES: OATMEAL.*
*[suggested in part by Finslippy's granola post which will make you laugh and hungry at the same time]

Begin by taking up your butter, which you have thoughtfully and purposefully allowed to gently soften on the countertop for lo these many hours. Your butter may be organic as mine was, but please make it unsalted regardless, and if your butter actually says “Margarine” on it, I cannot be responsible for your cookie results, no not at all. Unwrap said butter and place it gently in a bowl large enough to handle the entire volume of goods which you will be placing there.

Add then a nicely-packed cupful of brown sugar. I like the dark brown sugar, which seems to give an added smoky molasses flavor.

Take your Kitchenaid if you are lucky enough to own one and the counter space allotment to go along with it, or if you are me you have the tiny-but-cute mini Kitchenaid portable mixer, a definite upgrade to the cheap-ass mixer-thing given you on some jewelry-gift-giving occasion for which one year you received a weed whacker!, well take whatever damn mixing apparatus you own and use it to cream that butter and sugar together until it is what they call “fluffy”.

After that you will add your egg. I am sad that I didn’t think to photograph my lovely brown organic egg for you, and you of course may pamper yourself with a $.27 lovely brown organic egg also, or you may use an egg that suits your fancy. Try to keep bits of crunchy shell from marring the sugary-buttery loveliness in your bowl, and mix and mix.

Next there is vanilla, and if you’re me you will wish for some Neilsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla which I believe Martha Stewart also recommends, though I wish you wouldn’t use her name in connection with mine. Add to that some salt and baking powder and baking soda, plus some nice cinnamon, as much as your heart desires. I like Penzey’s Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cinnamon. Yum, this is getting good, isn’t it?

Then you have the problem of flour. This calls for both whole-wheat flour and all-purpose flour. I promise I will not tell anyone if you use just the all-purpose flour. Then remove the mixer and add your oats by hand.

To your cookie sheet which you have of course neglected to grease and don’t need to, make tiny tiny cookies the size of marbles or so. These cook in only 5-6 minutes so do watch them carefully, but they are small like this so that you have the enjoyment of saying “I had only 20 cookies!” when in fact you had what would equal perhaps 4 “normal”-sized cookies. It does promote tediousness in the spooning process, but it’s worth it. Of course you are welcome to make your cookies any size you like, even as big as a baby’s head, but I can’t say I recommend it.

Take your cookies out when done and heap them on your cookie cooling rack. These cookies do not mind being heaped; I believe they rather like it. Chocolate chip cookies would mind, and sugar cookies may well never speak to you again after having been heaped, but oatmeal cookies are very forgiving.

I thought you’d be amused by photos of my progress:

Hmm, I just remembered to take a photo. Who knows, this could be today’s blog post! I’m almost done though, oh well.

See how much is on the spoon? That’s what you’re going for.

Did I not mention this part? This is what makes these cookies so much fun. Who cares that it’s only 10:30 am?

Oh, is THAT what that is? It’s not exactly the good stuff, but on the other hand it’s less than half the price of the good stuff. Other reasons why I like Amaretto:
1. A girlie drink that, though lacking in paper umbrellas, looks like some kind of manly Bourbon or (retch) Scotch or some such, and there may be a time when that comes in handy.
2. Sweet.
3. Tastes good.
4. The alcohol. Duh.

See how tiny they are?

Hey, what’s that big pot?

Oh, it’s just the pot from last night’s dinner. I am quite the housekeeper!

Look, a random shot of some things on my counter! French press! Coffee grinder! My great-grandmother’s old red tin cookie jar!

At least I don’t have to cook in THIS kitchen:

I so hate sharing a kitchen with Eric. He just leaves the oven doors open and keeps any old thing in there, pineapples, whatever, and throws things a lot. Temperamental chef.

Hey, do you want the actual recipe?

