Paksworld

Every once in a while, the book I’m writing decides to come very alive, walk into my life, and reverse our roles.   It happened with the first Paks books (especially in one instance, when Paks took over and handled a situation for me.  I wish she’d done that more often!)

Tonight it happened with cooking.    I’m a pretty good cook, though not reliable (I have trouble making anything twice the same way, other than a fried egg.)  But today, something about the weather (warm but not hot, and breezy), and the smell of the Madame Alfred Carriere rose mixed with the smell of bluebonnet, and the burgeoning garden  with the pea vines at the top of the wires and waving above them, covered with white pea flowers…that and the new set of books, which have had gardens in them more than the Deed did….sent me over the edge.

We have fresh peas.  We eat them off the vine this early in the season.   Some have edible pods and some don’t, really (the peas are sweet and wonderful, though–just pop the seam and eat ’em like candies.)    We have overgrown radishes (originally to mark the carrot rows) and salad greens now at least a foot tall and green onions.  I had a bag of baby carrots in the fridge (our carrots still have strings for roots–no carrots yet)    I had some lamb left over from Friday night’s roast along with its gravy.  At the local store (small but good) I found a green pepper, a box of button mushrooms, and a can of sliced new potatoes.    I already had a can of Ro-Tel diced tomatoes and green chilis with cilantro and lime juice.   The garden harvesting part felt very much Paksworld–peas to shell, a few big leaves of arugula, some parsley, those big radishes, a few green onions, (test the carrots…no, not yet; admire the emerging potato plants.)   Then came the slicing and dicing, the chopping, the sauteeing of mushrooms, the mixing of ingredients in a pot with a jar of brown gravy (I am so far from the world’s best gravy maker that I regularly use commercial gravy.)   True, nobody on Paksworld has the pots I have (but most would have an equivalent to the old cast-iron frying pan/skillet

Lined a deep oval casserole with pie pastry,  poured the contents of the pot into it, topped it with more pie pastry, and shoved it in the oven until the crust was the perfect color.    And when it came out, and I broke the crust and looked…I thought, “This is a proper White Dragon Inn hot-pot, this is.”   Colorful, smelled great, and tasted even better.   (Yes, I’m bragging.  Though of course at the Dragon they’d have had redroots in it instead of potatoes, unless there’s some southern root vegetable that’s pale instead.  There could be.   But probably not, unless it’s a white radish…I used to use white radishes in soups.)

It’s a good sign when the book starts intruding into my life…didn’t get many words out today (partly because necessary yard work was going on outside the window with mower and weeder/edger) but the book’s nudging me to put those huge radishes in the mix, and use the arugula as well, means it’s beginning to flex its muscles.