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How we went to California, Part 4
Oct. 17th, 2003 08:38 pmHow We Cooked the Sand Dabs
We came home and located the cat. I forget where he was on this occasion, but locations from which he was hauled during our brief stay included under the bed, under the armchairs, under the chest of drawers, and nowhere in particular -- well, he wasn't hauled from there, he just appeared. Having made much of him, we turned to the problem of dinner.
When we originally arrived at the hotel in the dead hours, the kitchen looked pretty good. Decent-sized refrigerator, stovetop, pots and pans and plastic dishes and real cutlery and knives and a cutting board and a sink, everything handsome about it.
When we got back from Moss Beach, tired and hungry, the kitchen began to reveal its deficiencies. There was no oven, although there was a microwave. The bottoms of the cheap non-stick pans were warped, so that they made only occasional contact with the electric burners of the stovetop. The knives were appalling. We were tolerably cheerful about this, however. The person behind the fish counter at Whole Foods had told us to pan-fry the sand dabs with a little breading, maybe cornmeal. We had sensibly not bought cornmeal, and decided to use breadcrumbs. Failing to find a toaster, Eric started toasting two pieces of bread in the large skillet while I found a half-inch of knife-blade that worked and minced some garlic and then started cutting the brown bits off the ends of the Brussels sprouts and cutting little crosses in them.
The bread, even when toasted quite dark, persisted in being too moist to crumble adequately. I suggested pounding it with the back of a spoon, and after it had been returned to the skillet for more drying-out, this worked very well. Eric put the hard-won breadcrumbs on a plate and added a bit of soy milk and dredged the sand dabs in it. I worked on the Brussels sprouts and the sweet potatoes. The latter were easy; they just went into the microwave after being scrubbed and poked with a fork. The Brussels sprouts ended up in a kind of omelet pan with a couple of inches of water. This worked remarkably well. It all worked remarkably well. The garlic got a little scorched, but I kind of like that flavor. We sat down to baked sweet potatoes, boiled-or-steamed Brussels sprouts, and sand dabs with actual breading, cooked in really good olive oil with, oh, what should we call it, seared garlic maybe. It was extremely good. The breading was just like breading. I made a brief fuss about the bones in the sand dabs; then I realized one could get the whole skeleton out pretty easily; then I made another fuss about what Eric called the "whisker bones," the soft ones that won't hurt you. I calmed down shortly and ate my fish. Eric was very patient with me. He doesn't take many things personally and finds having food neuroses perfectly understandable.
The sand dabs tasted lovely, with a fairly delicate flavor, and they had a nice firm texture. I hate slimy fish, and they were absolutely not that. The Brussels sprouts had been very fresh, and they were done well short of mushiness. The sweet potatoes were fine. It was vastly entertaining, after the first edge of hunger was off, to see how the same condiments, olive oil and ginger soy sauce, made very different tastes on different foods, or how the different foods brought out different aspects of the condiments, however one was pleased to look at it.
Afterwards Eric went outside for a cigarette. I had just started on the cleanup, since I had not masterminded the cooking, when he came bounding back in, drew me over to the window so I could see the thin crescent moon just setting, and waited for me to grab a sweater. Outside the moon was even more spectacular, and at the precise right moment to be watched as it visibly sank slowly below the horizon, behind the freeway and the low hills sprinkled over with lights. Eric stood behind me and put his arms around me at collarbone level, a cozy and familiar posture from which we had often watched astronomical phenomena. When the moon had gone down and the sensation that the solid ground beneath us was hurtling through space at huge speeds went away, we walked about until we found a place from which we could see Mars. This was on August 29th, and it was still enormous and very red.
We went back in. I cleaned up the dishes and tried to play with the cat, but he wasn't having any. We both read until we were sleepy, which did not take very long. I was still working on Montgomery's Emily books, and Eric was reading Have His Carcase.
Since this is a somewhat shorter entry than the others so far posted, I wanted to make a couple of notes. First, I called home six or seven times while I was gone. I actually reached Raphael and had a conversation every time I tried. I got David's answering machine twice but did talk to him once. Aside from private topics and cat news, the main item of discussion was the matter of getting a new refrigerator for the upstairs, the original one having quit on us and been declared by the repair guy as not worth fixing because it was leaking freon somewhere.
Second, a phenomenon that distressed me intermittently during this trip, but that thought has revealed to be commonplace to my experience, is that we had no really intimate or wide-ranging intellectual conversation. We talked about what we had seen and done, in a kind of instant reminiscence and interpretation that is one of the things I treasure particularly about Eric. We talked about practical matters, how to cook what, what time to set the alarm for, what to do with the cat between the time we got to San Francisco and the time we could move in to the sublet, where to get gas.
It was much the same when I went to Arizona or northern Minnesota with Raphael, and to England with David. The travelling and the moment filled up conversation; other things went into abeyance, or were conveyed by means not verbal. In all these cases, and for various reasons most particularly in the case of this trip to California, the entire experience was profoundly intimate, and increased our knowledge and trust of each other. But this happened by means mostly other than words.
