Two Dreams

I had good dreams.

I dreamed that I was given a helium balloon, and it was so buoyant that it pulled me off the ground.  I was in a university, and went bobbing through the hallways, creating mayhem among the teachers, who were dreadfully dismayed by a flying student who scattered papers and grading sheets as she went past! 

I dreamed that I won the lottery.  Not a financial sort of lottery.  A man with a clipboard knocked on your door and told you that you had won a lifetime of happiness.  Throughout your life, you would always walk the path that would bring you the most joy.

The Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse of All Good Dreams

Mr Tabubil tells me that my chocolate recipes are my dowry.  I have a notebook - a fat cardboard portfolio stuffed with printouts and photocopies and handwritten recipes, all heavily  and smudged around the edges with egg and cream and chocolate – and rum.

I’m a boozy sort of cook.  The recipes that Mr Tabubil counts as his favorites are a chocolate almond cake – with rum,  a chocolate raisin mousse – with  LOTS of rum, and a boozy chocolate fondue sauce that kicks your teeth down the back of your throat and puts you to sleep at the table, dreaming of dark nights in a distillery.   If I could find a way to put rum and chocolate in a cookie I would, but it doesn't feel quite right.  A Cookie is a very wholesome thing, and rum is dark and thick and dances on a tropical beach at midnight with its shirt off.  In cookies, dark chocolate (85% CAFFEINE! ) is as far as I dare go.  Caffeine leave me dancing on a beach at midnight with my shirt off and bongo drums banging in both my ears, so that is pretty damned decadent, all right.

Chocolate, done right, is a mouth full of silk and black velvet – with a lingering caffeine buzz.  Alcohol is a mouth full of fist – and somebody else’s teeth.  Chocolate and alcohol, together, make a pairing that is divinely inspired, in which the alcohol ceases to be something boozy in a bottle, and becomes something intangible, a sensation that hovers, ghost-like, at the edge of your plate.  Try to pin it down and you won’t find it, but if you let go and return your attention to your plate and your fork, it will sneak sideways around the edges of your mind lift the chocolate into the realm of the sublime.

Mr Tabubil has come over to the computer and snorted hugely, and said that I wouldn’t know what to do with an elusive alcoholic essence if it came up to me on the street, wrapped its arms around my knees and begged me to take it home and use it as I would – my recipes use alcohol in quantities that resemble a one-two punch, with a knockout blow that leave the eater flat on the floor with a carpet wrapped around his head.

To which I replied that a dessert that isn’t intended for a showstopper is a waste of time, energy and chocolate for both guest AND baker, and referred him to the chocolate mousse I made for a party last Saturday night – a chocolate mousse that broke two diets, left six guests under the table (albeit smiling) and sent all of them home in taxis.

Mr Tabubil snorted again and said it was a fault of my upbringing, and went away. 

My mother’s is a sozzly and decadent  household..  Not to drink, my parents never drank, but they kept booze on hand for guests who did, and after the good dinner parties there were always half-bottles by the score that needed using up - so we cooked with them.  And my mother, an almost-teetotaler, tippled while she cooked, and dinners that started with beef bourguignon went down deep rabbit holes and found themselves in extremely interesting places.

Her magnum opus was the evening, two days after a REALLY good party, when I came home to find that she'd used the leftover red wine in a cabbage stew, soaked the cucumber salad in chardonnay instead of vinegar (I don't recommend the substitution) and, halfway down the second half-bottle of the stuff, she'd had a brainwave and boiled the rice in champagne.

It wasn't a meal that was precisely edible, but it got us through all of the leftover bottles, all right.  The liqueurs and chocolates that we ate for dessert were almost conventional - except for the moment when someone giggled and cried 'whoops!' and sat down and missed her chair - with a carafe of hot coffee in her hand.  The next morning was all about caffeine - believe ME - but the bongo drums came first.

In her honor, and in the honor of the six sozzly guests of Saturday last, I present to you my mother’s own recipe for Chocolate Mousse.  You can work with the given amount of rum, or you can go the whole Tabubil and magnify it.  I leave it to you.  I will only note that dinner invitations to our house are a highly sought after commodity, and a guest who doesn’t have a caffeine headache after the dessert course is a guest we haven’t satisfied yet. 

Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse

Begin Marinating raisins 2 days ahead of serving.

Make the mousse 1 day ahead of serving.  

 You need twenty-four hours to soak the raisins, and the completed dessert must rest in the fridge for another twenty-four before you serve it to allow the flavors to mellow.  Serve it early and you will be astonished by its insipid banality.  Wait a day and you will be hit with a bolt of pure alcoholic chocolate goodness.

