Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Let's see...we hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year - my girlfriend's Dad, stepmom, and sort-of grandmother (actually her stepmother's mother-in-law from her first marriage), and our good friends from around the corner. I brined a free-range turkey in a big bucket overnight, rubbed melted butter, garlic and sage under the skin, trussed it, then roasted it upside down for a couple of hours, before turning it breast-side up to brown.  I went to all this trouble to acheive a moist breast, cooked to the correct internal temperature (you want 165 degrees for the breast, but 185 degrees for the thigh, which is why breast meat is ordinarily dry, and a whole turkey is actually a stupid thing to prepare).  I think it turned out quite well, although this free-range bird was certainly different from your standard Butterball, which has a lot of salty broth injected into it to keep it moist.  I also made some blue-cornbread dressing, a very marginal last-minute green bean, onion and tomato dish, a chocolate pecan pie (with pecans from our own trees) and a cranberry orange tart.  It was all very fine, but not quite at the level of perfection I'd wanted.  It's too hard to cook with people roaming around, giving you beer and wine, distracting you with conversation, etc.  I think next year I'll keep it simpler, and try to have more fun.  I enjoyed myself, though.  I believe I could cook for a living - not that I am a great cook, by any means, but I could certainly learn that part.  I guess I mean that I really enjoy the focus, the moving around, the something-always-happening of cooking on a larger scale.  Also, over the course of the day I came down with a horrible cold.  I guess I only realized later that drinking three or four beers, a couple glasses of red wine, along with about half a bottle of Robotussin DM was not the best idea I'd ever had (this along with the fact that cooking for two days solid somehow destroys one's appetite, so I ate a tiny plate of food at dinner, and no appetizers).  Dextromethorphan is an hallucinogen, folks!  At about 6pm, I started to feel as though everything was very far away, and I probably came very close to becoming the dreaded holiday drunk.  Fortunately, I am one of those people who, upon realizing that I am becoming intoxicated, tends to exert greater and greater control over what they say and do.  The next morning I did vaguely recall a weird, elegaic speech in which I described Kyle Maclachlan riding the sandworm during the climactic scene in Dune (the movie).  On occasion, weird bits of dialogue from that film will pop into my head, although I haven't seen it in years, and didn't like it when I did.  From time to time I have been known to utter "Dune, Arakis, desert planet..." or "he is truly the Quisatch Haderach" (or however that's spelled).  The next day, I dumped the turkey carcass into a big stockpot with water to cover, along with one bottle of belgium beer.  I simmered that for a couple of hours over low heat, strained the stock, then simmered the stock for another thirty minutes with two quartered onions, two halved jalapenos, and about 15 cloves of crushed garlic.  I strained it again, discarded the vegetables, added the shredded turkey meat from the carcass, along with the juice from two limes and one bunch of cilantro, chopped.  We ate this for dinner with some homemade corn tortillas from the chicken place (the one referred to in this neighborhood as "the chicken place in the trailer parked in the gas station parking lot next to the drainage ditch").  Quite good, and I still have lots of stock left to freeze. I realize that this is not a very edifying or interesting weblog entry.  Perhaps I will try again later.  Today is my niece's 8th birthday, and we are having dinner out this evening to celebrate (at Tres Amigos - she is a big fan of yellow cheese melted onto tortilla chips, which she refers to as "nachos.").  I ordered a copy of the newly reissued 1944 children's classic "Jenny and The Cat Club," for her, from the New York Review of Books, and although I paid more than the cost of the book to have it shipped priority mail, it has yet to arrive.  I just wrote a rather irate mail to the NYRB customer service department...I'm quite used to amazon.com holding my hand through the entire ordering/shipping/tracking process, so receiving an email stating "we got your order, we charged your credit card this much," with no clue as to when it shipped, how it shipped, how to track it, etc. is just highly, highly annoying.  Say what you will about the yawning, gaping maw of the amazon.com capitalist machine - they do it right.  Here's another e-commerce annoyance, while I'm grousing.  I recently exercised a small number of my company stock options, to help pay for significant electrical work and housepainting.  I am forced to use E-Trade/OptionsLink to perform these transactions, and they make it well-nigh impossible to transfer the money from the trade into one's bank account.  I did this two weeks ago, and I honestly still haven't figured out how to do it.  I have figured out how to arrange to have the money wired to my account, but they charge $30 (this on top of the $19 to execute the trade) for the privilege, and when I tried to set it up, their internet site informed me that the birthdate I entered "did not match their records."   I realize that I sound very spoiled, griping about such things.  This is due to the fact that I AM very spoiled, readers.   I get upset when the magazines to which I am subscribed do not arrive in my mailbox prior to the first of the month, for example.  I like control, order, and stability - I go to great lengths to assuage my various anxieties (for example, the anxiety of not being able to find my favorite magazines at the newsstand) through the thoughtful exercise of these mechanisms, and it annoys the HELL out of me when my carefully-employed methods are met with resistance, sloth, and disregard.  I realize that there are vast swaths of my existence that lie completely outside of my control, which only further steels my resolve to micromanage the inconsequentials.  2:06:20 PM