"Are you going to combinate that?"

For home and for school, it's all about the soup and the sauce. On Saturday, I was part of a team that deconstructed 24 Dungeness crabs in preparation for Christmas Eve dinner for 30+. Our family tradition is cioppino on Christmas Eve; my brother Ed, who captains fishing excursions, knows a guy, and they did a deal, and so crabs were shelled and there's five pounds of meat, well-wrapped to prevent freezer burn. The crab bodies went into a 20 quart pot with mirepoix and resulted in about three gallons of crab stock; bechamel practice became a gallon of crab bisque that was dinner for three households. In class this morning, we assisted Chef in putting together a lovely brunch platter of gravlax, cream cheese, tomatoes, red onion, and bagels, and ate it up during food science, but everybody was a little on edge in preparation for the soup and sauce test (and maybe a bit hungover from the weekend still?) so the level of jocularity was low.

The test itself was jangling. Despite my efforts over the weekend to be organized (I printed out all the recipes and ingredients in summary on a couple of pages), our preparation was more haphazard than I'd hoped and our attention was scattered. In retrospect, making two soups and three sauces isn't "normal" to me — I'm used to putting together an assortment of dishes that belong together in a meal, and there's a natural balance that seemed missing today. At any rate, my perfect score on the hollandaise that I made myself (while Jordan was finishing the potato leek soup) was balanced by a perfectly unacceptable bordelaise (that I made myself while Jordan was finishing the consommé). The Chef said, "Were you here the day we made this in class?" Ouch. ("I don't really like Bordelaise anyway," my mom said, in sympathy). Overall, we scored 86. Acceptable. I'm trying to live a balanced life. I was on dishwasher duty, and they took 45 minutes.

This afternoon, back on Christmas prep, we used the balance of the crab stock in the tomato base for the cioppino, in two pots which total about six gallons. Lots of chopping and stirring, resulting in a couple of hours of increasingly tantalizing tomatoey smells. At one point, my dad stood next to me, "test bread" in hand, and said "Are you going to combinate that? Because it will astrolize from the big sky." His vocabulary has been increasing lately, in a most creative fashion, but I understood him perfectly. The soup is delicious. Christmas is coming.