Ingredients:

225g semi-sweet chocolate (substitute for 112 g dark chocolate and 112 milk chocolate)

1/2 cup sour cream

3 eggs, separated

1/2 cup loosely chopped raisins (slice them open to allow entree to the alcohol)

3 tablespoons dark rum (start with 1 1/2 and add the rest as and when needed)

300ml thickened cream

2 tablespoons castor sugar

The day before you plan to make the mousse:  

 Put the rum and raisins together in a shallow bowl.  Cover and leave to soak.  Add more rum as and when necessary.  Use as much as you like!

The day of the cooking:   

Bring the sour cream and egg yolks to room temperature.  Melt the chocolate.  Add the melted chocolate to the sour cream and egg yolks and stir until smooth; add the raisins and all the unabsorbed alcohol.   Lightly whip the cream and fold it in. 

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, gradually beating in sugar.  Fold beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture. 

Spoon into serving glasses (keep portions small!) and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy!

(Important note – you must always add melted chocolate to eggs and dairy – not add eggs or dairy to chocolate.  There’s a complicated chemical reason for this that I can’t precisely recall – but I can tell you from extensive personal experience what happens if you do it wrong – the chocolate tends to seize and solidify and ruin, and you have to start over!)

There Possibly IS No Business Like Show Business

On account of being sik, I spent my evening on the sofa, snuffling pitifully and watching old Hollywood musicals.  I started out with There's No Business Like Show Business because it has Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe AND Donald O'Conner in it, but the film didn't seem to do much with any of them.  There was a great deal of noise, but not much music.  There was a great deal of technicolor drapery and swirling, but not much dancing or choreography.  Lots of jokes, not much humor, and a great deal of Marilyn Monroe wearing not very much at ALL.   Her character sings in nightclubs, but her costume has chrome nipples on tips of its spangled pneumatic front and that's all I have to say about that.  Poor Donald O'Conner was forced to dance the highland fling to a New Orleans Blues version of Alexander's Ragtime Band - and Ethel Merman?  She had precisely two speeds - full throttle and off, and no-one seemed to be able to get near the off button.

After ten minutes and six musical comedy numbers, Mr Tabubil looked up from his book and said "You know what?  This is just like porn.  A tottery, badly acted plot to give a thin string of connection to the noisy bits.   And the noisy bits? They're an aesthetic abomination.  And the apparent sincerity of the actors?  Yeah, they're faking it."

So we put on Broadway Melody of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell instead, and Mr Tabubil forgot that he isn't supposed to approve of movies that aren't in color, and we watched happily until bedtime.

I am Sik

I am a poor unfortunate.  I am home in bed with an autumn flu -  a lady coughed next to me on the plane all the way from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt last week and it's all her fault.  I started a mild head cold on wednesday, then languished for days with the sore throat from hell, and just when i decided that it was a mere virus and GOING AWAY, last night it took a running dive into my chest and did its level best to become bronchitis.  And this morning, sinusitis as well.   Just to cover every contingency.  

The sneezing is impressive.  It echoes.   Do you remember the old saw about how if all of the one billion people in China jumped from chairs at the very same time, the earth would move?

I know that the mathematics are bunkum, but here in my sudafed-fueled daze I'm starting to wonder -  do you think that the mind has a resonant frequency?  And do you think that if we found it, and had everyone in the world hum it all at once, we could crack open every narrow mind - drive big wedges into the gaps and sing them open?  Make people HEAR the points of view that they don't let themselves see?

Wouldn't that be nice?

Mr Tabubil calls home every hour to ask me about my temperature , but I don't need to know my temperature.  Knowing won't make me feel any better, and I'd rather not find out in the first place.  The whole Tabubil family has an allergy to thermometers; when we see one coming, we hide under the bed.

It's all my mother's fault.  (Isn't that another old saw?)  My mother suffers from an excess of thermometer-related enthusiasm.  If one of us Tabubils ever stayed home sick, we'd find ourselves flat on our backs in bed with at least two - and often three- thermometers in our mouths: a digital one, a mercury one to back it up, and often another digital one to average out the other two.  

 

She always forgot about it and left it there.  I'd be in bed with a honking great sinus infection, incapable of breathing through my nose, but she'd beg me - on pain of maternal disappointment, not to open my mouth, so I'd lie there in a haze of headache and snuffle while the world went pink around the edges while mum implored me to HOLD it for just another minute - and about when I was turning blue and starting to make small squeaking snuffling noises, she'd say, from the kitchen, where she'd dashed off to - just for a moment, honestly, I swear I'll be RIGHT back -

"Oh Dear!  HOW long has it been?"   And it had always been ten minutes longer than it should have been, and she'd sigh and shake her head and shake the thermometer and say "It's been a little TOO long, I think.  Just one time, sweetie.  Let's do it again." 

And she'd pop the three thermometers back into my mouth , with a firm finger on my chin to keep the thermometers - and the wailing - in.  

Why Mr Tabubil thinks I'm going to use the wretched instrument  is beyond me.

Goodnight.

