If I attempted to write something like the Cleaner Plate Club, thousands of innocent Internet surfers would be upchucking all over their computer keyboards, retching in bewildered horror at disaster after culinary disaster, and I would be asked to leave the blogosphere.
The proof, Readers, is in my 2006 Stroganoff Debacle, served with an ill-conceived side of poorly cooked brussels sprouts:
You can open your eyes now! That will never happen again! I promise! You and the rest of the world’s blog readers are spared this fate forevermore, because on the eighth day, the Lord made an Ali, and presented her with a silicone spatula made out of another one of Adam’s expendable ribs. Yea, forsooth, the Ali was begat with smarts and a passion for healthy yummy food, and by the ninth day, she was teaching Adam and Eve to make the Earth’s first organic apple cobbler. And it was good.
I think many of you already know excellent Ms. Ali over at Cleaner Plate Club. If not, you must get acquainted, pronto. Not only is she sharp as a freshly honed Wusthof paring knife, if she were a spice, she’d be Moxie Spice, and nobody would cook without her.
What you may not know is that Ms. Cleaner Plate Club was my beloved college roommate, and an uproarious party gal. We lived in the top half of an old Grinnell, Iowa farmhouse out on Route 6, not far from the Dari-Barn:
[Thank you to Allen Bukoff, for the Internet's only known picture of the Grinnell Dari-Barn! We owe you a milkshake, sir!]
We lived in our groovy green farmhouse (named The Doghouse, natch) with our two boisterous puppy dogs. It was a beautiful, carefree, $250-a-month life, full of impromptu dancing in the kitchen, rugby practices that occurred mostly at the town bar, and the jeans of adorable boys left in crumpled heaps on our shag-carpeted living room floor.
Just like that! Only minus the laptop, and swapping out the bathroom tiles for shag. I did say shag. Yes, yes, smirk if you wish. Ah, to be 21 again.
Anyhoo, Ms. Cleaner Plate Club lured me into a sordid lifestyle of skipping my 9 am German class to watch “A Chorus Line” on stolen cable (thanks, Matthew J., for rigging that up!). Her usual bribes? Insanely good brownies, flaky honey-gooey baklava, and seriously stellar spanikopita. All made from scratch. I should have known she would rock the foodie-blog world someday. Except, um, of course, I didn’t know blogs would exist. When we remembered to write our papers, we wrote our papers in computer labs, and were pretty excited about the VAX, the instant messaging system they had on the computers at Grinnell. VAX, wherefore art thou today, VAX?
Ms. Cleaner Plate Club and the utterly charming Mr. Cleaner Plate Club are the reason I’m here in the Berkshires, and not just for their fab meals. They are simply uber-fab peeps. As perhaps you have gleaned.
Tonight, we got together and made a little something more of Memorial Day, to shake off the sunny-day, downtrodden-parent blues. All four girls ran around like crazy in the backyard. And while Blair manned the grill in manly fashion, Ali and I whipped up dishes in the Official Cleaner Plate Club Testing Grounds.
I was nervous, I’ll admit it. But no unfortunate brussels sprouts drowned in the making of this dinner. I was determined to hold my own. While Ms. Cleaner Plate Club prepared 17 different kinds of vegetables and soba noodles, I sauteed some scallops.
And I think I poured some water, too. Without spilling it. But you can probably do that, so you’re probably all like, whatevs. Hey, don’t gloat. It’ll bite you in ass. Let me have my moment.
I don’t have a picture of me and the scallops, or a picture of the 17 Seraphim of Green Vegetables that appeared in the kitchen, hovering and singing fervent vegetable hymns over Ali’s intent head. You just have to take my word for it: they were there, man. I saw them.
Ali did however take a photo of my scallops and my cleavage.
Oops. My bad. So many pics of seafood and other animals tucked lovingly into my bosom, I lose track sometimes. But if the cleavalicious scallop photos of dinner turn out, they may show up over in Cleaner Plate Club land. We added the scallops to the soba noodles while the angels gently mixed in the holy vegetables and made green halos for each other out of braided asparagus.
But Ali, a perfectionist, thought it was too soy-saucy. Being from the Dirtier Plate Club, I thought our Memorial Day Dish rocked the house. Beats Brussels Stroganoff made with expired half-and-half any day of the week.
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