Christmas Cookery (Someone’s in the Kitchen with Tigger)
Kemosabe says there’s something different about Christmas in the kitchen this year, and different is bad. Or is it?
The kitchen, for most of us canines, is one of our favorite places. It’s where the FOOD is, and it’s also the place where the floor yields amazing surprises in the form of dropped tidbits and crumbs. Christmastime is bonanza time if you’re a dog… so much activity in the kitchen: baking, cooking, and all those lovely smells in our house.
Until this year.
This Christmas my human is not making cookies, or pies, or candy or tarts. This Christmas my human is working on a new canine supplement, which means there is no sugar or flour on the counter, no jars of sprinkles in those fun red and green colors, no dollops of dough that land on the floor, no little apple slices for pies, no powdery confectioners’ sugar, no sticks of butter coming to room temperature.
Instead the counter is littered with tiny dropper bottles of extracts that, trust me, are not vanilla, small bags of pungent herbs, and jars of various unknown substances that smell familiar but remain a mystery to me.
She stands at the stove, adding drops and pinches of things, stirring, stirring, stirring, adjusting the flame, murmuring to herself. I sit near her, my eyes on the pot cooking on the stove. Today she’s making notes in her notebook when the contents of the pot start to bubble and hiss and spit. I bark a warning, she leaps into action and removes the pot from the flame, staring deeply into its depths as if she were divining tea leaves. Then she begins to tilt and roll that liquid around like it was crepe in a crepe pan on Top Chef.
Unlike the pre-Christmas kitchen activities of years past, there is no holiday music playing. We dogs love Christmas music. Crockett howls to “O Holy Night”, and Buckaroo and I do a mean duet to “White Christmas”. Thunderbear likes to solo on “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”.
My human says she will be playing Christmas music on Christmas Eve, so that’s something to look forward to. At present, the music in the kitchen is something called “Nature Spirit”, which includes pan pipe, flute, native drumming, water over stones, wolf howls, crickets, songbirds, and dolphin calls. Trust me, I’d rather listen to Mozart or Brahms. Crockett prefers Bon Jovi and Springsteen, but our human says that listening to vocals or powerful orchestration while she is experimenting is too distracting.
So no cookie tidbits or crumbs, no cookie dough or fruit pie treats. No Christmas music in our favorite room.
But wait… the concoction has now cooled, and she’s taking a spoon to it. She’s bringing the spoon to my lips and… oh my. What IS this creamy, yummy stuff? Wookie tries to barge in between Thunderbear and me to horn in on the action. Each one of us gets a teaspoon of the experiment. We lick our lips. We want more. I get a second teaspoon, I lick it clean. My human says she will be making this every day for us!
Maybe Christmas without homemade cookies isn’t so bad after all. And, there’s always the dog presents beneath the tree.
