Laurustina

I just finished reading “The House on Mango Street” and couldn’t help but think … now where did i leave those Villa Stories?

Tonight is all about the chutneys. Actually that’s not exactly true, but it IS the first line that came to me when I decided to sit down and write while simultaneously sweating an onion on the stove. Ok, so it started out about chutneys, which I had to Wikipedia for the most basic understanding, before I went off in search of a decent chutney to accompany the potato and pea samosas that I conquered  the last time i went on one of these nervous energy late night cooking sprees.

Mostly, it is a way to stop thinking of all the things I spend most of the day thinking about … the overwhelming, the sad and scary, the things I can’t do anything about late at night … if I am worrying about measurements and sauté pans and spice mixes (i have used more garam masala in the last month than i did in all the years which proceeded it.) somehow everything else manages to fall away for a little while.

I was looking for a spicy chutney recipe tonight, something that would compliment the mildness of the samosas that I wanted to make for my nephew’s wife tomorrow. But with what was stocked in our cupboards, I could only make a tomato/onion one (turned out way too italian-ish for these purposes) and the same basic minty raita i always make. At that point, i decided to up the heat in the potato/pea mash, hopefully making the samosas worthy of a nice cooling minty/cucumber dip.

Two hours of this kitchen putter and the sink is full of dirty utensils, the counter cluttered with spice jars, and the last of the nights creations ready to be snapped up with Tupperware lids and relegated to the refrigerator for the night. My hands are sore and protesting the evening’s labor. My feet remind me that they would someday like some fancy slippers with arch support. My whole self feels old and tired and achy.  But once again, I have outwitted, sidetracked and subverted worry, sadness, fear and grief until such time that I can fall exhausted into bed and a half-decent sleep.

Some days, that (and a tasty Indian appetizer with a halfway-decent dipping sauce) is the most one can hope for.

Update: As it turns out, the perfect accompaniment for the samosa cups (which is how i served up the taster version of the spiced potato/pea filling on the night in question) was a dollop (yeah, i said dollop, what’cha gonna do about it?) of plain Greek Yogurt. Who knew?

i haven’t left the house in two days. yesterday i managed to put real clothes on. today i got as far as putting my contacts in. i DID read a book, one i picked up at the used book section of my favorite thrift store a couple of weeks ago. The book  was falling apart when i bought it, something i didn’t notice at the time, realized when the first three pages fell out as I read them. There is something strange about a book which physically deconstructs as you read it, each page hanging in there just long enough to be turned, and then fluttering free as the forefinger sweeps them from right to left. it was a short book, a novella, and i was able to keep all the pages clutched together in a tidy stack, tucked into the broken spine. i finished it tonight after dinner, and wondered if i should save it or put it in the recycling stack. hell, you know i kept it, right? in part, because of the care it took to hold it all together. sometimes that’s enough.

today should have been their 18th birthday.

i mean to say more, but find that i can’t.

Last night I found her tennis shoes in the bottom of the hallway closet, a pair of white and pink K-Swiss, ladies size 9. Her blue Converse hi-tops have been kicking around out in the open since the day she left, but these were buried under a pile of other abandoned things and somehow the surprise of unearthing them unexpectedly punched me in the gut. We bought them at an outlet in Tracy and I still remember the wrangling and begging involved in the purchase, how I went through the whole mental juggling of bills and necessities to find the justification for such a purchase when she had perfectly good shoes on her feet, and in her closet back home.

There was a lot of that, in that last year, scrimping and splurging, wanting to make up for fifteen years without pink and pretty, without bangles and lace, things I would have given her if I’d known. But I didn’t. And even now, all this time later, I cannot go into a clothing store without seeing things that I want to buy for her, colors and shapes and sparkly things that would have delighted her. Every once in a while I’ll buy something small and tuck it away in a box filled with her things, a small secret gesture made too late.

And yesterday, when I thought of all those Mother’s Days spent with my boys, the little things they did for me in their little boys’ way, I found myself missing my daughter most of all.

i am so mad at you today – like that time you went down to the river with your friends when you were ten and you didn’t come home until after dark, and i had imagined all the horrible things that could happen to you lost in the woods alongside the river at night – and i had cried myself into such a hysteria that when you finally showed up, whistling and laughing, i wouldn’t speak to you for an hour – mad like that, except this time i know that the horrible things HAVE happened and you are not coming home – which makes me even madder.

On Saturday morning, I woke up with a vision of chorizo biscuits dancing in my head. Not that I’ve ever eaten a chorizo biscuit, not that i’d even heard of a chorizo biscuit, not that i was even sure a chorizo biscuit could be baked or enjoyed. I simply sat up in bed, half-awake and thought, “what I’d really like, is to go into the kitchen and whip up some chorizo biscuits for breakfast”.

I envisioned these biscuits big and fluffy, with just a trickle of paprika-stained grease escaping through a single pinprick, some kind of chorizo insertion point, though the manner and insertion implement were yet to be determined, as was the possibility that a simple biscuit had the integrity to withstand the rigors of baking after being stuffed with spicy meat.

Had it been done before?

Was there a trick to doing it well?

Whether it should be done, was not one of those questions that immediately crossed my mind. But there was plenty of time to consider such things before embarking on the experiment, as we had neither  chorizo nor biscuits on-hand. Instead, I ate two hastily fried eggs with a slice of wheat toast, and went about my day.

It was Sunday before I got around to googling “Chorizo Biscuit”.  What I found was underwhelming. There was a recipe for chorizo biscuits and gravy, accompanied by this rather unappetizing photo. And another recipe for a Rachel Ray chicken sandwich on a chorizo and cheese biscuit, which was also, nothing like what I had envisioned, but at least gave me a little hope in the possibility of some kind of communion between biscuit dough and chorizo.

