December 23, 2006

Chocolate and Gravy

You know what's a bad idea? Going for a three-hour road trip with a nearly-three-year-old who recently stole the Advent calendar and ate the last seven pieces of chocolate.

Yeah, I know. It should have been three pieces. We were running behind. Now we're ahead because a toddler who's stolen an Advent calendar will eat every last piece, regardless of the number on the door.

On the plus side, when I busted her, the first thing Clara Jane said was, "Hey Mommy? Would you like a chocolate?" as she extended the final, half-eaten candy to me. The little thief does have manners.

The ensuing road trip and the napless day that followed contained a degree of toddler psychosis never before witnessed by our family.

Do you know why throw pillows are called "throw" pillows? Because they're just perfect for a toddler with severe chocolate intoxication to throw! Around the living room! Repeatedly!

Shortly before dinner, she refused clothing, and ran laps through the house, grabbing pieces of fried chicken with each 35 mph run past the dinner table.

It's too bad she didn't grab fistfuls of gravy, because damn if we don't have an overabundance.

I think the problem's because today is December 23rd, and my mother and I have a history of December 23rd kitchen fiascos. Tonight, Mom made her ass-kicking awesome fried chicken, mashed taters, green beans, biscuits, and gravy.

Now, gravy is an art, no different than mastering any French sauce. That's right - hillbilly gravy has the same basis as fancy-pants French sauces. Hot, flavorful fat + flour + liquid = hillbilly gravy/fancy-pants French sauces. It took me a long time to master gravy. Truth be told, I did better with French sauces in culinary school than I did with gravy. Gravy required many phone calls to my gravy-making ancestors.

But oh, the torch has been passed.

Seems that my mom didn't think to drain off all but a few tablespoons of the chicken-frying grease. Granted, this was pan-fried chicken, not deep-fried, but still. The amount of grease required to pan-fry chicken will make enough gravy for bathing.

She kept adding giant spoons of flour, but still the gravy spattered and gurgled. I stood over her shoulder, watching in horror as the gravy grew. And grew. And grew until finally, I had to say it:

"Step aside, Mom. I'll save us from the gravy."

And I did but it was a bittersweet save. Bittersweet with a dash of black pepper and lots of creamy, chickeny goodness.

Do you want some gravy? Because we've got some. Oh, we have so damn much gravy. It's too bad my granny's dog, Lady, died six years ago, because that dog lived on gravy. In Lady's absence, the following uses for our mass of leftover gravy have been proposed:

Posted by Robin at 10:51 PM | Comments (6)

November 30, 2006

Day Thirty - Last Day! Real Content!

Ice has been falling from the sky since 8:30 this morning, minus taking off the noon hour for lunch. This is what my front porch step looks like:

Ice. On the step. Tread with caution.
So sparkly. So terrifying.

Awhile back, my Yooper mother-in-law made wise about us "southerners" closing schools when we have an inch of snow, while they function just fine with 3,847 feet of white stuff on the ground. To which my mother replied, "Ever try to drive on a two-inch sheet of ice?" or something to that effect.

We're not having a snow day today; we're having an ice day. I'd decided to keep Clara Jane home from daycare about ten minutes before her teacher called to tell me they were going to close due to weather.

Oh, how I love snow/ice day! I throw the rules out the window on snow/ice day. We can watch too much TV, eat junk food, play a little loose and free with naptime. What does it matter? We're not going anywhere!

The day started with Clara Jane asking to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas during breakfast. We piled onto the couch, she with her apple, cheddar cheese, and sippy of milk; I with my steel-cut oatmeal and coffee, for that is the snow/ice day way.

About a year ago, on a similar snow day, I made a post about making cookies and watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with Clara Jane. Today was no different, but completely different. I had a job for us.

I've been in a bit of a quandry about our Christmas tree this year. Clara Jane loves Christmas trees with a depth that borders on idolotry. I'm cool with that. The problem is, our tree (which we haven't set up yet; I refuse to buy a tree prior to December) is always decorated in tastefully matched silver and purple glass bulbs that we got for a wedding gift. Very breakable glass bulbs. On one hand, I don't want to deny my little tree-hugger. On the other, I don't want to spend the next month with shards of glass wedged in my feet.

Solution: let's make salt dough ornaments! Better yet, let's paint the salt dough ornaments purple and silver so I'm not completely sacrificing my pretty, pretty ornaments! And even more better, making salt dough ornaments will give us something to do when we hit Hour Three of snow/ice day and I start freaking out because we're snow/icebound.

Oh, what a difference a year makes.

December, 7, 2005:
Cookie cutter bracelets
Clara Jane wears her cookie cutters as creative fashion accessories, and covers two rooms of my house with green decorator's sugar.

November 30, 2006:
Making sugar dough ornaments
Clara Jane personally cuts three baking sheet's worth of salt dough ornaments all by herself, even lifting them off the table with a spatula and placing the on the baking sheets without dropping or breaking. Unlike her professionally-trained cook mother, whose salt dough cut-outs look like the snowmen who live near the toxic waste dump.

Last year: Clara Jane kept talking to the children on the TV as if they were really there.

This year: While making ornaments and listening to the show's soundtrack, Clara Jane recites bits of dialogue she remembers from her breakfast viewing of the show, reenacting the entire Schoder and Lucy piano scene.

Last year: I'm sure there was probably a temper tantrum when all the green sugar disappeared from her grip.

This year: Clara Jane has the emotional maturity to say, "This song makes me feel happy," when "Christmastime is Here" comes on.

Last year: Clara Jane squwaked a bit about being stuck at home.

This year: "Mommy, can we make a snowman?" No, honey. I'm afraid the only thing we can make out of this stuff is a Vanilla Iceman.

Last year: Clara Jane shoved half a tube of pre-made cookie dough down her gullet.

This year: "Mommy, we don't eat Play-Doh." That's what she said when I stupidly kissed the wad of salt dough she held in her hand.

And she's right. Don't eat the dough. It'll dry out your innards. Some things are learned the hard way.

Posted by Robin at 03:37 PM | Comments (11)

November 28, 2006

Day Twenty-Eight - Thank God, a Tagging!

I'd hoped to write one of my long-winded, thoughtful, possibly humorous posts today, probably about earplugs, but that's so not going to happen. I'm exhausted. Still feeling slightly crappy, and Clara Jane's still snotting all over the place. I spent the day trying to get everything back to normal after the long weekend away, which means shitloads of laundry. No real break, since The Snotmeister 2004 opted to not nap today.

Yeah. Brain-dead. That's me.

Luckily, my old pal Kara Joy, who I've known since we weren't a whole lot older than our kids are now, tagged me to talk about how weird I am. I'm pretty sure I did a similar meme a year or so back. Once I answer this one, I'll dig up the URL for the old one and post the link so you can get a double-dose of my weirdness. We'll see if I repeat.

Are y'all getting bored with this? You're getting bored with this. I can tell. You're all very quiet. I don't blame you one bit at all. I'd be sick of me, too, if I'd read 28 days of me.

Anyway, back to the meme. Here's the rules: Each player of this game starts with the “6 weird things about you”. People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says “you are tagged” in their comments and tell them to read your blog.

I normally don't tag, but I'm going to tag some of my fellow NaBloPoMoers to give them a boost. I know I needed it.

1. I love grocery stores. It can be frou-frou places like Whole Foods or Wine & Cheese Place, or a small-town mom & pop joint. Doesn't matter. I love them all, and I'm compelled to check them out. If I'm in a new city, I have to check out as many grocery stores as possible, partially because I have to try the local potato chips. Canadians - ketchup-flavored potato chips? Why?

Sometimes I even miss grocery stores from my past, or get wistful about stores that I never visited. One of the local grocery chains went out of business the same week I moved to St. Louis almost eight years ago. Just last week I drove past what had been the location closest to my house and thought, "Gee, I wonder what shopping at National was like?"

2. My bras have to fit perfectly. If they don't, I will fidget myself to death. I'm not above doing pilates-style moves with my shirt hiked up to my ribcage to adjust the back strap in public, or, as I displayed a few days ago, standing on a patio with other human people and passersby on the street, bent over, with my hand shoved into my right cup to get everything adjusted just where I want it. But at least you'll never see my 32 ounce boobs spilling out of a 20 ounce cup. I may have absolutely no class whatsoever, but my boobs look good and I'm comfortable. Maybe a little too comfortable, now that I think about it.

3. I read in bed every single night before I fall asleep. Doesn't matter how tired I am. I will read until my eyes slam shut, even if it's just one page.

