Drip Baby 7 November 2009

We realized sometime over the summer that we were getting HBO for free.  Well, not free exactly, since we had already given our first-born to the cable company in order to be able to have full access to AMC’s Hoarders.  What?  We have our reasons.

So, we’ve been enjoying our free year of HBO.  If, by enjoying, you mean sometimes remembering to see if any good movies are on, deciding there aren’t, hoping for a rerun of True Blood instead, and otherwise forgetting we even have cable.  But, we have it and with it we have access to semi-risque programming that involves scantily clad women.  As you can imagine, we’re all about scantily clad women.

This has led us to the early 90s wackiness that is Real Sex.  Have you seen this show?  Between segments on all manner of kinky indulgence (like phone sex, masturbation and mutual massage – the horror!) folks on the street are asked to give their opinion on topics relevant to the clips.  These are usually early thirties folks out for a night on the town, often tipsy, usually giggly, holding forth on everything from spanking to talking dirty.  Not a huge range. Especially not considering the favorite topic of Real Sex – getting messy.

Perhaps the producers were really into food and sex.  Or maybe they love the idea of women with whipped cream on their noses.  One way or another, episode after episode of Real Sex features beautiful women  in some state of food or paint related mess, often in a ring, or pool with chubby, messy men looking on.  Wikipedia describes this fetish nicely, though I wonder if there isn’t a more technical term for it.  Whatever it is, someone out there is fascinated by it.

That someone is shilling faucets.

Happy National… 3 November 2009

Let me tell you people, November is one wacky month.  Today, for instance, is National Sandwich Day.  By the way, November is host to so many commemorative days that I’m bound to mention more than just this one.  But first, let’s talk sandwiches.

Fact one about sandwiches.  In my house we do not refer to them as sammies.  Oh no, my friends.  Just as the acronym EVOO does not cross my lips, neither shall the word sammies.  If you don’t know the horror from which these words come, I’m not going to enlighten you.

Fact two about sandwiches.  I do not like peanut butter and jelly to touch.  Not today, not ever.  Not within the sweet confines of a loaf and not outside of it.  Not jam, not preserves, not crunchy, not natural.  No PB and J.  It’s a flavor combination to kill for – me killing you, that is.

Fact three about sandwiches.  As a child, I begged my mother to wed marshmallow fluff and peanut butter.  She never did.  I had one sandwich, once, at a friend’s house that blended warm, toasted, white bread with a sleek layer of peanut butter and a thick, fluffy cloud of marshmallow.  I have never forgotten the beauty of that moment.  I’ve also never fixed such a sandwich for myself, preferring to let that sunbeam streaked kitchen and sticky little fingers keep the memory.

Fact four about sandwiches.  I really only like to eat them for breakfast.  My prefered breakfast (besides a hamburger and fries…but that’s another post) is a sandwich.  In fact, the best sandwich I can think of for breakfast is a hard roll with one slice of thinly cut ham and a slice of cheese, nothing else.  However, be warned, you’ll never get me to eat ham and cheese that have been touching at any other time of day.  I barely even tolerate ham.  But, in the morning, I fall into some mysterious twilight zone breakfast hole that renders most dairy, all eggs and whole grains kryptonite and installs the duel combos of ham and cheese and hamburgers and fries as my saviors.

Happy National Sandwich Day.  Have one for me.

No, you can’t. 30 August 2009

You need vitamins.  Protein.  Even a healthy amount of fat.  Google searchers, you can not live on lettuce.

We don’t know each other, you and I.   But we both know that, while an attractive strategy to become a shard of your former self while still eating every meal, it can’t be good to eat only lettuce.  I was there once.  I wished that I could be as thin, no, thinner!, than the other girls at school.  Jill had the cutest, shortest white shorts that she wore all summer long.  Kim had legs that you could drive a train between.  Jennifer was a tiny thing – not five feet, all eyes and a smile.  A trio of Shelbys with itsy bitsy ribcages and small gently curved arms waving from snug tank tops.  I didn’t dream about magazine models – everyone knows you can’t look like those woman, right? – but I’d have given anything, even heads upon heads of lettuce to look like the thin girls around me.

I’ve spent time on the edge of resolutions.  Nothing anything after 8.  Nothing after noon.  Just breakfast.  Maybe nothing.  I’ll go to the gym for an hour.  Every day.  Twice a day.  I’ll stay two hours.  I can look like them.  I can be them.  Lettuce lookers, “can I survive on only lettuce” and “eat only lettuce”, I’m talking to you.

