Just
how crazy is this month anyway?
by
Robert LaFrance
Here it is the last week of November
when in fact summer just started (in my mind) about three weeks ago. How crazy
is that?
I’ve often asked in these pages, as
a rhetorical question of course, who is in charge of the weather? Not me, I’ll
tell you that, but I will make some comments about it, strictly on a voluntary
basis.
A week ago we were in the middle of
winter. It was minus ten Celsius and the January wind was howling on this
mountain, but here we are today under rainy skies and the temperature is +8C
outside. What is this, communism? (I have no idea what Communism is, but I know
some Americans. They tend to blame that political theory for everything from
poverty to haemorrhoids.)
My wife had even put away all her
summer rolling pins. It’s funny, I had no idea until last year that RPs are
graded as to size, season and weight. The heavier ones are used in the summer
when the wielder has all kinds of energy to hit an erring husband (which may be
redundant). She has such an array of rolling pins that she can put half a dozen
away for the whole winter.
(The columnist shakes his head.) I
wasn’t even intending to talk about the weather when I began this column –
there’s been enough written on that subject – but was going to discuss Flug’s
nephew Francis who is visiting from Medicine Hat, Alberta. He and Flug – who
hasn’t been married since his 15th wife Flora fled in August – have
been ‘batching it’ and trying to decide which is the worse cook. Whoever wins
that contest doesn’t have to do it any more, with the downside being he has to
eat the other fellow’s grub.
Francis decided he was going to cook
“one a them soofuls’ for supper last evening. I was there helping Flug get rid
of some ‘past-best-before-date’ lemonade when Francis made this announcement.
It took quite a while before we discerned that a ‘sooful’ was what other
persons might call a soufflé, a dish that is challenging to most of us who
fancy ourselves cooks.
I was still there when supper
(‘dinner’ if you prefer) was ready for us to clamp on the old feedbag, so I
stayed. I figured to have plenty of lemonade handy in case I needed to wash
down a disaster, but I was pleasantly surprised. It tasted quite, well, tasty.
However, it wasn’t a soufflé. I
diplomatically asked Francis how he had cooked this gourmand’s delight and he
was very eager to tell me. I had praised it effusively, so he was in a good
frame of mind while I was in a lemonade frame of mind.
“You know them soofuls have a lot of
eggs in them,” he began. “Well, I didn’t have no eggs, so I substituted cream
of mushroom soup. It called for parmesan and cheddar, but I only had cheddar,
so I used feta for the other cheese, for that Greek flavour…”
“A Greek flavoured soufflé?” I querried.
“It sounds a little…recherchment if I may use the Romanian expression.”
“No, I didn’t put any romaine
lettuce in it,” he insisted. “Anyway, back to the recipe. It called for cream
of tartar and milk, but I couldn’t find the first one in Uncle Flug’s kitchen,
so I used nutmeg and canned milk with a dash of honey.”
He described the rest of the
‘sooful’ and its preparation and I had to admit that this young man had a
certain something when it came to the kitchen. He has what might be called a
flair, while Flug’s cooking would more likely be called a flare.
Anyway, by that time I had imbibed six large bottles
of lemonade and was ready to appreciate anything that didn’t outright kill me.
Francis had lost the cooking contest – meaning he was a far better cook than
Flug – so it looked as if Flug would be well-fed for a while, until Francis had
to go back to Florida and take Chris Hadfield’s place in the NASA space
program.
It just goes to show you; never
judge a book by its cover. Or is it that a gathering stone should save a mossy
stitch in time?
-end-
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