Feedback. Reprieve.: Citrus Salad with Navel Orange Cubes

-An intriguingly molecular change of pace.-

Staring at a computer screen for 15 hours sucks.

It wasn't a straight 15 hours, thank heavens, as I'm afraid such a feat can be braved only by the truest of IT techs and World of Warcraft gamers and I am not a man of such mouse-clicking mettle; but rather 15 hours within a 30 hour time frame. Stephanie and I did take the occasional break to drink water, pee, or eat something that wasn’t 99% composed of carbs and dairy.

During the recent three day weekend we had rallied ourselves as key-striking soldiers for our most recent literary campaign. An editorial scorched earth policy where we would finally – Finally! – go through in hand-stitched detail all of the recipe feedback forms that had been pouring in from our testers for the cookbook.

Allow me, first, to provide some statistics to ease in comprehension of this task:

• 72 testers from eight countries, and nearly all 50 states
• 53 completed and approved recipes
• 3 testers per recipe, sometime more

Essentially, 160+ pieces of feedback to sift through.

-Let's get ready to sit down and work at the computer!-

Careful as a surgeon we read through each form as they trickled in over the past few months. Now we were going back and re-doing, re-testing, tinkering, or totally scrapping some recipes as testers wove stories of glowing dishes that wowed their friends, belabored the stresses of unclear or rather quirky instructions that left them in stupefied state, and hearing about the joyful discovery of new cheeses and/or the depressing inability to uncover them. Yet, to go over the whole of them again in one fell swoop for editing purposes was… daunting.

Like scaling a mirror-surface mountainside daunting.

More than once we attempted to forcefully distract ourselves with web cartoons or by teasing Rocky, Stephanie’s Aslan-looking cat with a Cowardly Lion demeanor. Yet, when one of us began to waver the other would rap the other on the knuckles like sister of the cloth-come-teacher and sit him or her back down in front of the computer because the work must be done.

-"Oh God, I'm so scared of everything!"-

The only real work breaks were, well, other kinds of work.

Temperamental Disposition - Homemade Honey Mustard

-Sarcasm: The primary building block of society. Mustard: possibly a distant second?-

“What are you –“

“Doing?” I cut Fiancé off before he could finish his sentence. “Mortar and pestling mustard seeds in my molcajete that actually has more uses than that of a decorative book end.”

“I was going to say ‘stupid,’ but okay, that explains things too. So why aren’t you using the food processor to grind them up?”

“Shut up. I tried that and the blades sit too high to pulverize the seeds and for some godforsaken reason that I cannot fathom I actually don’t own a spice slash coffee grinder to do this. So,” pause to slam in a few more pounds with the pestle against the crack of the tiny black balls, “molcajete.”

-Obviously...-

It was one of those projects I was for some reason suddenly obsessed with. You know how it is. Some random little idea for a recipe, activity, or whathaveyou finagles its way into your brain and without warning you're buried deep in every book about the subject and performing strange experiments in your kitchen.

Out of nowhere last week I was overcome with the urge to make homemade mustard. Not that mustard is my favorite ingredient and slather it on everything I eat. I mean, I like it and I go through a fair share of Dijon. At least, as much as any other average person. Yet here I was in my newly tiled kitchen with polished gas range and any number of fancy bits of equipment beating mustard seeds with a rock like some kind of culinary savage.

-The inhumanity of it all!-

Why I let these urges take control of me I will never know.

Oh wait. I do. Because it’s fun.

Absence and Secret Behavior: Cherry-Coconut Oatmeal

-We all have our little secret habits.-

Fiance is out for the weekend for his duty with the Army Reserves - an overnighter that he's not sure of the purpose of but that he is unequivocally required to attend. He was up around four in the morning this Saturday dressed in full camo with rucksack slung over his shoulder. He pecked me goodbye and reminded me that, yes, four am was something that existed and that he would be back late Sunday night. Then off he went while I drifted back to sleep.

And what a wonderful sleep it was.

It may sound a little terrible, but I love his reserve duty weekends that include an overnighter or require him to get up so early in the morning that it can barely be justifiably called morning.

-See? Sounds terrible. No loving mate should say such a thing regardless of how true it is.-

But then again it's hard for me to argue with the fact that I get the entire bed all to myself. After all, there's something to be said for sprawling. Tonight I won't have to share the covers with anyone but the cats and they don't complain when I spindle the sheets around myself into a fluffy cocoon of fleece, down, and flannel. No stray elbows are going to knock into my ribs and cause me to wake up with strange indigo bruises of somnambu-happenstance. And, though I adore him, Fiance's snoring is often mistaken for semi trucks downshifting on a highway, which, as you can imagine, doesn't make sleeping easy. Or feasible.

So yes; I slept well last night and I will sleep even better tonight.