4. I like my leftovers cold. Pizza, chili, Thanksgiving fixings (except for cold gravy, which is disgusting and could almost turn me off of gravy altogether ... almost), fried chicken, burritos. I rarely reheat any of them. This goes against everything I learned in culinary school about taste and temperature, but I don't care. I like cold leftovers. Always have. Although I seem to be outgrowing my cold chili affection. I've been reheating it over the past few years.

5. I hate having unannounced visitors, mainly because I dress like a complete slob when I'm at home and I'm probably not wearing a bra, despite (or because of) what I said in #2. If you were to drop in right now, you'd find me in ratty yoga pants, a three-year-old maternity t-shirt that's threadbare in areas and, of course, no bra. You'd find yourself punched in the face. Okay, not really, but you'd probably find yourself standing on my porch, wondering why I'm glaring out the window at you and not letting you in.

6. I've never had a cavity or braces.

Am I as weird as I was sixteen months ago? You be the judge.

I lied. I'm not going to tag. Too tired and lazy. If you're NaBloPoMoing and need some fodder, run with it.

Posted by Robin at 06:18 PM | Comments (9)

November 22, 2006

Day Twenty-Two - What it Takes to Buy a Bell Pepper

This is why I don't like to grocery-shop in my neighbor.

Today, I had a big jelly-making marathon ahead of me, but lacked a red bell pepper for a batch to Thai pepper jelly. I made a quick run to nearest store to grab one. $1.59 for one pepper. Sucks, but I understand. They're out of season, transportation costs are up, and the past few years have been bad for pepper crops. That's exactly what I expected to pay.

Got to the checkout. While ringing up the guy in front of me, the cashier looked at me and my lone pepper. "We have those?" she said.

"Um, yeah."

"I thought we only sold those in packs of three. How much is that?"

"$1.59, and only the green peppers are in packs. Colored peppers are sold loose."

"$1.50?!?! Why do you have just one? Why aren't you getting the whole pack?"

"Because they're not in a pack and I only need one," I said, just wanting to take my damn pepper home.

Meanwhile, the old man behind me is offer helpful tips like, "It costs a dime! It's so expensive because they grew it on Mars! Gimme a quarter for it!"

The cashier got the produce guy's attention - mind you, all of this is transpiring while the guy in front of me waits for his order to be rung up. It wasn't even my turn yet. "How much are these peppers? And don't they come in packs of three?" she asked the produce guy.

"They're $1.59, and they're sold single," he said. I'm sure his eye-roll wasn't directed at me, but instead at the cashier, who hadn't even bothered to look up the code on the pepper to see for her damn self how much it costs.

With this gal working the day before Thanksgiving, it's gonna be a loooooooooong day.

Wanna make my trip to the store worth my while? Buy some damn jelly. I restocked my Etsy store this morning. There's the afore-mentioned Thai pepper jelly, pomegranate jelly, key lime jelly, lavender jelly, and whole-berry cranberry sauce. Please don't make my pepper-suffering have been in vain.

Posted by Robin at 02:10 PM | Comments (1)

November 17, 2006

Day Seventeen - Friday Shuffle - The Sick of Posting Every Damn Day Edition

Is it just me, or have all the NaBloPoMo posters and commenters hit the wall? I know I sure have. I have things to write, things to comment, and blogs I'd like to read but my brain simply won't let me.

In light of my bloggity boredom, I'm going to give you three little tidbits and the shuffle.

Tidbit #1 - Thanks to the still-downed tree lying on my fence, I've started playing a new game everytime I open the back door. It's called "Which Neighborhood Dog is in My Yard Today?" This morning, I discovered the neighborhood weiner dog running amok in my yard. When the fence in your yard can't restrain a weiner dog, it's no longer sufficiently doing its job well enough to be called a fence.

Tidbit #2 - Lately I've found myself concerned about how Clara Jane interacts with other kids. During daycare dropoffs and pickups, I never see her playing with other kids. When I ask her who she played with she tells me that she played with toys. I'm not going to make a big deal of this; if she's a loner, she's a loner. There are worse things to be.

At lunch today, any notion that she might be a loner was vanished. She noticed another little girl sitting a few tables away from us and promptly stood up, waved, and yelled, "Hello, Little Girl! How are you doing? Are you having a snack? I have an apple. I love my apple. Do you love apples? I have yogurt. Do you love yogurt? Hey! Little Girl! HEY!"

Now I'm concerned about her being The Pushy Kid.

Tidbit #3 - I can't recreate what I was writing yesterday, but I can do two things: tell you how it vanished and tell you about the $6 candy bar. It vanished because the ctrl-shift-w function in Firefox, coupled with the space bar, closes the window, particularly if your chubby little fingers are a lot faster than they look like they should be.

Now, the $6 candy bar. For years I've been fascinated with Vosges Chocolate. They're a Chicago-based high-end chocolatier that basically throws weird shit into really expensive chocolate and sells it to food nerds like me who think, "Mmmmmmmm ... white chocolate with Kalamata olives. I could go for some of that. Let's get a second mortgage on the house and eat up!"

Our local Whole Foods started selling a small selection of Vosges awhile back, but I just couldn't allow myself to part with $6 for a 3.4 ounce weirdo candy bar. But yesterday, for some reason, I decided it was time to part with my $6 in exchange for weirdo chocolate.

Alas, the weirdo chocolate I really wanted - Barcelona, which is darker milk chocolate with grey sea salt and smoked almonds - wasn't available. Which is too bad because I have a serious smoked almond monkey on my back. At some point when I was little my parents put a can of Smokehouse Almonds in my Christmas stocking, and that was all she wrote. Best flavor in the world. Ever. That was another one of those signs of adulthood: the day I realized that I could eat Smokehouse Almonds every single day for the rest of my ever-almond-loving life if I wanted. I'm eating some right now, as a matter of fact. I like strong flavors. The only thing better than smoked almonds and sea salt would have to be smoked almonds and bleu cheese. I'm surprised Vosges hasn't jumped on that idea.

Anyway, I did have some misgivings about spending $6 on a candy bar in a flavor combination that might be horrible, despite my food adventurer tendancies. So, I went with the one I knew I'd mostly like enjoy - Creole, 70% cacao (really, really dark) with espresso, cocoa nibs, and chicory. I love chicory coffee. I love mochas. I'm going to love this bar.

You know what you get when you get a $6 candy bar? You get instructions on how to eat chocolate. Those cheapos at Hershey's and Nestle, they just leave their customers to their own devices. Let 'em remain ignorant to what chocoalte is supposed to look like and smell like! Let the philistines eat their dusty-surfaced chocolate that smells like bald tires! And let them *gasp* chew it with their teeth!

For $6, I know to let the chocolate melt in my mouth, instead of cramming the whole thing down my gullet before someone can snatch it away from me, the same way my Basset hound Chloe once did with a Nestle Crunch bar.

I resisted the urge to eat the candy in the car. If I'm going to spend $6 on what should be THe Chocolate Experience of My Life, I don't want to be distracted. I also don't want to be behind the wheel in case the experience is so rapturous as to leave my vehicle unmanned on the highway.

I sat at my desk, read the instructions and did as it said: I looked at the chocolate. I sniffed the chocolate. I snapped off a piece of the chocoalte. I performed acts on the chocoalte that are only legal in the state of Nevada and France. Then I put the chocolate on my tongue and pressed it to the roof of my mouth, just like the instructions said. And sure enough, just like the package said, it slowly started melting around thirty seconds later.

The verdict?

Eh.

Tasted great, of course. The cocoa nibs were rough and irritated my tongue and the roof of my mouth. There wasn't a single point in time where my spirit left my body during the whole experience. A little naked man didn't pop out of the packaging when I opened it, either, and for $6 you'd think they'd include a special little thrill of some sort. While tasty, it did not satisfy my mind and body, as the package promised. I still had a slight backache when I was finished eating the piece.

I just popped another piece in my mouth. Yeah, good. But slightly painful and not decidedly different than a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans. I keep encountering little pieces of hard, pod-like material. Perhaps that's what a flavanoid looks like.

Next time, maybe I'll shuffle through the display and buy a a horseradish chocolate bar. At least then my expectations will be in check.

1. Iko Iko - Dixie Cups
2. Baby Mine - Bonnie Raitt
3. East Virginia Blues - June Carter Cash (a woman who had enough good sense to not buy $6 chocolate bars, I bet)
4. Only Lie Worth Telling - Paul Westerberg
5. Tell Me That it Isn't True - Bob Dylan
6. Don't Get Me Wrong - Pretenders
7. Still Fighting It - Ben Folds
8. Close Together - Jimmy Reed
9. Rose Garden - Lynn Anderson
10. Walking the Dog - Rufus Thomas

The shuffle is filled entirely of artists who would most likely throw beer bottles at the heads of bourgeois idiots who'd spend $6 on a candy bar, and rightfully so.

