brisket dra­ma

The brisket.

Remem­ber, the enor­mous slab of beef that I mar­i­nat­ed in the con­trolled sub­stance and all sorts of pep­per­corns and juniper and eye of newt and what­ev­er else? I have mas­saged the beef every day, and I must report a rather eerie devel­op­ment of its sub­stance. It went from a rather flab­by, large red piece of meat to, over the course of ten days in its mari­nade, a much more com­pact, flat­ter, dark piece of meat. Inter­est­ing. Well, the day of judg­ment is near­ly here. Today I took it out of its mari­nade, washed it off, place it in a nice watery bath and clapped the lid of the pot on tight, and cooked it low for three hours. Now it’s cooled off, and been placed on a plate with anoth­er plate and two cans of hari­cot beans, one can of lentils and one can of peeled plum toma­toes on top. I know it may not seem rel­e­vant to spec­i­fy the con­tents of these cans, but late­ly I am tak­ing recipe writ­ing very, very seriously.

Tomor­row, then, my good friend and culi­nary victim/guest Annie and her fam­i­ly are com­ing to sam­ple this beef, and to com­ple­ment the beef/rescue the din­ner if the beef is hor­ri­ble, my men­tor Orlan­do’s straw pota­toes in goose fat. Plus red cab­bage and fen­nel slaw, and some rock­et sal­ad, I think, plus I had bet­ter come up with a dessert in case the the beef is… real­ly bad.

In the mean­time, let’s see, I’ve been devot­ed to the Christ­mas card list, and to putting fin­ish­ing touch­es on the Christ­mas tree dec­o­ra­tions. I admit it: now that Avery’s old enough to care about the tra­di­tions and the sto­ries behind all the orna­ments, she has the temer­i­ty to ask to hang some of them her­self. And as the kind of nasty moth­er who does­n’t real­ly want to share her kitchen with her child, I feel I should at least let her share in the hang­ing of orna­ments. But… secret of secrets… once she’s asleep I… rehang them. Isn’t that awful. And she lets me, and nev­er seems to mind see­ing that this or that angel or sil­ver ball has mys­te­ri­ous­ly moved place in the night. That is the sort of real-life angel she is.

The tree is just love­ly, this year, and hav­ing a tree in the kitchen is per­fect for me, since I spend all day in there any­way. If you look close­ly at this pho­to­graph, you can see on the far right a fig­ure that hung from my baby mobile that, in her typ­i­cal­ly gen­er­ous way my moth­er let me have, and down low a red bow that I bought for my first mar­ried Christ­mas 19 years ago, and the two pump­kins small and large that my moth­er in law gave me, and the gift-tot­ing fairy that appeared in Avery’s advent cal­en­dar this morning.

I also just reread “The Latke Who Could­n’t Stop Scream­ing,” by Lemo­ny Snick­et, a gift from my best friend Alyssa two Christ­mases ago. Do not, repeat do NOT attempt to read this book if your child or a house­guest is try­ing to sleep near­by. “Near­ly every­thing in this world is born scream­ing, and the latke was no excep­tion, even though the latke was­n’t con­ceived and born in the way you and I were con­ceived and born, but instead was fash­ioned from grat­ed pota­toes, chopped onion, beat­en eggs and dash or two of salt. Once these ingre­di­ents were prop­er­ly mixed, the latke was slepped into a pan full of olive oil heat­ed to a very high tem­per­a­ture, and this is when it began to scream. AAAAHHHHHHH!”

Report on brisket tomor­row evening… unless it’s bad and then I might just keep it to myself… espe­cial­ly since Alyssa report­ed by text to me that she was pick­ing up her brisket in New York at Whole Foods, and when I think of her delec­table brisket I just want to lie down and wish I’d nev­er thought of try­ing some bizarre Euro­pean ver­sion of my own. Involv­ing high explo­sives, no less. We’ll see.