Tasty little devils

Robert and I worked most of the morning on the devils on horseback for the Oscar party tonight at the Tropic.

I'd roasted the garlic cloves last night -- 250 degrees or so for maybe half an hour, just covered with olive oil in a glass dish. So we checked the dates for pits and fragments, stuffed the cooled garlic cloves inside, wrapped each in a third of a lengthwise-folded strip of bacon, and fastened them with picks.

Then I spread them out in batches on a rack in a lined baking tin, brushed them with teriyaki marinade and baked them at 450 for 9 minutes on one side, cooled them enough to turn, then brushed them again and put them back in for 6 minutes on the other side.

Time-consuming, but delicious.
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Postscript: They were winners. We dropped the big tray of 10 dozen devils off at the party early, and by the time we walked in to the grazers in the lobby there was applause. I thanked them, and told them that my mother thanked them, my father thanked them. . . .

Chris Peterson, who gathered up his full Bette Davis skirt and stopped to kiss us along the red carpet on the way in, was in fine form for the VIP pre-awards show. When I won a nifty canvas grocery bag and sunset-cruise tickets in his Oscar trivia contest, he got a good laugh when he took a truculent Davis puff and called me "that nice ho-mo-SEX-ual in the fifth row."

We went home to watch the actual show on our own screen -- commercials on a really big screen are really that much more offensive. Just as well, considering how little I like to cry in public, and how much I cried at the acceptance speeches for "Milk."