Posted by Robin at 04:06 PM | Comments (12)

November 13, 2006

Day Thirteen - Clean Nuts

My life just isn't exciting enough to support 30 blog entries in a row, so I'm going into the vaults today. I can't remember if I've told this story here before. I do know that I've told it everywhere else, but so severe is my lack of material, I'm telling it yet again. I considered being really lazy and simply pasting the piece I wrote regarding this story years ago, the one that landed me a long-term gig with a food magazine, but I'm going to take the effort to retell it. Which actually means I'm too lazy to look for the original on my hard drive.

This isn't random, though. A few minutes ago I glanced at the book for my recent-acquired bread machine. There's a recipe on the cover, written in my mom's handwriting, for English toffee, which is where our story begins.

Back in 1995, I was fresh out of college, living in my first apartment without roommates, and discovering a love for cooking I didn't realize I had. That holiday season, I learned to make English toffee, one of my all-time favorite candies. I'd spread a cup of chopped pecans in a pan, then cook three-quarters of a cup of brown sugar with half a cup of butter until it did that thing that candy does that makes it, well, candy. I'd dump the hot sugar and butter over the pecans, then sprinkle it with half a cup of chopped chocolate, which would melt from the heat of the sugar-butter. An hour later, when everything had cooled and hardened, I'd have a pan filled with sugary, buttery, nutty, chocolatey goodness, which might be one of the best goodnesses known to humanity.

British food gets a bad rap, but they totally make up for it be virtue of inventing a food that it nothing but butter and sugar. That forgives a lot of culinary sins, even the existance of Marmite.

Anyway, I made pounds upon pounds of English toffee that holiday season. I made it for friends, for my office, for myself. I could even make it while slightly drunk on cheap white zinfindel, so adept I was at toffee-making.

For whatever reason, my mom and I made plans to have a big ol' cooking day on December 23rd. Unusual, because most holiday cooking in my family involves my mom standing in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, sighing heavily while she says, "Either do something useful or get the hell out of the way." I was going to do my toffee and rum balls. She was going to make homemade rolls (with the bread machine that's currently sitting on my kitchen table, incubating an oat loaf) and I don't even remember what else. Before we got to work, we paid a visit to my granny.

Now, my granny knows something about making sweet stuff. We all know that she's the jelly-making queen of west-central Missouri. She's also a wiz with peanut brittle, and my parents and I ran for the tins of it that day. As we shoveled it in, not even a bit concerned about ripping our maws to shreads with jagged brittle bits, Granny told us what was, without question, the most disturbing thing I've ever heard her say.

Now, keep in mind my granny grew up poor with a huge family during the Great Depression. She's thrifty, and never throws anything away. Ever. She used to have a dog that I'm pretty sure subsisted entirely on leftover biscuits and gravy. When I was a kid and decided to start a stamp collection, Granny disappeared to her attic, returning with vases filled with several decades-worth of cancelled postage stamps. I had a collection in a day. Kind of takes the fun out of it, really.

"I just couldn't get that brittle to set," she said while we behaved like sugar-covered peanut-starved coyotes. "I left it for several hours and it was still liquid by the time I went to bed. But then I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. So I got up, dug it out of the trash, washed the peanuts and remade it."

We stopped the feeding frenzy.

"We're eating peanuts that have been in the trash?"

"Well, I washed them. They're just fine!"

And for the next hour, my family brutally teased a sweet, candy-making old lady for being so damn cheap that she couldn't sleep over $3-worth of discarded peanuts, which she later fed to her family.

Think about that the next time you try to swipe a handful of Granny's awesome holiday party mix.

A few hours later, my mom and I were back at her house, confident in our cooking abilities, knowing we would never, ever feed anyone discarded and washed peanuts.

Now, Granny is the sweetest person in the world and would wish no harm on anyone. But Granny is also a very devout Pentecostal. While I'm sure she would never ask God to unleash His wrath on anyone, I'm not convinced that, if God witnessed anyone making jabs at one of his finer followers that He wouldn't do a little manipulation. This is the only possible explaination for why I used butter-flavored Crisco in my rum balls and my English toffee. My butter toffee. Repeatedly. The rum balls had the texture of boozy mothballs, and I spent hours making toffee, waiting for it to set, watching it burn to the black tar that fills my soul, throwing it out, and starting over.

In the meantime, my mom had approximately 274 batches of dinner rolls fail to rise.

About six hours into this cooking melee, I left the house for real butter, and so I could weep in the car and while walking the aisles of the grocery store. When I returned home, I looked through the window in the back door before entering the kitchen, and immediately started backing away from what I witnessed.

The cabinet doors under the sink were flung open. The bottom half of my dad's body stuck out of the doors, surrounded by heaps of tools. My mom came running to the door to let me in, and I shook my head in horror.

I'm not going back into that culinary house of terror! You can't make me!

Dad was taking the pipes apart to retrieve a towel, which had been snatched from my mom's hands by the garbage disposal. "Next time it's your hand," it growled.

"My God! The authorities need to get over here and rope this unholy place off with police tape before we all die!" I wailed. And then I proceeded to make batch #492 of my English fucking toffee, because 1) I finally had real butter, 2) I'm tenacious, and 3) I'm an idiot.

Even with the real butter, something went horribly wrong and my golden toffee turned black. I didn't give a shit. I dumped it onto my now-stale pecans, tossed a handful of chocolate chips in their general directions, and took my ass to bed.

The next morning, I walked into the kitchen to find my mom standing at the work island, perfectly-sliced rectangles of toffee on a plate before her smiling face. "My toffee! It's perfect! Christmas miracle!" I squealed.

"Well, not quite. Yours never set up," she said. "I made this batch and it looks pretty good, don't you think? Have some."

I bit into the candy, and it was heaven. Sweet, buttery, tooth-shatteringly perfect.

"I didn't realize you had more pecans," I said. "I thought we only had the half a cup I used last night."

"Well, no, we didn't have more pecans. I, uh ... "

Oh lord, no.

"I rinsed your toffee goo off the pecans and reused them. But they never went into the trash can! I swear!"

I continued eating. "You know, the only part of this that gives me any hope at all is the fact that, at least you washed a slightly more expensive nut. When my turn comes to wash nuts, there's a chance it'll be something classy, like cashews. Or maybe macadamias, if I work really hard and marry well."

It was five years later, and they were really pricey locally-grown black walnuts from a botched batch of cookies that never got baked.

Shut up. They rocked.

Posted by Robin at 03:38 PM | Comments (9)

October 01, 2006

Buy Some Damn Jelly

I'm not a businessperson. Not by any means. Although I miss the paychecks and even the work itself, I never liked the business aspect of running my little catering endeavor. It's just not my forte.

And yet, here I go. I opened a shop on Etsy today. Currently, it just has a few homemade jellies. In the next few weeks I'm going to possibly branch out and sell some of my shortbreads, bread and cookie mixes, and such. It's all at poppymom.etsy.com.

Fucking sell-out.

Posted by Robin at 07:01 PM | Comments (7)

September 18, 2006

Three Tidbits & a Meme

1. If you visit me via the link at Fluid Pudding, don't forget to bookmark me before FP rides off into the sunset tomorrow. Or, better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed. It's simple. I use Bloglines to manage my feeds, and you should, too.

2. Hey all you local St. Louis people, especially my pals on the east side of the Big Muddy. There's much crafty fun afoot in your neck of the woods next weekend. My pal Allison has helped coordinate the first-ever Strange Folk Arts and Crafts Festival. It happens at O'Fallon (IL) Community Park on September 23 from 11 AM - 6 PM. Lots of talented artsy-craftsies will be selling their wares. There will be a bunch of hands-on art fun to be had and even a fashion show featuring local indie designers. I'm going. You should, too.

3. The ass-pox have moved on to sinus pox. Not that my sinuses have pox on them. I can't see them, of course. All I know is I feel icky and tired and you certainly don't want to be around me.

I did manage to whip up my quasi-homemade chicken noodle soup for lunch, despite my decreped state. It's easy. Dump a quart of chicken broth into a pot. Throw in a frozen chicken breast or two. Because I'm astute like that, when I make chicken breasts I always remove the tenderloins and put them in the freezer for just such occasions. Chop up some carrots, onions, celery, and garlic. Simmer it until the chicken falls apart. Cook some noodles or rice and add them at the last minute. Voila! Instant sinus pox remedy.

