For the halibut

The microwave died today. Since I was a child, well, I've just had the worst luck with microwaves. There was the one at Aunt Jeannie's which didn't display numbers unless you knew how to tap it just right with the knuckle of your index finger, like some culinary Fonz. There was the one in undergrad that randomly generated electrical storms and shot lightning bolts into your food as a result of a somewhat successful ball-lightning experiment. There was the one in my apartment that John just got rid of--and honestly, I don't know what the problem was other than the fact that the number "2" would be entered every 30 seconds, so when you wanted to use it you just had to plug it in and enter your time and then press start before Maxwell's Microwave Demon could press "2". And then there was the one John replaced it with, which just stopped working this morning. No demons, no lightning, no Fonz--just a whimper. And a ding.

Well, I thought, I can be Alice Waters and live without a microwave and maybe I will even start poaching my eggs in a bonfire I build in the backyard rather than using natural gas. After all, the only thing I use the microwave for is making milk tea, which is half milk, half cold water, one teabag, placed in the microwave for four minutes and twenty-five seconds, and then mixed with honey. It's steamy and perfect. But pretty much everything else I think you can do on the oven, or the stovetop, or the counter.

Then it came time tonight when I wanted milk tea, and--well, I had to get out a saucepan, pour into the saucepan, pour out of the saucepan, make sure I didn't scald the milk, make sure I didn't set the teabag on fire. This is really hard, Alice Waters, and the tea tastes a little funny too. Well, no, it's not that hard, but it's just different, it's a disruption in one of the little rituals in my life to which I anchor myself, and for the time being it's not working.

The point I am trying to make is that I don't know why I'm blogging about this because since the last time I blogged I stood on top of the highest point in the continental United States--no, not the one pictured above, because as you can see, in that photo there are higher points on top of which I am not standing--but you can extrapolate what the view from the top looks like from there. It's weird, what I think about this blog now, because two years ago it was reflections on pants and one year ago it was a beautiful picture dump and now I was on top of Mount Whitney two weeks ago but I haven't had the urge to write anything yet.

Maybe I will have something to say about that experience, other than waking up at 3 AM and seeing the cold shimmering stars and the clouds milky like my Earl Grey tea hanging in the thin clear air. But is it really important? Am I more defined by the fact that I could strap on some crampons and haul myself up six thousand feet, or by the piece of halibut that I bought on impulse on Saturday? Jeff and I cooked half en persillade (Thomas Keller's phrase for "with breadcrumbs, takes three times as long as you expect") and then I pan-roasted the rest last night. So is it me standing there in the snow at 4 AM breathing heavy in the moon-shadow of cold granite? Or is it me standing there in my kitchen alone at midnight picking through pea tendrils because I knew that I could make the greenest sauce I had ever known? What will we be?