Christian cooks dinner

 

The kitchen when Christian cooks Asian

When he has the time, Christian is a terrific cook who loves to experiment. He particularly likes to cook Asian dishes, so this week I ordered a lot of stir-fry vegetables—snap peas, bean sprouts, matchstick carrots, baby sweet corns, baby bok choy. I figured if Christian didn’t have time or didn’t want to cook, I’d do it, though my results would not be as spectacular. Two things about Christian’s cooking: he follows a recipe, maybe with side trips but he has to have a recipe to begin with, and he is slow. Even when he starts early, as he did today at about four-thirty or five, dinner is a bit delayed. I often think though that I should take a lesson from him and recipes—I try to do a familiar dish off the top of my head, and I usually regret the outcome.

So tonight Christian said he looked up stir-fry recipes but was disappointed—at most they called for soy sauce but no other Asian ingredients. So then he looked up chop suey, which I thought was something that came in a can when I was little and no one served anymore. Except Christian who found such a good recipe he decided he had to make fried rice to go with it. Dinner was, as he said, delayed. Jordan came out laughing sometime during that happy hour. It would, she said, take two days to clean the kitchen. Christian is not one who cleans as he cooks—maybe that’s one place where I outshine him.

Mary Dulle came for our regular Tuesday night happy hour, so we laughed and chatted while Christian cooked away inside the house. Somehow much of our talk was about Alter family tales, crazy things that happened when I was raising four teenagers. I guess that was partly because today’s big news was that Jacob got his first job—he interviewed this morning at Joe T.’s (Joe T. Garcia’s, a world-famous Mexican restaurant for those of you not from Fort Worth). His first shift as host is Friday, and a childhood friend will be showing him the ropes. We are all excited for him—I think it’s going to make such a difference in him—a big step toward maturity. An interesting note: Jordan said he had to sign a confidentiality agreement. Joe T’s gets almost every celebrity who comes to Fort Worth, and the staff is forbidden to take pictures. I know from experience that the wait staff will use our camera to take a picture of all of us, but that doesn’t count: we are not celebrities.

And, of course, this job puts Jacob squarely in family tradition. All four of my children worked in restaurants as teenagers. My friend used to tease me about being a generous tipper and I said it came from having my children work in hospitality. There was hardly at the time a restaurant in Fort Worth that I routinely went to where one of mine hadn’t worked. And when Jacob was an infant, his dad waited tables at Joe T.’s, while working in the title business during the day. I’m enthusiastic about Jacob’s job, and since he has his parents’ people skills, he’ll do fine.

Back to our dinner—Jordan and Christian carried it out to the cottage about seven forty-five, and I have to say it was worth waiting for. Vegetables were delicious, and Christian had “velveted” the chicken which made it tender. Best stir fry/chop suey I remember having—ever! And leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Christian's chop suey

This morning I would have told you today as Monday all over again—I had a hard time getting myself in gear after sleeping late. I was up at six and seven-thirty with Sophie and couldn’t resist going back for one last dream. Mary calls that second sleep, and I find I’ve gotten to count on it, now that Soph and I seem on a fairly settled schedule. Of course today I had to have the TV on to watch the doings in Miami, though there wasn’t much to see. Still, as Christian said tonight, the commentary was interesting. So many predictions, countless interpretations, statistics you can’t trust, and wild opinions about trump’s indictment, it leaves my head in a whirl. I have lots of opinions—no surprise there—but they are for another day, another blog. Meantime, I did manage to write a thousand words this morning—no small achievement. These days, reading the political news takes way too much of my time and cuts into my working time.

Today will stand out in my memory for a while as the day Christian made the good stir fry and the day Jacob got his first job. It’s enough.

The ongoing saga of my car

Thidaughter, s was when I first started to drive again

after two years away from the wheel

As many of you may know, I drive a 2004 VW Beetle convertible that I adore. It’s my “I’m-not-your-typical-grandmother” car, and I adore zipping around in it—or I did. For almost two years, when I had so much trouble with my hip and the surgery, the car sat—first outside my cottage and then outside my son’s house in Tomball, where I thought they would drive it. They didn’t, and when I finally was able to drive again, I had to do a lot of expensive repairs.

I had such a sense of release and freedom. I drove with a joy and confidence I never had before. Lately though that confidence has been replaced by uncertainty and a slight tendency toward panic. Long story short, I’m not enjoying driving much, and it’s a real dilemma for me. For one thing, it’s a pain when I am alone to get the walker and then me into the car and reverse the procedure whenever I get where I am going. And Jordan doesn’t want me to get in or out alone. She’s afraid I’ll fall or get mugged. So lately it’s been easier just not to drive.

