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orzo and pepper
Sunday, February 17 2013
We had visitors for most of the day, new friends from the city: a soon-to-be medical doctor named Stacy, her front-end-developer boyfriend Keith, and their dog, a 14 year old Whippet named Devo (get it?). Their multi-special family used to also include two rescued Greyhounds, but they both recently died. Stacy and Keith are still devastated by the loss, so Gretchen suggested they come up for the day. And so here they were. As always, Gretchen had been slaving away for hours in the kitchen, and I'd put in an hour or more vacuuming and washing dishes.
The meal today consisted of a French onion with mushrooms soup followed by an delicious orzo salad. A distressing amount of conversation concerned the various processes of food preparation, a subject that makes my eyes glaze over. I did, however, have a couple things to contribute to that topic at various times this afternoon. The first such contribution came during a tour of the upstairs, when I was showing off the tempeh fermenting rack I'd built in the laboratory. The other came during lunch when Gretchen brought out the orzo salad and then I fetched the jar of pulverized hot pepper dust (what had become of my autumn pepper harvest). I cautioned Keith as he enthusiastically sprinkled the dust over his salad, and it wasn't long before he wanted to know what I'd done to make it so powerful. He thought extreme pulverization had something to do with it.
Other topics of discussion included children (none of us want to have any), religion (none of us believe in God), and the things Stacy has seen in her OB/GYN training. There exists, for example, a doctor who, when repairing a woman's post-partum vagina, puts in a gratuitous extra stitch and then lecherously declares, "That's what I call the husband stitch." Stacy and Keith also admitted to voting for Ralph Nader while living in Florida in 2000, though they said if they had it to do over again they'd vote for Al Gore "in a heartbeat."
At some point we all went down to the greenhouse to see how warm it was. The sun had made it cozy in both the upstairs and downstairs. I'd put Clarence in the greenhouse upstairs earlier, and he was delighted to see us, even Devo the Whippet. From there we went on a short walk down the Stick Trail, though the weather was bitterly cold and windy and Devo's tender Chelsea feet soon started to bleed from an accumulation of injuries, so we turned around and came back.
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