The fingerprints on the windows are still here. A pair of shorts belonging to a boy who lives in Colorado sits atop my laundry basket. And just the other day I found an empty Coke can behind a chair in the guest bedroom.
Ah, the flotsam and jetsam of departed house guests. Nine to be exact, all family, ranging in age from almost 2 to almost 96.
Every Fourth of July, we entertain the brood for a few days here at our mountain abode in the White Mountains. Beds are pulled out, sleeping pads are spread about, and everyone is instructed about the leaking shower door.
I lay in enough food to feed a small army, most of it perched precariously atop one another inside my refrigerator or on my pantry shelves. Meanwhile, a freezer inside the garage is piled bottom to top with everything from hamburger to venison, hot dogs to frozen spaghetti sauce.
Naturally whatever I want for the next meal is always at the bottom, forcing me into a frozen Dumpster dive, recklessly tossing out everything from tortillas to pork chops along the way.
Somehow, everyone got fed — much of it via the barbecue grill or the new smoker my husband bought for himself a few months ago. We had smoked ribs, smoked pulled pork, smoked brisket. Yes, I’ve seen the warnings about smoked meat. Then again, we don’t eat like this all the time.
With all that smoking came a raft of new recipes my husband has been trying out, most calling for things I’ve never had before in my spice rack, such as coriander and fennel seed.
Um, swell. But where the blazes did my cinnamon and allspice go?
“Oh, I’ve alphabetized all the spices,” came the reply. What next — the Dewey Decimal System?
We had too many afoot to try out yet another gadget my husband also recently acquired: an electric pizza oven. Bakes a 12-inch pizza at 700 degrees, at a cost only slightly higher than what one would pay down at the local pizzeria.
Trouble is, there are no decent pizza joints within 20 miles of us up here in the forest, so this will have to do. After experimenting with several pizza recipes, we found one we like. Mix the dough, let it rise, spread it out, add pizza sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms, black olives, and a little garlic powder and oregano. Bake until the little timer goes “ding.” Mama mia!
But the pizza oven and the smoker won’t make the trip back to Tucson in the fall. No room for the smoker, and we have a fabulous Italian restaurant just down the street.
Meanwhile, slowly but surely, things are settling back down to normal here in the pines. I can actually see daylight in my refrigerator — well, OK, it’s the little lightbulb in back.
Windex and a little elbow grease will take care of the tiny fingerprints on the glass. Not sure what to do about that pair of boy’s shorts. No doubt the boy who wore them will have outgrown them by next summer.
Ah, next summer — when we hope, once more, to do it all over again.
