Tiny Door

When we moved into our present rental home, we had neither time nor resources to facilitate the process. After two moving trucks full of stuff, we were so tired of unpacking that we were just putting boxes in the storage area in the basement and garage and telling each other that we would go through it "first thing next week". Since Jason was still finishing his dissertation, that task got pushed again and again, till we decided that never would be a good time to go through that mess.

Everything found it's place, and we bought a dining room table on craigslist for $50. My only friend in town, a lady with nine children who lived next door to me, abruptly moved away. I was really bummed since I had just recently gotten to be friends with her and discovered that she wasn't involved in a creepy commune or cult. They are christian to the max, but the great kind that are nice to people and don't evangelize every chance they get. She is funny, strong willed, and an incredible task master. Her children are all sweet and smart. Anyway, when she left she pretty much gave me my pick of furnishings from her house. I was so disappointed in her move that I wasn't as jazzed as I normally would have been, but it was really cool to suddenly have an extra bookshelf and an air hockey table.

I also signed up for the local free cycle list serve and have gotten rid of items which we haven't had use for. The snowmen dishes, the size XL scrubs that mysteriously appeared in my sewing stuff, the footboard of the bed frame that the children obliterated with their incessant jumping; all taken.

Fantastically, I have an entire room specifically for sewing and painting, and have been working lots. When I initially started moving my things into the room I remember noticing a tiny door in the corner of the room and wondering about it. It was teeny like the door in Being John Malchovitch, and I entertained a host of scenarios regarding the mystical properties of the door, and somehow, I never opened it. As curious as it was, I was happy wondering and concocting stories and ideas.

Finally one day, Jason was in the room and he noticed the door. He opened it and it was full of laundry. Pre-teen laundry, to be exact. I had noticed the chute in the upstairs bathroom and considered it, but the door made a really excellent platform for my gigantic jade plant, so it has been closed since our arrival. At first glance you could see a lime green bandanna, something Hannah Montana print, and the tiniest, underwire bra I've ever seen. I asked him to close it and just leave the stuff there, since it wasn't hurting anything.

Again, I ignored the door for some time. Looking around my sewing room, I thought about items that could fit into the door; things that would be really funny to store there. My daughter has a fuzzy hair troll doll in a Hawaiian shirt that would be hilarious in the chute. It would be a good place to store my eleven pairs of scissors and five pin cushions since the kids can't seem to resist them. I imagined shoving baby dolls into the doorway till they filled the chute all the way up to the bathroom. If I decided to do this I would certainly wait till Fox was in the upstairs bathroom because, besides myself, he would appreciate a doll geyser more than anyone in the family. I'd have to move the Jade plant, but it would be worth it. Another great use of the chute would be to suspend someone's cell phone halfway down to drive them crazy.

Last week my other neighbor asked me if I was interested in looking through some hand me down clothes. She runs a home-based daycare, plus she has four kids, so when the neighborhood yardsale weekend came, a few of the parents of the kids in her daycare brought things for her to sell. Her oldest daughter is in the fifth grade and full of sass. She waits for the bus with Fox in the morning and I have talked to her a number of times. She is really cute and funny, and every time I talk to her she reminds me that her friend used to live in my house.

After picking through the immense amount of hand me downs while mentally patting myself on the back for never making the mistake of having a home based daycare, I settled on two large bags of little girl clothes, and started to head back across the street. My neighbor volunteered her daughter to help me with the bags since I also had my daughter and a stroller. She walked beside us and started to tell me about her friend, Janayah (rhymes with papaya) who lived in the house.

"Her room was the one at the top of the stairs beside the bathroom. And her sister and brothers shared the big one with the two huge closets. For a while one of them lived in the closet! The downstairs bedroom was Janayah's mom's room. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? THERE WAS A LAUNDRY CHUTE FROM THE BATHROOM TO HER MOTHER'S ROOM! IT WAS SO COOL!"

I remembered the stuff behind the tiny door and I invited her in to see what the house was like now. She followed us in and went straight to the tiny door. She looked at it, then looked at me and my daughter.

"Go ahead and open it" I permitted.

She reached over my drafting table and opened the door, then gasped.

I opened my eyes really wide and asked her if she thought that was Janayah's stuff.

"I BET IT IS!! I'M SURE IT IS!! I REMEMBER THAT BANDANNA!"

"Maybe you could take it to Janayah." I proposed; "Do you think she would still want that stuff?"

