Small Stuff

The receptionist was a no-show, and rather than listen to any bitching, I took the desk. Fine by me, I wanted to read about Munch anyway, following last night's sale. First I looked at more Modigliani paintings. Beautiful portraits of Jeanne, his last and truest love, she, though pregnant with his child, committed suicide the day after he died. When people complained about him painting pubic hair, he is said to have responded, "Naturalia non sunt turpia" which teases out as 'Natural things are not bad in themselves'. Hadn't realized Munch worked in so many mediums, there are thousands of lithographs, etchings, block-prints, often studies for or from paintings. Anonymous sent me a link to a good article on pate. There was a recipe for a 'Country Pate' that's very close to the formula that I use. I had to actually look at the calendar, to get my dates straight, because Kim is stopping by for the night of June 4th, on his way to a F1 race in Canada, and I didn't know when I was going to make 4 pounds of pate, but I see I'm penciled in to specifically NOT come in that Saturday, the 9th, when the wedding that fucked the schedule happens. So I can make it then, make a note to get some money from Trish, and bring an extra five gallons of water from town, for the clean-up. I need to make an extra pound, to take to the pub, and I always give B some. And I want some, so maybe I should make six pounds. It wouldn't dirty any more pans. The timing is way better this way, I'll age the batch for five days under pork fat. Not everyone likes this, and I'm not an arbiter of tastes, but the people that like it tend to cluster around the source and gorge. I like it, or I wouldn't make it, mostly on saltines, my medium of choice, with black olives and gherkins. It's good enough to repay the cost of production. In that I have to clean the kitchen afterwards or ants are suddenly a problem: it means that I needed a day, and I have it. But I also promised Sara that I'd make some for the unveiling of the new Carters, which I now see as a separate operation. A small batch I can make with one cast iron skillet, a bowl, and the blender. Amazing restraint, not using another comma, which as Flaubert famously said, could easily take up a day; empowers me, in an odd way, to take up a day making pate. Funny, how things play out. I'm famous for something most people don't like. Go figure.