I was on my way to work this morning (driving, unfortunately), when I saw the following bumper sticker on a little Toyota truck: “My other car is a Pynchon novel.”
For those who just fell out of their chairs laughing, congratulations on getting through Gravity’s Rainbow. For everyone else, no worries, it took me six months to read and I think I only understood about 20% of it.
That reminds me that I haven’t been beat to hell by a novel lately. Maybe it’s time to revisit V..
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. Not funniest website, funniest thing, period. Spamusement is a collection of “poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines” and it’ll have you falling out of your desk chairs.
Between Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, I think I spent about sixteen hours in my kitchen. I love my kitchen. It’s a great place to spend time, and, conveniently, a great place to prepare food. But sixteen hours was a bit much. I was preparing — with a tremendous amount of help from a wonderful girl — for this month’s dinner club, marking the first time I’ve hosted the event in its 18-month history.
I chopped and cooked and cleaned all of Saturday night, slowly preparing lamb stock (if only I’d known it would take five hours. . .)and simultaneously making tacos for dinner, and started in again on Sunday morning, with Vicky making a quiche while I focused on my “Seven Hour Leg of Lamb,” a recipe from Jennifer McLagan’s new cookbook, Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore. We also managed to make a late breakfast of blueberry-beer pancakes in between moving Dutch ovens and skillets to and from the stove and the quiche in and out of the oven.
Sometime around 4:00 PM, both starving, Vicky had the brilliant idea of using Saturday night’s dinner leftovers for nachos, which kept us going until it was time to reap the rewards of our cooking marathon as the dinner club arrived. There was Coq au Vin, Boeuf Bourgignon, Seven Hour Leg of Lamb (with five-hour lamb stock!), a quiche, various French salads, appetizers, and desserts. It was all wonderful food and good company (my apartment, it turns out, can seat 14), and a pleasure to enjoy eating what we’d been limited to smelling all weekend.
After four hours of French food, French wine, and decidedly American carrying-on on a beautiful Seattle evening (I can’t in good faith evaluate whether the weather was French), everyone left, taking most of the mess with them (the beauty of paper plates and thematic pot luck!). With the kitchen clean, the leftovers stored, my apartment in better shape than it’s been in months, and a deep satisfaction at having finally managed to entertain more than three people at a time, it was off to bed, exhausted from cooking and eating.
Upon reflection this morning, the most satisfying meal of the weekend was the five-minute plate of nachos, eaten hurriedly but thoroughly enjoyed, a simple, quick food with simple, quick flavors that far surpassed even Karl’s magnificent Boeuf Bourgignon.