Kitchen Casualties

One of the many benefits of managing your own time is that you can spend umpteen hours on any given activity your deem worthy of attention. For me, in the last few days, that activity has been cooking. I'm no master in the kitchen. But man-oh-man can I take a really long time to prepare a meal without flinching; and I can also dirty a few thousand dishes. Now, I don't own that many dishes any more. So I had to stop before I reached 1,000. It would have been close, though.

Today I constructed a very willy-nilly meal; it didn't quite coordinate, with the tang of this side dish, accompanying the salty verve of that entrée. It was, however, yummy--to use a really technical culinary word. And I took my sweet time making it. The Slow Food Movement would be proud.

Today's delight included molcajete-ground guacamole, with homemade corn tortilla chips, rosemary-roasted potatoes, and squash blossoms stuffed with goat cheese in a burnt tomato sauce. I'm really excited about the meal because, not only was it fun to make, and fun-ner to eat, most of the ingredients came from within the region where I live. Avocados from the Mixteca Baja region, chilies from the valley, corn tortillas from my local tortillera (the corn from the valley), squash blossom from the Mixteca Alta, goat cheese from the local farmer's market (can't remember the name of the small Oaxacan pueblo where the goats are kept), and tomatoes from the coast!

There was, however, a casualty from the the weekend's earlier culinary activity; my thumb. I cut it pretty deeply when I was making bruschetta for my friends the Cordero's. It's on the winning end of healing right now. But there's a small bit of the tip of my thumb missing, now. I wonder if it will grow back. I tried to take a picture of it to show you--but I'm not sure if you can tell. My camera doesn't take great micro-shots. I assure you, though, if you could really get up close you would see that the top curve of my left thumb stops, and then dips in, before it continues the long stretch down the left side, heading for the webbing between it and the index finger. If the tip doesn't fill in by the end of next week, I'm throwing a memorial service for the piece that was lost. I hope you all can attend.