Today, I have every hour planned down to the last minute, but I've just been waylaid by an errant decorative plate slipping from its perch and sliding across the shelf taking three wine glasses to the floor with it. D---. I'm sweeping glass from every nook and cranny in our breakfast room/kitchen combination, all the while fuming about this unscheduled interruption. When on a time sensitive roll, I can be more than a little anal retentive. There...finally finished.
But, as I glance at the cool decorative basket that holds my treasury of little used cook books, I see that it's also littered with wine glass shards. D---. I carefully pull out each book, wipe it off, then finally dump the glass from the basket and vacuum it with the tiny vacuum...the one with very little suction, but enough to do this job.
I begin to creatively place the books back into the basket--Tall books down to short? Short books up to tall? Mixed? Messy? Neat? What would Pottery Barn do? D----. I pick up a newish cookbook simply titled "Pasta" that I bought at IKEA a few months ago but haven't looked at yet. At the time I had some reservations about buying a Pasta cookbook that was produced in Germany, printed in Slovenia, then sold at the ultimate Swedish bastion of coolness, but threw all caution to the winds and put down my $8.00.
And now, I'm thinking that pasta would be good for dinner tonight--quick and relatively easy. I scan the Table of Contents, settle on "Pasta and Meat", Page 62, and begin skimming the recipes.
I'm brought up short by Page 84--Fettuccini with Rabbit. That is just sick and wrong, but I do continue to look at the list of ingredients which seems fairly inocuous if you leave out the various rabbit parts: fettuccini, salt, herb butter, garlic, cream, parsley, pepper, 16 Vineyard Snails. 16 Vineyard Snails? What are Vineyard Snails?
So now, I must fire up the computer to visit my new good friend, Wikipedia. But, Wikipedia is as stumped as I am...no entries for Vineyard Snails.
That, of course, means I have to go to Google, which I was trying to avoid because I have a scheduled day and it can take so long to really find what you might be looking for...and, sure enough, Google has returned 521,000 entries in 0.19 seconds. They're tremendously proud of that fact, but it's another 0.19 seconds out of my day which, if I haven't mentioned, is a busy one.
OK. Vineyard Snails, known to some as Helix Pomatia (Latin?) are quite the delicacy in Europe. "Highly valued" as a matter of fact. They are exported from Lithuania in great numbers. Apparently, according to an entry farther down the page, some slimed right off a container at the Port of Tacoma which, as of late 2010, was locked in a life and death battle with the little buggers. They (the Vineyard Snails) are quite fond of cereal grains and, left alone, could decimate the fields of Washington. Not something to be sneezed at.
Now, where was I? Oh yes. Don't worry, little fellow in my back yard, I wouldn't cook you even if I had 16 Vineyard Snails, so I'll put the cookbook away and go back to...what was I was doing when this all started?
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