So. I’m thinking that I’ll have reconstructions here to La Casita Johnson de Santa Fe to a stage wherein the cooking of a Thanksgiving dinner for a crowd will be possible. As I drifted off to sleep last night, I was thinking about a probable turkey menu with potential attendees, and also about the urine-soaked Texas Absentee Ballot we mailed off to Austin yesterday.
Thoughts of the ballot stewing in our juices in its plastic sleeve until opened sometime Monday brought thoughts of how to brine and bake a turkey at 7,199 feet of elevation. Those thoughts brought dreams of me doing a cooking show with Albert Einstein. Some guy wrote a book about kitchen science wherein he used my middle namesake as the scientist explaining the mysteries of cooking to his personal cook, and me, I’ve always wanted to read the book but never have.
In this TV show, I was Albert’s cook and Albert was my advisor on mind altering substances. I’m known to have spent decades perfecting recipes utilizing naturally-occurring chemical compounds—Mr. Einstein took great length demonstrating that each of the treats I prepared were not simple moleculed ingredients but were quite complex in structure—and the menu on this dream show included several of my personal favorites.
We started with an arugula salad with pickled celery and onions, truffle-shaved fire roasted Peyote buttons and a raspberry vinaigrette. Big Al Jones (the famous scientist asked me to call him Big Al Jones) told the audience that fire roasting Peyote helped release the bitter drug from its cellulose casing.
“The drug in Peyote—a spineless cacti closely related to the colorless succulent named Mittless Romneyi—is a native to the Chihuahua region of Mexico and America’s desert Southwest. The psychoactive drug in Peyote is a bitter alkaloid that can bring a bout of nausea as a precursor to the high. While it is usually cut in strips and chewed or brewed in tea, Mr. Johnson’s method of searing and then shaving the small buttons can reduce the timing of hallucinogenic effects from something approaching 45 minuted to just under a half hour and, likewise, reduce the incidence of nausea.”
“Thanks Big Al Jones,” I said in response, “Now, how about you explain all about the Bufo alvarius and the dangers of over-ingesting toad sweat.”
Which reminds me. Gram, the P-cubed, Honor the fucking cat and Ralph the limo driver are still missing. They disappeared Tuesday afternoon when the long stretched Hummer pulled away from the curb at La Casita Johnson de Santa Fe and headed, as Gram told me when she said, “We’re a headed inta tha mountains, Mooner. Penelope wants her a mountain man an we’re gonna git her one.”
When I reminded my randy old grandmother that New Mexico has eighty-nine named mountain ranges than range all over the fucking place, she said to me, she said, “Oh, who gives a shit which-a-one, Mooner. The P-cubed wants her a coonskin hottie an’ that’s fuckin’ that!”
What, inthefuck, is a coonskin hottie even look like in the year 2012? Except for reruns of the old Davy Crockett TV show, I haven’t seen a coonskin anything in forty years.
Regardless, I told Gram to be home Friday night if she wanted to be a part of the first full meal I cook in the new kitchen. “Don’t simmer no vittles fer us, sonny boy, mountain men kin be tricky to catch. We might need ta set us up some trot lines.”
Trot lines to catch a mountain man? “What’s the bait?” I asked absently to the flat back end of the departing Hummer limo. “What will you use for bait?”
And what size hooks?
Anyway, dinner last night was a nifty tuna steak, baked potatoes with mushroom-infused butter, and steamed broccoli. Gram brought me some fresh mushrooms from her cellar and they proved to be quite illuminating. And that reminds me that when I last spoke to Mother she told me several interesting things. “You need to watch out for those homo-sex-u-als there in Santa Fe, son. I hear that the thin mountain air weakens your resistance to their brainwashing techniques. Oxygen deprivation they call it.”
I tried to have an intelligent conversation with her about how if I was ever going to be a homosexual it would have been after my only homosexual-type sex act. “You know, Mother, when that asshole Baptist Boy Scout Leader raped me. That was my big chance to become gay.”
“I never believed you were molested, Mooner. Mr. Spenser was a good Baptist family man. You made that story up to cover for your bad grades in school and for spending so much time by yourself. You should wash your mouth out with soap for telling such a lie.”
I was stunned. “Fuck you, Mother,” I said to a dead phone. I guess she had hung up when I was stunned by her not unexpected callousness to me. I try hard to not tell my mother to fuck off, but sometimes it needs to be said. At least now I don’t have to be in the same room when she punishes me for ruining her life. And that, dear friends, is heartening.
Anyway, again, my favorite casino has a last Saturday poker tournament and today is October’s last Saturday. So it’s manana, y’all.
