Culinary Chronicles and Concrete Curbs

By the end of Thursday, I had run out of gas.

My most salient thought throughout Thursday was my strong desire to take a nap. Perhaps the circumstances preventing me from running in the morning were a blessing in disguise. When the time came to go home after work, I made a beeline home, without even stopping to greet friends. I was wiped out.

Before taking a powernap, I whipped up batter for a cake that I would bake after returning from my evening gathering. I would share the cake on Friday night, during a celebration with friends who were beginning our third year together in North Africa.

About an hour before my bedtime on Thursday, when all I really wanted to do was to retire for the day, I moved the batter out of the refrigerator and into a cake pan, placing the cake pan in the pre-heated oven. Setting my watch for fifty minutes, I went into my room and found myself unable to gain much ground on my list of items to do before Friday.

When I returned to the kitchen to inspect the progress of my baked good, I quickly discerned three things:

• First, the oven was at least a hundred degrees too cold.
• Second, my cake had yet to reach full cakehood.
• Third, pools of melted butter had formed atop the partially-baked batter.

After wearily, yet expectantly, waiting nearly an hour for my food-incubating kitchen appliance to metamorphose the batter into a yummy post-dinner foodstuff, these three realities confirmed that truly I had run out of gas. And now, so had my oven.

(Sometimes, when I get really tired, my brain uses unnecessarily large words to communicate simple concepts.)

I supplied a full tank of gas to the oven. Into the oven, once again, went the fledgling cake. As you may recall from a few paragraphs ago, in this drawn-out account of cake-baking, pools of melted butter had formed atop the cake, yet the cake had not completely risen. The cake, when reintroduced to heat, continued to rise, eventually causing the pools of butter to run down the sides of the cake pan into the lower regions of the oven, resulting in boiling butter and large quantities of smoke.

I took appropriate precautions not to let the smoke alarm awaken my roommates and closely monitored the cake until it finally did reach full cakehood. Amazingly, the cake proved to be resilient and received many compliments at dinner the following night.

Fast forward a few hours from Thursday night to Friday morning...

Last year I taught high school. I looked forward to Fridays, because high school teachers, on a rotating basis, brought snacks to share with the high school staff. This year, as a middle school teacher, I return to the high school guidance counselor’s office each Friday as an emeritus high school teacher and snack consumer.

Today the high school carried out its annual Beach Day, the day when our small, but growing, high school conducts various bonding and team building activities at a local beach. As a middle school teacher, I now oppose Beach Day: It caused my high school snack to get deported to the beach.

Here I should note the other culinary reason why each Friday at school is special: It’s Couscous Friday. When a person eats large quantities of couscous, two things can be expected. First, the person will be ridiculously tired an hour later. The medical term for this is “couscous coma”. Second, the person will be curiously hungry an hour after that.

While medical research still needs to be done on this latter phenomenon, it can be said with relative certainty that the emerging from a couscous coma, when coupled with the deportation of high school snack to a local beach, can cause withdrawal symptoms leading to abnormal behavior.

And all of this explains how I wound up sitting in a kindergarten classroom, nonchalantly crafting my own peanut butter, banana and chocolate chip open-faced sandwiches early Friday afternoon. In kindergarten, I also learned how to share, which is why it was necessary for me to make two sandwiches, while each of the other kindergarteners only made one.

I named my sandwiches. The one on the left is “Smiley”. On the right is “Bucktooth”. Bucktooth was tasty. Unfortunately, I then underwent a phenomenon known among elite medical scholars as “Bucktooth coma”…

…and finally, something completely different…

One friend, who deserved to be at Friday night’s celebration of beginning our third year in North Africa together, stayed at school, working tirelessly to weld forms that will allow a concrete curb to be poured around the track where I run each morning—so long as it’s not pouring. I took a picture of him as he was welding some stuff. I’m posting it here, because I think it’s cool.