And speaking of food, my pal Dixie posted a snazzy little food meme last week. I normally don't meme but 1) I'm sick, and 2) I love talking about food, especially since it's been nearly a year since anyone paid me to do anything related to food. Now that food's not work, it's fun again.

How do you like your eggs?

I'm not a big fan of eggs, but every now and then I like them fried with runny yolks, but I've gotta have some buttery toast to mop up the yellow egg goo.

Don't even try to make me eat a boiled egg white unless you want to be injured.

How do you take your coffee/tea?

My morning coffee is two pods of Archer Farms Fair-Trade Certified Organic Tierra del Sol Coffee Pods brewed in my beloved Senseo How beloved? I just bought a second Senseo to keep at my mom's for the whopping 10 nights a year we spend at her house. Anyway, two pods makes 10 ounces of coffee, which I doctor with about 1/4 cup of 2% milk and a heaping teaspoon of Splenda.

Tea, it all depends on what kind of tea. Sometimes I add a little Splenda or honey. Sometimes not. Most of the time, if the tea's brewed right, it doesn't require anything.

Favorite breakfast foods:
My love of cereal is downright Seinfeldian. But every Sunday, B. makes breakfast. We get the most amazing homemade breakfast sausage at the farmer's market. Yesterday he got crazy and made a Dutch Baby with fried apples.

Peanut butter:
Yes, please. I love peanut butter more than just about anything in the world. Just make sure it's the all-natural stuff.

What kind of dressing on your salad?
I almost never buy bottled salad dressing. When I was in culinary school I learned that making dressing is just about the easiest thing in the world. Ruined me for commercially-made stuff. I usually just make a vinaigrette with two parts extra-virgin olive oil, one part balsamic vinegar, and a dash of sea salt and fresh-ground black pepper.

Coke or Pepsi?
Coke, but rarely.

You're feeling lazy. What do you make?
Pasta with some of the mountains of pesto in my freezer, fresh parmesan cheese, and a bagged salad.

You're feeling really lazy? What kind of pizza do you order?
Plain ol' pepperoni. I'm a traditionalist.

You feel like cooking. What do you make?
Lasagna. Enchiladas. Something fancy-schmancy and brand new.

Do any foods bring back good memories?
Of course! Thanksgiving's corn bread dressing reminds me of my departed granny. I can't crack open a jar of jelly without thinking of my granny who's still here. Tomato soup and grilled cheese tastes like childhood. B.'s hot wings taste like love.

Do any foods bring back bad memories?
If I vomited it at any point in the last five years, it's tainted. Currently I'm off the otherwise yummy pizza from Fortel's, the grilled cheese foccacia from Sweet Tomatoes and the pulled pork from Bandana's, as those were the last three meals I ate prior to last March's Pukefest Gut-o-Rama.

Do any foods remind you of someone?
See the question about food and memories.

Is there a food you refuse to eat?
No. I'll try anything once. Things I don't like, I'll still try periodically because taste buds do change.

When I taught kids cooking classes, I had a policy that unless your parent gave me a note specifying that you couldn't eat something because of religion or allergies, you had to take at least one bite. You could spit it out, but it had to cross your lips at least once. At the time I despised mushrooms. Which is weird - I hated mushrooms my entire life until I got pregnant. Now I like them. But in the early stages of my pregnancy, yuck. Anyway, during the first class I would give my lecture about trying everything. I would tell the kids how much I hated mushrooms, especially raw ones, and I would then proceed to eat a great big raw mushroom in front of them, not bothering to disguise the natural facial expressions of pure revolt.

Of course, when I attempted this trick while two months pregnant, the mushroom promptly came right back up, much to the delight of the class. Gross and humiliating, yes, but lemme tell you, those kids ate everything without a fuss after that.

What was your favorite food as a child?
My mom's homemade pizza. Fried shrimp. Fresh raw peas straight from the garden. Just about any kind of fish.

Is there a food you hated as a child but now love?
Mushrooms.

Is there a food you loved as a child but now hate?
I can't really think of anything beyond the dyed sugar candies that only kids like.

Favorite fruit and vegetable:
Damn near all of them.

Favorite junk food:
Salt & pepper potato chips.

Favorite between meal snack:
Cereal. Cheese.

Do you have any weird food habits?
Not really, aside from being obsessive about expiration dates.

You're on a diet. What food(s) do you fill up on?
Raw fruit and veggies. Whole-grain bread.

You're off your diet. Now what would you like?
A pan of baked pasta with marinara and tons of cheese.

How spicy do you order Indian/Thai?
Medium-hot to hot. I worked for an Indian family when I was in college, and they were surprised that I could handle heat as well as they did. They were from Bombay, which is where the really hot curries come from.

The Thai restaurant I frequented in college had a wall where you could write your name if you managed to clean your plate if you ordered a #10 on their heat scale. I only made it to a #9. The first time I went there with my pal Big Daddy B., he ordered a #2. I called him a wuss, which cracked up our ancient waitress. When she came back to the table and Big Daddy was on the verge of bursting into flames with his weenie-ass #2, she swatted him with a dish towel and said, "Oh, you wuss!"

The thing is with Thai and Indian, they are usually exercises in balance. It's not just heat for heat's sake. It's heat tempered with cooling agents, like dairy, cucumbers, limes. That's what I love about both cuisines. Heat for the sake of heat, without balance is just boring and mashocistic.

Can I get you a drink?
Water or iced tea, please.

May I get you a drink?
A beer sounds good.

Red wine or white?
Red.

We only have beer.
Yippee!

Favorite dessert:
Pie and ice cream.

The perfect nightcap?
Sleepytime tea.

Posted by Robin at 01:43 PM | Comments (6)

August 28, 2006

Grape Jelly of Wrath

The farmwife conversion continues...

It was a busy weekend, what with the house makeover and such. The unfinished house makeover, but you don't hear me complaining. Not even slightly. I finally have a ceiling in my back room. My kitchen and dining room are pretty much covered with new subflooring. Just got a few cracks to fill before the new floor can be put in place and I can commence my underwear-dancing. Oh yeah!

Clara Jane hitched a ride home with my parents yesterday, allowing me to continue my slide into housemarmhood unencumbered. Although I suppose it's not a true slide into housemarmhood if I don't have a marm attached to my hip. Regardless, I still did plenty of damage.

White Peach Jam

This is jam made from delectable Missouri white peaches, a rare gem that's only available for a week or two at the end of summer. You want this. Trust me, you do. It tastes like the end of Summer Malaise.

This, you don't want. This doesn't even deserve to be placed in front of a window, where the sunlight won't penetrate the black evil inside the jars.
Horrible Awful Grape Jelly

This is the revamped version of last weeks grape jelly abomination. Today, I pried off all the lids and scraped the rubbery grape juice into a big pot. In the process I managed to fling the rubbery grape juice all over my new subflooring. I hope the new flooring will stick extra-well in that spot, just so that all my effort won't be wasted.

Some of the jelly landed between my big and second toes. I've washed them repeatedly, but they're still sticky. Brings all new meaning to the words "toe jam", doesn't it?

I put the jelly on the stove and brought it to a boil. Just like last week, it went from lukewarm to "Hey! Look at me! I'm rubbery grape juice and I'm a lava flow overtaking your entire kitchen!"

For two hours, I cooked this shit at a simmer, watching it like a hoodlum child who might dare to chase his errant frisbee onto my yard, thus forcing me to go all housemarm on his ass. That's the next step in my farmwife/housemarm conversion: screaming at neighborhood children to keep off my lawn and confiscating their toys.

I added more pectin. To the jelly, not the neighborhood children. They don't require pectin to make them gelatinously delicious. I added sugar. I stirred. I hovered. I wrung my hands. I sweated a lot.

And still the goddamn mess refused to gel!

At this point I've lost count of how many hours of my life I've wasted on these three and a half pounds of grapes. I removed them from the heat and came upon the next problem destined to suck up more precious hours of my life: it's too liquid to put in the trashcan, and yet too rubbery to pour down the drain. Attempts to pour it down the drain would most likely lead to the rubbery juice bouncing off the sink, hitting the ceiling, where it would then land on my head, creating an air-tight seal and suffocating me, just for wrath. Heh. Get it? Grape Jelly of Wrath.

Anyway, I let it sit on the stove for an hour while I pouted. When I returned to the stove, lo and behold, it gelled! Somewhat. Well, at least it wasn't completely liquid anymore. And even though it tastes scorched and is as black as my soul, you know what I did?

