Today, we spent the day getting the house in order for my sister’s visit this weekend. For some reason, my wife always wants the house to be guest-friendly, which means basically perfect in every way, as if my sister was meeting her for the first time.
Of course, I’ve known my sister for more than sixty years and we have no pretenses left. We are both cheerful slobs in many respects, which is not to say that we visit each other’s houses and make messes. We’re just comfortable being ourselves when family comes around.
Not so much for my wife, who has known my sister for over forty years. She views a clean house as a sign of respect for visitors, which includes my family, in and out of town. So we did some spot painting and rug cleaning and dusting to approximate a utopian ideal of a guest room.
I took the opportunity to also straighten out our various utensil drawers, which include vast collections of spatulas, cheesecloth, graters, and, weirdly, chopsticks. Like my closet, these drawers would benefit from aggressive editing, but every implement I review has enough utility to merit its place in the crowded drawer. I just have to remember that I have a herb chopper, a garlic press, a ricer (the best thing in the world for silky mashed potatoes), and a zester when I am cooking.
If I was a better cook, I’d reduce it all down to a chef’s knife, a paring knife, a fish spatula, a Microplane grater, some tongs, an electronic scale, and a probe thermometer.
But when you go to Sur La Table or Williams Sonoma, you find yourself needing pie weights and a strawberry trimmer for that lattice-crust pie you’ve been wanting to make ever since seeing it in the New York Times cooking app. So you get them, forgetting that a pound of uncooked pinto beans are just as good as the ceramic beads you just bought, and that your paring knife, spinning the strawberry on the edge of the blade, is just as good as the charming red plastic device gripping the leaves and core of the fruit with the same motion as the claw machines in an arcade (and with about the same rate of success).
And once bought, you keep them, even as you are trimming and cleaning berries with your paring knife. There has to be some kind of parallel to my approach to personal relationships here, but that’s a discussion for another day. Suffice to say, I am always inclined to hope for the best, in kitchen implements and in relationships, until either of them become so useless or toxic that I have to let them go, which explains my vast archive of spatulas and my long list of holiday granola recipients.
Speaking of cooking, I made my third batch of pesto from the basil plant in my backyard, a record return on investment due to my unusual level of care and attention this year. I have been aggressively and strategically pruning the basil plant, just above a node of leaves, prompting the plant to get bushier and more productive. Same for my rosemary and my sage, which are doing great.
On the other hand, my tomato plants keep teasing me, lots of yellow flowers, each a precursor to a fruit, none of which are actually getting there yet. I’ve caged them, water and feed them regularly, and check on them for bugs and blight every morning, but nothing yet. I’m kind of hoping that they will fruit all at once, an explosion of red blobs, as organic and fresh as a tomato can possibly be.
I aspire to what my friend Steve has in his backyard. I visited him last year, and he had six or seven plants all fruiting. He casually reached down and snapped off two or three cherry tomatoes, no big deal, and gave me a couple, letting me taste the fresh acidity exploding in my mouth all at once. That’s what I want this year in my back yard.
Until then, pesto abounds.
This week, poker on Tuesday, my sister visits on Thursday for the weekend, and I have a tour of the Rothko Chapel on Friday. Plus I finish my pending matter and start something new.
The watchword is focus.
No comments:
Post a Comment