Text 8400, 92 rader
Skriven 2013-12-31 22:48:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: rTCW 5
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I had nothing to do with desserts.

Anne made a very rich but light vanilla mascarpone cheesecake
with blackberries and raspberries: I suppose it was good as
cheesecakes go, but I had only a tablespoon to taste.

Annie did a pecan pie with lard crust (Syd went wild for this
crust, and I seconded her admiration for Annie's skill, but
the truth came out that the secret of the flakiness was in
fact lard, not the right thing for an ovo-lacto-pesco-chicko-
vegetarian to find out). For the nonmeat and nonlactose eaters
she also made chocolate chip bar cookies (blondies with way
too many chocolate chips); these were very good, better even
than when they had come out of the oven, as they had firmed
up to a nice chewy consistency.

Also a very dense pound cake from James Beard; we were going
to serve small slices of this with Turkey Hill vanilla ice
cream and crushed peppermint candy, but that plan was
forgotten, and some very large, very dense slices were
offered and surprisingly mostly eaten. There remains enough
to serve New Year's Eve in the manner originally envisioned.

People cleared out before 6, and my part of the cleanup was
finished by 6:30, and I was in bed by 7.

I got up around midnight for a snack of dirty rice and the
rest of the Asti - that is one of the worst pairings I have
ever made.

==

We were looking forward to a nice quiet rest day, but
overprotective Annie saw that Ciara's ear seemed to be
inflamed, so she roared off to the animal hospital (I
figured it was a fool's errand, and I'd just taken my Lasix,
so I declined to go). It took 2 hours! at the vet, and the
poor thing has to take a week's worth of antibiotics and
wear a thing on her ear that I guess administers medicine or
something like that. When Annie got home, she said, we're
going drinking. Apparently she had to help hold Ciara down,
the procedure was so painful, and the vet and the tech and
Annie all were severely clawed.

I was upstairs minding my own business when the usual call
came - come drink with me. This time staying home was not
enough, so we decided to go to the Crippled Bear, a biker
bar out west of town that has cheap beer and decent food.

On the way, we visited the Weis, where we argued about a
$2.50 bottle of Martinelli's sparkling cider, black-eyed
peas, spinach, scrapple, a pork loin roast, and chicken
breast. That's 6 separate arguments, in between which she
stopped passersby and informed them that we're not married.
Let's see. Neither of our New Year's Eve guests drinks (Anne
because she's old and frail, Kathy the housekeeper for
religious reasons, though it is said that Kathy's husband
once was shocked to see her take a small glass at a wedding),
so I wanted to make them feel just a tiny bit more festive
with that cider junk, and let's face it, it costs not all
that more than a bottle of Mott's. I thought that the black-
eyed peas, which are nasty, were unnecessary, as we had
plenty of food for New Year's Day, guests being Mike and Jill
and Sarah; I also thought we had plenty of greens for
Wednesday (turns out I was wrong, as some people turn up their
noses at leftover collards). What else. This store has four
kinds of scrapple - Country Farm or somesuch, Hatfield,
another local brand, and Rapa beef: so Annie wouldn't buy the
Rapa, which she said was nasty (I agree: the regular is the
industry standard; the beef has all the disadvantages and none
of the charms of tripe, with which it is made), so I said,
what about the others, and she said she didn't like them. Has
she had them? No. Next: 5 people for New Year's Day, and she
wanted a full boneless loin, saying it was cheap. I said a
3-lb half was enough, given that she doesn't do leftovers.
I won that one. Chicken breast, well, I lose always. The deal
is that Kathy doesn't eat various things, owing to delicacy
of either digestion or temperament, so instead of having that
stroganoff I wanted to make, Annie wants me to make schnitzel,
with herself producing spaetzle. I noted that there's not much
less digestible than deep-fried breaded pork and blobs of
greasy starch. The compromise: both my main and hers will
be on the table. We had at least $100 in argument for $30 of
merchandise. Oh, finally, peas. Anne apparently likes peas,
so whenever she comes over, Annie makes peas. One day Anne's
son Dan took me aside and said that she really did eat other
things than peas, so I conveyed this information, which was far
too earth-shaking to be acted on; and so it was. We got a pound
of the store brand peas, which I know to be starchy and
horrid; in this case the name brands are much better.
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