All your cookies are belong to us
Bacon ice cream is a weird thing to find at the bottom of your freezer.
Freshly made, bacon-studded dairy proved a good end to the Chinese New Year dinner Ben and I hosted a few weekends ago, and the ice cream was much simpler than what I really wanted to do—mod the laser printer and be like Homaru, creating edible fortune slips, or, better, print fortunes on the cookies.
I roped my friend Mica into helping me write fortunes for party cookies long before the celebration included dinner, and she arrived in the happy confusion that always permeates a kitchen when an entire package of bacon has been fried off.
I added to the confusion by welcoming her into the kitchen while piecing the drained bacon, adding it to the chilled brown sugar gelato base, and pouring the concoction into the gelato machine that I whisked into my bedroom to whir away while we wrote fortunes. “And that was a…dessert?” she asked, sliding onto a stool, looking at me and the five boxes of steamed rice from Asian Express skeptically. “A trendy one. For the fried rice,” I gestured toward the boxes; she nodded and uncapped a ballpoint pen, clearing a space in the middle of vegetable piles, in what looked like the backstage of Kitchen Stadium.
Since the party guests were mainly literature graduate students at the University of Virginia (and Jefferson and Hemingway were both born in the year of the pig), the fortunes this year and last reflected a lit nerd’s greatest hopes (“You will win the MLA First Book award”, “You will marry Žižek,”) and secret fears (“Oprah will expose your sorry research”, “Despite your efforts, you will not bring sexy back”).
Little did Mica know, as we generated fortunes and I made beef and broccoli and kung pao chicken channeling Kylie Kwong, the fantastic Australiasian chef who promotes lighter Chinese dishes, that she would be in charge of making the delicate cookies to encase her fortunes.
Dinner guests began to arrive and I started the fried rice, my new favorite meal. Sautéing vegetables, then eggs, then already cooked rice, then soy and oyster sauce in casual, unmeasured variations (I cooked my way through ten beautiful baby bok choy that I found at the local asian market, napa cabbage, red peppers, mushrooms, baby corn, snow peas, and mung bean sprouts in three batches,) fried rice forgives moments spent pulling up a purple glove, or brushing a stray Farrah lock back into place. And it helps to have foodie friends like Bethany and Dana willing to assist in plating and contextualizing the food.
Last year, my friend Rob, who is equally gifted at finding things and at naming events, suggested that, as hostess of a year of the dog party, we should rename the event to reference my gender, and I dressed for the occasion as Cruella de Ville.
This year I dressed as Lost in Space Piggy, although I felt more like Lew Zealand here, when the dinner guests voted to saltcrust the snapper and bake rather than broil or boomerang.
Twenty minutes in the oven later, Dana had found a hammer, and Dana is a belle, and Dana had a song to sing all over this land—with her hammer of Justice, she was the belle of Freedom, and it’s the song about love between her brothers and her sisters, all over this Land.
And she cracked the salt shell.
The salt crust comes off in pieces, leaving behind a really lovely flavor in the fish; we all ate the fish, as in traditional Chinese New Year celebrations, where the whole fish represents unity and togetherness.
We were finishing the bacon ice cream as party guests began to fill the house, and Stewart and Michael helped Mica escape from the kitchen.
The party grew and conversation circled around the zodiac year descriptions posted on the wall—cleverly, asking someone’s sign in the Chinese zodiac reveals the person’s temperament and age (if you can place them within a dozen years).
Fresca inexplicably appeared near Scott,
and Ben’s friend Will told us about his recent travels in China.
Three of the Charlottesville Bikram Yoga instructors (Michaela, Julia, and Meredith) made the best possible advertisement for the studio, sending out wonderful energy for the new year from the couch in the den,
(the lovely Michaela Curran, pictured below, had been radiating all night—)
My sister Katrina and Dana were a little taken aback before Mrs. Cleaver appeared, complete in my Guac Champion apron, possibly dismayed to learn the fortune cookies had all been distributed and June Cleaver’s platter was empty.
Mica’s handiwork with an offset spatula, spreading tuile batter thinly on a Silpat, resulted in fortune cookies so attractive they were eaten before I could capture them on film.
A few hours earlier, Mica had wondered how to slip the fortunes inside the cookies; when asked at the party, she smiled serenely, reluctant (as the best magicians are) to divulge the trick.
An American invention dating back to 1916, fortune cookies have become a stale, commercial offering presented on a lacquer tray at the end of a meal or included in take-out containers. Mica’s deft technique formed ethereal bites that were eaten as much for the cookie as the words on the paper slip inside.
So I’ve wondered in recent weeks: where lies the fortune? In the cookie? The literal string of words inside? Those fortunate enough to eat a cookie like this? If so, is the cookie a vehicle or a wrapper?
These cookies are delicate, folded once horizontally and then bent backwards, shaped so that the ends almost meet and the paper inside peeks through. For a few moments as it cools to crispness, the cookie is pliable, magic, like an http cookie that follows you.
The fortunes in commercial cookies are usually as stale as the cookies themselves, with odd grammatical phrasings and vague divinations. And yet, I always crack the thick shell to read the fortune—not for guidance, but out of curiosity. Just as an http cookie exists in infinite supply, a particular fortune cookie is meaningful to me because I open it. Homemade or not, the fortune will likely be silly, random, and nonsensical. And mine.
Best wishes for a succulent 4704—
Related posts:
- kthread cooks: epistemic fortune cookies
- bastille day brioche for mlle mica
- Year Two: There Was A Star Danced
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Posted Thursday, March 15th, 2007, 12:43 am * Filed in Design, Entertaining, Food. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Never fear! Now that I have fortune cooking preparation on my list of marketable skills, I think I will start a business!
March 19th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
As I made myself a very tired peach smoothie this evening, I thought back to the bacon ice cream and wished I had it on hand. I would kill you for leaving that delicious pate in the refrigerator, but it has fattened me to the point of immobility.