my kitchen has called a truce

derek started making his own wine a few years back. it's nothing too fancy, but showing up to a party with some tasty homemade wine is a crowd pleasing event. honestly, the whole process isn't too difficult if you just go buy a mix of the grapes already done. the initial purchase of tools and equipment can set you back a bit, but after that it's a lot of watching the sediment settle after you've added the proper amount of this and that before you bottle it up and show off. sorry derek - did i take away the mystery? don't worry. people will still clamor for a bottle of the "crack wine" when we go to see friends.

imagine my surprise when derek showed up at the house this weekend with supplies to make our own cheese! at first i was quite suspicious and my impulse was to have him take it all back to the store. it couldn't be easy enough for me to do, could it? so we laid out all the stuff and the directions before us on the counter. the next morning, before i was going to book club, we got a gallon of milk and proceeded to make a honkin' ball of fresh mozzarella cheese! it only took about half an hour to boil things, curd it up, drain the whey, and squish it around into an oozy lump of goodness. yes, i made cheese. no, really - i'm not kidding. as further proof of my new prowess, i took it to book club with me and they scooped it up with joy.

"this cheese is still warm and fresh. it's really good."
"i made mozzarella with derek today."
"i love mozzarella cheese. where did you get it?"
"i MADE it this morning."
"WHAAAA...?!?! you MADE cheese? YOU made cheese?"

and thus, i had to tell everyone (twice) that we made cheese at home. they looked at me to find the telltale marks of my recent cloning in an effort to discover what someone had done with the real george. hey, if i can't find my alien implant, it's a hard bet that you can't find it either. i have more access to a wider range of places on my body.

it would seem that my kitchen and i have gradually made friends over the years without me knowing it. my kitchen has always been like an adversary to me, one of places i communed with only in the name of cereal or sammiches. vee and holly both told me over the past week that i am a good cook. it was stunning. have i possibly overcome my kitchen hurdles? in thinking about it, i do whip up a mean quesadilla. i've been known to make a roast lamb shank surrounded with a creamy pear polenta. (that truly was a freak showing, but i might try it again someday.) i can walk in and concoct a faboo eggy bread, completely by accident. my rice is fluffy and wonderful every time, which is a skill unto itself.

oh, but there is still one thing i cannot do unsupervised. i officially suck at cooking any part of a chicken. the easiest things are the hardest bits to me. without derek around to poke at my attempts, i could have killed someone a long time ago. once again, i am totally not kidding. i can hope that my new george foreman grill with the detachable plates - thrift store find where i saved like seventy bucks! - can help me with this. hey, we're both georges, so it must be fate, right? so far we've only done steak on it, but i can tell you already that this thing is a pretty cool gadget. it must have been my good karma for handing over my sparkly like-new toaster oven to holly. in any case, we'll see if the death knoll, or we could call it the death bawk, of my chicken cooking adventure continues.

until that happens, i've made a new hobby of popcorn. remember jiffy pop? we absolutely, one hundred percent lived for that shit in the seventies! jiffy pop is exciting stuff. i grew up with jiffy and air poppers and stir crazys and microwave popcorn, so it never occurred to me that you don't need to get actual jiffy pop to make popcorn on the stove. it kills me with laughter sometimes how modern life has scratched away at my noggin. after some experimentation, i've discovered that a bit of oil can be heated with my favorite spices in a skillet pan, and when i throw in some corn to be popped with the lid tilted just a teensy bit, voila! by the way, the skillet pan did better at distributing heat and popping all the kernels than the stock pot. plus, i could make a smaller batch for snacking much easier. there's that whole "fill it to the top" urge we all get, you know? the funny thing was that it takes about three minutes pop a bag that i inevitably burn at the bottom in the microwave, but it only took maybe five minutes to do an unscathed batch on the stove. talk about bringing sexy back to the popcorn.

for those of you that grew up in a kitchen-functional household, this all might sound silly. for those like me that had the choice of either ultra chunky protein shakes and vitamin supplements in one house or little debbies and boiled veggies from a can in the other while growing up, you can relate to such a kitchepiphany. we're not looking to start a luddite household around here, but knowing what's in our food and maybe even how to cook a few things is a really big deal for me. i've literally spent years in an effort to figure out a use for wax paper beyond making crayola art with an iron. thank goodness for rhiannon and ladonna, the two people in my life most likely to tell me "what that thing is and what the hell it's for" without making me feel like an asshole.

insert commercial here - ladonna's fancy foods on cherry street ROCKS! she's fancy alright, but in a way that makes you feel fancy, too. tankoo berry mucho, my little kitchen saviour. you're impressed with every hurdle i can go over in my foodventure.

derek wants to make yogurt next. i'm up for the experience, but he has to taste it first, just to make sure. i'm not sacrificing my own life just to make better friends with a room in my house, and i'm not above watching him vomit from one of my creations. just because vee and holly have faith in me doesn't mean i've gone all stooopid. but i promise not put chicken in the yogurt. if i kill him, who would be around to supervise?


selfishly looking forward to:
jason's wedding
emergence project auditions
cleaning holly's closet