Okay, so the demand was from one person. But I knew he wouldn’t let me rest until I made one.

This weekend was highly domestical with a chance of naps. Last night we unleashed the naked feral dwarf by taking the bars off her little prison-home, turning it into a “junior” bed. Result: she was up at four and bouncing on our heads. We kept booting her back to her room, urging her to turn her lamp on and read a book. It’s going to take some training. A lot of training. And possibly a cattle prod or some kind of fence.

I finally put a pillow over my head, which Nietzsche saw as an invitation. She purred through the pillow, which put me right out. I told Companion and he was horrified, because purring has the opposite effect for him. He didn’t grow up with friendly cats, though. A purring cat is a sleeping pill for me.

I have a little tomato-fondling yard pictsie. They are just starting to go red, which sucks, because it’s late in the season for that. The garden’s been much better this year. Just when we have achieved Total Yard Domination, our duplex neighbors (who don’t care about gardening) are moving out, and we may have to share with the next tenants. Dang.

Then there was some cooking. I wish I could say these were all my cherry tomatoes, but we’re not quite there yet.

I made this dessert I’ve been eyeballing for a while, which has one of those ridiculous names: Sugared Pluots on Anise-Scented Phyllo. First, let me say that I have been ignoring pluots for years, dismissing them as freakish frankenfruits, but let me now say they are crazy delicious. I’m sorry, frankenpluots. We’re friends now. You can live in countertop harmony with my pureblood peaches and plums.

It’s pretty simple. You do layers of phyllo with butter, aniseseed, and sugar, and top it with the pluots. The result is like a crisp cookie, and it’s almost like candy. So good.

Before:

After:

You can even hold it up to the light and see through the golden phyllo with all the aniseseed embedded in the layers, like little bugs trapped in amber. I thought it was going to be whoa liquorice party, but the effect ends up being quite mild.

I am hoping to take this recipe with me into fall-time, and transfer it to apples. Do you know of a seed or herb that provides an interesting counterbalance to apples? I don’t want to go with the classic apple pie spices. Perhaps something that is used in Indian cuisine? I was toying with the idea of cumin in seed form. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.

For years I was afraid of things like phyllo dough. I would watch my mom try to use it and swear, but when you get the hang of it, it’s actually pretty easy. When I was first married at eighteen, I decided that since I was on the drug money bankroll, I should at least make myself useful and try to cook. I bought Betty Crocker’s New Cookbook, 1996 edition, because it looked pretty basic. I also found myself enticed by the covers of Martha Stewart Living, which usually featured impossible-looking desserts with ingredient combinations I wouldn’t want to eat anyway, like lavender-horehound-pistachio pudding, with was fascinating, but also fairly wtf.

I bought a few issues anyway, and attempted a few recipes. This usually meant I had to go to the special store, with the fancy bulk bins, and it was guaranteed that I didn’t have most of the items on the ingredient list. Yesterday, when I set out to make dessert, I had everything on hand but pluots. And it all went pretty fast, with a minimum of stress and no hand-flapping.

Part of it’s been time, and practice, and choosing to eat good food whenever I can. And part of it was extreme post-grad school poverty, which caused me to cook six nights out of seven, taking breaks only for leftover lambloaf night.

My ex-husband, annoying git though he is, used to talk about being a practicing, skilled jazz musician in an interesting way. He talked about hitting that breakthrough point where you can improvise during solos and jam and mix the melody together in a working, beautiful way. I feel like I am starting to hit that breakthrough point with cooking. I still love to try recipes, and I love to follow them to the letter, but I can look at a recipe now and tell how long it will take and what it will taste like. I can also tell if it’s a little bit off, and needs more or less of something. I can build things from scratch and from memory. I still have failures, and I’m still learning, but what keeps me going is that I actually love it. I’m glad I found something I love so much.

I almost lost my Betty Crocker book in my divorce. At first I thought I didn’t need it, and that I had passed beyond that level anyway. But I started to think about it more and more, and then I started to dream about it. The pictures from the book of chicken piccata and perfect muffins would pass through my sleeping mind. It is a known fact that if I’ve reached the dreaming about it stage it has become Serious Business.

“Can I have it back?” I asked him. He was never much of a cook.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really like the pancake recipe.”

“I’ll trade you for another, much nicer cookbook?”

“Mmm…okay. Let me write down the pancake recipe.”

So it’s back on my shelf, and admittedly I hardly ever use it. But if I want some old recipe I love, or can’t remember how long to steam corn-on-the-cob, there it is, crazy fast. Forget the Joy–I recommend Betty for truly brand-new cooks. And there was something I forgot. Of course it is full of my notes, so I know exactly how much peppermint extract to add to ice cream, and the recipe card for Southwestern Quiche from the bed and breakfast where I got knocked up with Franny, carefully transcribed by the owner in a slanting scrawly hand and taped into the front part of the section on eggs. I don’t dream about it anymore.

It nice to know that you can set out without any intentions, and become good at something just by living your life.

“MOAR tea, please!”

I have never seen a kid that I have to spend so much time hiding things from and keeping things up from. I made myself a screwdriver the other night and she found the shot glass on the counter and was licking the leftover vodka drops out of it. Whippet tells me to serve her some black coffee, that that will “cure” her. I don’t think so.

Cookie-cutter pancakes are cute. By the time he made these, I was too full of regular ones to eat them. What is funny is someone lovingly making you heart-shaped pancakes and then swearing up a storm when you are too full to eat them. “Goddamnit, woman. Eat your heart pancakes!”

In Other News

I realize I haven’t said word one about the KOMO-4 blogger meetup the other day. Two things happened which stand out in my mind. The subject of Blogher and its recent conference came up at my instigation, while I was standing in a group of men. Rather than ask me what it was like or anything else, they immediately jumped off and began arguing about exactly how important it was, and how big it was, and how it compared to YearlyKos. Instead of talking to me about it. Who had just been there. Unsurprising lulz. Also, I met some people from the Seattle Metblog team, and tried to talk coherently about what it means to be a Seattle native, modern Swedish films, and old friends. I like those people, they are A-OK. And I saw an old blog acquaintance who I’ll bet I haven’t seen in person since Seablog in ’02. Time, she is flying.