BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

What is it with Pumpkin Pie recipes? Do any of you know?

I’ve been cooking ever since I could drag a chair up to the stove, and while I’m not Iron Chef material, I know my way around a kitchen – residential and commercial. And, due to my background with a skillet, I usually end up doing quit a bit of cooking around the holidays.

When Turkey Day rolls around, I do get a slight bit of a rest every other year, as the family gathers locally and the cooking is divided up between a few of us. The other years I do the whole spread myself… But, no matter which year, odd or even, there is always the ubiquitous Pumpkin Pie.

I happen to love Pumpkin Pie. EK and the O-spring, not so much. No biggie, that just leaves more for me… Not that my lard a$$ needs it, but what the hell… It’s the holidays and if you can’t enjoy yourself, why even bother, right?

But, here is the big mystery – for as long as I have been clanging pots and pans in a kitchen, I have yet to discover a recipe for pumpkin pie that creates anything less than two pies. And, if you try to halve it, the damn thing doesn’t set up properly.

I’d assume it’s a conspiracy on behalf of Libby’s and all of the other canned pumpkin folks out there, but this even happens with fresh pumpkin…

So, there you go… Just one of those odd things I end up thinking about this time of year… Scary, eh?

More to come…

Murv

It was pretty much a typical Friday morning as Friday mornings go.

I rolled out of bed at 5:39 AM. A bit later than usual, yes, but only by around 9 minutes, which is the span of time allowed by a slap of the snooze button on our alarm clock. Not really a big deal. I just wouldn’t have quite as much “quiet time” alone in the office as I normally did prior to the hustle and bustle of getting E K off to work and the child off to school. I could easily live with that.

I hit the ground running… Or, these days, shuffling just a bit. I fixed breakfast for E K and the offspring, packed E Kay’s lunch while the coffee maker sputtered and steamed, downed a cup or two of the java once it was finished, answered some email, checked my Facebook and Myspace pages, and even took a quick look at the local news on the idiot box. (I prefer K M O V channel 4 here in Saint Louis, just in case you are wondering. They seem to have fun, and Matt Chambers is one of those honest weather guys who prefaces his forecasts with, “This is what we think is going to happen”.)

But, lest I digress…

In keeping with the regular Friday routine,  (as Friday has a few more steps than say, Wednesday, for instance), I had already run about the house  on a mission – gathering trash and replacing the bags in various refuse receptacles, then cleaning the cats’ litter boxes, (not one of my favorite tasks, but hey, it has to be done), and finally delivering the bountiful haul of garbage out to the street corner to await removal by the big, blue, noisy truck that arrives every Tuesday and Friday (except holidays, of course).

All was good… In fact, even with getting a bit of a late start, I was now actually ahead of schedule by just shy of 10 minutes. Not only had I made up the 9, I’d added 9 and some change to it. I was feeling a bit proud of myself.

I figured I could take advantage of that extra time on the back end of the morning, so rather than stop in front of the “toob” to admire Julie Chen and Maggie Rodriguez on The Early Show,  I just kept plugging away. As the clock continued ticking forward my routine progressed with little deviation from how it has gone for countless Friday mornings past.

My initial chores of the day were finished, (though there were many more on the docket for later), the offspring was in her room obsessing over exactly what to wear – as female offspring often tend to do, and E K was finally out of the shower. Since I was next up in the scrub-a-dub-dub queue, I slipped into the bathroom with my lovely wife and proceeded forward with step one of  “Murv’s Morning Routine Phase 2”.

Advancing mechanically through my usual order of tasks I had already run my toothbrush over my teeth, dragged a comb through my hair, and had even made it so far as to whip up a passable lather with my shaving brush,  (trying to be eco-friendly, I’ve used old school shaving soap and a brush – when not on the road – for several years now, as opposed to cans which just end up in landfills). At this juncture, my face was full of rapidly dissipating foam and I had just dragged a trio of  insanely sharp, cold metal blades resting on the end of a short, crooked stick, across my cheek when the demand hit my ears.

“Move over,” came my wife’s voice. “I need to wash my face.”

I gave the end of the screaming metal skin scraping stick a quick rinse and shuffled to my left. I was an inch away from dragging it along my jawline when I stopped, cocked my eyebrow, then turned to look at my bride. Her hair was wet and I knew she had just climbed out of the shower moments before. Still, not being one for taking things at face value, with a vague questioning tone I said, “I thought you just took a shower?”

