Iron Chef Challenge

So, the Instigator threw down the gauntlet, or rather I cheekily rose to receive it. In days past I was accomplished in the kitchen, but beyond my usual standards I haven't been called upon to deliver and frankly without any boys to charm and what with that nagging poverty I haven't turned much out of my kitchen.

So, this was the challenge.

Eggs, crab legs, portobello mushrooms and flank steak paired with Portuguese white wine, heifeweitzen, pink champagne and red wine.

The menu:

apps were thrown off because the crab legs were still frozen.

1. 30 min. Crostini with sweet sausage marinara, poached egg, white wine.

2. 25 min. Picked crab with truffle oil on endive spears, with fresh vegetable slaw. Pink champagne.

3. 25 min. portobello, yellow squash and fennel fricasee - beer.

4. 28 min. Pan fried flank steak with fig reduction and broiled new potatoe and leek chips. Red wine.

5. 16 min. seared nectarines with cinnamon and mint over vanilla ice cream.

Basically I stood over my stove for five hours, and it was totally worth it. I executed a fine meal, that I pullled out of my ass with five minutes notice and it felt really, really good. (A huge part of the challenge is not knowing what you are going to have to contend with.)

I would happliy do it again.

The best thing about remembering, or the best thing about doing is the ease that takes over, acid to acid, salt to creamy, finessing a sauce, the satisfaction of your own good knife work, ghosts on your shoulders, kitchens past, cut on the grain, cut against muscle, get out of my head, go on, get out, I still pick parsley exactly as you demanded.

But this, this fleeting glory belongs to me and my palette, I did it, and I wasn't sure that I could, but I did. And holy fuckballs, I done brung it home.

The Sharpest Moon

My hair is getting long, I haven't had color or a cut since May.

I am rootastic.

I just brewed two gallons of Mai Tai for work tomorrow.

That's a lot of grenadine.

The moon hangs like a knife point in an Almost Fall nightscape. I'd like to fall asleep beneath it, out on the lawn, oh troublesome employment.

When the moon rises in fuck

Bad shit happens. Tonight there was a heart attack a misscarriage and an incident on a swing, in between there was meat and tomatoes and some tears.

My good friend's father, my other good friend's uterus, and another's child on my good friend's swing. We only meant to be together for the season's tomatoes and Gartner's meat crack, but bad shit happens.

So you stick together, or try to and mostly succeed.

The day heated up brightly, I castigated myself for not riding my bycycle, but if you have ever had a period you'd know that bikes and cycles (ha!) are not so condusive. I keep having these dreams about making out with people at work I am not the slightest bit attracted to.

I am going up to the Olympic Peninsula with some friends at the end of September, I can't wait to step between the rasor clams and wade and wade in that glacially clear water, to scent the tide water like I scent the sun on my skin, a wide open sky, a cacophany of quiet.

September Song

Summer slipped by in a haze of heat and grass clippings and glass after glass of rose. I haven't had anything to say, because I have been reluctant to say anything. Poverty gave way to anxiety, and then acute lonelieness gave way to detachment. So my demons came a saucer-eyed to sit and leer up at me from their perch on my chest, so I worked long hours in an effort to make myself indispensable and the longer I worked, inexplicably, the less money I had and I became a shut-in and didn't get nearly tan enough.

Now the first of the leaves sway to gold toward russet and there are tendrils of cashmere melancholy above the promise of loam in the night air.

I've made a number of promises to myself this month, I remain wary, but with an indefatigueable idiot savant's optimism that if it doesn't take today it just might take tomorrow. I have missed writing.

So among the many promises, maybe I should make another, to write something for every night in September. It might take, it might not.