Paris deux

Things I've done since my last post:

-Reprised the audition for Sleeping Beauty by getting to act like wind
-Feted la musique with all of France on June 21st, the Fete de la Musique
-Arrived in Rouen, the site of Joan of Arc's burning
-Seen some really great street theatre
-Gotten attacked
-Seen some really bad street theatre
-Drunk hard cider on the site where Joan was burnt
-Read aloud from a book called "The Secrets of the Model Dorm"

Yeah.

Paris.

Things I have done since I've gotten here:

--Eaten raw steak
--Fallen in love with Jean-Paul Gaultier
--Convinced a Swedish model that I'm a professional face painter
--Seen a man eat a balloon animal balloon
--Drunk wine out of a baby bottle
--Sung "Santaria" in front of a crowd on the steps of Sacre Coeur
--Had a rainy picnic beneath the Eiffel Tower
--Ribbon dancing

Oh yeah.

My dad thinks I am a master of the French language. I am just about to call a French businessman to try to arrange a time for an American businessman to call him. I guess. I don't even really know. All I know is that this phone call will take place in a French that I definitely don't speak--business French. Also, in my nervousness about this conversation, I have completely forgotten English and can't tell if I've spelled business correctly despite Spell Check's insistence that I have. OH GOD SAVE ME FROM MYSELF!

I just did it. If this company dies, it is so not my fault.

Master Baker?

Sometime in the recent past I ate a delicious Seven-Layer Bar at a bake sale and scavenged my mother's cook books for the recipe, to no avail. It was a heavenly mix of graham crackers, chocolate, peanut butter and coconut... but that was only four layers. So yesterday I went into Whole Foods when I was much too hungry to be doing any sort of food shopping and proceeded to buy the ingredients necessary for my own recipe of Seven-Layer Bars. I wanted a graham cracker crust, a layer of peanut butter and a layer of brownie, sprinkled with coconut and walnuts.

I go back to Kevyn's where I have the house to myself...perfect time for kitchen experiments. Preheat the oven. Melt a bar of butter. Crumble up some graham crackers. This is very tedious and trying for the fingers. After I feel like I've got enough crumbs, I stick the mix in the pan. There are some bare patches, but I carry on. I begin to refer to them as the Heart Attack Bar as I've already used an entire stick off butter and this is only Layer One. Next I melt a bag of peanut butter chips and spread them on top of the graham cracker crust. Of course, Kevyn doesn't have a spatula or any sort of real spreading tool, so I use the back of a spoon. Inefficient. The graham cracker crust keeps coming up and mixing with the peanut butter. Next I mix the brownie batter. I have planned to only do half, but then I'm thinking that actual brownies might be too heavy, so I decide to eliminate the egg to make them gooier. So I throw in half the mix, add some water (a little too much, I realize, a little too late) then some vegetable oil, mix that all up, pour it onto the peanut butter layer. I start crumbling walnuts, but this, too, is trying on the fingers and I give up when I have enough for only half the pan. I decide to say that I did that on purpose. A Nut side and a No Nut side. Then comes the coconut. Oil is already seeping up from the bottom.

I stick it in the oven for 15 minutes and start to wash the many dishes I've used. 15 minutes later I pull it out of the oven, knowing that it won't have fully cooked, but I was not expecting it to have melted. It is a gooey, gross looking mess. I stick in in for another 20 minutes. When I come back, the edges look cooked, but the inside is still very gooey. So gooey, in fact, it's like lava. So much like lava, in fact, it's boiling. That was disquieting. I stick in back in the oven for another 20 minutes. After that is over, I pull it out. The inside is still gooey, but I realize that if it's boiling, it will continue to cook itself without the help of the oven. The amount of oil that is bubbling over the surface is disgusting. I try to sop some up with a paper towel. I'm actually pretty successful, and once a lot of the oil is removed, the concoction looks done.

Kevyn comes home after it's cooled a little so I decide to cut us some pieces to see if it's edible. The graham cracker crust has to be scooped onto our plates with a spoon, but it's definitely edible. Sort of delicious even. After we had dinner, Kevyn even went back for another square, a la mode this time.

I begin to realize something. I've always thought that I was better at baking than cooking. When you cook, everything is To Taste. Throw in as much as you want of whatever you want and it'll come out more or less fine. Baking is not like that. Baking requires precision and exact measurements. I realized that I cook like I'm baking--seeking specificity and rules--and that I bake like I'm cooking. I didn't measure how much water and oil I put into the brownie mix. I just threw it in, knowing that there needed to be more oil. I've decided that after Kevyn and I finish this batch of Heart Attack Bars and we both have recovered from our double bypass surgeries, I will try again. This time with a lot more forethought and measuring.