“I did,” she replied. E K didn’t seemed surprised at all by my query. Of course, after 22 years together she has grown used to my random verbalizations of various thought processes and simply accepts them as old hat. I’m certain this will serve her well later in life when we are both sitting in rocking chairs, side-by-side, and I am talking to myself for no apparent reason.

I pondered her answer for a moment, then gave her excessively damp, red tresses a one-eyed stare as I added, “And, you washed your hair.”

“Yeah,” she answered. “I did.” She still didn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that I was currently channeling Obvious Man.

At this point, had I bothered to look in the mirror, I’m sure my eyebrows would have been see-sawing back and forth like a puppy trying to figure out whether to pee on the carpet in the living room, or on the tile in the hallway.

“So…” I started, then paused.

“So, what?” E K asked, amusement now welling in her voice.

“So, if you took a shower and washed your hair, how did the water manage to miss your face?”

“It didn’t. My face got wet,” she chuckled.

“Okay…” I paused again. “But, you’re saying it didn’t get washed while it was wet?”

“Of course not,” my wife replied. Her tone had made a drastic and sudden change. It was now one of sympathy for someone who is obviously a bit slow in the brainpan, so by way of explanation she added, “I have different soap for my face.”

“Different soap,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “Different soap.”

She reached past me and rummaged around in the medicine chest,  so I watched on in silence, now taking notice of the countless weird shaped and various sized bottles, tubes, and jars lining the shelves. I’d never really paid any attention to them before. After all, they are on her side of the medicine chest, not mine. Of course, I have to admit that I had always wondered why her side of the three-paneled chest consisted of both the left and the middle as well as a portion of the right, whereas mine was just a small sliver of said right.

Now,  my curiosity was piqued, so I focused my attentions on her task.

Oddly enough, upon initial and even secondary inspection, I didn’t see any containers with “soap” written on them. I  did, however, see things like “anti-wrinkle cow placenta apricot avocado P H-balanced age defying micro-bead moisture-rich scrub“… With “scrub” coming in at the end of the title, I suppose that stuff would qualify as soap, but it seemed to me “face soap” would have saved some ink when the bottle was being labeled. But, that’s just me, I guess.

There were other products as well, each with equally descriptive and endlessly confusing names like, “glycolic facial peeling solution masque,” and  “collagen infusing pore cleansing makeup removing pre-wash.” I figured that last one probably had pig in it instead of cow, what with collagen being first in the title.

One of the bottles that did make perfect sense had adopted the simplicity in labeling scheme I suggested earlier. It was titled, “nail polish remover.” I pretty much got what they were saying with that, so it seemed like a pretty good marketing move to me. I mean, if E K were to say, “Honey, could you hand me the nail polish remover,” I was all good. But if she were to ask me to retrieve her “face soap”, I’d probably be back to deciding whether to pee on the carpet or the tile. By the time anyone found me I would most likely be doing the “potty dance”.

There were other bottles, jars and tubes – more than I could count really – but I can’t even begin to pronounce their dozen word, semi-foreign, hyphenated and fancy-script-fonted names, (nor would I want to, unless of course, I was considering a career in Dermatology).

“I see,” I finally muttered, even though I really didn’t.

After a couple more swipes across my face with the stubble scraper, I gathered enough courage to ask, “So, do you have different soap for other parts of your body too?”

By now, E K had dried her freshly washed face and was lining up various bottles of differently named products along the edge of the vanity – each of which thankfully ended in the easily definable word, lotion. This helped reduce my confusion, but only just a bit given that there were so many containers that ostensibly all contained the same thing.  Once the linear arrangement was complete, she began working her way down the line, applying different amounts of each to various different areas of her person. Had I not been somewhat preoccupied with my confusion at this point, it probably would have been fun to watch, in an adult amusement park sort of way, if you get my meaning.

“Don’t be silly,” she chuckled in response as she adopted a Marlene Dietrich-esque leg-hiked pose, using the toilet lid to rest her foot, then proceeded to slather, smooth, and rub various lotions into the shapely appendage.

I was actually taking some amount of solace in that answer until she snorted, “Of course I do.”

I didn’t pursue the conversation. A quick glance at the clock told me I had used up my almost 10 minute surplus of time and was instead operating at a deficit, now being a little over 3 minutes behind schedule. I figured I’d better pick up the pace, because since E K had been in the shower first, I knew I was going to be spending several more minutes just looking for the shampoo amidst all of those different bottles she had lined up along the ledge around the tub.

At least now, after 22+ years, I knew they weren’t just decorations…

More to come…

Murv