I don't know about you, but I read Food and Wine when I'm in the bathroom and I know I won't be in there long enough for the book I've stashed under the sink. Let's be more honest. I read Food and Wine when I've forgotten my phone and I have previously placed it courteously in the restroom as reading material for guests. Fine, Dr. Freud- we'll go a level deeper. The magazines find their way onto the tank of the toilet when I am too proud to admit that my unread magazine stack in the bedroom has become embarrassingly large and my boyfriend insists that I need to start whittling down. It's not that I hoard, but between work and work and work and the occasional sleep, I don't have time to sift through to find the good stuff. You know what else? The whole thing becomes an unpleasant experience because, as much as I'd love to dream about ouzo-scented swordfish with a mint gremolata, I found myself yet again in the drive-thru at Wendy's, two hours after I was supposed to leave work.
Don't cry for me, Argentina or Will or Eliza or whatever your name may be. I think I might finally get it. Here, on my couch at 1:47 in the morning with my cat very sweetly and aggressively cuddling in that gravity-defying manner that cats do, it came to me. I have been pinning my food life on wish fulfillment. If I can't make an impossibly expensive and hard-to-source meal, what good am I as a cook? Have I given up on myself? Yeah- probably.
I need to figure out a way to change that. Maybe not tonight, when this witching hour is possessed by the ghost of my over-eager promises of delicious lemon bars for an event tomorrow (later today?) at the completely reasonable hour of 7:30 am. My sainted boyfriend has made the harried run to the grocery store that services the greater midnight populace and your friendly neighborhood meth head for ingredients that I never wrote down because I had fallen asleep yet again on the couch. I know I don't need to tell you this, dear reader, because you too must be world-weary to be reading a three-post masterpiece of a cooking blog, well-hidden in the back corners of the internet.
Ever the poorly-advised optimist, though, I have big hopes for these lemon bars. They're directly out of the indisputable tome "Cook's Illustrated Cookbook"- it's big, red, imposing, and features that still life of pears on the cover that everyone had to draw in high school art. You know, the one where your teacher found herself forced to comment "I don't think you understand what a shape is" upon seeing the scribbles that took you four hours of intense, sincere effort to complete. So now, when I have promised quality as if promising my own hypothetical child could spin straw into gold, I don't truck with hastily Googled recipes. Oh no- I pass off the work of true experts as my own and deal with the condemnation of my leftover Christian guilt later. On the other side of that bridge, I'm also making the only bread creation I've actually cobbled together on my own. Again, honesty- all bread starts out cobbled together and in the hopes that the yeast doesn't mutate and turn into a delicious albeit deadly B-movie monster. I call it "A Bread Named Carl", partially because I assume I put as little effort into it as Carl would (you know what you did, Carl), and because I didn't think it was going to turn out. As I pulled the little nubbins out of the oven to brush it with butter, I would frequently ask it, "What are you doing Carl? Carl!" (You can see an exact replica of my Carl monologue here, because, like a true comedian, all my good bits are plagiarized.) I'll have to post the recipes sometime soon for the rest of you hooligans to steal or try for yourselves.
Well, I must leave now- both because my ingredient courier has arrived bearing gifts, and I'm so tired that throwing up is also on the table. And I've just been informed that my delivery boy has forgotten the most important part of any baking venture- "fucking butter". We'll talk again soon, dear reader. I want this to be more of a thing- me talking at you in the hopes that one day, like The Secret, my universally sown seeds of food-related ramblings will come back to me in the form of digital friendship and my mother's indignation at me swearing in a public forum.
Can I tell you the sentence that became stuck in my head, the crucible that may just get me to start cooking and writing again? I'm going to tell you because, you know: friendship goals. I, like you, read Food and Wine, when I'm shitting.
Sorry, not sorry, mom.