Well, of course you know what I did. You saw the photos. I put that sticky, charred black shit into jars.

Now, the next delimma: I have intensions of using the products of my recent canning frenzy as holiday gifts. My first instinct is to give the horrible burnt grape jelly to people I dislike. But I can't really do that. If I dislike someone, I have the overwhelming desire to make them think that I am far superior and can do no wrong. Give bad jelly to someone I dislike, just so they can say, "Yeah, that Robin, thinks she's such a fucking big shot in the kitchen. Taste this garbage. It tastes like the stuff I used to patch my roof last summer!" No. I won't be doing that.

I can give it to people who love me. They'll understand why people I hate are eating the good stuff while my loved ones are eating crap.

Regardless of who gets the Grape Jelly of Wrath, I'm changing the name. Since it's scorched and tastes as such, I'm going to call it "Caramelized Grape Jelly". You see, if I learned anything when I was in culinary school, I learned that marketing is everything. Burnt is bad. Caramelized is fancy. Therefore, you'll eat it and you'll love it, even though it tastes faintly of motor oil.

All joking aside, while I worked on my jam and jelly today, I spent a lot of time thinking about things that happened a year ago. How different everthing is now than it was a year ago. And yet, a year ago yesterday, I bought my first two skeins of sock yarn. And I'm still trying to knit a damn sock out of it. What does this mean? I have no idea. Maybe it means the reason I can't knit socks is because sock-knitting will always be connected to a time of fear, tragedy and loss. Or maybe it means that even when it feels like the whole world's going down the crapper, it's the fundamental things that pull us out of it. Or that hope springs eternal and life goes on. It's a different life, but it goes on and it's still good. Just in a different, more bittersweet and better-appreciate manner.

And speaking of good, my friend Janna's doing some good. Let me tell you about Janna. She evacuated from New Orleans before Katrina with her 2-year-old son and a daughter who was less than a week old. They were fine, and their house was fine, but they spent several months away from home. They spent a lot of time seperated from her husband, who's a college football coach. He had his hands full with a team full of freshman who were either dealing with their own familial loses on the Gulf Coast, or kids who'd just moved to New Orleans for school, only to be faced with this.

Janna and her family have been through it. So, when Janna says she's going to help those in her city who went through it, you'd better join in. On Tuesday, her company, Muffin Tuckers, will be donating 100% of the profits from any New Orleans-related items to Tipitina's Foundation. Tipitina's Foundation is working to help New Orleans musicians and school music programs recover from the devastation. I think Clara Jane needs this shirt, being a Mardi Gras baby and all. So, go help. Get something cute. Tell 'em Poppy sent you, and I promise you won't get a jar of Grape Jelly of Wrath come Christmas.

Posted by Robin at 03:50 PM | Comments (11)

August 21, 2006

In Which I Continue My Transformation Into a Farmwife, Circa 1932

I've been a busy girl while ignoring my blog and email recently. You might recall a few weeks ago when I went on a jam-making frenzy. Well, the frenzy has continued. Look, please and see how I'm turning from this:

to this:

Granny Viv.

First, let's talk about quilts, shall we? Because I've been up to my armpits in quilts lately. It all started nearly a year ago, and you can see how it transpired here in the comments of my blog. I'm guessing my granny never formed a quilting bee via the internet. I haven't gone completely Steinbeckian, not yet. The abbreviated version: Allison had recently found my blog because I'd mentioned her snazzy quilted potholders. She Googled, she found, she read, she emailed. And in the face of tragedy, she taught me to quilt. I love the internet! See? That's a totally non-Steinbeckian attitude.

So, Allison taught me how to make simple patchwork quilts, held together with tied string/yarn/ribbon, which are actually my favorite kinds of quilts. My enthusiasm lasted exactly 23 days. How do I know this? Because I blogged it all. See? I'm still modern and relevent. Why did my enthusiasm wane?

Let me show you what I use for "sewing":

The antique on which I vainly attempt to sew.

Now, I adore just about anything that came from the years 1930-1963, but this is ridiculous.

This sewing machine first belonged to my mom. Then my grandma. And then I think it went back to my mom, probably with a verbal exchange that went:

"You take it."

"I don't want it. You take it."

"It's yours. You should have it. Please, rent a forklift and take this 374-pound atrocity that doesn't maintain thread tension and haul it back to your barn."

"No! Hey, wait - I have an idea! Let's give it to Robin. Surely this will get her over the misguided notion that she should spend time sewing. That awful home ec teacher who nearly flunked her freshman year hasn't deterred her, but maybe this will."

It hasn't.

After several autumn days of happily sewing strips of donated fabric into my very first quilt, I finally got sick of fighting with the sewing machine's tension problems and gave up. Which is ironic, seeing as I have my own tension problems and you'd think I'd be more understanding with my tension-impaired elder, but I wasn't.

Two weeks ago, Allison came over with the 263 quilt tops she has finished since last September so we could start tying them. I showed her my 11/12ths-of-the-way-finished quilt top with much shame. Enough shame for me to spend the whalloping 20 minutes required to finish it.

And here it is!

My first quilt

First quilt, up close

Lovely, no? I spent a lot of time thinking about the Katrina evacuee who might be given this quilt, and how maybe the images of palm trees and fishies might soothe some of the pangs for home. Or maybe they'd make them worse, I don't know. But I thought about it a lot.

But now, nearly a year later, we all know that everything's all better on the gulf coast. Right? Right? Oh, wait ... I guess not. I emailed the woman who organized the quilt drive that got Allison and me quilting in the first place, but never heard back. So, we're going to keep our efforts a little closer to home. I'm a fan of Haven of Grace, and I'd like them to benefit from my 11 months of grueling hard work angsty teeth-gnashing over my non-perfect quilting skills.

Either way, I've got to release this quilt into the world, where it'll find someone who truly needs it, because I'm convinced that terrible mojo has been visited upon me for keeping these donated fabrics crumpled in my closet for the past 11 months.

Let's all hope it doesn't take me another 11 months to conquer my fear of learning how to bind the quilt's edges.

Allison and I collaborated on another quilt. Here's what she did:

Quilt I helped with.

And here's the part I did:

The extent of my helpage

I can tie like a vandal, yo.

But every little bit of help should be acknowledged and praised, right? In that spirit, I offer acknowledgement and praise to my special little Murphy, who helped with my first quilt:

Quilting, Murphy-style.

She helped by sticking her head under the quilt and remaining lost and tangled for over three hours, offering me ample distraction and laughter while I finished all those ties.

Now that I think about it, I think Allison's responsible for my march toward Depression-era spinsterhood. We met up at the farmer's market on Saturday, where all the Depression-era spinsters hang out and look for kicks. In exchange for two jars of jam, she gave me yet another metric ton of her home-grown basil, which I have since converted into frozen pesto:

Pesto!

When I was making this on Saturday, I can promise you that, despite the presence of two smelly dogs, a stinky cat, and a potty-training toddler, my house definitely smelled better than yours. Basil abounded, and we were all heady with its aroma.

So plentiful was the basil, I decided to completely lose my Amish mind and make some basil jelly.

Oh, shut up. I don't see you slaving over a hot-water canner. When you start making some damn jelly, then you can have a say over what the damn jelly's made from.

It's lovely, no?

Basil jelly

Don't be fooled, though. It's an enhanced loveliness, doctored with a smidge of food coloring, as natural-colored basil jelly is an unappetizing shade of gray. And believe me, when basil jelly's concerned, you want to pull out all the stops to make it as appetizing as possible.

(Actually, I kid. The basil jelly's yummy. I don't care that B.'s first reaction upon tasting it was, "Hm. That's ...weird." What the hell does he know? He's from a part of the country that has four legal food seasonings: salt, pepper, ketchup and canned chicken gravy. When he starts slaving over a hot-water canner, then he can have a say over what the jelly's made from.)

I also bought four pounds of grapes from a guy at the market who hauled a truckload of dubiously-named "Arkansas table grapes" to St. Louis from, you guessed it Smartypants, Arkansas. They need a better name, like "sumptuous little bursts of sour-sweet joy grapes". And what did I do with the grapes? Why, I made a much more orthodox and socially-acceptable form of jelly:

Oh, but don't be fooled by its purple-flavored beauty. All is not well inside those half-pints. Not well at all.

You see, my jelly isn't very jelly-y. It's more like slightly rubbery juice.

Upon looking at the recipe (and oh, how I love that the recipe is listed as a "side dish". "I'll have the pork tenderloin, a spinach salad, and a side of slightly rubbery grape juice, please."), I realized I made what must be a fatal mistake: I accidentally used powdered pectin instead of liquid pectin.

