Sunday, January 08, 2006
working despite cookie disaster
I got this cool idea for a short, which I have started tonight. I'm working on stopping the moment I feel like I'm waiting for things to get interesting and just not going where it was going. So far so good. I only have a page, so it's too early to say much. But I like the idea and lately, these notions have practically written themselves over 3 to 5 days, so we'll see.
I forgot that tomorrow the contractor is coming to demo the utility room so we spent the morning emptying it out and finding places for all the junk, which, I am happy to report, included the trash. Then I started reading
Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and it's really, really good. I already started crying once and I'm only halfway through. And, no, not because it's sad. This is a bona fine
wow book. Complex and rich and wonderfully written.
Then I had do some errands and it turned out someone substituted my sweet 10 year boy with a moody nerve-snapping fiend. It was not a fun trip so I didn't do all the errands I should have. A bit later, with me still annoyed, he reminded me I'd promised we'd make cookies. Well, that was true, so we made two batches that were supposed to come out green and blue so that we could do pinwheel cookies, only they both came out green. Ah. Yes. Egg yolks are yellow. Fresh egg yolks are incredibly yellow and blue + yellow = green. Sigh. The recipe for pinwheel cookies said to melt chocolate etc but we were not prepared for chocolate melting as the whole point was not plain and chocolate but blue and green and besides, someone who shall remain nameless but whose first name might start with C had only recently finished off the last of the chocolate suitable for melting. The inspiration of the moment was to empty the last of the fat-free cocoa into the should-have-been-blue batch and that seemed to be OK since the end result was two batches of different colors.
The batter needed to chill but I guess we didn't wait long enough, because, well, suffice it to say, the rolled up dough did not, at the moment of crisis, maintain the required stiffness and sort of lay there on the cutting board looking obscenely limp. Upon slicing, there were few recognizable pinwheels and they weren't circles, they were triangular or other disturbing shapes, so we ended up shaping and smushing them. But the problem went far deeper than shape. Consider the color combo. Green and brown. They're puke cookies. They came out of the oven round enough, but they don't really look very appealing. And the patterns are these sort of Rorschach test blobs and swirls and honestly, it's all rather disturbing and unsettling.
