“We’re having skillet pizza tonight,” the chef de cuisine announces, finally ready to tackle the recipe she’d snipped from last week’s local paper food section. Or was it the one from the monthly cooking magazine she’d “filed” somewhere in the mountain of similar recipes turning yellow from not being filed.
“Shit! I forgot to buy the fucking fresh tomatoes. But we have sun-dried. I’ll work around it.”
Of course she will, as she did two days prior when she forgot the dough needed 24 hours to rise and recovered by scrubbing the pizza for pasta primavera or five days earlier when she left her cherished butter lettuce at the grocery and could atone for the evil deed only with a luscious chopped salad or two weeks ago when she entered her realm crowing about the terrific tuna casserole we were going to enjoy only to realize she had bought sardines and would have to settle for a salad Niçoise (that of course was not chopped liver).
You think magic happens when you snap your fingers and say Presto? Maybe elsewhere, but not in this domain.
Magician Molly requires only the background noise of ancient Law and Order episodes she’s seen two dozen times, feline Twinkle leaping onto the stool so she can leap onto the counter and lay waste to Molly’s painstakingly assembled tools of the craft, and husband/partner/soulmate Willie interrupting with “news” flashes he deems essential to her welfare, but she rightly rejects as violations of her Sacred Space. How dare you enter without permission she glares as he slinks back to the dungeon.
In the chaos the magician
slices the garlic
dices the onion
spreads the tomato sauce
calibrates the temperature
and—voila!—inserts the skillet into the oven, where it will reside until she frees it.
“I have a few more things to do.” Such as puttering, pondering, fussing, deciding, rearranging, and, you know, stuff.
The pizza requires a few more look-sees before we let it see the light.
“I’m not sure whether this will work.”
OBJECTION!
Sustained.