I went in search of information on what this might mean for my rubbery grape juice. "Powdered pectin and liquid pectin aren't the same! Don't interchange them! The sky will fall if you do!" was all I could find. Surprisingly, jelly-making experts are few and far between on the internet. And the ones who are online are surprisingly fatalistic. Nevermind that I found several recipes identical to what I made, with the exception that the recipe-writer had swapped liquid for powdered and last I checked, the sky was still firmly in place, probably glued to the top of the world with rubbery grape juice.

But still, my rubbery juice remained and in a full-blown tizz, I called my granny, the woman who could probably make tasty jelly from, I don't know, pencil shavings and dog hair. She's also the gal in that b&w picture above.

"Grandma," I said when she picked up the phone. "I'm having a jelly emergency!"

Those are words I never, ever thought I'd moan to my sweet, sweet grandma. She's led a rough life. That's the last thing she needed to hear.

She assured me that my jelly would be fine, but I'd probably have to completely do it all over again.

*sigh*

Being Amish is hard work.

Want some bouncyjuice? Or an unbound quilt? Perhaps some herby jelly? 'Cause I've got a glut of it all. Take that 3,492-pound sewing machine with you, too.

Posted by Robin at 01:10 PM | Comments (19)

May 15, 2006

A Meaty, Meaty Mother's Day

Vegetarians, avert your eyes. I promise you, I ate about 20 cucumbers this weekend in addition to what I'm about to admit.

First off, horse news. Remember Henry, the Impulse Buy Horse? He was so wild that it took a few days for my dad to even touch him. Seems Henry was probably mistreated pretty badly at some point and is afraid of people. But not me! No, Henry loves me. I approached him while he was tied up, talking sweetly to him, and he quickly let me pet him. My dad told me to untie him and lead him around the yard, which Henry did without problem. As we walked past the horrifying tractor, he stopped, stuck his nose in the crook of my neck, and built up his courage by giving me a nuzzle. That's it! I am The Horse Whisperer!

Next, I took my skills to the problem child that is Cash. You know, sweet, sleepy baby Cash:



...who promptly wrapped his mouth around my right elbow and chomped with all his sweet little baby horsie might.

I wonder how often the real Horse Whisperer yells, "You goddamn little shit! You're not a horse! You're a cross between a llama and a fucking jackass,"? Often, I'm assuming.

To avenge the flesh of my arm, which is currently morphing from blue-black to yellow-green, we left Clara Jane with my parents and headed to Gauchos in Columbia, where B. and I were to partake in many cooked animals. This was our first foray into Brazillian cuisine, and I'll spare you every bad joke that amounts to getting a Brazilian for Mother's Day.

Now, there are two Brazilian restaurants in St. Louis, Yemanja Brazil and Cafe Brasil. We've talked for years - as in, since before I moved to St. Louis seven years ago - about checking them out, but never have. When deciding on where to go for Mother's Day dinner, I opted for Gauchos in Columbia because, "We can't get Brazilian food in St. Louis!" To which B. just gave me a withering look that worldless said, "There are two Brazilian restaurants in St. Louis, one that's been there longer than you, and a second that you drive past regularly, you dumb, dumb lady." No matter. The menu on the Gauchos website was intriguing.

We arrived for our reservation and were seated at a table overlooking a little lake. On Mother's Day! Best seat in the house! I must be The Toddler Whisperer, too! First up, caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil. It's a delish concoction of sugar, limes, and cachaça, which is Portugese for "diesel fuel". What's Mama getting for Mother's Day? Mama's getting drunk, that's what she's getting.

There was an episode of "The Simpsons" about a decade ago, when watching "The Simpsons" was still an enjoyable activity, where the family was at a Renaissance Fair. At one point in the episode, Homer bragged about having eaten six kinds of meat in one day. Since then, that has been B.'s goal - to eat as many forms of meat, preferrably on sticks, in one day as he can without his every major artery blowing out like a bald tire on the interstate. While yesterday was Mother's Day, it was B.'s dreams that came true, for he was able to consume four - four - forms of meat in one meal! He wanted to count the black beans as meat to bring his total to five, but I wouldn't have it.

The main section of the menu consisted of metal skewers of flame-grilled meats. B. ordered the pork loin. I got a combo of chicken and beef filet, both wrapped in bacon. We intended to share our skewers so we could get all the meaty variety our struggling, straining hearts desired.

I had noticed that each table had a big stone block with holes drilled into it. It reminded me of this candleholder I have - it's stone with slots for nine tea lights. These stones didn't have candles, and I thought it might have been just an oversight

This was no oversight, for the stone? They do not hold candles. Oh no. The stones? They hold swords. Big, four-foot-long two-sided swords! That are filled with our meat!

Our server, a tiny little blonde college girl who might tip the scales at a whopping 115 pounds on a bad day, arrived at our table with two large plates and our meat daggers. She plunged the swords into the stone, whipped out a knife as big as my arm, looked at me and said, "How much meat shall I cut off the sword for you?"

Why, a whole cow's worth, thank you!

She placed the end of the sword on my plate with the handle towering over her head. On tip-toe, she held the handle in one hand while cutting the carnage onto my plate, then repeated the process with B. Once our meat had been properly de-sworded, she placed the swords back in the stone and left us to eat. Or swordfight.

At this point I looked behind me. Since I was facing the lake, I hadn't noticed the other tables in the restaurant, all of which had towering sword bouquet centerpieces.

The food? Incredible. Every aspect of the meal - the meat, the black beans and rice, the fried polenta and plantains, the lentil salad, the potato-tuna salad - all of it, was culinary perfection. And yet, B. and I couldn't get past one factor: how wise is it to serve what might be the most potent cocktail in the world, and then give the people drinking it large swords? Especially at a bar and grill in a college town. How many Friday night frat boy swordfights do they have to bust up?

And what time do they happen? Because I'd really like to see that.

Posted by Robin at 10:03 AM | Comments (6)

April 12, 2006

The Five Stages of Grief as they Pertain to an Unfortunate Choice of Beverages at Starbucks

This morning I decided to forgo my usual boring latte in favor of Starbucks' new green tea latte. What transpired might require extensive psychological treatment. All that treatment I endured for post-traumatic stress disorder last year has been completely undone by one little hot beverage. To whit:

Stage One: Denial
"No! Surely it's not as bad as it seems. I'll just take another sip. It probably something with that hippy-dippy toothpaste I insist on using. That's got to be what's making this beverage taste like someone left a dead carp in the milk steamer."

Stage Two: Anger
"Motherfuckers! Who the fuck is stupid enough to think green tea and hot milk would be a good idea? It has a hint of melon ... hint of melon??? I WANT THE HEAD OF THE FUCKING BEE-EATING DIMWIT WHO CONNED ME INTO SPENDING FOUR FUCKING DOLLARS ON A DRINK THAT TASTES LIKE HOT CARP-STUFFED HONEYDEW, GODDAMMIT!"

Stage Three: Bargaining
"Okay, God. Here's the deal. If you make this big Venti paper cup of hot frothy koi pond water palatable, I'll never use the phrase "fucking bee-eating dimwit" ever again, no matter how badly someone deserves it."

Stage Four: Depression
"It's no use. The taste of seaweed is going to be forever imprinted on my tongue, marring everything I try to ingest for the rest of my life. I'm screwed. Starbucks is no longer a happy place for me. And what am I without my happy place? I'm just a poor slob, drinking hot milked-up algea-water and paying out the nose through it. I suck. I deserve to empty my wallet in the name of really crappy beverages. It's my punishment for being too stupid to see the obvious: this drink is a giant April fool's joke, and I fell for it. Drink up, Moron!"

Stage Five: Acceptance
"Hey, I'm getting used to the fish taste, and I can really feel the antioxidents working!"

Posted by Robin at 01:40 PM | Comments (22)

February 25, 2006

Working for the Weekend Tidbits

I've been far too verbose and serious this week. Really, I've had nothing else to talk about. The week has consisted of insomnia, a sick kid, a sick me, music aptitude news, and, well, that's about it. Today, I'm going to catch you up on the little bits of goofiness that have filled in the spaces between long-winded overthinking:

-I had a 90-minute-long phone conversation with my next-door neighbor on Thursday night. While she's not my favorite person in the world, I don't mind playing catch-up with her every six months or so. I just don't want to be her best pal, at her beck and call. I've been there. It's not fun. About ten minutes after I got my first might-be-positive pregnancy test, I was on the phone with my mom when this neighbor showed up on the doorstep, distraught over some miscellaneous drama. Hearing that I'd just found out I was pregnant didn't deter her from plopping down on my couch, moaning and wailing over something so minor I don't even remember what it was. That, I can do without. But the occasional neighborly chat's okay.

