weekend update January 13, 2013

Life is a lot like jazz - it's best when you improvise.” 

George Gershwin

Jazz and I didn't meet until I was nearly twenty- and just to be clear, jazz was around for a few years before I was twenty.  I met jazz at the same time and on the same university campus where I met the man who was to become my husband, and I fell in love with both of them at the same time. 

Miles Davis is next to Mozart and Magnetic Fields on my itunes playlist, and the lessons I learned from jazz- those jazzy ideas about composition, improvisation, structure and spontaneity  play out nearly every day in this classroom/laboratory otherwise known as the kitchen.

I offer the following riff:

This fantastic vegetarian chili recipe I tried last week. The deep umami flavor comes from (surprise!) unsweetened chocolate. To us maybe that seems weird, but historically, chocolate wasn't limited to sweets- in fact to the Mayan, cocoa was good medicine and found it's way into nearly everything.

they may have been wrong about the end of
the world, but that doesn't mean they were
wrong about chocolate.

So. Back to the more recent past, when I was making chili and conducting a frantic and fruitless pantry search for a square of unsweetened chocolate. Too late to change dinner plans, and the chocolate was a crucial ingredient- cocoa's in the recipe's name, for cryin' out loud! I can't make "vegetarian chili with cocoa" without cocoa!  Ack! This called for a little emergency improv! 

Did you know that there's a way to make an unsweetened chocolate square out of  fat (like butter, shortening, coconut oil) and cocoa powder? There is. It's on the back of every box of Hershey's unsweetened cocoa. Here's the formula:

Whew! Ingredient list complete! And the result?

best vegetarian chili ever. At least so far.

And today, another jazz-style call and response- this America's test kitchen turkey meatloaf recipe called for nestling the meatloaf on a foil covered wire rack which in turn is resting inside a roasting pan. My first response? Frustration.

Why do these Test Kitchen people assume that my kitchen
is as well equipped and  well staffed as theirs?

My second response? Improvisation.

I broke out the roasting pan, and weighed my roasting rack options:

too short............                        too precarious.........               a wedge shaped meatloaf? Icky.

The uncooked mixture was soupy enough to raise a few doubts about the success of this little kitchen composition, so I chose the flattest baking surface option:

and.....discovered when I opened the oven that the tray had slipped, the loaf had slid, and, well....

I wondered whether there might be a
"kitchen imprecations"  section of the
Urban Dictionary

Sigh. Too late to back out now. Looks like a large rectangley turkey patty for dinner. Upside? I suspected the flattened shape might have reduced the cooking time, and the thing might already have reached 160 degrees. And it had.  And yes, I took the trouble to take it's temperature. Because while one can call rare ground beef steak tartare-

people eat this. really.

one calls rare poultry salmonella.
Sigh. Dinner was already ugly. I didn't want to make it dangerous as well.

Except...as often happens with jazz....just when you think the melody's lost, and all is chaos, things surprise you by resolving themselves quite nicely:

No kidding! this is a great meatloaf recipe that just happens to be made of turkey. It's worth eating on it's own tasty turkey merits, and not just as a stand in for beef meatloaf. Definitely a keeper.

Thanks to all who patiently bore with me this week as I fumbled through creating a facebook page. Your gentle teasing made me laugh aloud, and your refusal to utter anything truly derisive gave me a grateful determination to learn a new thing.

 So I wrote on a cards the names of everyone who friended the mistakey facebook page, everyone who liked the more correctly done page and the two people who just told me that they wanted cookies, and smeared peanut butter on the cards. Because....

 I had asked my faithful canine companion for a little impartial assistance.

you know it's a random draw, because she can't read anything besides the words "cat" and "walk"

And........Jane, a box of (newly named) muselie bars will be on their way to you soon!

Guess what?

Once, a long time ago, jazz legend and all around good guy Louis Armstrong said "Man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know". 

And I can't tell you what jazz is either. I can't define for you  literal, musical jazz or the jazz that happens metaphorically throughout your day. But I can tell you how to hear it.

Some time this week (and  I can almost guarantee this) life will throw you something unexpected. Life will call out to you a wild, random, dissonant strain of music, and you'll be expected to respond.

 And you will respond.

And if you find yourself responding to that call with all the bluesy hope and creative power you can summon; if you find yourself spontaneously expressing beauty and love and composing that, somehow, into something you can offer the people around you, that's jazz. 

And you're an artist. A metaphorical musician.  

Cause, it's like Thelonius Monk said: 

"The piano ain't got no wrong notes"