Les Bonnes Choses

I was sitting at the desk in the "office area" at the back of my house last night. On my computer monitor was a walk-through on disabling superfluous notifications on my phone. Despite my personality deficiencies, I find myself with friends, some of whom live in Europe, and some of whom are night-owls. Consequently, I have had my room illuminated at odd hours in the night as the charging iPhone beside my bed notifies me about some comment or other on Facebook. So I sat back in my swivel chair and put my foot up on the desk to locate the facility on my phone to make the appropriate changes to my phone's settings.

A small dark spot moved quickly across my right peripheral vision along the lip of the desk, only to disappear underside the desktop.

I am keenly interested in how your various senses are wired together. I would wager heavily that those neurons that fire in response to rapid peripheral visual motion have a communication super-highway leading to the most ancient part of your brain stem that registers terror.

An expletive later, I was blindly spraying toxic bug spray under the desk, not for the first time that evening. The first application of what is no doubt an airborne carcinogen was to get a cocooning garden spider out of the corner of the ceiling. I asked myself, not for the first time, what the hell these damn things are doing in my house. I felt my objections, though rhetorical, were worth repeating in an open letter to the spiders and centipedes that cause me so much grief:

Dear Spiders and Centipedes,

I understand you perform a valuable service in the ecosystem. You are both predatory arthropods, and therefore can be counted on to control the populations of other pests that may otherwise damage my garden or get into my Cheerios. The problem is this: the only pests I regularly have in my house are you.

I see you in the corner, Mr. Spider. When you move into a room, I can always count on you to take up your position where the wall meets the ceiling. I knew you were in the room because I just walked through a strand of silk you cast off when you dropped from the ceiling. I didn't see the silk of course, which is why I walked into it. I never see it, because you never catch anything in it! There are no flies in the house, Mr. Spider. Why do you think that you will have better luck in the opposite corner of the room? You do not starve to death fast enough for my liking.

I see you in the bathtub, Mr. Centipede. I used to think you came up through the drains, which really creeped me out. But then I learned that you do not swim, and instead are finding yourself trapped by the too-slick enamel when you went looking for water. I resent having to look in the bathtub before I take a shower. I know you eat ants and other insects, but I really only had an ant problem for a month or two back in 2010, which I solved with a clever application of Borax. You know what Borax doesn't do? Scurry across your desk. It also helps clean laundry. Mr. Centipede, you are bloody useless at cleaning laundry. In fact, the one time I found your ilk in my laundry, it freaked me the hell out. I know that you are purported to hunt spiders, which might be construed as useful given the previous paragraph. Unfortunately, as I'm still seeing them, you seem kind of useless at carrying out even that function.

So I propose Mr. Spider go outside where the flies are, and Mr. Centipede can follow Mr. Spider out the door, and the two of you can have a little Sharks versus Jets face-off in my back yard and stay the hell out of my peripheral vision.

I walked with Jude and his cousins to school this morning before I made the drive back to Chicago. As the two older cousins fell back with their Lolo, Jude and Lydia walked just ahead of me. Crossing one of the two playgrounds on the school yard, Jude was practicing balancing along the wooden rail-tie edging as two older girls, perhaps second-graders, approached them. There was a brief exchange with one of the girls that I unfortunately didn't hear. But it left Jude flustered as I caught up to him.

"She keeps saying I'm cute," he complained, but in a way that didn't suggest that the problem was with the compliment. Unfortunately, he is not going to get any lessons in being slick from me, so he's on his own with this one.

"Good for you," I said, and touseled his hair.

Um, in other news, Apple was granted a patent for a steering wheel remote control? What the hell? Has anyone in the US patent office ever seen a single episode of Mythbusters? I'd like to see them bust the myth that the patent system has any credibility.

This one thematically goes out to my nephew Elli, who loves the cookie monster.

I had enough of a hankering for peanut butter cookies this evening that I went to the grocery store to pick up some key ingredients (namely, peanut butter). This is very uncharacteristic of me. For one thing, I hate grocery shopping. For another thing, I don't bake. In my house, Rebecca handles all the baking requirements because we have a nice little ecosystem in our family wherein she tends to like (or at least not despise) the activities that I hate. Like shopping, baking, and folding laundry. I'd like to hear C-3PO call the odds on my behaviour this evening. Then I'd turn him off again, because that character always annoyed the hell out of me.

But wait, isn't this a blog where I routinely (okay, disproportionately) post recipe sketches? Yes, it is. That's cooking. Some people cook; some people bake. The personalities required for each activity are completely different. Cooking is a slap-dash affair. Sure, you need an idea of what ingredients to combine, and maybe some general proportions. But really, anyone who rigorously follows a cookbook doesn't want to be cooking. They want to be baking.

Baking is an entirely different beast. My friend John and I learned that first hand when we joined the Regina Mundi baking club in our senior year of high school so that we could bake -- jeez, what was it? I know it was something chocolate. A mousse or something like that. Anyways, for whatever reason one afternoon we felt like we should plan to eat a chocolate dessert that week using as much of the school's resources as possible. So we joined the baking club that day, which allowed us to use the school ovens, mixing bowls, et cetera.

The ensuing dessert event probably turned out better than it might have, had we made it on our own. But that's only because the home economics teacher who supervised the baking club was a task-master. Flour, she said, needs to be spooned into the measuring cup (so as not to compact it), and then leveled off with a knife. Clearly, I learned something that afternoon, but learning something certainly didn't cause me to roll my eyes any less.

With our mission accomplished, we didn't go back to the school kitchens again. And I really haven't been much of a baker since then, either. Instead, I walk the world, doomed, to have my precisely-measured flour-based preparations fail miserably.

But that reminds me: I had promised a recipe sketch a couple weeks back. This one is a two-parter.

Part 1: spiced simple syrup.
This is a spin on a basic heavy simple syrup, which is dead easy.
In a large saucepan, combine equal parts sugar and water (say, 2 cups of each).
Measure out some amount of mulling spices (you can buy this online, or just mix up some bits of whole cinnamon, cloves, allspice, dried orange peel and anything else that smells like Christmas that isn't a pine tree). Put the mulling spices in a tea ball or a cheesecloth pouch. Drop your mulling spices in your saucepan.
Bring to a boil, whisking occasionally to get the sugar good and dissolved. Remove from heat. Let cool. Store in an appropriate vessel.
I use this stuff when I make apple chips. I also decided to use this in ...

Part 2: Fennel Salad
Finely slice up a fennel bulb (fennel is also called anise - it smells faintly of black licorice). I used a mandoline to do this. If you're creative, find a use for the stalks and fronds, but they don't go in the salad. Next, finely slice a Granny Smith apple or two. All these ingredients go in your salad bowl, by the way. Now try celery. You like celery? Good. Add it to your salad. How much? I don't know, how much do you like celery? Same goes for some dried cranberries and for some pecans, which I kind of crushed up a bit first.

Here's where the awesome happens. In a lidded jar, combine 1 parts cider vinegar, 2 parts canola oil, 1 part of that spiced simple syrup, salt and pepper to taste and maybe some lemon juice. I also find that adding a nice dollop of dijon mustard (an emulsifier) is good if  you don't want your dressing to separate. Shake to combine and pour over your salad. Toss to coat. Be amazing. Ask someone else to bring the dessert because baking is a hassle.

By the way, don't let the black licorice thing throw you off. Many people hate black licorice. I get that. I happen to love it, but Rebecca hates the stuff and loves fennel salad. And she's going to love it even more when I make it with this dressing.