Serena’s Beautiful Birthday Cookies

½ cup butter, softened
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tbsp. milk, or a bit more
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
cinnamon to taste
1 ¼ cup oats

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add beaten egg, vanilla, and 1 tbsp. milk; beat well. Mix together dry ingredients, and stir into the butter mixture. Stir in oats; add a bit more milk if needed. Drop onto cookie sheet by perhaps ½ teaspoonfuls (a bit bigger than marble-sized) to make delightful child-sized cookies. Bake 5-6 minutes at 350 degrees. [Cookies may look a bit underdone when removed from oven, but will continue to cook.]

I’ve been making these for years for Nathaniel and now Serena too. They freeze well and defrost in their lunches. Makes lots.

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup maple syrup
2/3 cup chunky natural peanut butter*
2 2/3 cups rolled oats
1 cup whole wheat flour, or whatever flour you have really
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup wheat germ

*or sunbutter if there’s a child at your kid’s school who will go into anaphylactic shock if a nut comes within 100 yards of her, or if you’re very flush with cash that day and feeling extra good, almond butter will do nicely, thank you.

PLUS:
2 cups mix-ins in any combination of the following: coconut, raisins, chocolate chips or carob chips (ahem), nuts, any finely chopped dried fruit such as dates, apricots, apples, etc. We like coconut, dates, and chocolate./p>

DIRECTIONS:
Mix syrup and peanut butter until well blended. Stir in oats, flour, wheat germ, spices, and mix-ins. If mixture seems too dry, add water 1 t at a time. If it is too sticky, add oats 1 t at a time. Mixture should be slightly sticky, but still easily spread in a pan with greased fingers.

Press into a 9 x 13 inch (23 x 33 cm) pan lightly greased. Bake at 350F/180C until barely browned. I start looking at them after 15 minutes, but they always take longer than that. Do not overbake! (The recipe I received says this, but I have a hard time telling when they are overbaked. If they smell like granola bars, they’re done.) Cut while warm into desired sized bars.

When completely cool, remove from pan with a greased spatula. Wrap each bar separately in plastic wrap and then store in a zip bag or air-tight container. These freeze extremely well. If they last that long.

Makes about 2 dozen bars.

Thanks, everyone, for the deluge of gorgeous pumpkin pie photos. I’m making one today, and sorry, there are no photos because it is UGLY! I make delicious cakes and pies but they are SO UGLY! Martha Stewart I am not.

However, my son Nathaniel created a cookbook, would you like to see it? Of course you would! He was about 6 at the time, and decided that since I was knitting feverishly and making a doll for his school’s annual benefit auction, he’d like to contribute as well. Liking, as he did, to cook in his little kitchen (which has recently been appropriated by Eric, who can be seen from time to time stirring and tasting various concoctions), he developed several recipes which I translated and made into a cookbook.

Lest you be TOO impressed, I should probably mention that many recipes began with phrases like, “Take some dough…..”

Like dough just comes. Mmm, dough. Tasty! He still asks for tidbits of the UGLY pie crusts and whatnot, and would probably consume an entire loaf of bread, raw, if allowed.

Here’s a good one:

BANANA CAKE

Take some flour and put it in a bowl. You can use whole wheat flour, but usually I don’t. Take some bananas and smush them. Add some sugar to the flour. If you like a lot, then add a lot of sugar. Put in a little bit of chocolate, like a Hershey’s Kiss. Add the bananas to the flour mixture. Add a pinch of cake mix. Stir. Crack one egg and add it to the bowl. Take one stick of butter and melt some of it; pour it in and mix. Put it in the oven and bake. Make some icing and put it on the cake when it is cool.

Or this one…..

Vegetable Pie

Take some vegetables – a carrot, maybe a pepper.Use each family member’s favorite vegetables. Chop them and place them in 2 bowls, one larger and one smaller. Take 1 egg and crack it into a bowl. Separate the egg white and the egg yolk. Place the egg white in the refrigerator. Mix the egg yolk with some milk and some flour and stir that up together so it is mixed and combined. When it is all stirred, put in a few bread crumbs and mix it well. Throw one bowl of your vegetables in, and save the other one, the bigger one. Mix that around. Put in a small teaspoon of baking soda or baking powder. Cook this in the oven. Next add the larger bowl of vegetables in another layer on top. Or, you could cook them separately and add as a topping. Use a pan that can go in the oven. When it is baked, put it on the serving layer. Put the rest of the vegetables on top. Put some seasonings and spices on top of that, and it is done. Bon appetit!

