Trying To Stay Awake

It is 9:20 and Rescue Me isn't on until 10, and my eyes are closing.

I had a temp job today, one of those register nitwits for the seminar numbers, and I had to be there at 7 am. I deeply resent this, because these things pay me $12 an hour, and I don't really want to get out of bed for $12 an hour. I mean, really - would you? Yeah, yeah, I know - it's $12 an hour that I wouldn't be making otherwise, but I still feel it's an imposition. I have NO objection to getting up at 3:30 am to make a 5:30 am location bus...but then I know that A. there will be a large breakfast waiting at the other end, and B. that I will come out of the deal with upwards of $200 in my pocket. Eight and a half hours of seminar crud, on the other hand, gets me a GROSS of $102 lousy bucks. Growl.

I made myself the nicest omelet last night! I am not much of an egg fancier...I love them deviled, and every now and then I get a yen for an old fashioned egg, bacon and toast breakfast, but in general, I don't do much else about them. But last night I was looking for the quickest thing I could cram into my face that happened to be lying around the house, so an omelet seemed the most logical...and damn, it turned out well. I was very pleased, and may continue to play around with omelets.

While eating my lovely creamy hammy cheesy omelet, I was (naturally) reading a cook book. This was one of my ancient (from the '60s) Gourmet cookbooks, and while I know I've gone into some of the insane things they suggest you might want to do with food before, I came across a whole new one last night (well, these tomes are like 600 pages - it's easy to miss things).

It was one of their madly complicated canape recipes, which involved eighty seven ingredients (a teaspoon of that, a quarter teaspoon of the other, etc.) and it started out by telling you to make toast and keep it hot. It then veered off into what you were supposed to put on this toast, and it actually gave the exact number of minutes you should cook these other bits...2 minutes here, 7 minutes there. This added up (well, I was curious) to about 25 minutes.

Here is the question. Why in the name of God are you supposed to make the toast FIRST? And where in the name of God are you supposed to keep the toast hot for 25 minutes? I don't know about you, but I've never seen a New York apartment kitchen with a warming oven. Do you keep the toast in a warm oven? After 25 minutes, wouldn't you have Melba toast? I should think it would be clear to the worst cook in the world that if a filling takes 25 minutes to make, and the toast takes 5 minutes, if that, the obvious thing to do would be to put the toast in to...well, you know...toast when you are doing the last 5 minute job of that filling (topping, I guess). Wouldn't any normal human being do that? Of course, this presupposes that those old Gourmet cookbooks are normal. After just running across a menu for an eight course dinner party, I really shouldn't put the words "normal" and "Gourmet" anywhere near each other.

I think I'll stick with the omelets.

Love, Wendy