Cold Rain

Internalize the quality of attention. I didn't get to the percussion concert last night, nor the (official) opening at the museum today, as the rain had the driveway slick, but I'm not sure I would have gone anyway. I'm in a groove of reading for eight hours (split-shift), going for a walk, and writing for six hours. Jim Harrison, a gifted food writer himself, also thinks that John Thorne is the best, and has a wonderful essay wondering about where all the chicken thighs have gone. Russia, as it turns out. I had a package three in the fridge, from the sale bin, and I needed to use them. Skin them, put the skins in a skillet over low heat, to render and fry, then poke slivers of garlic into the thighs, set them to marinate in papaya nectar, and a dry, fruity zin. Turn my attention to the skins, pull them over to a hotter part of the stove, cook them nicely, and save the fat (I'll be frying eggs in it tomorrow); then make a fold-over sandwich with fried chicken skins and pesto mayo. This is only improved with a large slice of onion or some left-over fried potatoes, or both. I bake the thighs right in the marinade, in a slow oven for an hour, during which time I make a small pot of rice, and a vegetable dish I dearly love, Brussels Sprouts cooked as a kind of vegetable pasta. What the hundreds of pastas teach us is that hollows can contain a liquid or sauce, and if you trim the Brussels Sprouts carefully, the ones you had gotten in a sale bin, because Brussels Sprouts are always remaindered. I look up and it's snowing, the roof is still dripping, but outside, it's snowing hard. What you do is trim off the ends and sear everything in a walnut of butter, then break apart the halved sprouts with a wooden spoon, and you end up with all these half-moon containers with which to convey a rich butter sauce to your mouth. Damned good. I've developed a technique whereby I bone-out a chicken thigh, my favorite part, and roll it around a filling, a sort of taco, top it with grated cheese, and finish it in a hot oven. Sinful. I'll die with my snoot in a pile of butter. When I got up to pee ---the meal had made me comatose, and I couldn't see to read, so I had taken a nap--- the back porch was covered with two inches of new powder. I had to sweep a path down to solid ground. Even then I was unsure of my footing, so I was very careful, in my slippers, going out to paint my name in the snow. Being Tom is easy, you just assume the fall-back position, hunkered down in a tree-tip pit, sucking marrow from a bone. The wind kicks up. We don't actually have any control. You know that as a fact, when the wind howls through the trees, and you're reduced to just being another mammal, peeing to the leeward.