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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I have a culinary experiment going on. It's called "poule au pot for the completely lazy cook." Authentic poule au pot recipes all rely on an awful lot of frying and fussing. The ingredients have to be fried in butter or olive oil - yes, that includes a whole chicken, also a side of ham, since European bacon is closer to what we Americans think of as ham than it is to what we call bacon - before being simmered on a stove in a large casserole dish or roasting pan, just long enough to cook all the way through but not so long that the meat falls off the bone and the contents become soup, then transferred in the roasting pan to the oven so that the cooked meat cooks even longer, which means frequent basting to ensure the meat doesn't dry out and become tough. Then all the ingredients have to be removed and set aside while the broth is reduced into gravy. The result is delicious, but very time-consuming and labor-intensive; also, it practically orders arteries to harden ("Toughen up! We know you can take more butter! Wimps!") and I think the ingredients would taste almost as good if they were simply boiled into a stew. The only way to prove my hypothesis correct, of course, is to test it, so I have a frying chicken and a small ham boiling in a stockpot with some wine and herbes de Provence added to the water. In a couple more hours I'll add the carrots, leeks, celery, mushrooms, and potatoes. All the vegetable ingredients will be tied into pretty little bundles or sectioned off in cheesecloth bags, just like in the original recipe, so the presentation shouldn't suffer too much. The dish will be ready in time for supper.
Another, even lazier version of poule au pot, also one I invented, involves simmering everything in a crock pot in a base of homemade gravy. I'll try that on a day when we both have to work and so won't be home until after nine.
Shortcuts are not cheats. They're creative variations.
They let me do things like dance with Magister while I'm cooking dinner.
This afternoon, I presented him with a mix tape I'd made earlier in the day. I used to make mix tapes a lot when I was a teenager, but that was when I had a stereo of my own and a library of records, cassettes, and compact discs. I left those behind in one of my moves. However, public libraries have extensive music collections of their own, and Magister has his small stereo in the living room, and blank cassette tapes aren't very expensive, so I decided to make him a present. The music is mostly classical. There are a couple of New Age pieces on it, though, and some pop songs - one a Bryan Ferry song that reminded me of him, a couple of Moody Blues pieces, and a few others, most of them from the early to mid-seventies. They seemed to fit.
Magister found the latter selections amusing.
"You do realize these were hits when I was young, don't you? Was that deliberate on your part?" He smiled at me when he said that. "Trying to make me feel old?"
"Bah. You're not old." I hadn't thought of that while I picked the songs. For the most part, I don't usually think about his age. I'm aware that there are two decades, an entire generation, between us, of course, and I can't say that I see him as a peer, exactly, but neither do I think of him as an "older man," let alone as old. He's just himself. "I thought they suited us."