The girl believed that Janayah would be really excited to have her things back, and, quite frankly, I was really happy to free up that secret space for other ventures.

While Fox gave her a tour of the rest of the house I put the laundry into a plastic grocery bag for Janayah. They came stampeding down the steps and she wanted to get another look at the chute.

"I can't believe you don't use the laundry chute" she said in disbelief, shaking her head. "It's just SO COOL"

"Well, I guess if the downstairs room wasn't my sewing room, we might. But I really don't want the entire family's dirty clothes coming out that tiny door onto my drafting table."

"Maybe you could move your bedroom down here and put your sewing room upstairs" she suggested.

I told her that I'd think about it and that it was kind of a shame not using the chute.

Zucchini; getting creative with

The month of July brought many wonderful blessings and experiences my way. My son turned three years old on the sixth, my dresses have been selling at a consistent rate for once, and my garden has produced enough food to make a dent in the grocery bill. As we near July's end and I reflect on the past four weeks I wonder; just how much zucchini can one plant produce?

Make no mistake. I LOVE zucchini. But damn! Zucchini has been on my dinner plate at least five times a week this month. Imagining all the stir fried zucchini my family has consumed lately makes me feel vomitous and slippery. Picking the vegetable is all fun and games, then you bring it into the kitchen and see it on the counter with the other zucchini that you picked yesterday.. . It's enough to make you want to dig a hole and bury it from whence it came.

After coming inside this afternoon, this attitude began welling inside of me and I happened to glance at my mounting collection of vegetarian cookbooks. The thought of riffling through each one's index for zucchini recipes intensified the sick feeling, so I just braced myself and started cleaning and trimming the vegetables.

I thought of the experimental zucchini concoctions, both from recipe and free form, that I had tried this season and remembered each one's qualities, both pro and con. There was the old favorite: fried zucchini sticks with horseradish dip; delicious, but hardly a meal. Zucchini fritters; good, but not quite sweet or savory enough to constitute repeating so soon. Beth's amazing Zu-canoes; a killer recipe she found in a Moosewood book that had ten too many ingredients (wheat germ, cottage cheese, cooked brown rice) AND ten too many steps for me to manage. I suppose there's no need to mention the stir fry again. What I truly wanted was spaghetti, but I felt guilty preparing a meal I consider standby when I had twenty pounds of fresh herbs and produce on my counter top, already trimmed. Feeling sorry that I hadn't planted eggplants, an idea struck me. Zucchini Parmesan.

I started by grating half of a mutant sized zucchini (the size of my calf, in length and girth) and combining it with a grated carrot, chopped, fresh basil, rosemary and oregano, and five chopped garlic cloves. Then I added a teaspoon of sea salt and a ton of fresh grated pepper. I let it rest in the wide bowl at an angle, then drained the liquid that gathered in the corner.

At this point I threw in two small eggs, stirred it all up, then added enough white flour to make the remaining liquids into more of a batter.

Before the eggs were added I poured a quarter cup of corn oil into a heavy saute pan and let it get pretty hot while I finished the batter. After stirring in the flour I used a serving spoon to scoop the batter into the hot oil.

I let them cook a while to allow them to get crunchy and done all through, but turned the pan around a few times as my stove top is at a shittious, minute angle which makes everything cook unevenly.

I warmed up some canned tomato sauce and boiled spaghetti while the cakes fried.

As I removed them from the hot oil, the cakes were placed on a cereal box to drain, and I topped each one with a bit of bland cheese. When I arranged the plates I put a scoopy-claw thing of spaghetti noodles, then a cake, then a ladle of sauce, then a ton of parmesan cheese, then crushed red pepper and an oregano flower. From start to finish this took around 40 minutes.

Going heavy on the herbs was definitely key for the zucchini cakes, particularly the rosemary, which I normally refrain from using in excess. I once took rosemary and gouda quiche in to work to share and hardly anyone touched it. Offended, I asked my safety supervisor "what the hell" and he apologetically explained "Well, see, in Mexico that spice... Uhh.....What is it?"

"Rosemary?" I offered

"Yes! Rosemary!" he happily replied, "This is what we bury our dead in. Soooo..."


Say no more.
Since then I have been reluctant of rosemary in culinary usage for fear of an impromptu dining encounter with a Mexican.

This was a great usage of zucchini in an atypical way. Try it!