My house is in unimaginable chaos right now. Our semesterly Special Dinner is tonight, and everyone who can cook or wave a knife at a stack of carrots has been drafted into doing so. I don't know what the percentage of cooks in any given "normal" population might be, but in this den of hedonism, creativity and general sensory addiction it's pretty fucking high. There have been at least twenty people in and out of the kitchen since 11:00 this morning, each one intent on one outrageous dish or another. We have fancy dips and tiny sandwiches and coconut cream fruit tarts. We have truffles. We have delicately herbed new potatoes and pumpkin-seed lasagna. We have fucking roast leg of lamb. We have individual chocolate ganache cakes with shattered caramel accents. It's ridiculous and sumptuous and every bit of it is homemade by some college kid you'd never suspect of knowing how to do more than boil macaroni.
Because this is a co-op and we take our excess seriously, it's also a game and a costume ball. It's a semi-murder-mystery centered around the funeral of Marilyn Monroe, and we all (50 of us) have roles. There's the family, the fans, the press, the fairytale characters and circus performers and detectives and random political figures and even more random bystanders. The guest list includes Joe McCarthy, the blind psychic, Marilyn's alcoholic mother, the drug lord, Dr. Watson, the person who doesn't get that it's a funeral, Little Red Riding Hood, and the kid trying to make it big on YouTube by making videos of the event. And me -- I'm the obnoxious fan with encyclopedic knowledge of Marilyn's life which is entirely, 100%, despite my insistence, dead wrong.
More on that later. For now, the key things are that a) I have to figure out how to make a mourning hat, b) I still need to heap several pounds of sliced tropical fruit on top of my sickeningly gooey masterpiece, and c) I'm forbidden to consume anything except ginger tea between now and dinner because I already ate enough coconut custard to make me sick. And it's only two hours until dinner and my hair is a mess! Whatever will I do??
Today is awesome.
Posted by dianna at April 14, 2007 06:10 PM