sewwwwiinnngg

It takes forever for me to finish anything. the only project I can complete in less than 7,000 hours is a table runner. So table runners are pretty much all I have to show for myself. I gave this one to my mom for mother's day:Part of the reason I make so many blasted table runners is that our little rented house has a gazillion (actually, six in all) non-functioning radiators. Every room has at least one, and our nice landlord bought these pretty covers at some point. When we first moved in I thought they were really quite charming, but I soon remembered that if you give me a flat surface I will let it collect dust and other clutter/detritus. And the radiators take up precious space in this teensy little house.
So the idea for the table runner was born. This one is particularly pretty, I think. It really brightened up this particular radiator-cover corner. But then I ran out of time to make a Mother's Day gift so it got given away. (I'll be damned if that isn't one of the most yokel-tastic sentences I've ever strung together).
Anyway, I started to make another one but added another fabric or two and it just doesn't look as...what? Blue? Rich? Deep? Anyway, it's shorter too and I was going to put a binding on this one--for practice, you know. I've even sewn the binding together! But looking at this one kind of reminds me of what a pale imitation the other one will be, and I feel that familiar about-to-give-up feeling I get, with the dragging feet and the knitted brow, like someone's forcing me to tour a museum dedicated to computer code.
Have I said this? Since no one's reading I guess I can say it all I want--cooking is easy for me. Even when I'm making something I've never made before, the process is familiar enough that I feel adept--deft, even--whenever I'm in the kitchen. Husband does not. Even when he's just helping me, he fumbles more than anything (sorry, baby--he might actually read this one day). But that isn't because he's a gallump. It's because he's unfamiliar with the process. When I say "take that off the stove" he doesn't know where to put it down. When I say "pour some oil in that pan" he doesn't know how much oil. When I say "grab me the salt" he doesn't know if I mean table or kosher. He actually rather loathes cooking. And when there is a deadline, when dinner is just about to come together and timing is a major factor (the pasta has to be strained NOW), I'm ashamed to say I get impatient with him and sometimes I am snappy. Like a mean turtle.
Anyway, when faced with a new (or old) sewing project, I feel like Husband in the kitchen. I don't know how much or where or which--I fumble. And it's really frustrating. The mean turtle turns on itself.
So I stay away from the sewing machine, even though I know that the only way to stop being a fumbler is to get up there and practice.
I should think of the way I used to dice onions, or anything else that needed to be cut up for a recipe: I would lift the knife off the cutting board and hack into the food willy nilly, taking twice as long to reach a dice as was necessary, and ending up with unevenly-sized chunks. With practice, however, I've vastly improved my dicing skills. Now it feels like it comes naturally, even though I know nature has nothing to do with it. I am a clumsy girl, with next to no natural physical grace or skill. My body must learn by rote, by repeatedly performing the same tasks until they become automatic. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I must learn to sew by rote, until all these little skills become automatic.
So I've really broken that down, haven't I? Been sitting here for a good thirty minutes working on that analysis. Guess what I could have been doing? Right. Procrastination is a topic for another day.

the long weekend

Friday we went out at happy hour, saw a woman we know and had several beers with her and her friends. One of those friends is a Vietnam vet who told stories and patiently explained, when prompted by curious me, the intricate workings of a mortar shell.
Then husband and I walked down the street for pizza and a pitcher of beer. We finished watching the Cavs game at home, where we were on some kind of tape delay. Lebron made a game-winning three-pointer at (literally!) the last second, and we heard the screams of fans from the bars down the hill from us before we actually saw the shot. That was fun--it's always fun when you think your team has lost and they win at the last second.
Saturday we drove to the town down the road and visited a few shops (I got lots of solid fabric in colors I regret a tiny bit--should have held out for a better selection either online or in the capital city but the lady was so nice and I'm a sucker for immediate gratification). Lunch at a little bar, walk with Dog (which walk included an invitation from friends to play euchre that night), bike ride to try out my new helmet, near-heart attack on the way home from said bike ride, showers, roasted chicken tacos for dinner, euchre & sangria at friends' house, home and in bed.
Saturday was effing great.
Sunday we made breakfast and headed out to the garden. we separated and boatload of hostas (and there is still a riot of them outside the front door!) and sweated lots. Took Dog to the park, went out for wings and beer to watch the depressing (as in: no last-second shot could save this one) Cavs game.
Husband awoke with a sore back yesterday. We had breakfast at a diner and then laid low the rest of the day. We are slowly making our way through the Wire and are currently on season 4, which lots of people I've talked to say is their favorite season. It's really good but I have the worst feeling about those corner kids--each episode makes me feel terrified for a different boy, and I know we're going to lose at least one of them by the end of the season. Even as I mourn in advance, I love the masterful manipulation those writers inflict on me: I love stories, and the Wire really socks 'em to me.
Husband's famous beer brats for dinner last night, watched some random movie snippets on TV, then an early bedtime. I read a new book ("Evidence of Things Unseen" by Marianne Wiggins) and Husband fell asleep real early.

On the bike ride this thought came to me, crystal clear-as-a-bell: "I never thought I would be this happy."

My Favorite Breakfast...

Consists of:
1. Peach yogurt. I know it's shamefully high in sugar, but I hate the taste of the fake stuff and I love how peach yogurt goes with...
2. Peanut butter toast. A simple, protein-containing classic. But these sweet and salty components need one more taste to truly sing. They need...
3. Strong black coffee.


I don't know. Is it that everything has a really strong flavor? The yogurt's reeeaallllllyyyyyy sweet; the peanut butter toast is very salty (and crunchy! Yum); the coffee is bitter and black and rich and unadulterated by the dairy products I occasionally add.
I had a long and rambling bit about how my perfect breakfast is like Rock, Paper, Scissors in its elegant simplicity and balance, but I deleted that because it was embarrassing (even though no one is reading or even aware of the existence of this blog, I like to put out a quality product).

