Figure A, Desiree...
..it's not OK. This is NOT beautiful.
Or Propriate.
Would someone like to explain this to me?
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Good Gravy Marie
Yaks, bovines, bad bully cud chewers and mean mommy moo cows....they've been in the news in their new dress blues, cats and kittens! Someone needs to tell these rumbustious ruminants ENOUGH ALREADY with the headline hogging shenanigans and high-spirited hijinks!!!
..it's not OK.
This is NOT beautiful.
Or Propriate.
Would someone like to explain this to me?
..it's not OK. This is NOT beautiful.
Or Propriate.
Would someone like to explain this to me?
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
I cast thee out, Pressure Cooker! I rebuke thee utterly!
This is going to be kind of rough, but the disgusting parts are icky enough to make for entertaining reading.
****************
My mother could have provided an entire career's worth of valuable data for someone specializing in the effects of poverty, abuse, malnutrition and rage over the long term. To describe the woman as having been 'warped' is simply to describe her in part. Her every waking moment was spent in a state of seething hatred and resentment. The entire world was her enemy and her coping strategies were that of a prisoner of war who had given up all thought of escape:
1. Life was shit, was never going to be anything other than shit and was in fact SUPPOSED TO BE shit because you were bad and were being punished.
2. Suck up to the strong
3. Trample the weak.
Yes, it was a barrel of laughs.
Now, despite having been employed in her fathers Greek restaurant for a number of years, and despite having been known as an excellent cook by all their navy friends, the woman I ended up with by the 1960's didn't cook so much as she simply opened cans and boiled the contents to death. Period. It took me years to associate the stories I heard about the dinner parties she used to throw and the food she used to cook with HER personally...it just never computed.
Not one meal-not ONE-ever landed on our table without having been complained about bitterly. 'Slaving over a hot stove' was a phrase she used frequently. So...three meals a day over 18 years is...a fuck of a lot of bitching about how she was nothing but a maid around this place and nobody ever lifted a finger to help because I was nuttin but lazy and boy, I'd sure have another thing coming once I grew up because POW comes the revolution etc etc etc WHATEVER, MOM, OK.
This is not to say that I was welcome in the kitchen (or that my help was even needed; after all, we had an electric can opener.) Neither would it be accurate to say that she ever taught me how to do anything in the kitchen except stay out of the way (I had to learn how to cook off the television from Graham Kerr) but the insinuation was, that were it not for me and my laziness, we would be eating fine cuisine off linen and silver.
...Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The story I heard most often was how she and her brother never had nuttin to eat but oatmeal. How all she can remember was standing on a chair next to the stove stirring the oatmeal. That much is probably 100% true....right up until the point where she went to work in her fathers restaurant, of course. So deprivation doesn't cover it, and lack of skill wasn't the issue.
It was power.
For example, she liked to brag about how, back when they were first married, every time my dad pissed her off, she took a dish that he liked off the menu.
He pissed her off a lot.
Their early marriage, from what I've been given to understand, was pretty much one long drunken slugfest. All that became a way of life. A perpetual grudge match. Nobody quite remembered why it was that way, only that it had to be that way.
I think that, in her mind, food meant love.
You pissed her off, you lost something you liked. Forever. The end. That'll fix ya.
Then I came along, and the grand tradition continued. On top of losing a favorite item off the menu for good, though, you got in trouble for 'wasting food'. Not that it makes any rational sense; when you were just sitting there as this shrieking harpy suddenly jumped up and went screaming around the room brandishing hot bowls and plates and emptying the contents into the trash; you MADE her do that so it was your fault. (And remember,we were Catholic! Wasting food was also a sin, which meant THAT was one more reason you were going to hell! Two for the price of one! What a deal!)
Now, not one-NOT ONE- single specific incident or misdeed or transgression comes to mind. Not one triggering incident or episode. She'd just jump up and start in, apropos of God only knew what, and that was that. Goodbye anything you liked. Spaghetti. Goodbye hamburgers. Goodbye forever. Goodbye Franz bread. Goodbye blueberry jelly. Goodbye cereal. Goodbye.
What happened to the stuff that still remained? I have no earthly idea whatsoever. I've wondered about that for years. Did she sit and gorge on it like an ogre gloating over its hoard while no one was around? I kind of suspect that's exactly what happened. It makes a kind of weird, mythic sense. Heaven knows, everything else that ever came into that house REMAINED unto all eternity, particularly if it was food.
