A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
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Roasting a turkey is surprisingly easy. I'd always thought it involved staying up all night to slow-roast the bird in the oven, basting every hour on the hour to keep it from getting dried out, which is what I remembered my grandmother doing prior to our family gatherings; but apparently, all I need to do is follow a recipe, and "following a recipe" involves putting the thawed bird in the roasting pan, covering it with foil, setting the oven for 325 degrees, and then letting it sit in the oven for an amount of time calculated by multiplying the weight of the bird by a certain number of minutes. There's even a little embedded plastic pop-up timer in the turkey that indicates when the bird is fully cooked and safe to eat. All this is right there on the turkey's label if the cook doesn't happen to have a cookbook handy as a reference.
That's it.
Gosh.
"If you want to get creative with flavoring," Magister says, "think about what tastes good with turkey, and you can put it in a sauce at the bottom of the pan. Every so often, use the turkey baster to squirt the sauce on top of and inside of the turkey. There's really no need to be intimidated by the thought of making a marinade from scratch."
I think.
"Wine?"
"That sounds good," he agrees. "I've already used the pinot noir for the cranberries, but there's an extra bottle of chardonnay you could use for the marinade if you want. Turkey's the sort of meat that would go just as well with white as it would with red."
In the end, I wind up adding some random green herbs, butter, Hungarian paprika, and a little chopped garlic and onion from the plastic storage containers in the refrigerator to the wine I've used as a base, and pouring honey on top - the honey, he says, not only brings out the flavor of the turkey, but it turns the turkey a nice golden brown on the outside when it roasts.
"I did it!" I exclaim. "I prep cooked a turkey!" I feel absurdly pleased with myself.
"Cooking, and feeding other people, is as much a form of magick as any other act of love," he replies, kissing me on the cheek, and we exchange places. The kitchen only has room for one cook at a time, and it's his turn to play with raw ingredients.
I take up a place on the living room couch and start reading. He has me studying Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Aristotle is obviously the odd one out here. I'm pretty sure the message for this week has something to do with altered states of consciousness - There are two paths possible on the quest for gnosis: Classical and Romantic. The former is rational, and exact, and were every aspiring magus aligned with the Temple of Apollo, this would seem the most logical way to achieve self-perfection and wisdom. However, let us not assume that the rational path is the path best traveled. For deep magick is hidden in a stranger place, that being the ivy and grapevine-bound bower of Dionysos. Some seekers of wisdom are given the gift of Romantic sickness, and for them, the only way to access it is through destruction and change. For them, magic is madness, I write. That's assuming this week's lesson has something to do with altered states of consciousness, the rational versus the irrational, and the need to get out of one's own head when doing energy work, but I won't know for sure until I finish all the material, even though I've already read most of the assigned books at least once before.
