Our Cynical Omelet

This is simultaneously the thing I hate and love about horror stories of a certain era, in this case as spoken by a character in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan.

She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as
she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now
I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood
in the midst of a wilderness.  You, Villiers, you may think you
know life, and London, and what goes on day and night in this
dreadful city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of
the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I
know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have
imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard–and
seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that
even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask
whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live.

The cheapest device in the proverbial book, the staple of early (and a lot of other) Lovecraft: The Unspeakable. But what on earth is it? In many of these tales, we are dealing with educated Englishmen who would certainly have the Greek and Latin to come to grips with what Plato thought about young boys, what horrors are perpetrated against women and children in war, and what sort of things Caligula got up to on his days off.  Popular fiction of the time had lots of bloodthirsty druids and opium fiends… so what’s so darned unspeakable?

I’m haunted by the paranoid idea that everyone who read that in 1894 knew exactly what Machen wasn’t saying, and that I don’t.

Spending so much time snowed in this winter revived a nascent interest in cooking, and over the past two months, I began to play around with recipe sites and magazine—all of which, over the past six weeks or so, have been flogging recipes for cassoulet.

Until this, I remembered the word only as a shorthand for “Frugal Gourmet Recipe I Hated During My Teenage Years.” Not wanting to spend all my worldly goods on meat, however, I eschewed all the meat except sausage, which I got at the grocery, and confit duck legs, which I got here. It is pricy, but when you consider that duck confit takes at least a day and a few pounds of duck fat  (and that I am a smallish Crazy Cat Lady), this was an easy choice.

Here, more or less, is the recipe that led to a good dinner this week (makes 2 servings):

• Remind yourself that you’d pay more for two portions at a decent restaurant.
• Chop some kielbasa (or sausage of your choice) into small cubes, about 1/4″
• Over ovenproof frying pan, strip meat and skin in small pieces from duck leg; put these, with some of the fat from the can, in the pan and add sausage.
• To this, add garlic to taste, something onion-flavored (I hate actual onions, so resorted to a dash of powder), salt and pepper
• Add a can of canellini beans,  approximately 4 oz chicken broth and a very generous splash of white wine (I used Cavit Pinot Grigio). Let simmer, stirring occasionally.
• Chop a handful of parsley and add to mixture. Stir.
• Realize that the can of crushed tomatoes suggested by several of the recipes you looked at might in some way dim the heavenly smell of what’s on the stove. Ignore it.
• Mix bread crumbs (I used crushed garlic-cheddar croutons) and sprinkle-able parmesan cheese in a bowl. Use to top the mixture before putting it in the oven for 10-15 minutes at 350 degrees.
• Savor the knowledge that, since you only used one duck leg, you get to do this again soon!

I suspect the finished product would be recognizable to no French person anywhere, but it was fantastic.

Mermaid In Exile, the previous name for this space, never seems to have got off the ground. So welcome to Our Cynical Omelet, future home of such vignettes as I choose to share. Enjoy!

Every time I see that CrunchGear did a profile of my area, I think I’m hallucinating.

Busy day today, if I don’t chicken out: today it is my intention to go to the courthouse and legally change my middle name.

The name change thing is, literally, the oldest thing on my to-do list: I remember pushing it very hard when I was 12, and I know it had been a desire of mine for longer than that. At first, I wanted to change the whole thing, but after growing fond of my last name and conceding the first to its (two*) admirers, I intend to make my middle name Alexandra.

It’s simple. It’s recognizable even to the poor spellers of the world. It has elegance. It lends itself to multiple potential nicknames. It’s not my current middle name, a huge plus given the recent tendency of my colleagues to misspell my first name into the middle one. And if I turn evil, you can all call me Lex Proofor.

I am also having my first medical checkup in, oh, several years. It’s easy, if your job doesn’t have health insurance, to tell yourself that it’s money and not a phobia keeping you away from the guy with the white coat. At least, it is until you get health insurance. I put it off, then considered making an appointment in late 2007, then found out a loved one was very ill: we didn’t need any more bad news then, and I was happy to put it off yet again. But now it’s time. I can’t wait to see what my blood pressure reading looks like!

Last on the Terror Tuesday list is the SciFi Channel’s transformation into one of the dumbest-named networks in electronic home entertainment (“Spike” is a possible challenger), SyFy. Do they really think the people who’ve been watching Star Trek: TNG reruns, Stargate, Eureka and bad Saturday monster movies are somehow unaware that they are huge nerds? Racking my wits to figure out whom this could possibly be expected to appeal to, I have arrived at the following:

1. Sylar fans (Heroes). Semiliterate Sylar fans at that;
2. A marketing manager who has naked pictures of some of the higher-ups with seventeen bottles of vodka and a petting zoo.

If you have a better idea, please “enlyten” me.

*Plus the thousands of other slightly dotty parents who birthed girls in the ’70s, of course…