And in this particular chat I learned two interesting things: 1) she's started sex toy business, and 2) the neighbors across the street from her have a piercing and tattoo studio in their basement. So, if you're ever in the neighborhood for a Prince Albert and a Clitopatra II, make sure you stop by my place for a spot of tea.

In less quease-inducing news ...

-Looks like Clara Jane will be taking her first flight this summer, as my British buddy Sally and her darling boy Oz are going to visit her sister Kirsti in Detroit. While Detroit isn't exactly close to St. Louis, if Sal's there, I go. Relatively speaking, she's damn near in my neighborhood if she's in Detroit.

I'm a little nervous about traveling solo with the kiddo, although if we can survive last October's traveling vomitorium, we can handle anything. Also, I figure Sal's flying solo across the Atlantic and half the US with a kid six months younger than Clara Jane, so I have no room to complain or be chicken.

One of my favorite things about Sal - I'd give you the whole list of favorite things about Sal, but it might take months - is her unabashed love for things us Americans take for granted. Like IHOP. When was the last time you got excited about IHOP? Never? Well, I get excited about IHOP, just because Sal gets excited about IHOP. Excited enough to steal for her. Besides, it's the International House of Pancakes. I get to go there with someone who not only lives in London, but has also lived in Russia, South Africa and Australia. What could be more international than that?

Last night, B. suggested a trip to IHOP for dinner. Sounded good, since I've had IHOP on the brain all week in anticipation of Sal's visit. I think IHOP's happy about the upcoming visit, since they're going to have their own little Shrove Tuesday celebration this week. In preparation, Clara Jane wore her Mardi Gras beads and insisted on dancing when Elvis came on the PA system:



And I insisted on taking a photo of my dinner, just for Sal:



You're two months and two days away from the chicken fried steak promised land, my friend.



Clara Jane would just as soon bypass the fried beef and pancakes in favor of a pound of bacon, please. It's good to see that her experience with puking bacon across rural Illinois last October hasn't detered her hog product consumption.

-My poor, stupid little dog Murphy had a horrible experience last night. When we got home from IHOP, we got out of the truck and B. said, "Jesus Christ, Murphy! Shut the hell up!" We could hear her in the house, whining, all the way from our driveway.

We came inside, and Chloe greeted us at the door. Murphy couldn't be bothered to get up. She just laid on her back in our big red chair, whining and wagging and wiggling around like a damn squirrel. I gave her a belly rub, lovingly told her what a fucking window-licker she is, and went about my way. Still, she stayed in the chair, wagging. I had the thought that maybe she had her harness hooked on the quilt in the chair. I checked, and she was free, so I moved on, muttering about what a damn weirdo she is.

Five minutes later, she was still on her back. Even by Murphy's uber-freak standards, that's a bit excessive. B. took another look, and discovered that Murphy had one of her front toenails hooked in the ring for her ID tag.

Obviously, Murphy gets her intelligence from me.

-It's the end of an era. In today's mail, I got the 20th and final volume of Kristina's Rock Yer Punk Ass mix CD series. It all began an astounding four years ago this month. It was her first mix CD, throwing her into the mix CD crazy place where Kara and I had resided for about a year. Of course, we welcomed her to Crazyland with open arms. The three of us traded CDs like mad, with the unspoken rule of not repeating songs. For example, let's say I put Punk Rock Girl by the Dead Milkmen on my "Punk Kids Vandalized My Derelict Car" mix, then it would be in bad form for Kara or Kristina to put it on one of their mixes. It's just good mix CD manners.

However, even with our stupifyingly large music collections, we were always unwittingly using the same songs. The most overused being Brass Monkey by the Beastie Boys. We latched onto it like, well, like a monkey to a handful of feces. We made it ours. And even though the song is about a really horrible cocktail, we took it literally.

Do you need some stuff with monkeys on it? Well, Kara, Kristina and I have some stuff with monkeys on it. Like the fabbo $4.50 monkey clock Kristina gave me last year. So intense was our zeal to procure the best monkey-related junk for each other that Kara kept saying, "We're taking this too far. Too many monkeys." To which I said, "We haven't taken it too far. Until one of us winds up with a live monkey, we haven't taken it too far."

For Valentine's Day 2003, I found a pair of cheesy, horrible cards with leery photos of chimps with shaky googly eyes. Of course, I sent them to Kara and Kristina, signing them from Priscilla von Monkeyassen, who resides at 6969 Baboon Lane, Monkey Island, South Carolina.

Of course, once they spied my awesome monkey alias, they had to have them, too. Thus Star Monkeybrass and Exena Humpamonkey were born. It's just good sense to have an alias, you know. When I got pregnant a few months later, my fetus was christened Coco Monqueytoes.

Had I known the monkey names would stick for this long, I would have picked something other than Priscilla for myself, since that's my mother-in-law's name. I eventually shortened it to Prissy. So, when you see a police report in your local paper regarding one Prissy von Monkeyassen and her accomplice Coco Monqueytoes being held in lock-down for stealing carafes from the IHOP, you'll know it's me, and I need to be sprung, please.

I'm sure Kristina will keep making mix CDs; she's just retiring the "Rock Yer Punk Ass" moniker. It has rocked her well. She's got a castle in Brooklyn that's where she dwells.

Enclosed with the CD, Kristina included an article about Loverboy from the December, 1983, issue of Creem Magazine. She even took the time to highlight each usage of the phrase "hog balls" in the article. I leave you with photographic evidence:



I think that headline pretty much sums up why we listened to Loverboy way back when: because they were there, and remote control technology wasn't like it is today, therefore making it more difficult to change the station to something that didn't suck.


Hog balls.



Nothing screams "heavy metal" quite like an unattractive Canadian man wearing nothing but a towel while blow-drying his man-perm.



That's Exena Humpamonkey on the left, lovin' every hog ball humping minute of it while she's working for the weekend.

Posted by Robin at 02:01 PM | Comments (4)

February 15, 2006

Sugar Sugar

For Clara Jane's second birthday, we're going to get her some diabetes. Here's a list of the nummies that are currently in my usually junk-free kitchen:

As I was slicing the hump off the top of the birthday cake prior to frosting, I thought, "Hm. It seems such a shame to throw away these little cake remnants. I should put them into a baggie for snacking." And then I collapsed in a heap on the floor from insulin shock.

I'm expecting a terse letter from my pancreas, just as soon as she stops convulsing.

Posted by Robin at 03:39 PM | Comments (5)

January 23, 2006

It's January, When We Do Nothing But Eat

Not much to report today. I mean, how do you top meatloaf shaped like a house?

By making a batch of muffins with a toddler, that's how.

Clara Jane is fascinated by the cooking process. "Mama's making cooking," she says when she sees me at the stove. Of course, she imitates what I'm doing. She hauls bowls and pans out of the cabinets, stirs and bangs them around, hollers a few profanities, then heads to the emergency room for stitches and burn treatments.

No, really. She's into the cooking thing. That's why I decided that we would make muffins together today.

I used to teach cooking classes to kids. Granted, kids much older than my kid, but still. I was good at it. Injuries were rare, and most of the stuff we made turned out pretty good. Well, except for that really hot day when we tried to make a castle out of melted marshmallows and a variety of fruity cereals.



It didn't work.

One faulty castle aside, I had no reason to think that I would encounter problems teaching my own child to cook. We had our successful outing with the Christmas cookies last month. Dried cherry muffins, here we come! Why should this be any different than our great cookie experience?

Well, because this involved the #1 most terrifying thing in my child's world: the Kitchenaid stand mixer. The noisy motor has always made her nervous, but on Sunday night while playing with the paddle attachment, she got her finger caught in it. Calm down! It wasn't in the mixer and going at the time. Anyway, she saw the mixer and the paddle and promptly lost her shit. Ran in terror, and this was before I even turned it on.

We had a little talk about how she's not going to get sucked into the Kitchenaid Vortex of Doom. She didn't seem to buy it, but she relented enough for me to park her in the high chair. Being the former culinary professional that I am, I plopped the a mixing bowl and a flour sifter on the high chair tray, gave her a cup and three-quarters of flour, and told her to have at it.

In retrospect, I probably should have just given her a small bowl with a little bit of flour and a spoon instead of entrusting a 23.5-month-old with the task of making the actual muffins.

