ohmygod FOOD.

There has been so much cooking, though not always new things, though:

I made truffles-early grey and key lime to start with. Though I will tell you more about that later.

So, I heard that if you boil maple syrup to 240 degrees and pour it over snow, it gets all crispy and turns into this neat midwintery snack. However, apparently, if you boil too much, or just put the snow in a tray but don’t pack it down, it turns to mapley slush, which you then drink, and feel disgusting. That’s why I’m in bed at 10:30.

Other point of interest: hot chocolate with a coconut milk base. Delicious! Very rich. Right now I’m having a love affair with  full-fat coconut milk and seriously, I have been licking the cans like some kind of pervert. So maybe less overwhelming if you use low-fat, or cut it with water, or something. But delicious. My house also has dagoba brand communal chocolate, which is fancy-dancy hippie stuff. I can’t even imagine who bought that and just decided to share it, I probably wouldn’t, but I’m also bad at buying things like hot chocolate mix and vegetable oil and things in general that aren’t NECESSARY but are in fact sometimes actually quite USEFUL.

Also, I’ve been making a lot of soup lately, and I have three kinds in the freezer right now. I am going to be so sick of it in the near future. I will need to branch out to burritos or something else equally reproducable in bulk. Something about this weather does NOT make me want to eat vegetables or fruits, so I keep throwing kale into my soups.

Tonight I made creamy mushroom soup. I put in:

2 pounds crimini mushrooms

3 leeks

1 bunch purple kale

1 carton vegetable broth

2 cups water

4 cloves garlic

1 tsp thyme

LOTS of fresh-ground pepper

1.5 tsp salt

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/2 cup flour

I chopped up the mushrooms and cooked them in butter, and did likewise with the leeks, and then threw everything together and let it simmer, though the flour and spices were a result of dancing around the kitchen discovering that we had thyme and being totally baffled by the smell.

This was loosly based on an epicurious.com recipe, but  I added the kale and meant to add potatoes as well, but got distracted.

So, actually, I don’t really like mushrooms. And evidently I particularly don’t like mushrooms when I cook them. Because when all is said and done, I don’t really make creamy-brothed soups (which exception to stuff with a coconut milk base, which kind of is and kind of isn’t the point) and I will eat mushrooms when other people make them for me but in a home-grown kind of way they turn my stomach. I’m sure it’s something about them being “earthy”-like how I don’t like cooked broccoli, and my smartyass chef friend tells me “most cooked brassicacaes smell like methane.” As in FARTS. I don’t like this vegetable because it smells like FARTS. To me, this is an entirely legitimate reason to not favor a vegetable. Especially having grown up with three brothers, resulting in entire years of my life being mired in the stench of methane. It was inescapable. Now I have a low tolerance for it.

But my housemate, at whose request I was making this, was highly satisfied.

And it was pretty good soup, it improved immensely when I told myself to imagine that my friend Anne had made it for me, who is one of the people who feeds me most frequently, though her specialties lie in esoteric varieties of shortbread, but make a particular mushroom-onion-pasta thing sometimes that’s pretty good. I eat the mushrooms she cooks, but generally they do not sit well with me. They are a fungus. Like athlete’s foot. Not pretty.

Also, last night I was the dessert maven at a shindig, and bought a gluten free chocolate cake mix, which I saved by adding probably a teaspoon, maybe a teaspoon and a half of fresh-grated ginger, and making into cupcakes, which I stuck dark chocolate into. They were famous.

I don’t know how much I’ve grown as a cook in the last year, I still have a relative disrespect for authority and disinclination to follow rules and I seek out substitutions for the sake of my own amusement and preference for improvisation, but I also think that makes my cooking interesting. I’ve also gotten better at fussing with spices and improvising measurements without totally screwing things up, which makes me feel impressive. I also have more people to feed and what’s funny is I think the people I know are just grateful for most things including my efforts, and I cook and so they validate my cooking, which is so so good.

I have gotten the feedback in my life that I am not a good cook-because I am sloppy, or disorganized, or forgetful-and I definitely have moments of not-glory, like the time I made beautiful blueberry scones and had used baking soda not baking powder. They taste terrible. It was so sad. BUT! I am developing my improvisation! And learning to trust my nose!  And developing an intuitive balance of excess and restraint! And people eat what I cook and they like it! Ha ha!

Also: Grad school apps are probably three weeks from done.

And I am going to Vancouver BC in the next couple weeks, and while I am devoted to Seattle (I never seem to leave) I am PASSIONATE about Vancouver. Something about it being the urban metropolis I wandered in college because I needed to get the hell out of the college town I was living in. It also had something to do with the fact that in 2004, I was a desperate wreck, and resolved to skip town, go get an MA in library sciences, and live there forever with my sweetie. I had many weekend trips up there in which the whole world seem to be sparkling in every direction around us, and we were so excited,”The mountains and the ocean are so beautiful! Ivan Coyote lives here! When we walk down the street holding hands people smile at us! Canadians are quirky and speak French!” And we had been together for a long time at that point, probably three years, and I think he was gazing at me and imagining a future in which I would have his babies and I would insist that we would drag them to cultural events and be the first wave of gentrification in communities of color and things like that. I was definitely gazing into the future, but to contextualize, one of the things I was trademarked for was my general assumption you should do what you want, whatever makes you happy because people don’t look that closely and if they do who gives a fuck. The general assessment was that I felt this way because I grew up in a progressive family in a city with parents that generally didn’t exactly know what I was up to.  I have maintained the notion for a long, long time that life is immense, and so many things in the world are hugely possible. (though I’ve only recently begun to develop strategies and organization for said plans, whereas for a long time the point was to say,”Anything is possible! Be whatever you want!” as loudly as possible.)

Vancouver was the city I roamed through as a young adult and imagined my life being different. I was living in a town I hadn’t learned to love, I was in a monogamous relationship with somebody who was pretty terrified of life, and my closest friendships were generally with people who didn’t share the same inclination to jump on life and have a tickle-wrestle war. The only thing I approached with passion and intensity was the degree I wound up designing, though I had lots of enthused outbursts but no sustained fueling of my sporadic enthrallments.

Nothing formative happened to me when I was in Vancouver, I spent most of my time there with somebody I generally didn’t love or even necessarily like; but I stared wide-eyed at that city like it was going to give me something back. And it gave me the vision of my life in a greater context; of political radicalism, of a city like Seattle but even more gorgeous and cosmopolitan and international, and of a more glamorous life that I just needed to imagine for myself and then throw myself on top of until it got used to the idea.

I did not move to Vancouver, I did not marry that nervous boy, and I did not become a librarian. I moved back to Seattle, had a lot of therapy, fell in and out of love with a couple of people, learned to cook, hopped off and on the hussy train more times than is necessary to count, and live in some orbit of community based on location and politics and the fact that everyone I know is usually broke except when it’s happy hour. But I am going back to Vancouver, and it is still this gorgeous mirage of a life I didn’t have, but some days I still want to.