No Power Failures

Plotnik has made it a habit to cook extra amounts of sauces and freeze them in 2-person serving containers, so when he and Ducknik return from overseas or overland to an empty refrigerator it is easy to cook up some rice or pasta, pour the sauce over it and chow down.

But this last trip took care of the last bit of Ragu Bolognese. So it's time to make more. Since Monday the World Headquarters Kitchen has been bubbling around the clock. The Bolognese Sauce is simmering away now (it takes close to 5 hours to make a double batch), the Pollo a la Cacciatora got made Monday and the Cochito Chiapaneco yesterday. These are all staples of the Plotnik Kitchenography at this point -- the Bolognese from America's Test Kitchen (simple, but time consuming), Cacciatora (chicken) from the Saveur Italian Standards booklet and the Cochito (pork with ancho and guajillo chiles) from Rick Bayless. After the Plots consume vast quantities when the recipes are first ready, they should yield maybe two large frozen containers each, which should set us up for Argentina and back a couple times, barring a power failure.

Remember when you had a big one of those? One year in college, Plot lived in a room down the hall from the kitchen. Though no one else on the floor used that kitchen, they all had to pass by it.

Plotnik forgot to clean out the fridge when he went home for a long vacation. Everyone else went home too. Since all the students had gone away, the owner of the building turned off the power to save some money.

He must have left town too, because when Plot walked up to his building three weeks later, he could smell his kitchen from two blocks away. He kept hoping that stench didn't belong to him, but it was his. People had come back before he had but they weren't going to do anything about it, no matter how gross the stink, because, after all, it wasn't their kitchen, and anyway light enough bongs and turn on enough Ornette Coleman and old broccoli starts to smell like a jazz club.

The lesson learned: broccoli smells worse after three weeks than milk or cheese.

OK, NotThat, are you still hungry?

Moral of the story: cook up a storm and hope the power stays on.