Repeat after me: It's okay. It's just flour. It will vaccum up. Except she's afraid of the vaccum so maybe it's not all okay after all.

After half of the dry ingredients landed on the floor, I finally clued in to the obvious solution and gave Clara Jane her own ingredients while I dealt with the real deal. And it worked.



It's hard to wait for the muffins while they're baking, and toddlers certainly aren't known for their patience. But I thought it was a bit much when she started scooping up her flour-sugar mixture with crackers and shoving it in her mouth. She's not going to have carb issues when she grows up, not at all!

The muffins were delish and Clara Jane eventually came down from her carb rush long enough to climb down from the ceiling fan, where she spent the afternoon perched like a howler monkey on meth.

For dinner I made pasta puttanesca. Did you know that "puttanesca" is Italian for whore's sauce? I thought about trying to sculpt it into a brothel. I'm sure Kara, Mindy and that Greenlight fella are just loving that.

And since today's all about stuff going down gullets, I spent the evening writing at Starbucks. You know what I really enjoyed about the visit? I enjoyed the car in the parking lot, hogging two spaces and sporting a "Stop road rage!" bumper sticker. Wanna stop road rage, Buddy? Don't fucking take up two damn parking spaces!!! Now, if you want to make it up to me, bring me a cinnamon dolce latte and we'll talk, Big Boy.

Posted by Robin at 10:18 PM | Comments (3)

January 22, 2006

A Meatloaf Shaped Like a House

A few days ago someone came to my blog by searching MSN for "meatloaf shaped like a house". I'd never heard of such a thing, but it doesn't surprise me that MSN thinks I have information about meatloaves shaped like houses. If blogging has taught me one thing, it's that MSN's search engine is terrible, evidenced by the many people who arrive here by searching for porn on MSN. I think we can all agree that my blog might possibly be one of the most unerotic web sites ever.

While there may not be any hot mom action here, I've taken a bit of pity on the person who was searching for house-shaped meatloaf. Also, I've been a bit bored of late. I mean, the parenting, book-writing, housekeeping, wifely duties, shopping, housekeeping, knitting, parent-herding, Idiot Dog management, blogging, codependency and occasional napping just don't completely fill my days. Which is why I decided that today, I would construct a meatloaf shaped like a house in hopes that the poor person using the shitty search engine might come back and have her hunger satiated.

Vegetarians, be warned. Meat-related carnage follows.

The meatloaf, in its pre-loafed state.

I'm not a fan of touching raw meat if I can avoid it, so all meatloaves, whether house-shaped or traditional loaf-shaped, get mixed in my stand mixer. Which might present a problem...

This is what my meatloaves normally look like. Because of that whole not-touching-meat-if-I-can-help-it thing, I usually just dump it onto the baking sheet. Maybe I should opt for a meatloaf shaped like a geodesic dome house.

I quickly got over myself and got to shaping. It was easy, really. I mean, it's not vertical. I wasn't aiming to create a gingermeat house, much to B.'s disappointment. It's meatloaf, and it's shaped like a house. What more do you want?

Some bacony eaves, perhaps?

Would some pork product doors and windows make up for my lack of vertical reach?

You know, if I went with the vertical gingermeat house design, there's no way my ketchup trim would stay in place, what with gravity and all.

It's a housewarming! Get it ... it's a meatloaf shaped like a house, and it's warming in the ... oh, forget it.


Vegetarians, you can unavert your eyes for a minute.
Of course I made pototoes and green beans.

And once the meatloaf shaped like a house came out of the oven, I used the potatoes to do a little landscaping in the form of fluffy snow. I thought about crafting an evergreen tree out of the green beans, but that seemed a little silly.

Mmmmmm ... real estate... *drool*


When I first started culinary school it was with the intention of becoming a pastry chef. I dreamt of crafting incredible cake creations. That lasted all of a semester, then I discovered that I'm inherantly incapable of frosting a simple layer cake without leaving it covered in fingerprints and long strands of my hair. But now I'm wondering ... maybe I should combine my skills as a cook with the creativity of a cake artist . I could be a ... a ... a meat sculptor!

I'm sure the culinary world is still reeling and mourning that I'm no longer a catering professional.

Posted by Robin at 06:29 PM | Comments (22)

December 18, 2005

Apres-Apres Party

1. I don't feel like someone who drank six pomegranate cocktails* last night. I feel fantastic! Not fantastic enough to compose real paragraphs, but pretty damn fantastic considering the amount of vodka and brandy that beat the hell out of my liver last night.

*A drink of my own concoting, and quite divine, I might add. Feel free to make them at your own holiday gathering. Or for breakfast. I'd be honored if you'd refer to it as the Poppy:

1 shot vodka (I prefer Ketel 1)
1 shot pomegranate juice
1 shot Kirsch (cherry brandy)
1 wedge lemon

Put ice in a martini shaker. Add shots. Give the lemon a squeeze and toss it in. Shake. Pour. Imbibe. Dance on the dining room table with your pants around your ankles. Take photos and share them with me.

2. I like cooking again. I knew I would, once I quit catering. I just didn't expect to like it again so soon. Last night's menu:


All my recipes. And it was fun. Cooking is fun again! This makes me insanely happy.

3. I really don't know what possesses me to throw holiday parties. There are just too many other things going on and it's hard to get everyone I'd like to see together at the same time. From now on, I think I need to forgo the holiday stuff and do something in, say, mid-January, when everyone's bored senseless. This isn't to say that last night wasn't great. It was. I should host more small gatherings. It was nice to be able to sit and actually converse, instead of mingling.

4. Mindy makes the most fabulous things with paper and photos. She surprised me with an amazing Clara Jane photo book. Seriously. Damn near made me cry, it was so perfect. I wish I could show it to you, I really do.

5. Although Angie couldn't make it to the party, she did leave a Starbucks gift card in the amount of a venti eggnog latte on my porch yesterday morning. I think that means I owe her a blow job. Feel free insert the "fluid pudding" joke of your liking in this space.

6. Speaking of being horrible, I was actually very well-behaved in the presence of Mr. Greenlight. He was the one who brought up sodomy. Not me.

7. My 8.5-year-old Basset hound, Chloe, finally succeeded in leaping over the back of the couch after months of trying. While I avoid giving her table scraps, I felt like she earned a bit of fresh-from-the-oven salmon for that feat. So not only is her old body feeling the brunt of the jump, but she also has a burnt tongue.

So overwhelming was Chloe's night that she slept where she dropped:


Yes, she's asleep. Yes, I'm headless. Yes, Mindy has the cutest headband and boots in the world. And yes, B.'s totally drunk.

8. This morning, my codependent little elf and I had our own little Christmas morning gift exchange. Because we're all about the schmoop, we surprised our men-folk with stockings of goodies. They both got Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas on DVD. Why yes, Kara and I are both involved with 11-year-olds.

9. Kara gives good codependent loot. There's the Vertigo 2005//U2 Live From Chicago DVD, partially filmed at one of the U2 shows we attended (new link - I originally posted the wrong one). Since Greenlight gave her the same thing, we've discussed synching the DVDs and watching them at the same time, at our respective homes, and looking for ourselves. Codependency: the gift that keeps giving.

She also gave me a big pile of porn in the form of sweet, sweet sweaty Tyler Florence's new book. You do know how much I lah-uve Tyler, right? His new book, Eat This Book (yes, SIR!), should be sold in a brown paper wrapper, because it's pure porn! I love it. I love it so. And I apologize to everyone in my house this morning who had to witness how much I love it.

As if that wasn't enough, Kara also loaded me up with goodies from Lush. I haven't tried the two bath bombs yet, but I've become intimately acquainted with their lovely Candy Fluff and Silky Underwear dusting powders. A word to the wise: when desperately trying to open the can of dusting powder, don't pound on it with the antennea of your cell phone, no matter how good of an idea it may seem. Because when the antennea finally penetrates the plastic with the use of much force, the geyser of sugar-scented powder that erupts will leave you looking like you've spent an evening in a toilet stall at Studio 54 with Liza, Bianca and a Colombian named Hernando who wants cash from you now.

10. Clara "Thank God I Missed This Soiree" Jane is visiting her grandparents and having a lovely time gorging herself on Bugles. B. is punishing himself today by hauling his hungover ass to the stores to Christmas shop for me. I'd love to see this, this, these, or this, which doesn't smell nearly as slutty as you might think. But really, I'll be thrilled with whatever he gets me. The fact that I'm home, in my pajamas, alone all day today is just about the best gift in the world.

Posted by Robin at 11:54 AM | Comments (9)