Do you not just want some now? I have to wonder what this says about my own cooking technique, which he undoubtedly was basing his own on.

One more? Are you sure? Well, okay…..

Carrot and Chocolate Concoction

Use tiny tart pans, 2-inch. Take a round chocolate ball (like the kind Santa brings) and shave or grate it into small bits. Peel a carrot and continue using a ribbon-type peeler to create long flat ribbons of carrot. Take the carrot ribbons and press them into the tart pan to line it. Sprinkle seasoning over this. Peel and chop another carrot and some assorted vegetables (broccoli, celery, anything yummy). Place the vegetables in a mixing bowl and season them. Stir. Place a layer of the vegetable mixture in the Tart shell. Top with a small slice of ice cream. Sprinkle with a layer of the grated chocolate. Add a whole chocolate ball. Repeat with another two layers of vegetables and chocolate bits, ending with the chocolate. Enjoy!

Mmm, carrots and chocolate, a holiday family favorite! We actually made some of his recipes (not these), and they turned out okay.

Want to see what he looked like then? Of course you do!

And here’s Serena from about that time, at age 2:

And here they are together, maybe a year later. Look how they loved each other then. So what happened?.

Cute, weren’t they?

And now that the Way-Back Machine is in high gear, have a look at me from 1998:

I’ll just leave you now with that image.

Wait. What’s that? Oh, the things on his ears? Nathaniel had just come from the dentist, and those were the prizes he picked, a couple of bracelets, which to him became earrings. Did you not know he had on a skirt beneath that manly plaid shirt?

[Stupid HTML. Cannot get rid of these blockquotes. Gah.]

The first time I ever went to New York City still stands out in my memory in sharp relief. It was in 1994, when The Ex was still in High Courtship Gear. This is when everything by definition looks Shiny! Sparkly! Tasty! but is really caused by an attack on the brain cells by the Dreaded Love Blindness Disease, similar to the affliction that affects many after a six-pack-and-a-half at closing time, when all the men in the bar are suave and handsome and all the women are beautiful. (never mind the next morning when reality sets in)

We flew from Pittsburgh, still one of my favorite cities anywhere, small and yet somehow cool, and landed in New York, which I found to be smelly, steamy, dirty, ugly, scary, graffiti-smeared, and Simply Gorgeous. I heart you, New York! The people! The incredible energy! I heart you, all of you!

There I was, finally experiencing first-hand the place in which I had lived vicariously since childhood through dozens of old black-and-white films. Buildings! The Park! Times Square! FAO Schwarz!

Wow. My brain was exploding little bursts of happiness all weekend.

When I returned to Pittsburgh after my thrilling weekend, it looked….smaller. Dirtier. Grimier. I was forever a slave to my own suddenly-enhanced expectations about What A City Should Be Like.

Last weekend I went back to NYC. I hadn’t been there since a brief trip to see The Gates only a few months before we left for Colorado. My other trips since the first were often a disappointment, peppered with brief Moments Of Goodness. I had no idea what to expect this time.

Verdict: No disappointment whatsoever. It was just the same, if not better, than the first time. The people! The energy! I really should get out more!

I went to dinner at a restaurant called Dragonfly in the Village. Inside its narrow seating area, the size and shape of a railroad car, there was a huge aquarium filled with colorful fish, visible from the street. We sat between it and the window, and I could see people as they walked by, glimpsing little slices of their lives, all lit up from the light coming from inside the restaurant.

I was excited about the varied menu. What to choose? Vegetarian, vegan, Thai, Filipino? We’ve got NOTHING like all that in Podunk, PA, land of second-rate “Philly” cheesesteaks and mediocre lasagna. Let’s see. Haven’t had Filipino cuisine yet, let’s try that! I chose Chicken Adobo, sounds slightly familiar. Yum.

