The Gentle Sandpiper

I've sent La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore off on a sort of Snipe Hunt this morning, just to get her out from underfoot.

There really is such a thing as a snipe -- a "shorebird," Wikipedia tells me. Plovers, godwits, ruddy turnstones. I even ran across the creature named for the famed attributes of my blueblood birding family: the double-striped thick knee.

I am a sucker for a sandpiper. When I was in high school, my stepmother, a great gift-giver, got me a little sandpiper statuette -- ah, I just found it: the Gentle Sandpiper Sculpture from the Smithsonian Store. Why don't I still have it? Where and when did I choose to leave it, break it, whatever I did with it? Could it be that the bill broke off, that it would not accept my sad efforts at repair?

I am known for the destruction of my own property. Fits of pique, whatever. Photographs, term papers, dissertation chapters. My hair. Gifts from stalkers.

So what is The Castafiore out looking for, what fruitless quest have I set her? To find and purchase the ingredients for injera, a type of Ethiopian bread.

The Castafiore neither cooks nor bakes. She does not grill, steam, braise, fry or parboil. The Chaste White Flower, the Milanese Nightingale does, however, love to eat and enjoys exploring the myriad of ethnic cuisines.

The Fredster lived several years in Ethiopia -- the origin of his passion to end hunger.

Strange, then, that we are celebrating the very paucity of ingredients that has made round and empty so many distended little stomachs.

He misses the bread, the coffee, the large soupy mashes of vegetables and tough stringy goat meat. Eating with the bread as utensil, the act of sopping. Tossing out the odd gem of amharic.

No doubt he also misses the beautiful woman with whom he lived (along with several members of her family) but with whom he could barely communicate. I've seen her picture and she is lovely, brown, placid, thin but also round.

Anyway, after years of harrassment, Fred is cooking an Ethiopian meal for us but is demanding (being demanding) authentic, fresh, quality ingredients.

I suppose it once was impossible to find teff flour, properly ground, to make the spongy sour injera. No more. And really, it is not far from being an unleavened sourdough -- if that makes any sense whatsoever. We go through spurts of drinking a variety of Ethiopian coffees that are readily available at a local international Farmer's Market. Even here -- deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé -- there is diversity.

When all the right makings are purchased, when the stars are all aligned, Bianca and I will clear out and leave him to it.

For today, though, the stuff of his meal is serving me as snipe, for I am in a mood.

This business of little sleep is wearing me down, eating at my sanity. Last night, I managed to sleep from midnight to one, then three to four-thirty. I feel like taking a carrot peeler to my eyeballs.

I am waiting for my surgeon to get back in town. I want to get this second left spacer out. And at the same time, I am tired of trying. Fred and I keep going over the opinions we were given last week. They still don't make sense to us.