High school years behind me, I know I was that same girl.  Rounder maybe, curvier.  Cuter.  But I lived on ice cream sandwiches for breakfast, an apple for lunch and two hour swim practices each afternoon. How I managed it, I have no idea.  Regardless of my miserable eating habits (which I am now, happily, over) I never resigned myself to a vegetable that is basically water.  So please, don’t come here looking for tips on living on lettuce alone.  No one is selling that promise here.

The Devil’s Fruit 30 July 2009

Spoiled, stinking, garbage in the sun, rotting.

Yes, cantaloupe is in season.  I’m sure there’s some smell you can’t stand.  Something that can send your stomach into convulsions with just a whiff.  Maybe you haven’t smelled it yet, but you will.  For me, it’s the cantaloupe.

It’s a serious problem.  I happen to like the taste of cantaloupe and I like the way the inside of cantaloupe smells but I might. die. if you bring a whole cantaloupe within 10 feet of me.  Die.  Choking on my own vomit.

Unfortunately for me, cantaloupe is all the rage at the CSA and we’ve been bringing home one a week.  They are getting gradually larger and I’m beginning to fear that soon we’ll be bringing home two a week.  D has cut some up (thus saving herself from a harrowing life as a spinster) and I cut some up this week.   You’d think it would be impossible to wade through the stench in order to chop up the fruit but once I can crack the rind, I can once again breathe in pure, sweet melony air.  Going into grocery stores lately has become an exercise in self-discipline.  Will I be able to hold my breath long enough to get from the parking lot, through the door, and safely down an aisle?  Get out of my way, cart man, lest I throw up on your shoes!

The Constant Spinach 13 May 2009

Another week of fresh veg, another week of spinach.  It has been raining every Wednesday for a month.  Rain every Wednesday means that the vegetables we pick up are dripping wet when we weigh them and stuff them into bags.  As we drive home, mossy, damp air settles into our noses.  It’s a peaceful earthy moment before we come home and start processing the packed bags.  Greens swimming in a sink of water, rooty veg scrubbed, wet things dried, dry things put away. 

The spinach was an easy answer this week – spinach, red pepper and feta quiche.  It’s a favorite standby for summers at our house.  Good hot or cold and perfect for warm evenings when you don’t feel like doing anything but sitting and talking.  The maple syrup was delicious on buckwheat pancakes.  We also brought home watercress and a tiny bit of cilantro both of which we’ve had trouble using.  Salsa is on the docket if the cilantro has survived (or if it appears again) and while I know watercress is high in vitamin c, I just don’t love it in salads.  We need an alternative dish.  Waiting to be used: giant spring onions – the size of thick ropes. 

The threat of shitakes still looms over us.  The rain this season has put a damper (quite literally) on mushrooms and so the promised delivery was delayed until later in the season.  This makes D happy since she’s not a fan of fungus but she has agreed to try a risotto should the shrooms ever show up.  I’m looking forward to the chance to try a new dish.

We’re expecting strawberries this week.  An unexpected delight.

Lettuce, I Cannot Live Without You 5 May 2009

We joined a sort of CSA* this spring. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years. In DC, the idea of a box of vegetables delivered to my doorstep was a temptation I couldn’t stop craving but also could justify paying for.  I won’t eat beets, who knows what else they might deliver, and why would I pay someone to gift me with a brussels sprout?  The answer?  I would not.   Sealing the deal was the effort going into getting those vegetables to me – gas for the truck, etc – vegetables that might well rot in the refrigerator in a wave of restaurant nights and lackadaisical cooking efforts.

It’s my downfall.  I’ll admit it to you.   I love the idea of vegetables, but not the reality of them.  Not the earthy flavor that creeps into some bites.   Not the wilted, wet blackening of lettuce.   Not the contortionist thinking when I try to determine what to do with something my mother never cooked.  I bring fresh veg home (and by this I mean only broccoli and green beans) and then I guiltily toss them after determining that we’re tired of tough broccoli or the black spots on the beans might be dangerous.  I know.   It’s criminal.

Charlottesville drew me in with the offer of a CSA drawing from multiple farms, offering a variety of pick-up spots (relieving me from the guilt of a door-to-door delivery) and providing a huge variety of produce.  After much debate (and by this I mean me telling her repeatedly I was going to do it and her nodding sympathetically), D and I agreed that we would commit.  Commit to eating our greens.

I’ve repented, mended my ways, found religion in this CSA.  I had no idea that rhubarb tasted good.  Historically, one bite of standard strawberry-rhubarb pie left me alternately scraping my tongue of sweetness and wondering why there was a slight vegetable taste.  My lettuce lexicon consisted of iceberg (ugh), romaine (bland), and arugula (bitter and not really a lettuce).  I’d never seen an actual beet.  It’s shocking, really, that my love of cooking and food could have resisted variety for so long.

