Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Pesto is the best, o!

Saturday, Sept. 8, 2007
9:47 p.m.
The bad mood from yesterday spilled over into today. We have a dishwasher. In the mornings I generally empty out the clean dishes and put them away. Generally. Sometimes I don’t and it sits full of clean dishes all day, the dirty ones collecting on the kitchen counter, until someone puts them away and starts loading the dirty ones. That someone is usually (but not always) me.

I have asked people endlessly to please put their dirty dishes in the dishwasher (when it is emptied) instead of leaving them on the counter. My husband, whom I love and adore until death do us part, is the worst culprit. I am forever putting his dishes in the dishwasher. My daughter is pretty bad too, leaving her dirty dishes on the kitchen table. In the warm weather we’ve been having, I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave dirty dishes lying out and about.

Also, generally, if beer is in the house, the box the bottles came in will be somewhere in the vicinity of the fridge convenient for replacing spent beer bottles. Do they go in the box? No, of course not! That would be too logical. Today I found an empty bottle on the floor right next to the box. At that point I totally lost my cool and started yelling at the guilty party (who was my husband whom I love and adore until death do us part).

My daughter, who was waiting to accompany me to Costco for pesto-making supplies, witnessed this, and asked me in the car later why I had such a hair-trigger temper. I tried to explain that I didn’t want to blow up, but when my hormones are out of whack as they are, it’s as though the little man who keeps the dragon from exiting its lair is on holiday, and there is nothing to stop me from exploding. I guess this is why my brother called me a loose canon. I don’t think I am one, though. I blow up at little provocation, but there is always some (however small) provocation. It’s just that at certain times of the month, the size of the reaction is totally out of proportion with the severity of the perceived affront.

Anyway, we picked up her friend O.B. (who is her BF’s roommate and had volunteered to make pesto with us, as the BF [who was my sole helper last year] was suffering from food poisoning) and drove out to Costco, glutting ourselves on free samples. My mood finally turned when I had some chocolate-covered blueberries, a product of a nearby Trappist monastery. I do love free samples!

When we got home, after a cup of tea and more chocolate, we got down to the business of making pesto. The two kids plucked and I proceeded to make 14 pints of pesto, two of which I gave to O.B. to take home with him. The rest I froze. It took hours. My hands still smell of it. The kitchen smells of it. We had fettucine with fresh pesto for supper. If there was ever a reason to rejoice in simple things, like basil and garlic, pesto is it.

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