Another Thanksgiving feast has come and gone (though leftovers aplenty remain) and here it is Blank Friday already and I haven’t snapped up a single solitary bargain, not one.
Herself had requested Emeril Lagasse’s chicken cacciatore for dinner, and I decided to add the traditional accompaniment, Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash.
Somewhere along The Path for reasons unknown we got detoured into butter-cookie construction, and as a consequence I was a wee bit tardy getting started on my own preparations, which are extensive.
These dishes are not complex — the succotash needs just four minutes in the wok — but they involve more than a few ingredients, among them Emeril’s Essence, a spice mix with eight components.
The cacciatore itself has 20 more. The succotash? Eleven. Many cups and bowls for the mise en place, many, many of them.
For the cookery I needed a large Dutch oven, a pasta pot, and a wok. Knives, spatulas, spoons, graters, cutting boards, colander, oven mitts, rubber gloves, yadda yadda yadda. Clean as you go, etc. Stand back, gimme room, and so on.
A memory with fewer holes in it would have been nice, too. For some reason I had it in my head that the simmering phase of the cacciatore would last only 20 minutes, which was 40 minutes short of actuality. This put a slight hitch in my culinary gitalong and thus we were late sitting down to the actual eating, which annoyed Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who is a stickler for schedules (her own).
Didn’t matter. We’d lunched on eggs over medium and pan-fried potatoes, so we weren’t drooling and ravenous. We didn’t have two-legged guests waiting, growing surly with drink, reawakened memories of past slights, and plans for vengeance. And we didn’t have to drive home afterward.
During the final cleanup, which was extensive, we sang along with Arlo, singing loud to end war and stuff. We hope yous all did likewise. There’s a lot of it about.
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