Music and Cats

While Paul and I are not football fans, we spend most Super Sundays with our TV tuned to the game. Many years, the TV is muted save for during the commercial breaks. This year, however, our local team made it to the Super Bowl, and it seemed our civic duty to pay some attention to the game, if only so that we might make reasonably informed small talk with baristas and store clerks for the next week or so. We invited a few friends over to watch with us. Yelling at the game and laughing at the commercials - or vice-versa - is hungry-making work, so I planned a simple but hearty repast: homemade chili and Mexican chocolate icebox cookies.

Alas, my friends, I was not at the top of my game in the kitchen yesterday. (Sadly, I was not the only Seattleite suffering from top-of-game issues.) While my game plan was good, I failed to execute that plan effectively on two important occasions. In the interest of improving future performance, I offer the following post-cooking play-by-play.

A failure of multi-tasking
Had I made proper Texas chili, this failure would not have occurred, but almost 10 years after leaving my home state, my chili-making has become less than pure. I put beans in my chili. Tomatoes and bell peppers, too, but we shall not speak further of these now.

Yesterday morning, shortly after Paul brought up my morning coffee, I went downstairs to the kitchen, added some more water to the pot of dried black beans that I’d soaked overnight, and put them on the stove to cook. I then came back upstairs to finish my coffee and check my email. I didn’t spend a long time at the computer, but I got into a conversation with Janeen, and read a blog post or three.

When I noticed the aroma of black beans, I breathed in deeply. I caught a whiff of something more acrid. Cursing, I raced down the stairs, scattering startled McKittens in my wake. The pot had boiled over, and those beans were goners, their dark liquid spreading across the stovetop and the kitchen floor. For a short while, I thought my big stainless steel pot might be a goner, too. When I set it in the kitchen sink, the water on the sink’s surface sizzled away. I filled the pot with cold water, then poured the whole mess out. At the bottom of the pan, I had created a fine black bean enamel.

I have never kept a bar, but yesterday morning, the Bar Keepers’ Friend became my friend, too. Half a box of powdered cleanser, and half an hour of scrubbing and rinsing and scrubbing some more, returned the pot to its original shiny condition.


Despite my fumble, we had beans in our chili. Dropping back to safe territory, I sent Paul out to buy canned black beans at the local grocery.

A failure of tool-using
After finishing the chili, I prepared to mix up a double recipe of Mexican chocolate cookies. Fetching my heavy stand mixer from its box in the basement seemed too much trouble. Surely my handy-dandy hand-held electric mixer would be up to the task. Of course I heard my better judgement yelling, “What are you thinking? This is a job for a heavy mixer,” but did I listen? I did not.

The little mixer successfully creamed the butter, sugar and eggs. However, when I attempted to blend in the flour, cocoa powder and assorted spices, the sadly underpowered mixer complained loudly, overheated, and began to cough and stutter as the beaters attempted to work through the thickening dough. Realizing that I was about to commit mixercide, I switched the poor thing off.

In the bowl before me, small lumps of partially blended dough sat in a matrix of cocoa and flour. What to do? Subbing in the stand mixer at this point would involve transferring the mess of dough and cocoa flour into that mixer’s bowl. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves and plunged my bare hands into the bowl, using my fingers to rub the flour and cocoa into the dough. In a couple of minutes, I had a smooth ball of cinnamon-scented chocolate dough. Split in half and rolled into logs, the dough was retired to the freezer until game time.

In their near-death agonies, the struggling beaters had spit small globs of dough and a mist of cocoa flour onto everything within about a foot of the bowl. The time required to clean counter, canisters, coffee maker and cookbook exceeded the time I would have spent to use my stand mixer.

*****

Unlike my fellow Seattleites in Detroit, I managed to recover from my bungled plays; both the chili and the cookies, baked during the game, were declared winners. However, that may be only because there were no referees in my kitchen yesterday.

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