Wed. Nov. 17, 2021: Online Cooking Class (And Some Writing)

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Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Waxing Moon

Neptune, Chiron, Uranus Retrograde

Cloudy and cold

Yesterday was actually a lot of fun.

After I hit my word count quota, I went to Big Y to get the ingredients for the evening’s cooking class. There were a few snow flurries in the air as I came and went, but nothing major, and it didn’t stick.

I came home, went through email, worked on script coverages. We did an early session of Knowledge Unicorns, which went well.

As I set out my ingredients in preparation for the class, I realized I’d somehow missed seeing that spinach and pine nuts were part of the ingredient list. Instead of spinach (for the turkey tarts), I decided to use celery (I mean, I didn’t even have kale I could have swapped in for it. Not having kale on hand in the Berkshires is a form of blasphemy). I’ve substituted walnuts for pine nuts in pesto before, so I decided to do that.

The class itself as part of the NYU Alumni Supper Club series, and our instructor was Chef Cherrie of ChefTorial. She was working out of her kitchen in a small town near Manitoba, our host was on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls; it was fun. That’s what I love about online events. People can participate from all over the world (we even had one person attending from Hong Kong).

NYU has always been at the forefront of virtual conferencing. When I was at NYU on work-study, back in the early 1980’s, I worked for the Interactive Telecommunication Department and Alternate Media Center (and had to say that entire name every time I answered the phone). We had one of the first ever virtual Christmas parties between our NYU office and China (I think it was Shanghai). It was a ton of fun, and a little whacky.

Anyway, back to the class. We had fun cooking and doing “Sociable!” (not sure if I should explain what that is, but trust me, it’s fun). Charlotte sat on a kitchen chair in front of the screen for the first part, but she wasn’t getting enough attention, so she left. Willa took up the post, absolutely fascinated to watch the tutorial on the laptop (which I’d set up in the kitchen), and her new fascination with watching me cook.

The three recipes were sweet potato toasts with maple-walnut-goat cheese topping; turkey tarts filled with ricotta, cream cheese, spinach (well, celery for me), and cranberries; sweet pea pesto on toasted ciabatta.

I got into life-or-death battles trying to get the ricotta and the cream cheese open, and got cheese all over the kitchen. At that point, Willa fled back into my mother’s room, where she could sit on the bed and watch from a safe distance.

Tessa stayed out of it.

I would have never thought of lining a muffin pan cup with a slice of turkey, filling it, and baking it. But it works!

All three recipes were outstanding. The Chef and host were terrific, and the other people were a lot of fun. I posted photos of the dishes as they were finished on Instagram. The photos are pretty lame; I didn’t do any styling or real arrangement, it was just shoot and go, because we were moving pretty fast.

The food was good, but the kitchen was a disaster area by the time I was done. It took longer to clean up than it took to cook.

I was wiped out by the end of it, but it was a good tired. I definitely want to do more Supper Club events with NYU Alumni, and they have a Cooking Club, too, that the host will send me information about.

And we definitely have leftovers.

I overslept this morning. Tessa was not amused, since she’d been trying to wake me up since who-knows-when. But my mom got up early to feed the little monsters.

I put chicken and vegetables into the slow cooker, and that’s tonight’s dinner. Because after cooking so much last night, a slow cooker meal seems like a good idea.

I also made a frittata for breakfast.  With the supply chain issues meaning frozen vegetables are in short supply, and the canned goods on which I stocked up during the early part of the pandemic needing to be used up, I’d used a can of mixed vegetables to go with a dish a few days ago.

They were disgusting.

I mean, I knew they wouldn’t be great, but I don’t remember them being this disgusting.

Needless to say, we had leftovers. I hate wasting food, so I decided to hide their grossness in a frittata, by adding in leftover basil and parsley from last night’s ingredients, and then cutting up some fresh grape tomatoes, mixing it in with the eggs, shredding some cheese to go into it, and some salt and pepper.

Frittata is a tasty way to get rid of leftovers I don’t know what to do with. Eggs, cheese, and herbs can hide a lot of less-than-wonderful leftovers.

Anyway, it was a huge frittata, but it was delicious. I still can’t judge properly when it’s set enough to flip, so it usually ends up looking like a gigantic mess, but it tastes good. With leftover ciabatta, too.

I was late hitting today’s word count on CAST IRON MURDER, which was 2661. The story took a completely unexpected turn that was not in the outline, but works well, so I rolled with it.

This brings me over 42K for the month. I only have 8K more for the Nano quota, and I’m over halfway from where I need to be for the full book. This draft will be lean. In the second draft, I’m going to expand some carefully chosen descriptive detail, to support that Lorraine, as a cook, sees a lot of the world through food colors, textures, and flavors. That can all be layered on top of the basic story, so if I come in a little lean on word count in this draft, I have room to play without getting overblown and info-dumpy.

I’ll be teaching TWO classes at the Cape Cod Writers Center Conference next August, and the Executive Director and I are working out the details. I’ll share them when I have them.

Remote Chat today, which will be tons of fun. I have script coverage to do, and some other things to take care of.

If the weather holds over the next few days, there will, I hope, be a day of local adventure, which will also be fun to share. If the weather sucks, I’ll stay home and write.

Have a good one!