The talk of the party

A box of cookies, a bottle of wine, and a wine yoke. The ultimate wine accessory for the man who has everything. It leaves the hands free for important things, like eating!

Hope you had a nice Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day

It's Valentine's Day already. My shiny toaster oven is a handy little tool, but not up to 3 dozen sugar cookies. More like, I'm not up to the job of making 3 dozen cookies in an Easy-Bake Oven. So no heart cookies for John to take to work on Valentines for longer than I can remember. But in March I'll have a fancy new oven and will make it up to the ladies then. I promise.

This also means no broiled steak and lobster tail like we had last year. No homemade cake, either. But when John gets around to reading the blog today he'll be excited to hear I'm making his favorite dinner. Homemade gnocchi doesn't require a broiler or even an oven. Yes, he actually likes boiled pasta balls with red sauce better than steak and lobster. Go figure.

Remember how sweet and exciting Valentine's Day was when we were kids? The decorated "mailbox" in the classroom? The coveted job of "mailman" delivering the individually addressed valentines? Would your "boyfriend" send you a special one? Then the sugary afternoon treat made by a nice mom and eaten off a napkin at your desk.

I hope your day is full of kind words and love. And a little treat on a napkin. Here's some cute valentine cards from another time.

"Pictures from an Exhibition"

If you're my age, that title might bring to mind this classic 1971 album cover from Emerson, Lake and Palmer. But the original Pictures from an Exhibition is a virtuoso piano suite that was written by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874. We heard it at the Seattle Symphony yesterday along with some other good stuff, but the famous Pictures was the highlight of the afternoon. Mussorgsky wrote it as a piano composition but it's been transcribed for full orchestra, with Ravel's arrangement being the most performed. The excellent guest conductor was Roberto Abbado, who comes from a family of maestros including Claudio Abbado, his uncle.

Mussorgsky, age 18

Mussorgsky, a bit later

Mussorgsky lived only 42 years and died miserably in a hospital a few days after this famous portrait was made by Ilya Repins. Let's just say Mussorgsky enjoyed his vodka and leave it at that. Like other alcoholic artistic geniuses, he managed to be incredibly productive during his short life-- he composed the Night on Bare Mountain, the opera Boris Godunov and dozens of other works. Probably all with a hangover.

But his most famous piece is Pictures from an Exhibition, written as a remembrance to the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. They were close friends, and when Hartmann died suddenly in 1873 Mussorgsky was devastated. An exhibition of over 400 of his paintings and watercolors inspired Mussorgsky to pay his own tribute by writing a series of piano pieces based on the pictures. He completed it in only three weeks at the same time he was putting the finishing touches on a couple of major operas.

Viktor Hartmann
1834-1873

Mussorgsky's music depicts an imaginary tour of the art collection, and the ten movements allude to specific pictures. Each is completely different, but tied together by a prelude or promenade during which you can imagine walking through the exhibition. Today most of the pictures from the Hartman exhibition are lost, but musicologists claim to have identified several. Many of them were made while Hartmann was traveling abroad in Poland and France.

Being more visually inclined than musically, I would have enjoyed looking at the Hartmann pictures while daydreaming through the music. Of course there wasn't enough room in the program to reproduce them, but I found several later on the good old Internet. Here's a few examples:

The Catacombs of Rome

The Poor Jew, Warsaw

Sketch of Little Chicks in Their Shells
from Ballet Trilby

The Great Gate of Kiev

Accidents will happen...

"Accidents will happen in the best regulated families; and in families not regulated by the influence of Woman."

From, David Copperfield
Charles Dickens 1850

Thanks everyone for your comments and nice emails yesterday. I'm trying to keep in mind the 50,000 or so meals I've cooked without setting off a kitchen conflagration! We've already ordered a spanking new gas range that has some fancy features my old industrial-strength Viking didn't. That's exciting for the cook. The bad news is it won't be installed for two weeks, which means two weeks without an oven. John doesn't think he can go that long without his homemade granola or garlic bread, so I'm headed to Target this morning to look for one of these to tide us over:

You just never know

Maybe you noticed there wasn't a blog post on Wednesday.

Late Tuesday afternoon, dinner prep was humming along as usual. A classical CD playing, a glass of wine poured and I was in the kitchen making chicken fajitas and refried beans. John kept coming up from the basement saying "something sure smells good up here." All was normal and right with the world.
As I cooked, I took a few pictures and thought about writing a refried bean posting. Not exactly fascinating stuff, but then February can be pretty dull around this house. Little did I know, that was about to change...

Anyway, refried beans in Mexican restaurants are good (lard) but canned refried beans come out in that congealed lump and taste like, well-- the can. If you're ambitious, you can soak and boil dried pintos to make refried beans completely from scratch, but whole canned pintos work too.

When I buy a pound of bacon, I divide it up into miserly little packets for the freezer. Two slices are perfect for seasoning a package of frozen vegetables or "frying" beans. Minced and fried crispy, two slices leave a teaspoon or less of bacon fat in the pan. In my book, an acceptable amount of bad for a side dish. You can rationalize anything, but most of us could happily devour four slices of bacon at a sitting.
The other benefit of using canned beans is the seasoned liquid. Drain the beans, save the liquid. Dump the beans in the pan with the crispy bacon bits then start mashing over low heat. As you mash, add the thick canned bean liquid to get the right creamy consistency. Between the bacon drippings and bean liquid you probably won't need to add any salt, but of course beans are a blank slate and you can season creatively with cumin, chili powder, smoked paprika, garlic, etc.
By 5 pm, everything looked tasty, neat, clean and ready to eat. So I popped a few Mexican fried tostada shells on a cookie sheet in a very hot oven to "crisp up" and sat down with my glass of wine in the living room.

Big mistake. An ominous smell. A cloud of smoke. An oven window that looked like Dante's Inferno. Black oily smoke pouring out the burners on top of the range. Who would have thought tortillas could burn like smudge pots?

It's all a blur now, but there may have been some "Fire! Fire!" screams, rushing about and wringing of hands on my part. Cool Hand John went into action with the fire extinguisher that's been sitting in the corner for 20 years, patiently waiting for that very moment. A loud, nasty, gray, gritty whoosh, and it was over in seconds.

Well, over except for a lingering cloud of black smoke, a hideous smell and a trashed Viking oven. On the bright side, at least we still had a house to sit in, and there wasn't a bunch of young wet firemen stomping around giving me a lecture on kitchen safety. Young, wet, firemen? Well, even that's not worth burning your house down.

The Aftermath

And that's the story of Wednesday. The story of Thursday was about looking up consumer reviews and then shopping around for a new gas range.

The really bad news? I'm sorry, Ladies-- the new one may not be here in time to make your Valentine's Day cookies for Tuesday.

A well-cremated tortilla
(Something you will never see at Martha Stewart's house)

Snow moon and pussy willows

In the mornings we've been scraping ice off the windshield, but by afternoon the days are sunny and warm. Driving home yesterday from the museum my car thermometer read 60 degrees which is pretty amazing for early February. I was watching for the first flowering trees on our street-- in a city of micro climates this neighborhood is sometimes called the banana belt of Seattle. Today is the first cloudy day in a week, which is kind of like waking up from a dream.

The black pussy willows are one of the first signs of spring in our yard. When I took Nova out to see them, she wanted to "pet the kitties" exactly like her mommy used to say. Sometimes I actually forget who I'm holding in my arms. Grandchildren have a way of compressing the years into minutes. Tom and Nova are making the long drive back to the Methow Valley today, so we'll have to say our sad bye-byes (for now.)