Nope, they’re out of the chicken. At this point my Dragonfly Cosmopolitan has begun to work its magic, so I threw caution to the winds and said I’d go with the Pork Adobo. After all, it’s interchangeable with the chicken, right?

The food came, my Cosmo is almost gone, and a large bowl of dark meat-looking chunks swimming in a pool of dark liquid is plunked down in front of me. So…pork. That’s like bacon, right?

Looking forward to my first taste of Filipino cuisine, I take a large bite, almost half an entire chunk. I chew. It’s…..fat. It’s nothing but fat. There’s a HUGE wad of FAT in my mouth! And I’m chewing it! I can’t spit it out gracefully, I just met my dinnermates today! What will they think, seeing me hack up a wad of fat like a cat’s hairball, right at their dinner table? I sooo want to spit it out, but Must. Chew. Fat.

Then, the inevitable: Must. Swallow. Fat.

Need another Cosmo.

Knifeless, I must use my fingers and a spoon to separate what shreds of meat exist on these huge dark chunks of fried fat. I hope no one notices. I have no money for a second Cosmo, so am drinking water. Lots of water.

I love New York.

Serena, reaching for another IKEA Swedish meatball, one of her new favorite food groups: “Are meatballs made of meat?”

Nathaniel, tactfully, and with a knowing glance in my direction: “Some of them are made from vegetables.”

Serena, chewing thoughtfully: “Oh.” Turning to me: “But these don’t have meat, do they, Mama?”

Me, suddenly finding my mouth is too full to utter an intelligible syllable: “Mmmph.”

Serena, satisfied, beaming: “Good.”

Inside my refrigerator are the following:

1. 3 kinds of butter (Trader Joe’s organic unsalted; Kerrygold unsalted from Ireland, and something from Iceland that I fell prey to during a tasting event at Whole Foods)

2. Organic whole milk. The children have turned thumbs down to the raw goat milk we used to get, so this is pasteurized cow milk. We don’t use much.

3. 3 shriveled mushrooms. Oops.

4. Bacon. Mmm, bacon.

5. A partial tube of tomato paste. Did you know this stuff comes in a tube? How handy!

6. 3 bottles of Stewart’s Cream Soda. Michael’s addiction.

7. A carrot.

8. 3 kinds of apples from a local orchard: Honeycrisp (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!); Jonagold, and, uh, something else. Apples are highly prized here.

9. Leftover mole enchilada from going out the other night.

10. Leftover plain pancakes from this morning’s breakfast, a staple food for Eric.

11. Kalamata olives.

12. Half a bunch of celery.

13. A zucchini that shouldn’t be there anymore.

14. About 3 Wallaby organic yogurts.

15. Lettuce (organic, naturally. Green leaf.)

16. A little more bacon. Mmm, bacon. Bring on the nitrites!

17. 2 kinds of Brie.

18. Apple cider, from the orchard that brought us the apples.

19. Fresh cranberries, for making Serena’s favorite autumn offering, cranberry sauce.

20. Pickles.

21. Peanut butter.

22. Wheat germ.

23. “Squeezie” yogurt-in-a-tube, organic Stonyfield Farm.

24. Mozzarella cheese sticks (good for school lunches with #23).

25. About 3 other kinds of cheese.

26. Dijon mustard.

27. Leftover crock-pot chicken-vegetable stuff.

28. Mayo.

29. Organic red grapes.

30. Cream cheese.

31. Free-range organic chicken broth.

32. Leftover brown rice.

33. Organic free-range yada yada yada eggs.

So my fridge is full yet there’s nothing to eat here! What can I make with this stuff?

And, more importantly….what’s in YOUR fridge?

(Tomorrow: The Freezer)

Now, as I have said before, I am an excellent cook.

Really.

There have been times, however, when things have gone awry. Seriously awry. For instance, the Meatloaf Debacle of 2006, or the time I cooked a turkey with the bag of giblets still inside (I wondered where those damn things were!), or cranberry sauce that refused to jell.or any number of cakes I have made whose layers slid off the one below and look as much like anything Martha Stewart turns out as do the pothole repairs on my street.

