Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins by Ellen Sweets Page A

by onions and garlic and the woman was still talking.
    That was Molly, always willing to stop, listen, smile, thank you for speaking to her, ask your name and thank you again, this time addressing you personally. And she meant it. She refused to see herself as a celebrity. She certainly never behaved like one, and God knows she never dressed like one until she reluctantly yielded to a personal shopper. As often happened on these supermarket junkets, despite the fact that we’d take different carts, our paths would overlap.
    On one such occasion, I saw from a distance that Molly was in deep attentive mode, looking into the speaker’s face, nodding but not really smiling—engaged, but not in a good way.
    The woman was taking Mol to task for something she had written about then-president George W. Bush, whom we had come to know in Molly par-lance as “Shrub.”
    Quelle
surprise.
    The woman was jibberjabbing away, as some people do when making a point, reiterating and, not getting the desired response, saying the same thing again. She droned on, a sclerotic passive-aggressive smile fixed in place.
    I didn’t know how to intervene, but I now stood behind the woman, facing Molly, spasmodically shifting from left to right and regressing to somewhere around sixth grade. I was twitching, doing a bit of furtive glancing here and there, and scrunching my face into strange contortions.
    I knew Molly wanted an out, but I just didn’t know what to do. So there she was, listening, nodding, and waiting for this scold to wind down. Suddenly Molly interrupted, apologized, and excused us, leaning in and conspiratorially whispering that she had to get me home for my medication, which was almost overdue.
    We concluded our foray up and down the aisles—intermingling impulse purchases with stuff actually on the list. We arrived at the checkout counter shocked—shocked!—to learn we’d spent almost three times as much as we had anticipated.
    E: “I thought we were using artichoke hearts in the salad.”
    M: “I thought we were doing hearts of palm.”
    E: “Why don’t we do both?”
    Problem solved.
    After the drive home in Bob the Pickup, much slicing and dicing, chopping and pureeing, ensued in Molly’s not-so-spacious kitchen.
    A sip of Chardonnay for her, a sassy Shiraz for me.
    Hellman’s in the potato salad?
Mais non
. Out came the blender, eggs, lemons, oil. Hellman’s might be the mayo of choice when I flew solo in the Ivins kitchen, but when I was sous chef, it was homemade or not at all.
    Hope Reyna, Molly’s housekeeper extraordinaire, insisted the kitchen was never as much a mess as it was when I visited. She was kinda right, which is why I hid from her on the morning after a particularly enthusiastic meal. Leftovers went to Athena the poodle, who devoured them voraciously.
    So, yes, anyone who ever ate at Molly’s house has most likely eaten from a plate touched by Athena’s big, long, pink poodle tongue.

9
Food in the ’Hood
    MOLLY ’ S FOUR-PERSON KITCHEN often felt like some kind of architectural afterthought, but there was actually great order about it. Nevertheless, four people would be hard-pressed to maneuver in it in any meaningful way.
    Built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinets housed odds and ends of dishes on the three bottom shelves of one side, while upper shelves and door shelves were stocked with herbs, spices, and all manner of oils—safflower, olive, extra-virgin olive, peanut, grapeseed, canola.
    There were salts—sea, kosher, smoked, pink (from Hawaii),
fleur de sel
from France—not to be confused with gray salt, also from France but indigenous to the coast. Oh, and let’s not forget sauces—Worcestershire, A1, tamari, light soy, dark soy, Chinese soy, Japanese soy, and Thai fish sauce, for the one time we decided to cook a Thai meal. She didn’t love it. Actually, she didn’t even
like
it. The