Last week, we picked up spinach, beets, rhubarb, chard and red sails lettuce.  This was week three of spinach and so it went into a dip for a party (and by this I mean there’s a bodily limit to how much spinach a person can consume).  However, the generous addition of dip ingredients and crunchy bread made up for the side effects. The beets are awaiting a sweet potato/beet roast while the chard will be joining us in a parmesan prosciutto pasta.  We discussed the rhubarb at length (why does it look like celery?  Does it taste like celery?  Why are the leaves poisonous but not the rest?  What is it about strawberries? How can we avoid the sickly sweet berry/barb combination?) before tossing it into a rhubarb bread pudding.  In theory, this would be redeemable because D prefers bread pudding to even me and I prefer her happiness to everything else except yours.  It went into a bread pudding looking weird and celery-like and came out of the oven tasting delicious.  Horizons broadened?  Check.

The real star of last week’s haul was the red sails lettuce.  This beautiful cluster of tender, flavorful leaves trumped everything that had come before it (including both the apple butter and the honey).  We’ve eaten it as quickly as we could, testing the previous leafy limits set by the spinach.  I had no idea a lettuce could be anything so perfect.  Pretty, delicious, slightly sweet and useable all the way through.  I realize I was a hostage to iceberg as a child and only begrudgingly welcomed romaine into my life as an adult.  For having never met the red sails lettuce, I am deeply sorry.

Here’s to this week’s bounty.

*for local folks, we joined Horse and Buggy Produce a “local natural foods cooperative”

Coming Out 7 November 2007

Already you’re thinking this is a gay post, but it isn’t!   I just used the cleverly deceptive title to fool you!  Ha ha!  Do you feel fooled?  Extra points, dear reader, if you didn’t sigh at yet one more post cleverly trying to fool you into thinking it was gay when – gasp – it wasn’t!

While I could regale you with stories about my own coming out (uneventful, I assure you, unlike the time I left the vibrator out in the middle of the living room.  Which was, of course, all in the same week.  My poor parents) I will instead delight and awe you with the tale of my blog coming out.  You don’t have to look so disappointed.

We were at a party this weekend with a passel (like how I used that word there?) of lesbians that D. knows but I don’t.  It was delightful actually, homemade wings and nachos, football, tons of yummy beer and easy conversation.  Apparently, I enjoyed myself so much that I casually mentioned having a blog.  Unlike the way I’d envisioned it, the conversation didn’t stop, no one eagerly demanded my url, waiting with bated breath to jot it on a napkin, no one even looked surprised.  Of course, I had my eyes closed, wondering why I would say such an appalling thing.   I’m delighted that I was able to come out while not having to actually share anything.  Now, as long as I don’t go and leave the vibrator on the footstool, no one will even remember.

Points for your own coming out story.

Food Love 5 August 2006

I’m not going to be tiny, ever. Here’s why: Flavor.

It’s not that I love to eat. In fact, most of the time, I think of it as maintenance…or necessity…or a chore. It has to be cooked, chewed, and digested. Don’t get me wrong. I love to cook. I like the way garlic smells with olive oil and onions. I like the way things blend together (or don’t), burn or brown, combine to make whole new flavors. I enjoy eating. But the other night at dinner, I was reminded why I love to eat.

We went to a spot we’d been eyeing called Artie’s. We thought it was probably middle-of-the-road American – in fact, we were looking for something easy. Instead, we got the most flavorful calamari resting on lobster cream. We got delicate flounder wrapped in kale, crab meat and slender slices of crisped potato. We got braised pork tenderloin with a slightly caramelized chili glaze and shredded parmesan potatoes flecked with a hint of dill and broiled just enough to crisp. All we drank was water, but it was appropriate as everything had the perfect consistency; nothing melted when it should have crunched, nothing was gummy when it should have been flaky. We thought we were satisfied (no, thank you, I couldn’t eat another bite!) but in fact, the strawberry shortcake proved beyond our willpower and the from-scratch biscuity cake (not too sweet) and the layer of rich cream (not too bitter) with the plumpest blueberries (none soft) and the ripest strawberries (perfectly juicy) went beautifully with the hand-churned ice cream (not too firm).

I felt like I could have rolled home, but I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. The waiter was friendly without being flirtatous (which I find unappealing in a waiter), the booth we sat in was deep and comfortable, slick brown, padded cushions blocked by a shiny, glossy…buttery…dining table. The napkins weren’t too stiff and the service was perfect; our water glasses never got low, unobtrusive busboys cleared plates at the appropriate time, the staff seemed to truly like each other. I don’t know how soon we’ll go back, but I’ve been back three or four times in the last week alone.

And that is why I’ll never be the girl in the magazine.