Then there’s the problem with fire. I have set aflame any number of potholders, and no Thanksgiving is complete without at least one application of Weleda Burn-Care. (Good stuff, that. I highly recommend it.) And naturally I have burned my share of broccoli and pancakes.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I found out that the smoke detector works. I was broiling a steak and apparently it caught on fire. No problem, it went out, and it was even (mostly) edible. So sue me, I was a vegetarian for 15 years.

Today I decided to make cinnamon swirl bread. Yum! One of the recipe variations was for individual cinnamon rolls. Even better! Though I generally ignore recipes and use them as a rough guideline, a “suggestion”, if you will, I decided that with this I’d be more precise. So, recipe it was.

This recipe instructed me to divide the dough into 3 equal pieces. Check.

Then I had to roll each piece to an 8 x 9 rectangle. Check. Sort of. It’s really more an oblong. But check.

Then I had to take 1/4 cup butter (I knew this was half a stick, I TOLD YOU I’m an excellent cook! An excellent cook would know these things!), and slice it thinly and place over the dough. Uh…….check?

Is that 1/4 cup butter FOR EACH PIECE OF DOUGH? Or divided among them (as if anyone has a clean surface large enough to roll out three 8 x 9 rectangles? I don’t)?

Hmm. Shit.

Okay, it made the most sense that each piece needed to be covered with butter. There’s no way 1/4 cup will cover three pieces of dough, at least, I don’t have the knife that will slice butter that thinly. Okay. 1/4 cup butter per piece it is. Check.

Next mix 1 teaspoon cinnamon with 1/4 sugar and sprinkle over. Check. I already knew the answer to THIS one, we covered that with the butter. Obviously it’s one batch of cinnamon-sugar FOR EACH PIECE OF DOUGH, even though I saw my stash of expensive but very worth it cinnamon dwindling rapidly.

So. Butter (a lot). Check. Cinnamon (also a lot). Check.

These better be good.

Roll up, slice, and bake 10-12 minutes. Check. Damn, are you getting hungry? Maybe I should post the recipe. I’ve already had a request for the recipe for my granola bars. Hmm.

Anyway.

Fast forward 10 minutes. I’m busy checking my site counter stats my email, and I hear the bell for the timer on the oven that I figured out how to operate. Yay, me! I wait a bit longer, sensing somehow (I told you I’m an excellent cook — we excellent cooks have this intuitive sense about cooking, you know? Like the food is calling to us, saying “I’m done now!” or whatever the hell it says. You know?) that it needed another minute or so.

Fine. I wait the minute. Then I enter the kitchen to remove the proud beauties from the oven, wondering idly what is that smell? and then I see it. Clouds of thick, black, toxic smoke, belching forth from my oven.

I open the front door to air things out a bit, then remove the cinnamon rolls, remarkably unharmed and still slightly underdone, and discover that all that butter, we’re talking a stick and a half, has melted and formed a carcinogenic lake at the bottom of my oven and has morphed into black noxious smoke that is now pouring out of the oven in a toxic cloud reminiscent of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

If I had used, say, margarine, which isn’t even a food, I would understand. But this was butter! The wholesome, creamy gift of goodness from happy cows! How can butter turn into something resembling a mixture of toilet cleaner and bleach that hung in a pall throughout every room in my house? I had to open every window for hours, crank up the heat, and still it smells of chemical nastiness.
The cinnamon rolls? They’re fine. Just slightly underdone, like I said. And, well, buttery.

But what worries me is that the smoke alarms never went off. A little steak-smoke, and they’re bursting our eardrums. But butter-cancer? Not a peep.

If I find out the smoke alarms are made by Land O’Lakes, I’m moving.

Oh. My. God. If there was a god, I mean.

I just read today’s installment from supercyberhero Heather in which she reminisces about her college days of eating nothing but cereal.

I so was going to write about cereal today, too! Really! I was! C’mon, really!

So we must be linked psychically or something.
When I was growing up, there was nothing I liked better than receiving a tiny Dixie cup of M&M’s (the plain ones) on a rainy day so I could curl up on my pink-flowered bedspread with three or four of our cats and read “Little Women” for the sixteenth time.

