December, 2012

I Love Cooking With Wine. Sometimes I Even Put It In The Food.

One of the many reasons Ducky and I get along is because we both have an avid interest in food and the preparation thereof. It's a neyh-neyh point that I got his mother's closely-guarded gingerbread recipe and he spent a weekend re-creating a dessert he had never even had. (Great Aunt Deirdre swore she wrote down the recipe for Lemon Fluff. She was wrong. She literally died and took it with her. We had been trying for years—decades—to reverse engineer it, to no avail. Ducky appealed to my mother's better nature, camped in her kitchen for an entire weekend and they made batch after batch of the stuff until Mom yelled, "That's IT!" She threatened to nominate him for a Nobel Prize in chemistry.)

Lexi enjoys cooking—under very close supervision—too. Of course her favorite things to cook involve copious amounts of butter, sugar and chocolate—baking, rather than cooking—but she likes to help cook, too. It's a good way to sharpen math skills, and to show why you must follow a cake recipe exactly, but you can play around with spaghetti sauce like crazy. Cooking is art; baking is science.

The Christmas Lexi turned four, she was our right hand girl for dinner. She helped make the sausage and mushroom dressing, beat the potatoes to a fare-thee-well and helped cut out slightly funny looking but quite tasty biscuits. While everything else was darn close to ready or done, Ducky decided she was old enough for a bird's eye view of how to make gravy.

"First you melt the butter… add in the flour… This is called a roux," he explained as he worked.

"Roo? Wike Kanga?"

"Well, it's pronounced the same, but this is spelled r-o-u-x. We're going to be adding a half a cup of white wine, could you get a half-cup liquid measuring cup… thank you… can you find the white pepper on the spice rack? Perfect!" They continued to work while I scooped veggies into their correct bowls, then heard the two words you never want to hear from a doctor, dentist or cook: "Oh, dear."

I turned around and clamped my lips together. The gravy was in the gravy boat; rather than "thickening" as it set, it had "clanked up." It was solid, the spoon standing straight up like a flagpole. Think cement. "That's, uh, thick gravy," I managed. (I had done the same thing over the years.)

Lexi reached out and whacked the spoon. It leaned over a bit, then twanged back to attention. She grinned in delight. "Coo-ow! Rigor mortis set in!"

For those keeping reality check score: this happened the first time my sister made gravy. The youngest of my three elder brothers mouthed the fatal phrase. My sister burst into tears and fled the room, while Dad and Bill had a *discussion* in the back yard.

Confession: this isn't the story I planned on posting. But I am so happy on Nyquil, what I wrote isn't making sense even to me. Maybe next month.

Have a wonderful holiday! When Miss Jayne posts the Jibbsfest Secret Santa exchange, I'll post the link on my bio page. For a Jibbs story, mine had darn little of it…