Pea Green by Kimberly Larson Edwards
©Anonymous
I was visiting my friends from college, helping with last minute organizing for a holiday party they were putting together. They lived in Brooklyn, and I was living in San Francisco and making a pit-stop on my way home to Vermont for the holidays. We were all one year out of college and hadn’t seen each other for months. We had started our jobs, gone to our corners. Now we were back together, for Christmas time in New York (which, while cheesy, truly is a magical time to be in the City).
The plan: let’s have a holiday party, have a spread of soup and sandwiches. And egg nog. We need to have egg nog.
My best friend Ulla made the egg nog. She had recently started bartending, and wanted to try a rather involved recipe where you mixed the yolks with the rum, heated that on the stove and then separately whipped the whites to a frothy mess and put that on top of the warm yolky alcohol like a cappuccino.
It sounded delicious. Problem was, we quickly grew impatient with the electric stove in the small Brooklyn apartment and the time it was taking the heat the yolk/rum concoction. So, we decided to take a short cut and turn up the heat.
Second problem:
“Oh my god, it’s starting to scramble,” I heard Ulla remark in horror.
We now had chunky nog which didn’t fit our vision of the warm and whipped mug we intended. You can’t have chunks of egg when you swallow a holiday drink.
We turned down the heat, but the damage was done. But, like any recent college grad on a limited budget would do, we decided to not throw out our revised recipe but instead try and fix it.
And that’s when we noticed it.
While we started working on a solution to the scrambled egg nog, we noticed a smell growing in the kitchen and down the hall. It smelled like ass.
It was the only way to describe it: like someone had done some serious damage in the bathroom, hadn’t wiped carefully, and then decided to walk around the apartment with their pants down and cheeks splayed. Worse, the smell was spreading fast.
“What’s that smell?” I whispered to Ulla.
“I think it’s the soup,” she whispered back.
We looked at each other and then the large covered cookpot on the stove that had been simmering for about an hour.
An early party-goer hanging in the kitchen drinking and watching us strain egg nog into mugs then confirmed our fear.
“Oh, is that the soup? I thought you were boiling your underwear on the stove,” he remarked.
He could smell it too. It was real. This wasn’t some flashback from too much of something in college.
To get a head start on the party planning, Jenny, Ulla’s current roommate and our friend from college, had decided to make leek soup the day before the event. She chopped and sautéed and pureed green stuff for hours and let it simmer. We now feared that that same green pot of liquid had turned into something else. We weren’t sure, as Jenny had been occasionally stirring and tasting the soup over the last hour while we scrambled the drinks.
Just then, Jenny put down her spoon and ran down the hall. We heard the bathroom door slam.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
Then our friend and the other roommate Paulo (the biochemist) said: “I think Jenny left the soup out overnight on the stove. She basically created a giant Petri dish and then heated it up and has been eating it the last hour.”
With less then 30 minutes before the guests were set to arrive, we needed a plan, and fast. My brain was fuzzy with visions of rum flavored eggs and pea-green ass soup.
What to serve?
The sandwiches. The New York deli around the corner had saved the day with platters of pre-made clubs that I had forgotten about until Paulo pulled them out of the fridge in desperation.
The rest of the evening the guests munched on layers of bacon and turkey, sipped their now-less-than-chunky-due-to-lots-of-straining cups of egg nog and mingled while occasionally catching faint wafts of what they kept wondering was a toilet overflowing, in between stronger scents of vanilla candles and lemon Lysol.
Jenny spent most of the night in the bathroom, but recovered.
©Kimberly Larson-Edwards, 2008
Kimberly Larson-Edwards lives in Seattle with her husband Scott and son Miles. In addition to writing and chasing her son, she spends her time organizing with Environment America and U.S. PIRG, growing cukes and killing slugs in the garden, and other many forms of mischief and outdoor play.
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