That may have been the start of my eating disorder.

I was a skinny kid. Not that I thought so at the time, but in looking at the photos, yep. Until I turned 16 and could get a job. Some of my friends worked at McDonald’s, one pariah worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken (and I’ve heard the stories about what goes IN the “chicken”…..not the only reason I won’t eat there, but compelling, quite compelling), but the coolest of the drama geeks worked at Winchell’s, the donut shop (not “doughnut” — that would be too formal for a place where you can buy something covered in colored “jimmies”). In my year-and-a-half sentence of hot grease-laden air and cold dingy gray mopwater, I gained probably 25 pounds.

It must have been the grease in the air, NOT from eating donuts NO NO NO, because TO THIS DAY I won’t eat a donut. Except Krispy Kreme, of course. But I digress.

So fast-forward to driving around in my parent’s 1974 Honda Civic, getting high and fulfilling munchie cravings with a gigantic box of Froot Loops.

And when I got out of the military a couple of years later (long story), the first thing I did was to buy a huge box of Corn Pops.

Then, years of Lucky Charms, Sugar Smacks (now called Honey Smacks? like that makes them healthier? is anyone fooled by that?), Corn Pops, and Froot Loops. Oh, and Honeycomb.

Mmm. There’s nothing better than digging into a fresh box of Froot Loops while watching Bob Barker’s hairpiece jiggle not an iota while some fat t-shirt clad woman kisses him slobberingly after winning a washer and dryer and a year’s worth of Jiffy Pop on The Price Is Right.

But these days, my pantry is filled with three kinds of oats for porridge, miso, bagels, and the only cereal is Purely-Ohs, a Cheerio-based organic sawdust product. Mmm.

So I’ve decided that if one day my family all suddenly disappears, the first thing I’m going to do is go to the store and load up on Corn Pops and Sugar Smacks.

Last night I made….meatloaf. Sounds so Middle America, doesn’t it? Actually, I have no idea why I decided on meat loaf, other than the fact that I had picked up some organic ground beef and was looking for something to do with it. After more than ten years as a Rampant Vegetarian, I still have trouble thinking Meat.

Meat. Just the sound of it is a little nauseating, isn’t it? Meat. I mean, you hear, “chocolate mousse”, and you know instantly where you are, but Meat? That could mean, well, anything.

And apparently last night, for Michael, “anything” was Not Good.

Oh, I’ve cooked meatloaf before, back in the Old Meat Days, and even once in the past year. And that time, despite the fact that Michael had forewarned me that he Did Not Like Meat Loaf (but pleaded with me to make it anyway? is that twisted or what?), it was a hit. So big a hit I thought I’d try again.

Here’s the recipe.

2 pounds ground beef, one was organic and one was grass fed
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 eggs
heel of homemade bread, made into crumbs
salt, pepper, some thyme, some parsley

That’s it! What’s wrong with that?

But as Michael slid his plate down on the floor for Mickey to lick, there was a surreptitious shake of the head that meant: This One Is NOT A Winner, And If You Make It Again Please Tell Me Beforehand So I Can Eat Out.

I think I’ll make me some nice chocolate mousse now.

meat loaf
recovering vegetarian
cooking disasters

When I bought these and placed them artistically in a bowl, awaiting dismemberment for use in yummy things like hummus and all general cooking, actually, I noticed how very much these bulbs of garlic resemble two plucked headless geese.

Don’t they? Or is it just me?

Anyway, after awhile, it felt like the geese became familiar. I would greet them in the morning when toasting bagels or making tea or oatmeal, and all throughout the day when preparing practically anything to eat for the five people (and dog) in the family.

The geese were my friends.

Tonight, though, I committed murder.

It doesn’t matter that the geese were already dead, already missing their heads. The fact was, they were my friends.

I chose one, slit through the papery outer skin, and broke off a fat clove. I silently gave thanks to my friend the headless plucked goose, and chopped that clove of garlic into spaghetti sauce.

Thank you, friend goose.

garlic