Oh, and Dog loves to lick clean the dregs of my yogurt container. And she loves tiny bites of peanut butter toast. Sadly for her, she never developed a taste for coffee, so she is doomed to live the rest of her life missing one leg in the golden tripod of My Favorite Breakfast.

on living up to the name of this blog

I have been learning how to sew. But it's a painful process, a little bit like learning long division. I don't have a strong sense of three dimensional space, so three-dimensional objects (like aprons, pillows, tissue-box covers...) blow my mind a little bit. Table runners, I can handle.
Anyway, when I'm finished with a three-dimensional object I don't want to revisit the agony of its creation right away. I'm satisfied knowing that it came together successfully--the same kind of satisfaction I get solving 2,467/49 by hand, using techniques I learned in 4th grade. I want to go play now. I don't want to sit down and upload photos of the pretty solution.
That's one of the reasons I haven't put up pictures of this apron, which I made for my friend at the beginning of April. I even embroidered a "S" on the pocket. I think it's cute, and now it resides in Tennessee, where it probably hangs on the hook in her kitchen where she put it when I gave it to her. I fear this is not the kind of apron a person wears. It's a little frilly and fancy and trouncy, but I'm glad I made it because now I've made an apron. So I know I can do that. It's a skill set, like long division.

Coq a Vin...

The chicken was purple. Like, in a blue way. The photo does not do it justice. It's probably pointless to post this picture, except I think it does illustrate how unappetizing the meat turned out.
It looked positively revolting when I removed it from my beloved enameled cast iron casserole. I returned the chicken to the pot and it was like a carnival dunk tank filled with butter and other viscous fats, and anything with that much butter (and other viscous fats) cannot stay truly purple. So when it hit the table, the "chicken cooked in wine" was brownish-purple, and luckily I'd already plied the guests with blue cheese (it was Maytag, and that's really how they spell it) turnovers and booze. Plus the scalloped potatoes were quite breathtaking in the cast iron skillet, topped as they were with patches of browned, bubbled Jarlesberg cheese. So everyone graciously (and tipsily, I think) overlooked the dyed poultry.
The asparagus was lovely (I didn't tie it like Julia said I should, but Husband was very conscientious with the salt-to-boiling-water ratio, so they were well-seasoned) if a little overcooked (I blame Julia for that, actually. She said it would take 12 minutes; I checked them after 9 and they were already a little soggy). Maybe it would have been better if I'd peeled them like she said I should. But Husband prevailed in that as well, scanning the destroyed teensy kitchen and pointedly remarking that he had never, ever eaten a peeled asparagus spear. Plus we had guests and at that moment Dog was their only available host; she tends to be overly demonstrative and olfactorily curious, especially when pastries are being eaten on her couch. So peeling like 30 asparagus spears was completely out of the question.
Oh my, I still shudder to think of the way our kitchen looked as we sat down to eat. There were so many soiled, damp kitchen towels! The little pot smeared with melted chocolate (oh, but the entire cake got eaten even after that audaciously rich coq a vin! I'm getting better with that chocolate cake); the slightly bigger pot that served as a double boiler; the huge pot we used to boil the asparagus--ew, green, asparagus-smelling water--; the various dinner plates, strainers, forks, salad plates, ramekins...Lions and tigers and bears, my ass. Oh my.

But it was worth it. We sat at our makeshift "dining room" table until after midnight (on a Wednesday!). We talked about politics, feminism, football, basketball and baseball, TV, real estate...In short, it was the quintessential dinner party. For some of you, that might sound frightfully quotidian, and someday I'll explain why it wasn't so for me. But Jeebus, I can't get into it now. Look: this is a very long and disappointingly-illustrated blog post. Husband is all up in my grill about brevity being the soul of wit (actually he tactfully suggested that I start a haiku blog), so I'm going now.

What's French for "Eureka!"?

Coq au vin! It's perfect, I think: multiple steps, which appeals to my longing to be put through Julia's paces; super-French-sounding; elegant and appropriate for an Occasion...
I'll still serve scalloped potatoes (a level of richness that Julia Child would not approve of, I think, but what if the chicken didn't turn out and all we had were her suggested parsley potatoes? That would be a failure, I'm sure) and asparagus, and a salad to start. Chocolate cake for dessert, and cheese puffs if I get ambitious with the hors d'oeuvres. (Full disclosure: I totally had to look up how to spell hors d'oeuvres. I'm a babe in the woods with this French s#@%.)

I'm nervous about the dinner party tonight. I've had Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" for like a year and a half and have only made three or four things from it. So I decided that tonight's menu would come exclusively from that book, thinking it would be a good way to get some practice. But now I think that will make for a rather boring dinner: roast chicken; scalloped potatoes; asparagus. Chocolate cake for dessert? How un-jazzy. ("Jazzy" being a word I picked up this weekend at my parents' house when perusing their 1968 "modern" cookbook, which had some of the grossest-looking recipe photos I've ever seen, and hi-larious titles like "Jazzy Meatballs.")
But the party is tonight! My other options for meat were not very promising: expensive cuts of beef that would probably embarrass everyone with their price tag; tongue; veal; pork chops.
This is where my inexperience as a dinner party hostess really shows itself: the menu. (Couldn't it show itself in something a little less showy, like the wine's too bold for the fish?) It's going to be unimaginative in the extreme unless I find some way in the next hour (the farmer's market opens at 10) to, well, jazz it up.
Julia is encyclopedic on the subject of mushrooms, so that is where I will begin.