I've written about the hoarding. Huge 10 lb tins of flour absolutely alive with weevils and castings. Sugar turned into solid bricks in the bag, stuck to the shelves. Cans and mixes from 1963 that nobody was allowed to touch. Cases of capers in the basement.
Food was stashed all over the house. Behind books on the shelves. On the top shelf of the linen closet. In the buffet. Ancient candy stolen out of my Easter baskets and Halloween bags. Her purse, her coat pockets, all her sweater pockets were full of old hard rolls, bread sticks and crackers, packets full of every condiment known to civilization, creamers and old fortune cookies. We never left a restaurant without a doggie bag. Doggie never saw it. She even ganked food off other peoples plates once they'd left the table. If we went to a buffet, she brought an extra purse and a scarf. My father and I were press-ganged into going back for more, more, more. When we left the restaurant, that purse was full. There'd be a scarf lying on top of all the greasy napkins full of fried chicken and dinner rolls.
Now, I belong to two online groups dealing with hoarding and having grown up with a hoarder, and I'm still at a crossroads with the issue. They tend to see it as an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and for some people it definitely is. But that explanation doesn't cover it all. Not by a long shot. Compulsion does NOT describe what I grew up with. It's my contention that it wasn't OCD at all... it was warfare. SHE won. You LOST. SHE got the food. You didn't. SHE had it, not you. That was her attitude. Nothing was more blatantly obvious. She wasn't stressed or fearful about starving...that old 'child of the Great Depression living in fear of the next market crash' bullshit doesn't wash in her case. She was going to WIN and you were going to LOSE. The way you kept score was by the number of stale fortune cookies in your purse.
I have had nightmares about the sound of a pressure cooker. Remember them? They had a little round thing that went over the steam vent on the top of the pot, and when the steam would reach a certain pressure that metal thing would rattle and hiss and shake. I remember that noise going on for HOURS at a time. Literally.
Anything that came out of that pot was a crime against nature.
Particularly a dish she liked to call "stew".
It started out innocently enough. A cheap cut of beef, potatoes, yellow onions, maybe some cabbage, and carrots...other things that had started out green; and here I'm assuming beans or peas or something along those lines...some salt and pepper.
All of it hacked into fist sized chunks.
All of it sealed up in this iron lung of pressurized horror together where it screamed and cried and beat its little fists bloody against the hard, unyielding walls of its prison to no avail.
And then the heat was turned on, and it was left there.
For HOURS.
What came out of that pot was something that I had to wait years to see again, not that I was waiting with bated breath, mind you. The next time I saw it again was when I opened the door to a refrigerator in a house that the tenants had abandoned, where the electricity had been shut off for a month.
The contents were MELTED.
It was like opening a sealed coffin. It was SOUP. The only way it could be identified as food was that some of the wrappers were still recognizable. The food inside had not decomposed in any sense that you'd ordinarily recognize; it had simply turned into a chunky, indescribably foetid, LIQUID.
The same sight greeted you when the lid was finally taken off the pressure cooker, and God help me, something of the same warm, armpitty, bacterially active smell. Now heaven knows there was nothing left alive after that kind of treatment; you could have packed it into an open chest wound and not worried about infection because whatever else it might have been it sure'n the fuck was STERILE.
She would serve it up with a mean, mean grin as the loooooong strands of translucent onion slithered off the spoon like dead angleworms after a hard rain. In fact its that slithery texture, that texture of decomposition and slime that comes back clearly across the years. That, and the SMELL. Oh my God, that smell, like bad, bad breath, like boiled fat, like a sink full of dirty dishes on a hot day.
"Your favorite thing!" she'd chirp, and my father would laugh. Then the screaming would start, and the threats, no television, no going outside, no phone calls, no friends until I stayed there and ate everything on my plate and no getting up until someone gave me permission and I'd have the same thing for breakfast and on and on and on and on. I mean, as the night follows the day. That pot would come to the table along with the grin, and then the yelling and freaking. Meanwhile I'm just sitting there. Counting the days left until I'm 18.
Now there was a period of time when we saw that shit come to the table every single evening. