posted November 8, 2002
It is a pity that ferrets never have to brush their own teeth, for I very much envy them their apparent ability to open their entire cranium at the jaw hinge to an angle approaching 180°. I, myself, am prone to gagging violently on the tooth brush as it approaches my back molars, which does not make oral hygiene a delightful prospect. How I wish I had a ferret's jaw....
Oddly, the fur-lizards seem only to accomplish this feat when recently roused from sleep. Usually, this is accompanied by a full stretch, climbing the forepaws upward, upward along what ever surface is handy. When it yawns it reveals a diamond shaped maw lined with Great White Teeth. The effect is somewhat lessened by the fact that the gaping creature then flops bonelessly to the floor. I suspect that ferrets have a cut-off switch of some kind implanted in their necks and once the head is opened far enough, the switch is depressed and, like those push-button puppets, then lose all tensioning and sprawl hopelessly in a pile of disanimated formerly-cute bits. They quickly recover, however.
Perhaps it is the frustration of their inability to open the gaping maw to full stretch on command that makes them run about in such a fit, waving their revealed fangs through the air and bouncing blindly like demented rubber balls wrapped in grandmother's mink stole. Anything unfortunate enough to encounter the open mouth will be clamped upon: shoes, feet, furniture, cats.... The cat does not particularly care for this and runs away, but this only makes him a target for the owner of the jaw who pursues in miniature bounds as much sideways as forward.
Denied, the ferret then seeks other victims. It is not picky about the victim, anything will do. It will even deign to play a while with this shambling great lump of a human who toils here, staring into this terribly boring bright thing which doesn't smell very interesting at all.
I can take unfair advantage of the ferret's generous impulse and scoop it up and toss it onto the bed, where it will bounce and wriggle in mock-fury a while. Valiantly, I enter the fray, tickling the critter as it lays on its back. I grab it by the rear half and fold it over, wiggling the tail past the face.
Having forgotten that it owns a butt, the ferret will attack the tail and feet which have so foolishly come within compass of its be-fanged mouth.
"Ha, ha! victims!" *snap* "What, ho?! You bite me while my back is turned?! Varlet! Ha! Take that!? *nip* "Hey... Where are you anyway? I'll find you just as soon as I deal with these feet...." *bonk* "Hey!" *nibble* "No, fair! Some other ferret is biting my feet while you distract me with these... wait a minute... I sense a conspiracy here...."
The ferret bounds away to find whatever sneaky little mustelid was biting it on the butt. In a few minutes it will, once again, have lost the sense of proprietorship most of us have for our rear ends and be taken in, once again, by its own feet.
It's five-o'clock, little ferret; do you know where your rump is? Of course not.
Winding down, it yawns, flops over, and lies there, apparently thinking that if it could just manage to yawn at the right time, the world could be dragged away and stuffed into a hidey-hole. Anything could be put in the hidey-hole, if only the ferret could get his mouth around it....
And this is not to say that he has not tried. Boots, footballs, dog toys, purses, small appliances, books, computer parts, and cell phones have all made their way to the hidey-hole, propelled by the auto-pilot butt and secured by the flip-top head. If the object proves too big for the head to accomodate, the butt goes into leadership mode, heading happily for the hidey-hole in a series of bumping hops while the forepaws clutch on for dear life. Thus the football goes humping across the deck, mercilessly mauled by the fangs which cannot quite close around it, to the accompaniment of the ferret-thudding chorus of the intrepid ass.
Ah, if only I had a flip-top head....
posted November 24, 2002
That first big food-holiday of the season is this Thursday. Turkey-Day we call it. Well, Thanksgiving, according to the calendar, but you can't put that over on me. I know what it really is: National Support ButterBall Day; Stuffing Appreciation Day; National Weight-Gain Day; Attack of the Relatives Day. Yes, Turkey (and forty pounds of side-dishes) Day.