But cars don’t do well just sitting. I’ve had to have the battery jumped twice, mostly because I didn’t park it in such a way that Christian could get a car next to it to use jumper cables. Garages have those handy little things they carry around and don’t need cables. Jacob has been good about going out to start it, but it still doesn’t last long. So today, Christian jumped it—we had parked deliberately the last time we started it—and Jordan and I drove to get gas and to get eggs and milk at Braum’s.

My beloved daughter turned into a back-seat driver. “The gas station is on the left”—I know that. I’ve lived in this neighborhood over fifty years. “Slow down. There are people walking in the street”—I see them and am being careful. As I drove in the driveway, “Wait for the gate to open”—I’ve been driving in this driveway with that gate for about twenty years. “Why won’t your windows go all the way up?” Because the door is still open. Sheesh! I can see the handwriting on the wall, the point at which my kids will think I should no longer drive, though after my two-year hiatus, each one had to drive with me to check me out, and each one had different objections. Truth is, I’m a  pretty good side-street driver, not so much on busy streets, and not at all on freeways..

Christian was quite stern with me: I will have to drive it frequently; we can’t keep jumping it. And I can do that, albeit it’s a bit of a pain. Next dilemma: my driver‘s license comes up in July, and at my age I will have to appear in person and take the test, the thought of which gives me the nervous willies. Sometimes they require that you wear your hearing aids and not drive after dark—I’m okay with that. I would like to keep my license, if for no other reason than in another year Jacob will have his learner’s permit, and I can let him drive as long as I am in the car as a licensed driver. I’d probably give him the car, but he doesn’t much like it, and Christian supported him by saying, “It’s not a very masculine car.” What kind of nonsense is that? When I drove it a lot, women came up to me to say, “My husband would kill for that car.”

So here I sit, pondering all these variables. At least, it’s not a decision I have to make tomorrow, and it’s a good distraction from worrying about the corona virus.

Old-fashioned cooking

As has become my habit on Saturdays, I did some cooking today. Sometimes I don’t want to buckle down to desk work on the weekend, and cooking makes me happy. I doubt, however, that my cooking made Christian happy. He is the most patient son-in-law, but I really thought this morning he would say, “Please, Juju. No more cooking. It’s too much work for me.”

The problem is that my  kitchen is not set up for baking, so I need a steady stream of equipment and supplies from the house to make brownies. Last night I told him what  I needed—a large icebox dish (no, that is not an old-fashioned term!) and an 8-inch square baking pan. This morning I added a request for the hand mixer. Then, with brownies almost ready to go in the oven, I sent out a desperate plea for baking powder. Christian and Jacob escaped to the Baylor game in Waco.

The brownies have a back story. My neighbor and good friend, Mary Dulle, is a member of the Facebook New York Times Cooking Community, as am I. The other day she posted that she had made the brownies she remembered from her childhood, and they were dry. She needed help but confessed she had substituted whole wheat flour for white and added flaxseed. No brainer! No wonder they weren’t right. Online I advised her to just go back to the original recipe. Over wine a couple of nights later, she was resistant (putting it mildly) to that idea. Okay, I could go with the flour change but not the flaxseed. I decided there was nothing for it, but I would have to make the original recipe. I may save her one brownie. Watch for the recipe in Thursday's "Gourmet on a Hot Plate" blog.

Easy and good, except that I suspect the pan is a 9-inch square, which means the batter was in a thinner layer, which means it could be dry. I will try after supper tonight. In a strange irony, Christian and Jacob (the latter somewhat reluctantly) went to a nutrition class this morning while I was making good, old-fashioned brownies with white sugar, white flour, and real butter. Christian said he didn’t feel he had to be healthy all the time—an occasional lapse is okay.

My other project was potato salad, just because I’ve had a yearning for it. I used the County Line (an Austin bbq joint) recipe, which is all over online. I seriously considered substituting green onions for white but simply, out of respect for Jacob, cut back on the amount and diced it fine.

Tomorrow night for Sunday supper Christian will grill lamb burgers, and we’ll have potato salad and maybe wilted lettuce. A posting on the Cooking Community page reminded me that I love wilted lettuce. Will do some tonight for my supper—that and potato salad will be dinner, though the potato salad will be better tomorrow.

And I’ve got a good book to top off the evening--The Chillbury Ladies Choir, set in England during WWII. Reminds me of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.