Sunday Feast!

I made chicken parmesan yesterday, six chicken breasts pounded flat as papyrus, slathered in egg whites, powdered with Italian seasoning bread crumbs, gently placed on a thin bed of Ragu sauce in Pyrex dishes, then covered with shredded cheese, more Ragu with Italian seasoning, garlic powder, fresh diced onion and home grown sliced tomatoes ripened on the windowsill. The dinner took somewhere between three hours and six months, depending on your "go" time - the pounding of the chicken or the planting of the seeds - and was quite a lot better or at least more to our taste than restaurant chicken parmesan. We accompanied the meal with sparkling white zinfandel repurposed from the Kleinerts' thirtieth anniversary celebration, and afterwards I felt very, very tired but too awake to nap. I think I read, but it's all a little hazy. For desert, Brandi made a nifty Cherios-Krispie treat. Basically, you substitute Cheerios for Rice Krispies, melt marshmallows and butter and glom the mass into a pan. I hinted strongly that the aluminum heart pan would symbolize our love. I further hinted that frosting our treat would be a great symbol of the sweet cement that binds us, but that may have been a bridge too far, since the treat was a little too Krispie and needed a little warming up to more easily parse with my elderly mid-thirties teeth. Brandi liked it as-is, but she is very kind.

I enjoy this kind of hard work on days when I don't have too many projects going on. I also appreciate the patience all my relatives, friends, ex-roommates and ex-girlfriends had with my food experiments, sometimes layering starch-on-starch in bewildering ways that tested the patience as well as the palate. Thank goodness I passed out of my ramen phase ages ago. Or did I? We still have some in the cabinet, in case I feel like making mom's broccoli slaw, but the urge to chomp on it raw is strong, even in the face of a feast.