Every year it's turkey. Why eating turkeys is somehow more "thankful" than eating other dead animals, I don't know. Perhaps it is that one is thankful when they are gone, since they hang about for-frickin-ever. Or perhaps one is thankful that not everything else in the world tastes like turkey (the other bland meat). I don't really mind turkey the first time. It tastes like... well not like chicken. It tastes like turkey, which is to say, like chicken which has been left wrapped in a wet dishtowel. It doesn't actually offend and it's the trimmings which are yummy.
Which is why I was perfectly content to have something other than turkey a few years ago at a friend's place. She called me and said "come for Thanksgiving. We won't be having turkey."
This was surprising, because, up until then, I thought the roasting of a large land-fowl too stupid to out-think a dirt-clod and too unattractive to get a date with anything sexier than an eye-dropper was a national requirement. It was announced, to my amazement, that since we all lived in the Pacific Northwest, we would be having Northwest obsessive-food, instead: salmon!
Planked Salmon. What? A large migratory fish which has been hit with a board? Fish as stiff as a board? I was told it was delicious and directed to find a recipe for planked salmon, so I took off for the library (I had no reliable Internet connection at the time, or I'd have stayed at home and done it).
I incredulously wrote down such instructions as I found and wandered off to the fish-counter at my local supermarket to confirm the oddity. The fish-monger allowed that planking a salmon was a good thing and applauded our resolve to feed a small army on this delicacy. "The trick," he warned, "is to soak the board overnight in water, so that it doesn't burn, and keep the heat moderate so that the fish steams all the way through and isn't raw in the middle. It smokes a bit, but that's manageable." I assured him that the fish would be feeling the heat to give up cigarettes, but that we would restrain ourselves from irritating the fish to the degree that it lost its temper entirely.
I called my friend back and reported that we could plank our fish at, apparently, any temperature we liked between 300F and 375F, according to the Internet, for anything from 5 minutes per pound to 15 minutes per pound. Planking a salmon apparently makes it very accommodating and flexible, although an otherwise environmentally-friendly animal apparently becomes a tobacco-addict. I was informed that two planks had been acquired and would be soaking happily when we arrived at the site of the planking.
On the day itself, we arrived early, to help with the preparation. So had everyone else. The hostess was not in a good mood and anything like organization was out the window, along with one of the cats, who really wanted to get to know the salmon before it got planked.
Unfortunately, we had no side dishes. Just a pile of wrapped fish and two large, wet pieces of wood. Oh, yes: and alcohol. We had lots of alcohol, which the hostess had already opened by eleven AM.
After a long debate, two veg, bread, appetizers and scalloped potatoes were proposed. Recipes had to be consulted and a shopping list made up. Then minions were sent to the store to fetch the goods and return.
There was no bread. I was put in charge of finding a recipe and making bread.
Now, I made bread once. I suspect it's still acting as a doorstop somewhere. I tried to explain this to my friend, but she was having a fight with her brother-in-law for stealing all the sour cream which was supposed to be used for dip and eating it straight from the container. Several small children were upset by this, including the brother-in-law's wife, so a caterwaling had set up which, naturally, brought in the cats, including the fish-curious one who went right back to her post, guarding the refrigerator in case any of us should go near her fish.
Everything on the menu needed to go in the oven. There were two ovens. There were seven items and each needed its own space. Each was large enough to feed six to ten, since we had twelve humans, and a passle of children who were howling madly that they didn't like fish.
In the cacophony, I had discovered a bread recipe which even I couldn't totally fuck up and which did not require setting to rise for 4 to 6 hours. One of the minions and I escaped long enough to buy the ingredients and more sour cream, also a host of other items we had all somehow forgotten: like paper towels and hot dogs for inducing silence in small children. (I proposed to my minion-of-honor that the most efficacious use of the hot dogs in silencing the children would be stuffing the cylindrical objects up their noses and down their throats, whole, to create a muffling effect which, if we were lucky, might cause them to pass out from lack of air and we could then dump the lot of them into the farthest-removed bedroom and lock the door. She wanted to go for it, but we were stopped by a limited supply of hot dogs--apparently we weren't the only people plagued with entree-hating juveniles on Thanksgiving.)
We returned to the war-zone and had lunch. No, not the salmon, which was still under cat-guard, but a quick sandwich to ward off the impending faintness conjured by no food since eight AM and it was now four PM.
