fish

I'll provide a detailed account of my adventures at the zine symposium later - right now I have to mail the zine I made during the madcap trip down I-5 and then failed to make enough copies of before the event started.

After Portland we raced home and cleaned frantically to prepare for a week of socializing. Eli arrived on Monday; she is in town for an experimental dance conference. We met through the Chorus and we were excited to have her as a guest for the week. She had a friend along for the first evening and they are both vegan so we had to think about what to make and came up with yellow curry (with red peppers, green beans, potato, fresh basil, and fried tofu).

Curry is so easy - why didn't I know?

The second night we were stumped and Jennifer was about to arrive; she is in town for a management conference. We have been friends since Governors' School in 1988; exactly fifteen years. We also grew up in the same general geographic place but I went to local schools and she took the ferry to Seattle for Catholic girls school so she never really socialized with the locals. We went to the same college at different times, know many of the same people, have had similar work and educational adventures, but always staggered.

Jennifer bought us lots of fancy dinners when we were impoverished students and she had a real job, and we wanted to reciprocate, but froze on what to do. Take her out? Make food? But we don't know how to cook. Tizzy offered tips via email on good restaurants, but the kids were all squirrely so we decided we had to stay home.

I was going to have Byron call Stella and ask for cooking advice but apparently we lost our private phone book during the trip. We plunged into the cookbooks with no luck; they use words like sear and suggest precise measurements and such things. Finally I looked at Stella's site and printed a copy of the salmon postcard.

Eli helped me make a list of the ingredients I needed and I ventured forth with trepidation. I had to find things I know nothing about, like shallots.

Most of my shopping adventure was consumed by an attempt to purchase good wine. My personal preference runs to cheap and red. This is not a good heuristic when the guest actually has a palate.

Why is there always someone insisting they must advise me in the produce section, but never in the wine? I'm capable of picking out greens and onions. But wine? The best I can ever do is evaluate the relative savings when the bottle is on sale.

In the end we made veggie sushi with avocado, carrots, and tofu; spicy glazed salmon; spicy glazed tofu; fresh corn; and brown rice. Our friends found our fumbling attempts at cooking quite hilarious and said that we are better than most comedy shows. Just because we don't know the difference between table and tea spoons! But Eli helped us roll the sushi and "mince" the fresh ginger, and Jennifer supervised the fish so we didn't poison anyone.

It was a very tasty dinner and we talked and laughed and read the conference proceeding titles.

I'm so glad that I am not an academic.

Anne dropped in to pick up the copy of her manuscript my daughter commented on, then Tizzy dropped in to meet up with Anne, and I told crazy stories and accidentally made a pun.

The children were amusing, the friends were amazing, and everyone was well fed.

After Jennifer took off to go on a 93 mile hike around Mt. Rainier, the others left, and Eli went to bed, I sat down at the computer and bought my tickets for California. I waited too long, expecting a fare sale or some kind of deal, but my cosmic luck with cheap tickets seems to have evaporated insofar as San Francisco is concerned. Or rather, there are no decent ways to save money on that city these days unless you book a hotel and airline at once, and I'm going to be staying with friends.

Oh well. The tickets only cost $20 more than a month ago, and that isn't a huge problem except that I'm a cheapskate.

Now back to the mail!

Posted by Bee at August 06, 2003 11:31 AM