Moose in the Kitchen

In my world, friends mean food. Only with less implied cannibalism. But, really, doesn’t everything mean food? Finish a paragraph, have a snack! Vacuum the rug, eat a cookie! Organize the closet, why you deserve a wheel of cheese! I try to convince myself that fancy tea is food so I can avoid weighing five hundred pounds. It only works if the name of the tea includes caramel and I strain my imagination. Really hard. Every time a friend and I plan to visit, it inevitably involves food. Few things go together as well or give a better excuse for buying the good mozzarella, the kind that comes in watery sludge and not those awful rubbery shreds.

Friday, continuing my quest to become an irascible Martha Stewart (see: nesting, too much of), I had my lovely ex-roommate over for dinner. She brought her miniature dachsund. When Ria:

tried to sniff Meeka’s nethers, as dogs are wont to do, she couldn’t even reach them with her nose. She had to hop to do the sniff test. Meeka seemed confused and requested a meatball for reassurance. If, of course, request means “You’d best be giving me one of those meatballs, woman!”

Complete with semi-threatening wet nose.

Neither dog was granted a meatball until, as I was trying to scrape the meatballs from the pan into the pasta, I misjudged slightly and sent meatballs flying around the kitchen. Oh, how the little legs flailed in the massive Dog Scramble of ‘07.

I made mushrooms with melted (and fresh! down with plastic shreds!) mozzarella, linguini with meatballs, and Italian cake that was really more like bread but that may have been because I miscalculated the whole yeast thing. Be warned, this cookbook likes to measure things in ounces. This may lead to asking someone how many ounces are in a block of cheese inconveniently measured in pounds (oh yeah, I buy my cheese by the pound), being asked (unhelpfully) how many ounces in a pound (also known as, figure it out yourself, chump), replying “Six! No, ten! Thirty-four?” and earning yourself a look of horrified pity. Luckily, the meatballs didn’t require much in the way of measurement (just: Italian sausages, 4) and were very tasty.

As was the aforementioned bacon onion tart, eaten by the aforementioned vegetarian. Please restrain your awe when viewing this stunning example of photographic skill.

Hey, look! People! Minus the fuzz.

The lovely lady on your left is the vegetarian. The guy on the right will eat anything you put in front of him, including a large glass of jet fuel or perhaps a lobotomized frog. We later lounged on the bed that was conveniently placed in the kitchen and drank sidecars while comparing ourselves to the Romans, minus the vomitorium.

Sunday afternoon, I met a friend for tea. Successful tea involves a tea pot and either a very large platter or a three-tiered plate apparatus. Ours could definitely be labelled a successful tea. I got three tiers ALL TO MYSELF. My three tiers contained salmon on a crumpet, green salad leaves I ignored, a lemon tart I didn’t, scones (yes, that’s plural) with jam and clotted cream and fruit. It was sunny in San Francisco on Sunday, sunny enough to make you squint and wonder if your SPF is strong enough. I love that about global warming in January. We went to Samovar and sat outside so we could squint and turn pink, pink squinters who shove clotted cream down our throats and talk with our mouths full. Fine, that was only me. We both sprayed crumbs all over the table. All right, fine, also just me.

In spite of getting virtually nothing done the past few weeks what with all this cooking and visiting, I feel good to have reconnected with a number of people who considered themselves my friend until I dropped into a Worm Hole of Prodigious Size about six months ago. OK, a year ago. Fine, four years ago – depending on where you live. P.S. Going to school on the East Coast sucks, because you find yourself with all these awesome friends in random places, random places the bus won’t take you, so you can never afford to visit them, at least without inappropriate credit card debt and/or auctioning off your car.

And then there are other people, people like Crunchy Nanas, who defected to England to marry some British bloke. (Hi, Crunchy Boy! We blame YOU!) You should go visit her blog and leave obnoxious comments about her marathon training. I recommend pointing out all the energy she’s wasting running miles and miles and how that cow? Died in vain! Died in vain for your burger, whose calories you just tossed aside like yesterday’s trash! You should mention that just because it’s a worthy cause doesn’t excuse such blatant calorie wasting. You weren’t even running away from anything! Don’t let me catch you running again unless there’s a bull chasing you! A big bull!

Lots of exclamation points are crucial. And, um, don’t tell her I sent you.

So far, the only thing that’s missing in this new life of having friends and writing questionable fiction is recreational reading and sanity. If I start gibbering about monkeys on the blog, those of you who know where I live, please stage an intervention. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I would gibber about monkeys while still mostly sane, so maybe do an exploratory recon mission before confiscating my lap top and all the alcohol. Thanks.