2011
Beans for Brains
I’m trying to find a way to make cooking fun, but at this point I think I need to just let that fantasy go, for the sake of both the family and my eyebrows.
Last night I was two hours and an overnight soak of dried legumes into cooking a nice spicy black bean soup for dinner, and I was literally minutes away from having completed a meal without so much as dropping a finely diced cube of onion on the floor (let alone committing an error more likely and horrific, like amputating a finger with the Slap Chop), and, as with the beef stew, those last few moments were my downfall.
The soup itself was done and I was actually only making the garnish when things went awry. THE GARNISH. I’d cut some corn tortillas into strips, brushed them with oil, and put them on a baking sheet to crisp up at 350 for an undetermined amount of time. I emphasize that last part because that was the whole problem, MARTHA. I was using a recipe out of my Everyday Food magazine, which you may remember as the source of the Borked Hand Pies . The instructions for the tortilla strips said “bake until crisp.” To me, that could mean three minutes or two hours. I need specifics. Specifics allow me to set a timer for an exact number. Specifics would have told me that the tortillas just needed a little more time, not more heat. Specifics would have said, specifically, “DO NOT switch the temperature to Broil so the strips will cook faster, and DO NOT turn your back to the oven and start writing a long and thoughtful email, you stupid woman.”
As I turned up the heat, I actually considered tweeting that I was pulling the whole “If it cooks for one hour at 250, it will only take half the time if I crank the oven to 500″ blonde joke, which is funny because it’s so idiotic. AND YET.
I knew the tortilla strips were ready to come out when the oven beeped and flashed an error code and shut itself off because I had…sorta set things on fire. I opened the door to a plume of smoke and said to Simon in the next room, “There’s been an incident,” which was code for “You’re going to have to stand on a chair and turn the smoke detector off in about ten seconds.” He entered the room to find me dancing the tarantella with a dish towel over my head, trying to disperse the toxic fumes.
The tortilla strips were ash. Blackened lines of carbon that crumbled to the touch. Simon mused that perhaps they were “overdone.” I begged his pardon and huffed.
Remember that snowboarder Linsday Jacobellis, who was so far ahead in the race for an Olympic gold medal that she pulled a trick on the last jump, fell on her face, and lost her sure thing because of mismanaged, or at least ill-timed, pride? I don’t think I can call checking my email when I’m supposed to be monitoring the tortilla strips “showboating” in the same way, but then again, I’m already kind of comparing making a soup garnish to the Olympics, so what the hell.
Gold medal gas, that’s what.
I don’t know what to tell you other than this: clearly someone has put a culinary hex on me (is that what that whole “kitchen witch” thing is about?) in an attempt to humiliate me in front of my family. It must be that. Nothing else could explain the hand pies and the beef stew and the tortilla strips and that time I made a pie without a pie tin, and then, also last night, a brief comedic scene in which the manual cheese grater appeared to be broken, but no, I was merely using it upside down. I always wanted to be in a New Yorker cartoon, but I didn’t think it would be like this.
2011
22 to 28
Week 4 of Project 365. (A very patterny week!)
***
And some that didn’t make the cut:
2011
My Fab Five
I hardly need an excuse to talk about people I love, but this week I actually got sponsored to write about some of my favorite bloggers (and not the same-olds I’m always linking to anyway). I hope you’ll go check it out and welcome some fabulous new people into your reader.
(For anyone who gets wigged out by this stuff, this is NOT a product review or advertisement but an honest-to-god straight-up sponsored post (i.e., they gave me a topic and a link and some disclosure language I didn’t have to say a word about any product or service or anything). Even better, the sponsor’s link, should you choose to click it, takes you to a contest to win $1,000 to grant a friend’s wish. That’s the sort of thing I’m happy to support, and I honestly hope one of you wins because I think my readers are the best.)