Pamela
We came home and located the cat. I forget where he was on this occasion, but locations from which he was hauled during our brief stay included under the bed, under the armchairs, under the chest of drawers, and nowhere in particular -- well, he wasn't hauled from there, he just appeared. Having made much of him, we turned to the problem of dinner.
When we originally arrived at the hotel in the dead hours, the kitchen looked pretty good. Decent-sized refrigerator, stovetop, pots and pans and plastic dishes and real cutlery and knives and a cutting board and a sink, everything handsome about it.
When we got back from Moss Beach, tired and hungry, the kitchen began to reveal its deficiencies. There was no oven, although there was a microwave. The bottoms of the cheap non-stick pans were warped, so that they made only occasional contact with the electric burners of the stovetop. The knives were appalling. We were tolerably cheerful about this, however. The person behind the fish counter at Whole Foods had told us to pan-fry the sand dabs with a little breading, maybe cornmeal. We had sensibly not bought cornmeal, and decided to use breadcrumbs. Failing to find a toaster, Eric started toasting two pieces of bread in the large skillet while I found a half-inch of knife-blade that worked and minced some garlic and then started cutting the brown bits off the ends of the Brussels sprouts and cutting little crosses in them.
The bread, even when toasted quite dark, persisted in being too moist to crumble adequately. I suggested pounding it with the back of a spoon, and after it had been returned to the skillet for more drying-out, this worked very well. Eric put the hard-won breadcrumbs on a plate and added a bit of soy milk and dredged the sand dabs in it. I worked on the Brussels sprouts and the sweet potatoes. The latter were easy; they just went into the microwave after being scrubbed and poked with a fork. The Brussels sprouts ended up in a kind of omelet pan with a couple of inches of water. This worked remarkably well. It all worked remarkably well. The garlic got a little scorched, but I kind of like that flavor. We sat down to baked sweet potatoes, boiled-or-steamed Brussels sprouts, and sand dabs with actual breading, cooked in really good olive oil with, oh, what should we call it, seared garlic maybe. It was extremely good. The breading was just like breading. I made a brief fuss about the bones in the sand dabs; then I realized one could get the whole skeleton out pretty easily; then I made another fuss about what Eric called the "whisker bones," the soft ones that won't hurt you. I calmed down shortly and ate my fish. Eric was very patient with me. He doesn't take many things personally and finds having food neuroses perfectly understandable.
The sand dabs tasted lovely, with a fairly delicate flavor, and they had a nice firm texture. I hate slimy fish, and they were absolutely not that. The Brussels sprouts had been very fresh, and they were done well short of mushiness. The sweet potatoes were fine. It was vastly entertaining, after the first edge of hunger was off, to see how the same condiments, olive oil and ginger soy sauce, made very different tastes on different foods, or how the different foods brought out different aspects of the condiments, however one was pleased to look at it.
Afterwards Eric went outside for a cigarette. I had just started on the cleanup, since I had not masterminded the cooking, when he came bounding back in, drew me over to the window so I could see the thin crescent moon just setting, and waited for me to grab a sweater. Outside the moon was even more spectacular, and at the precise right moment to be watched as it visibly sank slowly below the horizon, behind the freeway and the low hills sprinkled over with lights. Eric stood behind me and put his arms around me at collarbone level, a cozy and familiar posture from which we had often watched astronomical phenomena. When the moon had gone down and the sensation that the solid ground beneath us was hurtling through space at huge speeds went away, we walked about until we found a place from which we could see Mars. This was on August 29th, and it was still enormous and very red.
We went back in. I cleaned up the dishes and tried to play with the cat, but he wasn't having any. We both read until we were sleepy, which did not take very long. I was still working on Montgomery's Emily books, and Eric was reading Have His Carcase.
Since this is a somewhat shorter entry than the others so far posted, I wanted to make a couple of notes. First, I called home six or seven times while I was gone. I actually reached Raphael and had a conversation every time I tried. I got David's answering machine twice but did talk to him once. Aside from private topics and cat news, the main item of discussion was the matter of getting a new refrigerator for the upstairs, the original one having quit on us and been declared by the repair guy as not worth fixing because it was leaking freon somewhere.
Second, a phenomenon that distressed me intermittently during this trip, but that thought has revealed to be commonplace to my experience, is that we had no really intimate or wide-ranging intellectual conversation. We talked about what we had seen and done, in a kind of instant reminiscence and interpretation that is one of the things I treasure particularly about Eric. We talked about practical matters, how to cook what, what time to set the alarm for, what to do with the cat between the time we got to San Francisco and the time we could move in to the sublet, where to get gas.
It was much the same when I went to Arizona or northern Minnesota with Raphael, and to England with David. The travelling and the moment filled up conversation; other things went into abeyance, or were conveyed by means not verbal. In all these cases, and for various reasons most particularly in the case of this trip to California, the entire experience was profoundly intimate, and increased our knowledge and trust of each other. But this happened by means mostly other than words.
Pamela
