Easter

Maybe mornings are not the best, sharpest time to write blog posts, but that’s when I have time, so there you go.

Yesterday Ray and I went up to Dave and Margie’s house for their Easter party.  It’s funny how good times are hard to describe, but bad times made good drama.  I had a good time.  But it seemed like a lot of the people there were exhausted.  Well, with Doyce and Kate you have to expect that–new baby.  But there were gaps in the conversations all around the room, people too tired to say something funny.  And if you know that crowd, you know that’s saying something.

But we got there eventually.  The food and the coffee helped.

Toward the end of the evening, after a lot of folks had gone home (about seven?), we started talking about food tragedies, horrible accidents of food miscreation.  And some near misses.  There were a couple of funny stories about Food So Awful It Was Legendary.

I was racking my brain for something to add to the conversation, and I realized that I couldn’t, really, not because I didn’t have any, but because I’ve had so many.  It’s all part of my cooking philosophy:  push the big red button marked “Do not push this button.”

I have burned things, cooked them beyond edibility, overspiced, oversalted, undersalted, undercooked, had things fall flat, refuse to gel, refuse to freeze (that’s alcohol for you), and just be too damn full to bother eating.  High altitude cooking.  Discovering trifle.  Add that to serving food that people aren’t used to and then refuse to eat on the grounds that it’s just too plain weird.  I often warn my family that I’m in an experimental mood and that they’re going to have to at least take a bite, although they can excuse themselves afterwards for cheese sandwiches or whatever they want to make.

It’s just not funny or otherwise remarkable anymore.  Except for the part, driving home, when I realized that the dish that I’d been screwing around with that morning (Easter hummus) had barely been touched, and could be considered part of my cooking oeuvre of failure.  That was pretty funny.

It would kill me to have to do the same damned thing, reliably, all the time.  Except cheesecake.  It’s annoying, because it’s so repetitive.  But I’m good at it, so I do it, when called upon.  I’m brave.

It rained intermittently all the way home.  Ray laughed about the way the streetlights turned into streaks on the pavement; she’s not used to it.  Eventually I got off the interstate and drove through town, because it was raining so hard, and the drivers on the interstate were yelling “vroom vroom” out the window as they cut in front of me, throwing mist up faster than I could scrape it off.  Driving in the rain at night in Colorado makes it seem like a foreign place, especially with the fog, and sometimes you drive up hills that seem to have no end, and nothing past them once you go over the top.

But here I am, at home, getting ready to charge into a new project.  Dried out and needing a shower.  I should have left the window down on the way home, to soak up the water.