The adults were mostly schnozzled (or possibly planked, as some of them were stiff as boards) on beer and wine, by now. The children had been momentarily distracted by a Disney video and the kitchen was on its third round of cleaning and re-filthing as the potatoes and a salad spread out over the whole place. I rudely chased half the kitchen crew out, and the cat, and started in on a double-batch of "Quick Onion-Herb Bread". It wasn't too bad, except for the usual battle with onions and the Kitchen Aid mixer flinging dough up to stick to the ceiling in small, white stalactites. Once the bread was dumped into its pans, I managed to remove myself from the team invading to prepare green-bean casserole on the grounds that I thought it unkosher to mix creamed soup and canned legumes with incipient yeast-dough still lingering on my hands.
I cadged a glass of wine and some cheese and asked when we would be firing up the barbecue for the fish. The fish, I was told, would be cooked in the oven, after everything else. The instructions on the planks said it was OK. What temperature and time did we plan to use? I asked. Well, they didn't know, they'd figure it out. The plank said 300F, but the instructions I'd brought said 375F, so they'd split the difference and do it at 350F. I protested that this was a non-smoking household and the fish was a known smoker and should be confined to the yard, but I was poo-pooed and plans went ahead. I skulked.
The bread, the casseroles and the potatoes got baked and everything was set aside under towels to keep warm. Now it was time for the planking of the fish.
Dripping slabs of alder wood were dragged into the kitchen by the host and the fish unwrapped and placed upon them. The cat was most upset that she was too short to wrest the fish from his hands, so persuaded her compatriots to join her in a protest movement: back and forth around the host's feet as he walked from fridge to boards. Their tactics were not successful and the felines sulked while the third Disney flick of the day maintained an uneasy peace in the family room. My minion-of-honor and I lurked into the unheated dining room and kept warm with wine and bitching.
Things certainly smelled good and the host was content to pop in and out of the kitchen, checking the fish occasionally as they got steamed (though they seemed very well-tempered to me, for slabs of dead piscean).
In the dining room, we were joined by my husband and a single, adult-niece of the host's as the sound of hungry discontent began to mount in the family room. We got drunker and paid little attention to the lowering atmosphere in the other room.
When the smoke alarm went off, we figured the fish had had all the planking it was going to take and was ready to talk. We filed toward the kitchen as the house reverberated with the screeching of the device, which no one seemed to be able to turn off.
The family room had vanished as black smoke poured from the oven. Small children, cats, fighting relatives and the host were driven back as the oven poured out its choking, but fragrant, clouds.
The fish, we decided, was burned, but upon inspection and the judicious use of fans to clear the area, we found the fish to be, apparently, fine. The planks were toast. Sixty-dollar toast. They went into the sink as the fish was off-loaded to a couple of platters.
Food was piled upon the table, then unpiled as there was no room for humans. We remade the table, exiled the children to the smoky family room with hot dogs which were not shoved up their noses, much to my disappointment, and sat down to have dinner. Fish was served and passed around, side dishes piled high on plates and we all waited with anticipation for the first pronouncement that it was good.
"I don't eat fish, so I don't know...," the hostess's father declared. "Is it supposed to be raw, like this?"
We all poked it. It was, indeed, uncooked in the middle.
It appeared that the planks, those traitors, had been the real smokers, not the fish. Long, steel bolts driven through the planks to hold them in shape had heated and begun to burn the wood, sending up the alarming gouts of smoke, while the thick fillets had simply sat there, insulated from the heat of the burning boards by the as-yet-unburned wood, and turning a deceptive brown on the outside. The fish, though tasty where it had cooked, was raw as sushi where the smoke had not penetrated.
We stole the remaining hot dogs from the children, wolfed down the forty-pounds of green-bean casserole, scalloped potatoes, salad, corn, and the actually-very-tasty Quick Onion-Herb Bread and held it down with copious amounts of wine and beer.
Then we went out for dessert.
I'll stick to turkey for a while: at least when they smoke, they do it for a good cause.
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