Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook

On Election Night, I stayed up late with my dog. We lay on the couch together. He napped. I tried to avoid checking the stupid New York Times needle every 10 seconds by reading scholarly articles about the meaning of Martha Stewart. The deadline for this piece was coming up. I had spent the past two weeks obsessively poring over Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres Handbook and then shopping for expensive ingredients and assembling them into tea sandwiches and canapes and mini-quesadillas. The cost of imported ham and cheese and seafood made me nervous. And when I finished cooking, everything had tasted like crap, except for the very expensive lemon and crab tea sandwiches. The dough for the pain de mie stayed liquid, no matter how much extra flour I added, and resembled a cinder block when it came out of the oven. The ham and goat cheese sandwiches tasted like all goat cheese, no ham. The flour tortillas, the product of an entire afternoon of work, were simultaneously pasty and tough.