I explain all of this to my sister on Sunday afternoon, as we are driving over to a friend’s house, and when I realize that I’ve been rambling on and on about it for maybe seven minutes, I say, “You understand that this isn’t so much about eating something as it is obsessing over creating something, right?” She laughs. Later that night, it is Mr. J. who reminds me that we have one of those Ronco Flavor Injector thingies, normally reserved for shoving cloves of garlic and such into a roast, but

By Monday afternoon, I figure that I should stop talking and theorizing about the damn thing and just do it, so we went up to the store, tossed two rolls of Pillsbury Grands Buttermilk Biscuits into the shopping basket, as well as two packages of chorizo, one the traditional pork and the other, soy-based. (My preference is honestly for the pork, but I’ve used soy chorizo once or twice, as it reduced the fat content and therefore the guilt factor. (And yes, at some point we could could have a discussion about Food Guilt, but let’s save that for another day, alright?).

Ok, so last night, after dinner, I enlist Mouse to help with my experiment.  We cook up half the soy chorizo, adding a bit of olive oil, because it fries up awfully dry and crumbly, and then we get the idea to mix in some crumbles of pepper jack cheese to help hold it together well enough to use one of those Flavor Injector thingies (normally reserved for shoving cloves of garlic and such into a roast) to shove the filling into the dough. We fill most of the biscuits this way, poking a hole in the side, shoving the injector in and then pinching the dough closed around the insertion point.  They’re not particularly pretty, but at least they’re holding up to the poking and prodding.

On the last two biscuits, we experiment. Me, with slicing right through the dough, adding a layer of chorizo and cheese at the center and then flopping the top back on and patting the sides until they close up. Mouse shoves his thumb down into the top of the biscuit and makes a little well, which he fills and leaves uncovered. We give them one last look and then pop them into the oven. Fifteen minutes later, we have this:

On the top right, is one of the ones we shoved the injector into. It’s ok, but not particularly pretty. On the bottom right, is the one I sliced open. Happily it held both its shape and its filling. It is the Stealth Biscuit, with just a little trickle of paprika-stained grease on the edge. And on the left, well there’s Mouse’s lovely thumbprint biscuit, which kinda looks like a bagel, but is definitely the visual crown jewel of the collection.

I insisted that Mr. J come over and take a look. I called my sister out from her bedroom to see them too. I buttered the tops of the ones that had tops. I removed them from the tray and arranged them on a plate. I took photos of them and smiled at them and felt quite proud of myself and my boy.

And then it occurred to me that yes, we had solved the question of whether or not it could be done, but hadn’t considered whether or not it should be done. Was this going to be like the beef and vegetable pies I made with the wrong kind of pie crust, the ones that looked all kinds of lovely as they sprung from the oven, only to devolve into a soggy, weirdly sweet and inedible mess?

I broke open one of the ugly biscuits and shoved half of it at Mouse. He ate it and pronounced it good. But Mouse will eat anything, so then I called Ruby back out from her bedroom and shoved the other half at her. She ate it and nodded. I broke open a second biscuit, noting how the cheese kind of broke off little melty strings as it came apart, looking tasty and warm and gooey. And then I took a bite. And a second bite. And I knew, not only that it could be done and should be done, but that it had been done. That I did it and it was good.

I’ve been reading Dave Eggers’ book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” which had long been on my To Read list but found its way to me through the book bins at the Hospice Hope Chest thrift store. These are my favorite book bins, because all paperbacks are a dollar, except when they are 50 cents because its one of those EVERYTHING 1/2 OFF days. For some reason, which I have yet to figure out, they have the best used book selection in town and I rarely leave without an armful. It is one of those cases of the right book finding you at at the right time. I like when they do that.

wow. wierd. I haven’t been here in a while. Back in November, when I was writing every day, I got into this mindset of writing first thing in the morning, but way back in the day, when I wrote all the time, I did much of it at night. Now I don’t, and I don’t really know why. Maybe its because my hands hurt by the end of the day, or I got so used to my hands hurting by the end of the day that I just stopped even considering writing at night. And now that Mouse and I share this computer, we trade off a lot at night, so I haven’t fallen into an evening writing groove. But blah blah blah … all of that is really just a long-winded way to say that it feels weird to be here now, and it reminds me of the Capitola years, when Mr. J. and I spent our evenings on opposite sides of that big bedroom upstairs in that tiny condo, when my desk was set up on the built-in vanity which meant that all evening I sat at the computer facing a giant mirror, in which I could see the television, the back of my husband’s head, the children when they wandered into the room, and the dogs (Iggy and Fat Lola) sprawled on the bed. There are things I miss rather desperately about Capitola, but the condo is not one of them.

Mouse called from Capitola tonight. He’s visiting for the week, playing the piano in the coffee house late at night and dancing along the cement seawall on his way back to Mary Mary’s place. I look forward to him coming home on Friday. The house is too quiet when he is not here.

I finished The Letter this week. Finally. Its the one I have been mentally working on for more than a year, the one I wanted to send to the Board of Directors at The Pride Center downtown. Actually, it it a completely different letter than the one I first intended to write. But it is, I think, the right letter; the one I needed to send, anyway.Maybe that’s why it took me a year to write it, because I had to get enough distance to realize that what I needed to say and what was actually important for them to hear were not the same things.

I am sending three books for their library along with the letter. My sister made little stickers for me to put inside each one, which read: Donated to the Pride Center library in memory of Ashlie V.; beloved daughter and fierce friend. There is a part of me that wanted to keep the books as soon as they arrived. (I’ve read them all, but own none of them) but I also hope that some day, someone like me will wander through their door in search of information that they didn’t have when I wandered through their door, and someone will go to the shelf and pull down one of those books and give it to her. It is a small gesture and at this moment, even the small gestures feel like  milestones.