1. I went to bed Monday night and Charly seemed to be what is now her usual self. She spends most of her time lying on or near a couple of quilts placed on the rug that covers much of the living room. Before her legs began to give out, Charly often joined me in the Vizio room and, until about three months or so ago, she joined me on the bed at night.
No longer.
Now she confines herself to this one area, sleeps quite a bit, and she signals to me with whimpering when she's hungry, thirsty, or needs to be carried out back to do her business.
She doesn't cry or pant in pain. In fact, when she does drag herself out to the kitchen or when she occasionally goes on a safari, dragging herself to far regions of the backyard, it doesn't appear that it's painful.
As Monday night stretched past midnight, Charly was out of sorts, whimpering. After one o'clock or so, I got out of bed, fed her, made sure she had water, and I carried her outside. Usually food and a trip outside help settle her down, but not tonight. I went to bed. Charly cried. I got up. She stopped crying, ate a little more, possibly went out more times (I was groggy), but as soon as I returned to bed, Charly resumed whimpering.
It's never quite happened before, but I hypothesized that Charly was lonely.
By now, it was about 4:30 a.m.
I fixed myself a cup of coffee. I sat in the living room. I started writing.
Charly relaxed. She fell asleep.
She just wanted company.
2. Coincidentally, Charly's restlessness took place during a night when I was charged up, too.
Some nights when I go to bed I can hardly wait for the next day to come because of what I have planned. Most often, it's a hike to somewhere I've never been (Stevens Lake, for example) that has me eager to get up in the morning, but, right now, with the trails I normally hike covered with snow, my excitement through the night was in anticipation of a cooking project.
On Monday, I did some reading about how to use crab stock. Thanks to all the crab shells I bring home from the February Elks Crab Feed, I have made a lot of crab stock and, every time I've used it, I've made some kind of fish chowder -- and I've loved it.
But, I have been wondering about other possibilities.
Online, I discovered things written about combining crab stock with tomatoes and other ingredients to make a pasta sauce.
Charly was restless for her reasons.
I was excited throughout the night in anticipation of cooking pasta sauce and using crab stock in a new way.
Around 10:00 this morning or so, my first move, once I'd thawed a quart of crab stock, was to reduce it, thus steaming about half of its liquid content out and intensifying the crab flavor.
I poured a quart of my homemade crab stock into a pot, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat and reduced the stock for about fifteen or twenty minutes down to about a pint.
I didn't have a specific recipe to follow. I had read some descriptions of making crab sock/tomato sauce, seen some recipes that gave me an idea of ingredients, but, mostly, I was on my own.
I like buttery things. So, I put a chunk of butter in the Dutch oven, melted it, added about three or four cloves of garlic and a chopped onion and sauteed them.
When the onion was soft, I poured the reduced stock into the Dutch oven and decided to add three 14 oz cans of diced tomatoes and appropriate, unmeasured amounts of salt, fennel seeds, tarragon, a couple of bay leaves, thyme, and some extra dry vermouth.
I cooked this down. I loved how it smelled. I lost track of time, but at some point I decided it was close to the thickness I wanted and I slowly added an unmeasured and rather slight amount of heavy cream to this sauce and let it continue to cook on a low heat while I boiled a batch of macaroni.
I suppose I had originally thought that I'd cook this sauce and boil the macaroni at evening dinner time.
I couldn't wait.
The sauce gently bubbled. I made some macaroni, and I greedily ate all the macaroni I cooked with my crab stock fennel creamy tomato pasta sauce poured over the top of it and I was as happy as I've ever been with something I made.
I had a quart left over, so some time in the next few days, I'll get to serve myself more of this sauce. I just hope in the meantime I can keep my greedy, gluttonous self from sneaking spoonfuls of sauce out of the container.
3. Good Lord.
Fennel.
Why had it taken me so long to cook again with fennel?
About thirty-five years ago, I went through a phase of drinking licorice root tea. About that same time, I frequented the Keystone Cafe. The Keystone experienced a change of owners and a guy I never knew, but saw around Eugene a lot back then and in the ensuing years, named Bruce cooked at the "new" Keystone. One day, I ordered a huevo rancheros and Bruce had seasoned his sauce with fennel.
The flavor of that sauce floored me.
I didn't know what gave the sauce that subtle licorice flavor and I screwed up my courage and asked Bruce about it and he told me that the taste I so enjoyed was fennel.
I was in graduate school then and I used to make tomato sauce in large batches to eat with pasta and with my own versions of foods with tortillas. I started adding fennel to my tomato sauce and I loved it.
Something happened, though, and I quit using fennel. I'm wondering, but I'm not sure, if when Debbie and I got together if maybe fennel just didn't work in our new family. That's very possible.
After a long fennel drought, though, it returned to 940 Madison back on January 7, 2011. On a whim, not knowing what I was doing, I bought a porketta from Carlton Farms at the South Eugene Market of Choice. Upon bringing it home, I discovered that the porketta was seasoned with, among other herbs and spices, fennel. My blog post from that day reports that I thought it was the best pork I'd ever eaten and that Debbie remarked that she couldn't believe we were eating such delicious food in our home.
I bought and cooked more of these pre-seasoned porkettas over the next few years, but, somehow, aside from the porketta, fennel didn't make a comeback in my cooking.
I don't remember ever cooking with fennel in Maryland nor back in Kellogg, until today.
When I went shopping to make today's crab stock sauce, I didn't have fennel seeds on hand. I'm having trouble remembering the last time I had a supply.
So, eating this sauce today was not only a sensory pleasure, it brought back memories I cherish of the mid-1980s Keystone Cafe and those graduate school years when I lived alone in a cozy basement apartment at 361 W. Broadway in Eugene and learned how to cook delicious and nutritious meatless food in a tiny kitchen, living on a limited budget, and set my love of cooking into permanent motion.
Today, it was invigorating to have the taste of fennel and those old fennel seed years come back to me.
My next move? Don't let the fennel get away again.
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