Perfect Ice Cubes! AGAIN!

My bad mood seemed to have crystalized into an intense misanthropy. This is in contrast to the usual Dear-God-Perfect-Ice-Cubes-AGAIN stupor in which I usually wander around.

Human beings suck.

Don’t believe me?

Just watch a couple of episodes of the British version of Love Island.

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Anyway, since I believe the entire online world was solely created to give me access to imaginary people to insult when I’m in a bad mood, I’ve been like Sherman burning his way from Atlanta to the sea on Facebook. Fuck yew-w-w-w-w-w!

Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. It’s cathartic.

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Of course, after about half an hour or so of this, my Puritan instincts kicked in: Is this productive behavior? No, it is not!

So, I started cooking.

C had given me 10 pounds of peaches from the S______ compound trees. Not so very long ago, the S______ compound was a productive peach orchard. In their dotage, the trees are not very well cared for. Nobody would ever want to eat these peaches—well. Maybe if you were serving a life sentence in an Angolan prison, you would want to eat these peaches. But as I am not, I made peach cobbler out of them. This is a somewhat more complicated (though not difficult) procedure than you may think because it involves removing the peach skins, which can only be achieved by blanching them in a boiling water bath for 60 seconds.

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Long, long ago, back when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I had what remains in my memory even today as the perfect apple pie. It had toffee in the crust.

I have never, ever been able to find a recipe for that perfect apple pie.

So, I keep experimenting.

And yesterday, I decided to put toffee in the peach cobbler. So, I went searching for Heath Bars at the supermarket. There were none! (Do they still make Heath Bars?) I bought something that billed itself as “toffee.” When I got it home and began shattering it, though, it turned out to be some kind of chocolate truffle with infinitesimal shards of toffee.

Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now! I thought, looking down grimly at the chocolate shards.

And popped them into the cobbler in place of one of the cups of sugar.

The results are actually very tasty and quite unlike any dessert I’ve had before.

Although not particularly peach-cobbler-like.

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I also skinned about 30 pounds of tomatoes—same process—threw them into a pot with some basil, thyme, garlic and red wine, and made about a gallon of extremely tasty pasta sauce.

Which I’ll freeze for the winter.

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And I went running.

And I chatted for an hour or so with L about Cathy Day’s problems—which are so much more insurmountable than anybody else’s I know that I’ve often speculated to myself that Cathy Day has some psychic form of Munchausen by Proxy. Everybody in Cathy Day’s immediate orbit is either autistic, suicidal, or wrecked by cancer!

The tomato sauce wasn’t ready to be decanted until well after midnight, so I went to bed far later than I usually do. (There were all those episodes of Love Island to catch up on.)

This morning, I’m in a good mood again.

Go figure.