I should be packing, but instead I’m as not-packing as I possibly can be. I also should have been a good little homemaker and made stroganoff out of the roast tenderloin I made on New Year’s Day, but I had a serious hankering for some tekka maki and sticky rice with shrimp sauce that could only be quelled by the little Japanese place on Broadway. And oh how good it is, too. No waxing entries about the experience this time. It was good. That was all.
I’m still not packed. I’m so not packed that my suitcases are out in the mudroom. Esteban, without even packing any bags, is more packed than I am because he has a packing plan. As we will be dining at a restaurant which requires a coat and tie, he plans to wear his sport coat on the plane so that he doesn’t have to haul his garment bag. He’s very efficient sometimes.
I outrightly refuse to pack for him. Every time we go on a trip, his mother is aghast. ‘Well, what if he forgets something?’ She asks incredulously. Then I guess he forgets something. Besides, what sort of egotistical gendercentric bullshit makes ME better at remembering the stuff he’ll need than HE is? That’s just the kind of sisterhood crap that keeps women working 40 hours a week AND refusing to relinquish any of the housework because ‘they don’t know how to do it’. Esteban doesn’t complain about this. He doesn’t even harbor the expectation that I would pack for him.
Sometimes women really piss me off.
But rather than dwell on that or talk yet more about how I will be wandering the streets of New Orleans naked, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘Big Easy’, I’ve had some cooking mishaps recently.
First off, about a year and a half ago, because he likes ice cream and he likes things that plug in, for our anniversary I gave Esteban a Cuisinart ice cream maker. It is the giver of ice cream and it also plugs in, thus one would think this would be a certainty, but his comment? ‘Because I’m not fat enough? Now you want me to scare small children?’
See, not always the sweet man you all went ‘Awwwww!’ over yesterday.
So he shoved it behind one of the computer desks and there it has sat. Until last week, when I unpacked everything and stowed the two freezer tubey things in the freezer. Last night, I made a lovely vinaigrette salad, baked salmon, orange pepper asparagus, and rice pilaf. And also some vanilla ice cream, which involved doing the most uber Food TV thing of slicing a vanilla bean in half and then scraping the little black seeds out into the perfectly good cream and whole milk. I have had three vanilla beans for a year, just waiting for the opportunity to use one of them. I finally stuck one in my sugar bowl to make my Special K taste all that much more Special, but that was pretty much exhausting my use for the beans, which look actually pretty nasty, like some kind of dried up placenta or something.
Did I mention the cream and whole milk? Yes, two cups of heavy cream and one cup of whole milk (and ‘ c sugar, if you want to make it right now, along with the vanilla bean seeds). Yes. Lots of creamy milk fat in that. So you would have thought that at some point, maybe when I was surgically removing the seeds from the pod or whisking together the milk fat with the other milk fat and sugar, that it would have occurred to me that hey, I’m pretty allergic to milk fat.
You know, I just want to point out right now that I am not lactose intolerant. When I tell people that I’m allergic to milk, they always ask if I take lactaid or something. No. Lactose Intolerance is when you cannot digest lactose. That always makes me want to crab a big pile of poop and smush it on their cheek, (like that one guy with the grapefruit, Jimmy Cagney? Steve McQueen? I have no idea. No, Steve McQueen was something with hardboiled eggs. And Ally Sheedy. Or something.) and yell “How about this? Are you poop intolerant too? Are you ok with the poopy?” Basically, if the stuff doesn’t close my throat in a big swollen mess or cause a big snorky asthma attack, I can digest it just fine. And I can drink skim milk pretty much without noticeable problems, but the same amount of whole milk will leave me wheezing and that much butter or cream will pretty much guarantee not only an asthma attack but a stuffy nose and a whistle in my lungs for the next several days.
So I made the ice cream and after much anticipation during the churning and the freezing process, we dug into our respective bowls. After about five spoons, I started to feel ill, but I perservered because damn it, I had scrapped a BEAN for that ice cream! And it was tasty too! All creamy and luscious and sweet and cold and snorky and snotty and can’t breathe and aw crap.
Without a word I handed the bowl to Esteban.
‘Killing you, isn’t it?’ He asked, grinning for the sudden landfall of a second bowl of ice cream.
‘Nnyah. Nucking Stunnf.’ I grumbled.
So, there goes the ice cream maker. Although I’m going to look up some recipes using Rice Dream, because I think that would be yummy. Or at least won’t kill me.
In other kitchen experimentation, we went to Joel and Cheri’s house for dinner on New Year’s Eve. Joel is an incredible cook and last year he had specifically made a zucchini soup that used no cream. It was incredible, not to mention conducive to Operation: Hottie. But since he was already encoring some of the dishes from last year’s New Year’s Eve (lamb chops in garlic and red wine sauce, lobster tails, raspberry/walnut salad), he experimented with a new soup.
Garlic soup. Made with twenty heads of garlic.
Not cloves. HEADS.
It actually made all of our eyes water. Apparently his house still reaks. The soup wasn’t bad’ it was just strong. In fact, if you can smell something right now, it’s this website. I can’t help it. I’m sorry. It’s coming out from within.
I’ll bet none of us will catch a cold for YEARS. The scary thing is that he’s planning on bringing the leftover garlic soup to the guy’s game on Sunday. And I have to sit next to Esteban for several hours on a plane roughly eight hours after that.
Pray for me, people. Pray hard.
And pray for someone to come and pack my suitcase.
