It has recently come to our attention that in 90 days my husband may, or may not have a job. As the House Writer, I began immediately to work on resumés, cover letters, and all manner of beguiling a lifetime of hard and varied work into an irresistible nugget of information. No spinning or glossing is necessary in this case; the man has worked hard from the time he was driving a tractor illegally through the fields of the family farm. The work, the hard, complicated part of the thing is distilling the best of him using “action verbs” (as opposed to those other, non-action verbs) and using terms and jargon expected by the business world.
As I write about his work, and think again about the many things he knows, I think about how very odd, incomplete and schizophrenic my own resumé would appear at this time in my life. As of 7:30 or so last night, I might have said something like “well, I gave up law to be a cook, and I’m not trained professionally but I’m really good at it.” Having come directly from putting 25 pounds of flank steak to bed in sealed bags of fragrant marinade, knowing that I would get up this morning and make 100 impossibly fluffy biscuits for strawberry shortcake, I was feeling pretty cocky.
Just the thought of the world coming to an end, generates a tantalizing excitement in my belly, the mere fact, that I could devour my most favorite delicacies without consequence, guilt or social shame!
I don't know if it’s the famous economy, or I'm just going through an I can't stand take-out anymore, but I've started to cook again. Not just grill a burger, which turns out pretty good when done on a stove top grill pan. I've actually been making vats of chile, or chicken and vegetables in marinara sauce, and freezing perfect portions in those great plastic containers everyone else in the world discovered before I did It's been a bone-chilling winter in New York this year, and coming home to something yummy that I can pop into the microwave, then actually eat straight from the container, has been life-changing. So that's what the room with all the white stuff that I used to go into all the time, is for.
As far as I’m concerned, two things of note happened in 1994. First, I won the science fair. And second, after spending weeks recreating a miniature, but insanely scrupulous papier-mâché Mt. Rushmore, I lost the fifth grade “state fair” by handing out fist-sized bags of pure, unadorned flour as a snack during my oral presentation. And yet, neither the triumph nor the failure were really mine alone: I had what’s known a yes-man on both counts. (You know who you are. Mom.)
.....well, it's really an Asparagus Popover but it looks more like a fritatta to me. I feel like a popover should have a thicker crust but that's just my opinion. Maybe if I made this in a slightly bigger pan there would have been more extension of the crust, but it's water under the bridge at this point.