In Morning (sic)

Regretfully, due to technical difficulties, will have to post this without pictures for the time-being. It cannot wait a second longer! May need to fire live-in Tech Support which may be awkward on account of the marriage certificate and all.

Dear Pickle -

The mummy cupcakes are SOOOOOO CUTE! The fact is, this is why every child needs a cool aunt. I can't believe there were no Halloween baked goods in our house - I was too busy making costumes and endless autumnal dinners (that the kids don't eat). I didn't even have time to make myself a costume and just went as 'harried chick'.

I know I'm unforgivably late with this entry, but on top of Halloweening, I have also been in mourning for Gourmet magazine. Up 'til now, I'd been listening to all the stories about the death of print media with a certain devil-may-care imperviousness ('Denver Post' closes? Ooooh, sad. Oh look, 30 Rock is back - and there's a cupcake in the fridge!) But this sad passage one hits a little too close to home. I've been reading Gourmet for a good twenty years. Yup. Apparently I must write a will, before I croak in a La-Z-Boy. It was a kind of aspirational lifeline for a girl in a tiny industrial town where 'gourmet' meant you made your Jell-o salad with FRESH fruit instead of canned. Yes, it was impossibly snobby and almost impenetrable at times - I remember a lot of stories about the meats of Eastern Hungary as eaten on authentic stagecoach tours or how to prepare 'Chicken Liver Veloute with Quails Eggs and Pickled Starfish'. And when I went through my looooong vegetarian phase, I'm not sure exactly what I kept reading for. But read it I did. My bit of a girl-crush on the elegant and spicy Ms. Ruth Reichl may've helped boost me over the hump. I've got a huge collection of back issues, some even older than I am, which I refuse to throw away. Much to the chagrin of my garage-cleaning hubbo. But someday, someday, I'll have the time to cook my way through them.

However, I must admit that my subscriber copies have been sitting for longer and longer in their sterile plastic wrappers. I'd get the magazine, take a glance at the impossibly gorgeous pear on the cover, and then it'd end up sitting there. Dejected. Raw (i.e. - uncooked from). And then the next issue would arrive, piling on top of the second dejectedly. I can't immediately remember the last time I actually whipped something from the pages. My near-daily epicurious.com habit means that I must've made a few of their things recently, but even then it seems that most of the recipes I pull up to actually make are from the younger, somehow more in step with me 'Bon Appetit'. It's definitely a more user-friendly mag, packed with loads of recipes and using ingredients you can find. Without going to Hungary.

So I am sorry, Gourmet. I guess I was part of the problem. I will miss paging through you and being an armchair glutton/tourist. But I don't have enough money or time for all the things you asked of me - I don't purchase Cadillacs and I am not sure I am up to creating a Chicken Liver Veloute.

Instead I hope to keep blogging with my much-more-punctual blog-mate (more punctual than ME, that is, not more punctual than Gourmet, which always arrived on time.) Pickle, I am SO proud of you for making it all the way through this coffee cake dance marathon! I agree, making dough is something that ought to fit so easily into our lives, because the steps aren't difficult or time consuming, even for this particular monster-piece recipe I assigned us. In fact I managed to squeeze it in before hopping a cross-country flight. The relaxing steps of mixing and waiting, kneading and waiting, shaping and waiting - they all fit in well around wrangling a baby and packing a suitcase (then a suitcase for the baby.)

Although all three boys in my house went nuts for this, I have to say I found it kinda 'meh' in the final balance. It was a little dry, a little too danish-like for my liking. Because I am not a fan of the danish. Undoubtedly there are good ones in the world, but most that I've encountered have a dry staleness that belies their calorie count.

Plus we've already discussed that I have a large-ish hippie streak in me, a part that wishes to live in a commune and grow sprouts for a living. Bread-baking brings this alternate personality too close to the surface already. So making the bread into this kind of ornate lazy daisy shape threatened a full-on breach of the hippie bit I would much rather keep buried. Until next Halloween, maybe. Should I dress up as a hippie? ;)

x
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