dancin’ to satan’s mandolin

Dear readers of fat tuesday,

I have been remarkably remiss in updating the cooky blog; I have been woefully absent from my kitchen lately. There has been lots of wine-drinking and tomfoolery to do with the holidays and new years’ etc. I haven’t been coking lately. It’s a sad thing. I’ve been eating a lot of cookies (today I had some that were largely constructed out of potato chips-they were pretty good), I think I may have developed a caffeine addiction (or else it’s the incessant staring at the computer and and dim lighting that makes work so wearisome), my friend has been educating and expanding my tea palate-though for years I would only drink the most fluffy ridiculous tea (I was a big fan of “Victorian Earl Grey” which is earl grey with rose and lavender-I think it’s delightful, other people complain it’s too perfume-y. Lately we had Sparkling Sugarplum-smells like plum, glitters in your cup because of the sugar crystals-today we had some kind of coconut tea that smelled like macaroons, exactly as she predicted.). My friends from LA brought me California chai, my youngest brother bought me rooibos chai for Christmas, I am beginning to appreciate the difference.

Cooking wingman made me a cookbook for Solstice/Christmas/December holidays, eventually those recipes will make it to fattuesday. It was kind of like a love letter from somebody who knows what I’m actually like. But I’ve been stoked about making bread for months; maybe I’ll actually make challah because now I have  recipe that has been tried and tested. A particular difference between our cooking styles is that my culinary endeavors are more like adventures that usually don’t fail abominably but are often more process than product oriented; and I usually expect my friends/housemates/whoever I have decided to grace with my cooking to come along for the ride and be grateful. Her acts of culinary exertion are more conscious and intentional. They are usually based in the science of Having Cooking Skills, or as often as not as this act of love and affection from someone who verbalizes a lot of snarkiness but will perform amazing feats in the kitchen in the name of feeding people. So she has recipes that she tries, experiments with, and improves upon. The cookbook includes instructions like “don’t substitute this. no, really. don’t do it. you may think you can, but vinegar and lemonade are not the same thing.”

Also, I get myself into quite a bit more trouble than she does. It is good to touch base with the fact that life, and cooking, need not always a freefall mediated by intuition.

And by the way friends-tomorrow grad school applications go out. I know the world of people connected to my cooking blog are not necessarily as connected to the minutiae of my life as…..other folks; and I have appreciated everyone’s encouragement and good wishes in the meantime. I need to sustain the vision that I will get into grad school somewhere and that the wondrous life I have imagined is impossible, and lately I have been engaging with things like fear and doubt, and this is not so useful or fun for me. So if you could rub your little brain-antennae together and help me manifest that shit, that’d be awesome. Or pray, or chant, or visualize, or get naked and paint yourself green. Do what you need to; but at any rate I am five steps away from letting it all go, so all I can do afterward is make it happen on a cosmic level. And while I have yet to touch base with the Catholics I grew up with, and I will at some point soon have a flock of Catholic nuns praying for my acceptance to grad school, why don’t y’all help me make it happen with your tarot cards and the secret and your daily affirmations or whatever woo woo gets you through the day.

And in the next while I will have updates most likely about experiments with curry; I want to make that thai curry with potatoes in it. Mussaman!

I hope everyone’s two-weeks-off-from-life were delightful.