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Magnalite
11 December 2002
I'm about as good at organising my life as I am my house; this morning I went out to buy hooks to hang things on, and came home instead with things to hang on hooks. But one of them was a new Magnalite pan for about a third of its proper cost, and Magnalite are just my favourite things to cook in, so that's okay. They've got a couple of their frying pans as well, and I am terribly tempted. Just that I have about a dozen frying pans already, and I can't quite think of a credible excuse for buying more.
The new pan - it's a sort of small wok, I guess - was broken in this evening, with my first shot at a Thai potato-and-mushroom curry. Look, no meat, ma! There are several things that I ought not to do while drunk; listening to and then deleting all my phone messages is one of them, and issuing invitations is another. In consequence of my failure to obey one of these simple rules, I have vegetarians coming to dinner next week, so I thought I'd better practise. I tell myself (firmly, and regularly) that it will be fun; and actually, tonight's curry was lovely. It's just the concept that appals. I was myself veggie for four and a half years, in my twenties; and ex-vegetarians are like ex-smokers, rabidly opposed to the practice of their former vice. Like ex-poets, which of course I also am; which I've just been holding forth about tonight, for Bryan Talbot's benefit. Lucky man.
Otherwise, I spent the day dreaming of new kitchens. Dreaming of converting the dining-room into a kitchen, in fact, and the current kitchen into a scullery and larder. I don't know, you do half an hour's DIY and suddenly you want to remake the house. I do, though, almost entirely. Just can't think what to do with the cats. Or how to afford it, but that's a minor matter compared with the disarrangement of my sweetlings' daily round. All that banging and dust, they'd hate it. So I guess we go on as before. We usually do.
© Chaz Brenchley 2002
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.