2001-12-20 - 7:57 p.m.
Spent the day Christmas shopping with P, and got home about 4:30 to get ready to go to a Christmas party at 7 - but I decided that I'm not up for another night of small talk, and so I bailed and planned to stay home, decorate my tree, and make some Christmas cookies. My mother, Christmas maker extraordinaire, is a little behind on her baking this year, and since I'm unemployed I volunteered to do some of it for her. We decided on who would make what, and I dug out my new (last year and never yet used) Kitchen@id mixer and made a list and went to get the ingredients. I located the cookie sheets and the cooling racks, and I was assembling all this shit in my teeny tiny kitchen when I realized that I don't have any cookie cutters. Correction. I have a couple dozen cookie cutters, but a fat lot of good they're doing me, packed up in a box in NJ.No big deal - I'll run out and get a gingerbread man cookie cutter, and get started. No problem.
However. Apparently there is a dire shortage of cookie cutters in Greenwich Village. I went to the party store. No luck. To Jefferson Market. None. To Lechter's on 6th - out of business. To CVS, to Balducci's, to the Gourmet Garage. To the specialty basket store on my block, where they had a snowman cookie cutter filled with white chocolate, and an apple cookie cutter for God's sake, but no gingerbread man. Balducci's had ONE giant copper bell cookie cutter.
And finally, at the ghetto Gristede's on 4th Street, I found cookie cutters. Two. Both BEARS. So guess what? It's gingerbread bears this year, and I better not get any shit about it, either. When I was a kid, my mother and grandmother and I would all do the cookies together. And by the time I was in high school, they let me in on their little secret. Every year my 70 something year old grandmother would make obscene gingerbread people, and they would laugh like maniacs and hide them in a bag in the cabinet so no guests would see them. So the gingerbread men are not to be messed with. It's tradition, right there.
But why no cookie cutters? I saw cheese cloth and basting bags and shrimp forks and cooking parchment. Lobster picks and candy thermometers and stainless steel ice tongs, but apparently, there is no one baking in these parts. Well, fuck it - ginger bears it is.
But right now, right this very minute, there are Christmas carolers outside my apartment. I can't see them when I go to the window, they must be standing in front of the bookshop windows. So I'm going down to see....guess that makes up for the lack of utensils.
I'm back. I went down to the stoop with a cigarette and my coat, and the carollers were just four random people with sheet music, doing it for fun. They were damn good, too. And if I were actually baking like I should be instead of writing this entry I could have given them some obscene ginger bears.
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last five entries:
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