Is it midnight yet?

 

Jacob at three
but the cookbook has some 
of my favorite reciipes

Ever have those nights when you feel at eight o’clock that it surely must be midnight already? That’s how I feel. Although I am constantly trying to rid myself of obsessive schedules, I’m pretty much tied to my own routine. I don’t want to go to bed at eight or nine, because I don’t want to wake, sleepless, in the middle of the night. I try to sleep from eleven to eight, the Lord and Sophie willing. But tonight I’m sleepy, worn out by some conflicts swirling around me. I tell myself—and others—I don’t want to be involved in intrigue, but sometimes I can’t remain aloof. And so it is tonight.

To soothe my soul, I began to do some menu planning, always an activity I enjoy. For instance, I found a recipe tonight for rosemary pot roast. Between now and the holidays, the calendars around here are full, and I foresee meals on the at-home evenings of leftovers or heavy hors d’oevres. But it’s never too early to stash things away in my “never tried” file, which is bulging. Periodically, I go through it and firmly say to myself, “It sounds great, but you’ll never fix it” or “You like this, but your family wouldn’t.” And, plop, it goes in the trash. I waste a lot of printer ink and paper that way, but I haven’t gotten sophisticated enough to keep my recipe collection online. And if I did, I’d just have to print each recipe out as I cooked it. As it is, I do that with recipes from the manuscripts of my cookbooks. But I foresee rosemary pot roast on the January menu—see how I’m jumping ahead?

Tonight, looking through appetizer recipes for our neighborhood ladies very small happy hour next week (Jordan wants to make my salmon dip), I came across my mom’s pickled shrimp. She always said it would keep a week in the fridge. In early adulthood I developed an allergy to shrimp—made me break out, so I was afraid to try it for fear the next time would be anaphylactic shock. Allergies come and go, and I might well be able to eat shrimp now, but the fear lingers. Still, for nostalgia’s sake, I’d like to fix that. We do still as a family treasure Mom’s cheeseball recipe. This year, sixteen-year-old Morgan said she would make it, although she pointedly said she would not eat it.

Funny what one person will eat and another won’t. For our four-person neighborhood event, I said I would buy a small jar of pickled herring—one of the ladies and I both love it; the other and Jordan turned up their noses. But when Jordan suggested goat cheese log with wasabi, the pickled-herring friend said, “I don’t eat wasabi.” I’ll probably make it pesto instead of wasabi, but it’s good quick appetizer. Just split a log, small or large, of goat cheese lengthwise, put wasabi (be cautious, not too much—a wavy “S” pattern) or pesto down the middle, put the two sides together again, and roll the log in toasted sesame seeds. So good. Are you like me and have to toast two batches of sesame seeds because you always burn the first one?

This morning I was productive. I’m trying to clear the decks as it were as I prepare for the holidays and try to focus more on my writing projects. The trouble is that I’m programmed—there it is again, that routine I can’t let go of. I do this every year, get so efficient about Christmas and all my projects that by about December 10 or 12, my desk is clear and I wonder what I should do next. Too close to Christmas to start a new project—but I have old ones in limbo I can work on.

At any rate, back to clearing the decks. Yesterday I wrote my December column for Lone Star Literary Life. The schedule is changing so I’m not sure when it will appear, nor when the January column will. But today I wrote the January column—I was on a roll, with good material, and it flowed easily. So I wrote the publisher and said I’d just written the most interesting column I’d ever sent her. And then I said I’d send it in a few days, which made her laugh. But it was fun—two women who team up to write fiction, and a woman who decided she didn’t need a super sleuth but needed a team. If you don’t subscribe to this weekly free literary newsletter, you might consider it. Just go to Lone Star Literary Life

Enough. I’m written out. Going to calm myself with a book. Sweet dreams of sugar plums and all thinks good.