INK blog

I cook twice a year: once for Rosh Hashanah and once for my husband’s birthday party every January. While three sit-down dinners in three days is exhausting, millennia-old recipes and limited attendees make the Jewish New Year manageable. Plus, if I really screw up, I can repent the very next week and, truth be told, my father usually does a fair amount of the cooking and hauls it in from New York or Arizona.

It’s the annual party that gets me. Cooking for 40-something people is doubly overwhelming for me, as I hate to cook. And I’m not very good at it. While I can multitask the life out of nearly anything else on earth, I cannot multitask cooking. I must pay very, very close and exact attention, or all hell breaks loose. I generally start cooking the weekend before the party and cook every day until it’s over. Then I plop on the couch until I feel fully recovered. That can take days.

People often ask if they can help or why in the world I don’t have the party catered. Honestly, it’s a labor of love. Not of cooking, but of Jeff. Other than the city in which we live, pretty much everything else we do is about me; this is the time when I want everything to be about him, so I cook my little brains out. Jeff, bless him, has learned much in 17 years of marriage, and he is quite good at knowing when to stay out of sight and when to come bursting into the kitchen with the first-aid kit.

This year, I have had some particularly fun snafus.

First, I was making my now-famous macaroni and cheese. You start off with what I now know is called a roux (don’t know why). I melted my stick of butter, then added the flour. The recipe calls for three-eighths of a cup of flour. Alas, there is no measuring cup for that (um, why?), so I figured I’d just use three one-eighth cups. Alas, again: Eights look a lot like threes. I used three one-third cups of flour. Instead of a roux, I accidentally made dough. Who knew that’s how you make dough? So I smushed it in a pan, baked it and realized it tasted like crust. I ate it with creamed honey. Delicious.

Later, as I was stirring polenta, I dislocated my whisk. Jeff came running. My whisk, not my wrist, I explained.

Then there was the makeshift standing mixer I made by balancing an electric hand-mixer in a batter bowl. Brilliant, until it launched itself and the bowl full of dressing off the counter and splatted all over the kitchen and me.

Which reminds me of a Weight Watchers meeting: Everyone was sharing recipes, and I lamented that none of it was helpful to me since I don’t cook at all. A woman sitting next to me said, “I don’t understand how you can like to eat so much and not cook.” I looked at her with pity, as I try to do with idiots, and responded, “I like to wear clothes, but I sure as hell don’t sew them myself.”

I met Posey when she first got to the shelter and was still in quarantine. A one-year-old border collie mix, she is black and brown and white and gorgeous and sweet and loving. Walking her was the high point of the highlight of my week: volunteering as a shelter dog-walker — Woofy Wednesdays, as my husband calls it.

Posey and I went for a long walk. She is well-trained; she sits, stays and listens. She also looks lovingly into your eyes and, best of all, hugs. Really. She is a leaner and a hugger, two of my favorite puppy traits. We chatted with a woman and her dog. She looked at me and said, “You have little hearts coming out your ears.” I couldn’t believe she could see them, too.

When I brought Posey back to the quarantine area, we were greeted happily by her bother, Dolby — a bigger, older, all-black version of Posey — who was residing in the booth next to hers. If he stood on his hind legs, he could see her and talk to her through the divider. Posey and Dolby were found together as strays and came to the shelter together.

I went home and told my husband about Posey and set about looking up her breed(s) to see if she could be happy in our sedentary apartment life. Border collies like to have a job and to herd things, I learned. “She can herd the beanbag chair around the apartment,” I exclaimed. (Yes, I have a beanbag chair.) “Probably not what they had in mind,” my husband said gently. And they need space and lots of exercise. Damn.

On the following Woofy Wednesday, Posey and Dolby moved up out of quarantine into the shelter, where each dog has its own spacious private room. They had come upstairs that very morning. We took Posey and Dolby on a dual walk, where they played with each other nonstop. When they went back to their rooms, however, all was not well. I sat in Posey’s room with her, and we listened to Dolby bark and cry and hurl himself against his door. Posey cried and barked and alternated between pawing at her door in response, jumping up to try to see him through the clear part of her door and looking at me with beseeching eyes. She put her paws on me, trying to make me understand.

I needed to leave to walk another dog. All I could hear were their cries — their literal cries — along with barking and a lot of thuds. I came back from my walk and nothing had changed.

The (human) dog attendants reminded me it takes time for the dogs to settle in and get used to their new surroundings. And, since the chances of Posey and Dolby being adopted together are slim to none, they need to adjust to being apart (please say you know someone to adopt these two perfect, gentle dogs together). Maybe if I spent some time with Dolby, they suggested, it would help him calm down a little.

I went in and sat with Dolby. He licked me and hugged me and climbed on me, but he never stopped crying and barking and scratching his door — nor throwing himself up against it to get to Posey. He was inconsolable. He climbed on my shoulders to get a better look out the clear part of his door, to see if he could find her. I hugged Dolby and stroked him and whispered over and over it would be OK, as tears poured down my face. And he threw himself against the door, trying to get to his sister.