Happy Mardi Gras 2014!

Had a dinner party this past Sunday night - Mardi Gras (moved from Tuesday due to illness). My contribution to the dinner was chicken-sausage file gumbo and King Cake. Oh, and dirty martinis.

The day went like this: grocery shop at 9, while the first load of laundry gets washed downstairs. Back home, load wet clothes and dirty clothes into the Kia, put dog into back, and beat feet over to Chris & Ginny Burroughs house, where they were gracious enough to let me use their laundry equipment. Okay, dryer going, washer going, dog back in car, home to climb nineteen steps, and begin the prep work for the gumbo. But I couldn't really get to the prep work, because I couldn't get to the sink. First I had to clean my kitchen.
Loads changed, dog runs around back yard, home again, climbing those damn nineteen steps again with a load of clean sheets in my arms. Prep work can now begin. Green onions, onions, garlic, green pepper, parsley. Of all of that, I really only like garlic. Talk to a true Cajun, though, and you'll be told over and over the Holy Trinity of roux - garlic, onion, green pepper. Cut up chicken, slice ham, slice sausage, both Andouille and Polish. Okay, time to go.

Stupid steps.....
Little Boy runs around the yard, I fold the duvet cover, and pop towels into the dryer, clothes into the washer. (Yes, all of my bath towels are dirty - and yes, I look like I need a shower!)

Man, I'm putting in a chair rail - I trip up the last three of the stupid nineteen steps, catching myself on my right palm, and left arm. Fun, fun, fun.....

Brown the chicken - vegetable oil. I never have vegetable oil, only olive oil. So I had to buy it, and was overwhelmed by all the choices. Vegetable oil, Crisco, okay - the chicken stuck to the damn pot, and splattered up - right onto my face. Yeah, so the F bomb came flying out - a couple of times! Chicken out, put into warm oven, time to begin. Roux .... flour into the oil until the color of hazelnuts, then veggies for another ten minutes. A scarce 1/4 cup water for roughly three cups of chopped and minced veggies. Suddenly the smells filling my house went from okay to orgasmic.

Add sausage and chicken, stir liberally - but carefully, so as to keep chicken on the bone. Add 2 quarts of water, come to boil. I added one quart of water, and the liquid seemed fine to me - I stopped there. Added pepper, cayenne, basil, fresh bay laurel leaves crushed (Chris Burroughs had given them to me as a house-warming gift in 2012 - so damn good!). 

Boil achieved, lid on pot, fire off, time to go.

Stupid steps. Little Boy practically ripping my left arm from its socket in his eagerness to GO, LET'S GO! Those last four steps were taken in one jump.

Last load, fold towels, put clothes into dryer.

Damn I hate steps!

King Cake - I don't have enough sugar, so I stop and get more sugar, then go home to begin the cake. A yeast-based cake. It's 4:30. Party at 6. Yeast-based cake .... yeah, I didn't really follow through on this very well, huh?

Well, I get the cake assembled and set aside to rise, the file added (in two parts) to the gumbo, get me cleaned up, and by now it's 5:30. 

I want a nap ....

Instead, I stir the gumbo again, and bones float up to the top. Hmm....what happened to keeping the chicken pieces whole? Well, that was moot .... the skin floated to the top, the bones kept surfacing - okay, I guess we're going boneless. I skimmed off oil during the course of the afternoon, fished out bones and skin, and by the time the dinner hour was upon us, only the King Cake remained to be shoved into the oven.

Susan Kucynda is the first to arrive - with red beans and rice. Because what would a true Cajun meal be without red beans and rice????? She and I catch up, enjoy a martini, and I'm still trying to finish the damn King Cake. 

Chris and Ginny arrive, in two installments - Chris with food, Ginny with dogs. Tucker is delirious. They brought Mosby wines, and shrimp with remoulade sauce and rabbit sausage with Cajun spicey brown mustard. I served dirty martinis to accompany the appetizers - oh my god. I mean, really. Oh my god.

Keith and Kristen arrived bearing a beautiful salad. Kristen makes a salad look like a piece of art - and this was no exception. Beautiful, simply beautiful. For dressing, she offered up Lucien Delicate Shallot and Cucumber Creamy Dressing, a perfect match to the spices of the meal.

We were finally ready to eat - everyone served themselves. Bowl for gumbo, plate for red beans and rice and salad. Glass for wine, bourbon, or water, whatever your pleasure was (yep, martini hour was over). I bet you can't guess who had the bourbon.....

Dinner was amazing. Every layer of the meal, from four different houses, complemented the other beautifully.
We finished with the King Cake - and I didn't use a baby or a bean. I used a bullet - and that was the same day Lynn Martinis posted the book quote on my page about some girls carrying guns .... cracked me up! 

The postscript to the bullet is even funnier. No one found it, which doesn't surprise me - the damn cake could have served 18 people, not just six. We broke up the rest of the cake trying to find the bullet, and none of us could find it. However, after I'd gone to bed, the Little Boy just couldn't resist the delicious yeasty goodness wafting through the air to his overly-sensitive nose, and he somehow managed to climb up onto the desk-cum-table and inhale the entire cake. On one side of my desk was the bullet, coated in spit and sugar. On the other side of my desk, the wall side, was a HUGE pile of his .... appreciation. Ugh.

However, the hours spent cleaning, prepping, cooking, the trips spent up and down those damn stairs, the two days spent cleaning up my mess in the kitchen .... I wouldn't trade it for anything. 

Great great night - Happy Mardi Gras 2014!!!!