Dogs in Santiago

Santiago has very little dogs and very BIG dogs. The little ones are yappy and live in apartments and are walked by maids in pinafores. The enormous ones live in houses with very small gardens and boil off their frustration and boredom by barking furiously through the front gate at pedestrians in the street. The effect can be devastating - they time their attack for a moment when the pedestrian has momentarily looked the other way and compare notes afterward, grading for speed and distance, and mostly, how HIGH the pedestrians jump.

Last week I saw a man walking two dogs -  the biggest German Sheppard I’ve ever seen in my life, and the smallest, yippiest, fluffiest white poodle I’ve ever seen. All I could think was “how is it that one of the two hasn't become lunch?”

Daschunds are the loudest dogs in creation. They yell even bigger than beagles. Yesterday I took a new route to work.  The dogs along my usual route were used to me - I hadn't been barked at properly in weeks, and my edge was getting rusty.  I was humming along, with my music going in one ear and walking far too close to the fences, and suddenly all HELL broke loose at a hundred and fifty decibels right under my left elbow. I levitated - straight upward, with all my limbs flailing independently, and - I admit it - I yelled.  I came back down to earth just in time for a massive German Sheppard to come bounding out to join the wretched sausage dog and start snapping a set of slavering jaws about a foot from the level of  my nose. A little grey poodle came out to add HIS noise to the din, but by that time I was long gone.

Horrible things.

I vented my feelings by barking rudely at the next dog I saw, an elderly spotted spaniel, who lifted her head, stared at me with bemusement and went back to sleep.

I do enjoy barking at dogs. Last week I walked past a house and a cocker spaniel sitting on the front stoop perked his ears up and bounded joyously toward the fence, ready to give me the full treatment. Right as it reached the gate I gave a full-throated “RUFF!” and the silly thing stopped in mid bounce, like he’d galloped into a wall. He fell flat on his belly, with his mouth hanging open most unbecomingly, and an expression of total flabberghast on his face.

I WISH I knew what I'd said.

Little Dog Meets Little Dog.

I went for a little walk this evening to buy fresh fruit (apples, peaches, white nectarines and blueberries - even the tail-end of summer is extravagant!) and stumbled into the most LUDICROUS dog fight I've ever seen.

A teacup poodle being walked up Calle Suecia decided to take on a miniature dachshund being walked down Calle Suecia, and the dachshund perked up her ears and said "Oh, bring it ON-"

They lunged at each other - yip! yip! yeek! yip! - teeth bared and ears back - and then, simultaneously, they reached the ends of their leashes, discovered that they were only about 12 inches apart (nose to nose, practically! Gosh!) and with one last terrified "Yeek!" threw themselves backward and cowered behind their owners feet with their tails between their legs.

And from that vantage point, each little dog saw that the OTHER dog was cowering, so each, again, lunged forward, yipping and yeeking and snarling - and came to the limit of their leashes to find themselves nose to nose with something just as big as they were and terrifyingly loud and snarly -

In total terror, they threw themselves backward and hid behind their owners legs and quivered there, with their tails so far between their legs they were practically tickling their chins.

And then they snuck a look across the sidewalk, saw their foe cringing, perked up their ears and did it all over AGAIN.

No kidding - from my perspective, this was serious 'stand stock still in the middle of the road, gawping with disbelief" stuff.

Canine intelligence is frequently overrated.

Painters All Over the Place

Our building is being painted.   For the last month, a flock of painters on bosuns chairs hang all over the building at all sorts of hours of the day, painting half of this then going away again for a week or so while they paint a third of that, then taking three days off, then showing up again at four pm on a Saturday afternoon for an odd hour or two  - it's an odd method of working, that leaves the building mostly piebald, and the residents live with curtains drawn, just in case the painters happen to show up outside a window when you'd rather they didn't.

It's been a rather eventful month.  There was the day that the painters discovered that a series of drain spouts had filled up with wasps nests, and one of the painters was attacked by an entire hive - while hanging from a rope, six floors up.  Another day, a different painter forgot to eat his lunch and fainted on the job - fortunately, he was only half a storey up from the ground at the time, but it was a near thing.  And three quarters of the residents are not on speaking terms with ANY of the painters after a trivial little disagreement about drying times - the painters were being poetical and speaking in hypothetical absolutes, but there's a lady on the fifth floor whose mother's eighty-seventh birthday party turned out to involve quite a lot of dry cleaning for the guest of honor and several other  people on the guest list.

And the concierges, who have been resolutely neutral throughout the whole process, met me at the door  four days ago in a cloud of angry arms and exceedingly colloquial Spanish, after one particularly enterprising painter painted over all the water meters for all the apartments on building's south side.

Life is a constant adventure, full of surprise and mystery - and so will be our water bill this month; the meter-man was on deadline and didn't stay to wait for the paint to be scraped off.