21 November 2001
Last year: What, oh what, shall I do?
The Curse has awakened in me. I had hoped that it would pass me by, but it was, alas, not to be.
My mother had asked me to make a coconut creme pie for Thanksgiving - specifically, she wanted the same coconut creme pie, made with fresh, hand-grated coconut, that came from her mother's cookbook.
Remembering this pie with no little amount of joy from my own childhood, I readily agreed. Monday, I retrieved Grandmother Waters' cookbooks and found the recipe. Checked the ingredients, and put them on the grocery list. My intent, since I also planned on making a peanut butter pie, was to make the coconut pie on Tuesday, and the peanut butter on Wednesday.
So last night, around 6:30 or so, I fished the hammer and my biggest nail out of the toolbox, and went into the kitchen.
If you've never cracked a fresh coconut before, this is what you do - you take a big nail, and you hammer it into at least two of the three indentations at the top of the coconut. Then you pour out the "milk." (It doesn't look like milk, really. It's clear.) Then you hit the husk of the coconut with the hammer until it breaks open, and use a knife to trim the inner husk from the white meat.
Except I couldn't hammer my nail into the coconut. It wouldn't go. I hit harder, and my nail bent. I went back to the toolbox, only to discover that I was out of big nails.
This was the point at which I should have gone out into the garage and picked up my cordless drill. I did think about it. But I thought, "It's just a coconut!" Foolish me. Instead, I picked up a screw.
Finally, after nearly fifteen minutes of banging, I got two holes punched in the coconut, and I shook the quarter-cup of milk into a cup.
For another five minutes, I banged futilely on the coconut. It would not crack. I considered going out into the garage and getting my cordless circular saw, but decided instead to first take it outside and hit it again, this time on the unyeilding concrete - the formica counters have just a tiny bit of give.
That did the trick! The top half of the husk popped off all in one piece to reveal - not the rough inner husk I'd been expecting, but the white meat of the coconut, somewhat dirty.
I'd never seen that before. I wondered if the coconut was rotten or unsafe to eat. But it smelled fine. I decided I'd just trim off the outer skin, as if it had a husk (it was dirty, anyway) and use the meat.
I finished cracking the husk off, then cut the meat into pieces and started in with a knife. After a few minutes' struggle, I thought, If I keep up like this, I'm going to cut myself with this knife. So I switched to the vegetable peeler.
We have a wonderful vegetable peeler, sharper than any one I've ever seen before. So perhaps it was inevitable that, trying to shave the top off a bit of coconut, I slipped and nearly sliced off the top of my left middle finger.
I stuck the bleeding digit under the running water and yelled for Matt to bring me a band-aid. Not until after he'd put a small band-aid over the cut did I realize it was much bigger than I'd thought, and I had to fish out a second, larger bandage, and wrapped it tighter.
Matt offered to finish the job of cleaning the pieces of coconut. (I think he was afraid that if I continued, I wouldn't have any finger left.) I agreed, and took the few pieces I'd already done and started to grate them.
(My mother, making this pie, inevitably scraped her knuckles bloody on the grater. I paid close attention to the chunks of coconut meat in my hands, and dropped them when they became too small to comfortably hold.)
Matt finished with the scraping, and left the kitchen again.
I consulted the cookbook. "Strain the coconut milk..." Well, that made sense, since there were bits of husk floating in the liquid. But I don't have a liquid strainer; just a colander. I chewed on that for a while, then improvised: I took a clean washcloth from the drawer, and strained the milk through that.
Now, I was supposed to heat the coconut milk, some cream, and some regular milk in a double-boiler.
I don't have a double-boiler. But I'd known this in advance. You don't really need an actual double-boiler; you can make do with a metal bowl suspended over a pot of boiling water.
I could have sworn that I had a metal bowl. But I poked into every cabinet I have, and the only metal bowl I could find was the bowl for my Kitchenaid mixer, which was too big.
I should have gone out to the store and bought a metal bowl.
Instead, a little experimentation showed that my one non-teflon pot would balance fairly well on the edge of a stewpot. Well, it would have to do.
I measured out the coconut milk, cream, and milk, and suspended the pot over boiling water. While it was heating, I measured out sugar, salt, cornstarch, and flour, mixing them together until all the cornstarch lumps were gone.
It occurred to me that I didn't have the slightest idea what the cookbook meant when it said, "Heat milk to scalding." But I'm resourceful and innovative - and I have one of the world's best cookbooks for concise, clear definitions and explanations. It was the work of only minutes to look up Scalding, milk in the index, and read the associated paragraph.
I went back to stirring.
Eventually, the milk was hot enough, and I took it off the stove. I poured a little of it into the bowl with the dry ingredients, and stirred vigorously, so the corn starch couldn't re-lump. Eventually, I got them all stirred together and smooth, just like the recipe said.
I poured it all back into the pot, and re-suspended the pot over the boiling water. According to the recipe, I was now supposed to cook the mixture for about ten minutes, stirring constantly, until it thickened.
I had been stirring carefully for about three minutes when the pot jiggled, bounced off the edge of the stew-pot, and dropped into the boiling water. A good cup of hot water splashed into the custard, completely ruining my efforts. Over an hour's work, down the tubes.
It's the Curse, you see. We can't have a holiday dinner without some disaster happening.
It's practically a family tradition, at Thanksgiving dinner, to trot out all of Mom's old disasters. The time she de-boned an entire turkey in obedience to her recipe, then turned the page to see the sentence finish, "...breast." The time she misread "tsp" for "tbsp" and made ginger soup instead of pumpkin pie. The time she baked the jello salad (though I feel obliged to chime in that I'd actually liked the result). The time she forgot about the beans she was boiling and the aluminum pot melted and fused to the stove. John and I used to tease that we'd miss her "special sauce" (i.e., blood) when we went off to college, she cuts herself cooking so often.
She takes our teasing with good grace, laughing as much as any of us.
But now... now the Curse has passed on to the next generation. When I called her last night, to tell her about the coconut creme pie, she started laughing. By the time I was done, she was in hysterics, gasping for breath.
I think I detected a note of relief in there.
Word of the Day:
omphalos - a central point; hub, focal point