high-bar baking

I do not let the fact that I don’t know how to dance it stop me. 

“What are we listening to?” Even I said it when my sister queued up the track. “You said you wanted me to play music for making pizza! This is that!” 

Then the jam actually starts, and I understood. The beginning is unexpected, ok! Once the music proceeds, it does become the perfect song for pizza. And dancing. Especially dancing around the kitchen. The only authentic manifestation of the art form. 

Dean Martin’s Mambo Italiano. 

Like I said, no clue how to dance it. I imagine it in the style of West Coast Swing, or the various Latin dances. Push and pull, push and pull. Two people moving as one unit, reading pushes and pulls and staying together. I’ve never learned how to dance like that. 

In Country Swing, we move as two ends of a rubber band. Together, apart, together, apart, drawn by tension that’s built and dissipated over and over again. Leads and follows don’t dance together in unison, and they’re not supposed to. We swing. 

So I can picture a little Italian nonna dancing with her man, but I can’t begin to replicate it on my own. Fear not, blatant incompetence has never stopped me before! (Would that that were so.) 

I just carry on my dancing however I see fit. It’s my kitchen. 

Today was Maria’s Fudgy Chocolate Cookies with Peanut Butter Frosting. Exactly as billed. Unlike Mr. Martin, I have to say — a little one-note. You could put that frosting on a slab of cardboard and I’d eat it, which I suppose is a mark for the frosting and against the cookie. They were fine. So many things in life are fine. Save the mediocrity for the fun things. Like your oh-so-snazzy dance moves. 

The ones your family would roast you for. You know.