busy, busy

I've had a burst of energy lately, which has been mostly channeled into cooking. Here are two observations I have to share with you: first, the next time you make an upside-down cake, instead of melting butter and mixing in brown sugar, instead cook a quarter cup of honey until it is dark and slightly reduced. Add your fruit to that and proceed making your cake. You'll discover that caramelized honey is one of the most magnificent tastes in the world, and you'll wonder, "Caramelized honey? Why haven't I been eating that forever?" Secondly, if you make your own onion dip from scratch -- and I don't mean mixing powdered soup mix with sour cream, I mean cooking your own onions in butter until they're golden and soft, mincing them, and mixing them with sour cream, cream cheese, salt, and pepper -- the results will cause everyone who tastes it to go into a contemplative gobbling state. They will not want to stop eating that onion dip, even if you implore them to save some room because there are four other dishes coming.

As well as cooking, another hobby, reading, has been paying off of late. Thankfully my long, rough stretch of reading God-awful books came to an end, with the excellent "Blind Submission" by Debra Ginsberg. "Blind Submission" is the story of a young, aimless woman who winds up working for an extremely tightly wound boss, a boss who insinuates herself into all areas of her employees' lives and leaves their sanity on shaky ground. This reminded me very much of an over-the-top boss I had for a while when I was practicing law. My old boss used to try power ploys like trying to make us come in at six a.m. "My MUNI route doesn't start running until seven," I said acerbically. "Just roll out of bed and call a cab," said my boss airily. "I am not about to start taking a ten dollar taxi ride to work every day," I said firmly. "That's going to be fifty dollars a week!" But then my favorite colleague, who lived even further from the office than I do, agreed to come in at six. Our boss then decided to up the ante and by the end of the day had forced him to agree to show up at four thirty a.m. Meanwhile I was still scheduled to arrive hours later, after the 5 Fulton majestically began its route and leisurely conveyed me downtown. My friend looked haunted at the prospect of needing to be at the office by 4:30, and I chided him. "You've got to grow a backbone!" "I do have the backbone.. the backbone of a frog," he mourned.

After reading "Blind Submission", I had horrendous nightmares that I was back in that job. But perhaps the true nightmare is that a highly educated, talented person chooses to be unemployed, as though Betty Friedan had never written "The Feminine Mystique." My psychiatrist tried a few weeks ago to push me gently into going back into the law, but I"m resisting. "I can't face it, all that stress," I told him frankly. Maybe next time I'll tell him I'm still having nightmares about one of my hellish bosses from those days. But my psychiatrist thinks I'd be happier if I had people routinely appreciating my intelligence and paying me for my insights. Maybe he's right. After all, that's an occasional cause of strife in the home, my accusations of being treated like a dullard. Here's a cinematic treatment for you all: