It’s 7:00 am, and I’m at the market. The bread I want didn’t come in. So I buy the extra meat, the parsley for garnish, two fancy holiday style cheeses (one with cranberries, one called tintern, which I’ve never heard of), overly expensive crackers. And creamer for tomorrow’s coffee.
By 7:20 I’m at the second market, and buy the bread. Salted marcona almonds, too.
Yesterday I bought meat, walked next door with it and my printed recipe, got a wine recommendation: a 2009 Chateauneuf du Pape under $30. Is that even possible? The bottle is black, sleek, with raised emblems. Bought it.
Tonight we’re having guests, and the only way to make it happen is a meal in the slow cooker. I’m making a Moroccan style beef with sweet potatoes, apricots, and chickpeas, all relatively easy, once all the items for dinner are procured. And once I’m done making minor improvements to the yet-to-be-tried recipe, touted as easy, which I’ve instead made complicated.
When I woke up this morning, I looked at the gorgeous pile of stew meat, and realized it wasn’t enough. Whoever wrote a recipe with 1½ pounds of stew meat designed to serve 6 people hasn’t met my carnivorous family and friends. We consume far more than the 3 oz-per-person recommendation from some uptight, over-controlling, joyless administrator at the National Institute of You-Shouldn’t-Eat-This. Thus the early morning trip to the market.
Not only am I in my jammies, which, thanks to it being winter, are basically long underwear, dusted with flour from making sugar cookies last night, paired with thick extra-warm slipper socks stuffed into my sneakers, but my hair is the hair of older women who wait too long to get it done, the ill-consequenced effect of trying to save money by pushing the appointment back week by week until the unrelenting swath of white forces a call to the salon to check for a cancellation, any cancellation. I have an appointment at noon to address my scraggly, graying, grown-out mop of a mess, but that’s at noon. Flour-dusted jammies, bad hair, no make up, didn’t even bother to swirl mouthwash after morning coffee. Apologies to all I encountered in the last hour.
Despite the embarrassment, it’s somewhat freeing to shop in jammies, no layer of anything underneath. Under a nice thick coat (so certain details and movement are unseen to the outside world), I am happy and uninhibited, wrapped in the knowledge that I am about to create a masterful, deceptively simple dinner that will be pleasing to the taste buds and psyches of the people at my table. I vacillate between feeling free and silly and mortified that I’ll be found out, encountered by someone who usually sees me in my far more put-together self, then realizing I’m entitled to be jammied and grey-haired and bopping along in the early-market buzz, just me and the market delivery people and the one or two other poor souls who need today’s lunch, or just another ingredient or two to finish up their dinner plans.
Fortunately I ran in to no one I knew, other than the folks who work at the market. I made a point to out myself, declaring with an odd mixture of pride and sheepishness, “I’m shopping in my jammies!” to each cashier and early morning stock person, so they might consider this is not my normal look. Shame yourself before being shamed by others, that’s my motto. Especially when I’m in my jammies.
coincidence (sorta): tom and i are having friends over on the 15th, and before i read your post i had decided on a malaysian beef curry with potatoes and lots of spices, in the slow cooker (OF COURSE). probably very similar to your moroccan beef dish. will have rice, a salad and homemade fruit sherbet of some kind (made in advance of course) for dessert. great minds think alike! 🙂
I think this is one of my favorite posts of yours!! We’ve all had this experience, the freeing feeling of going somehere in your jammies, you write it so well. I was reading it while Jared slept this morning and had to stop my self from laughing out loud! Thanks for the smile today 🙂