Remembered Moments ....

I had an email exchange with a business associate who is becoming more of a friend; quirky sense of humor, wicked good taste in food, and he has a Golden. All in all, I figure he's a good guy. I had closed out my email to him with a movie quote, and when I stopped in the office this fine Saturday morning for some files, I checked my work email and discovered he'd answered me. His comment? 'Great movie....' Yeah, well, more than twenty minutes had passed since I'd sent him that email, so I had NO clue as to what he was referring. I scrolled down in the exchange, and saw the following quote:

'You're killin' me, Smalls!'

Now, for those of you who know this movie, you know it's probably one of the top three 'coming of age' movies out there, ranking right up with 'Stand By Me' and 'The Christmas Story'. Fabulous film of a young pre-teen boy coming into his own, making friends, learning about life. For those of you not familiar with the movie 'Sandlot', Smalls is the last name of the newbie on the block, trying desperately to make friends in the summertime. Remember summertime? When you played with your buds from school, and didn't bother with anyone you didn't know, except to mock and belittle? Yes, well, that's the world he walked into. The 'sandlot kids' take him under their wing, a group of misfits who live for one thing - baseball. Hanging out in the treehouse one particular night, one of the boys says to Smalls: 'want a smore?' to which Smalls replies, 'more what?', and the boy says ' a smore!' in a tone implying idiot. Confused, Smalls looks at the boy and, with great dignity (remember, still a newbie), says, 'how can I have more, if I haven't had any?' The boy looks at him, shakes his head, and says, 'You're killin' me, Smalls.'

And when my buddy replied that it was a great movie, I got to thinking about growing up, the things we did to entertain ourselves. If we wanted s'mores, we couldn't go to the cookie aisle in the grocery store. No, we had to go to the cracker aisle, buy the graham crackers, hunt down the 'mallow (marshmallows), buy the Hershey's Chocolate bar (and you know only Hershey would do), and then we had to convince someone, one of the big people, to let us build a fire out by the creek, or better yet, convince our parents to take us camping. Only then, after we'd been eaten alive by bugs, fallen out of trees, nearly drowned one another in our swimming in the creek excursions - only then, under the night sky brilliant with moon and stars, firelight dancing high into the night, and only then, could we enjoy a s'more. Half the enjoyment - okay, most of the enjoyment - was in the anticipation of the treat. Piece by piece, it had to be built, created from nothing. The buy-in of the big people was the beginning .... the night ending with sticky fingers, chocolate around the mouth, graham cracker crumbs dotting the sleeping bags, and dogs licking any small hand they could find .... that was the final payoff.

That got me to thinking about all the other things we did, without safety nets, without the consumer republic there to help us satisfy our every whim and urge. Swimming downstream in the creek one summer, in a still wading pool, coming out to find our feet still black with sand. Okay, we'll go rinse them off again. Still black. The still wading pool was a breeding ground for leeches. I'm not sure which of us screamed louder, me, my two little sisters, or my brother. Literally, our feet were black. We stayed upstream, in the current, after that. Diving off a tree limb into the creek, learning quickly that you must dive shallow, or risk a severe head injury. Riding on the bar of a bicycle, to get thrown off, smash your head into the ground hard enough to have pebbles picked out of your ear for over an hour by the family physician. Halloween, when it was safe to eat the candy. There was a woman who went all out, every year, for the kids. She opened her home, dressed as a witch, and would bring us in in groups to bob for apples and be generally terrorized. Man, we looked forward to that night from the moment school started up in September.

Summers we would spend with my grandparents, still living in the house my mother finished her growing up years, in the Pittsburgh, PA area. And the first thing my father would do, once we crossed into Pennsylvania, was to stop at a corner grocery and send one of the kids in for Krispy Klondikes. Best ice cream on the planet, or so we believed as kids. You could only buy Krispy Klondikes in Pennsylvania. We didn't have a drivers' license. So, rather like the s'mores, the anticipation of this treat began the moment our parents told us the dates of our summer with Grandma. Was it the best ice cream on the planet? Probably not - although it is pretty darn good. It was the anticipation of an infrequent treat that jacked this really good ice cream up into the stratosphere. I was living in Houston, married but no daughter yet, when I stopped in the middle of the frozen food section, staring in disbelief, then gaping in astonishment, then grinning with joy. There, in the middle of the frozen food section, was the best ice cream on the planet - yep, Krispy Klondikes! I bought the six-pack, took it home, gave one to my husband and said, 'You've got to try this!', all the while unwrapping my own. After devouring the square of vanilla ice-cream covered with rich chocolate with rice krispies embedded in it, I called home to Cleveland Ohio. My dad answered the phone, and I just burst out: 'Dad, Dad, I had a Krispy Klondike!' to which my father replied, 'That's nice, honey. Did you want to talk with your mother?' and just like that, I was ten again, and we were driving down Central, Pittsburgh's answer to Lombard Street in San Francisco, Dad's big Cadillac slamming down in the dips, flying up into never-never land with each rising hill.

All these memories, triggered by food. It's never the food - it's the day, the moment, the life wrapped around that food. Making s'mores during our winter picnic, my mother and sister Jenny sitting in the car, heater running full blast, the rest of us playing in the snow as if it were high summer. My father taking us around Pittsburgh to show us his haunts when he'd been a young boy - the trip beginning, of course, with Krispy Klondikes. 

Cherish those moments, when the light changes, and a heaviness comes to you. Those moments will sustain you in the dark. Trust me on this.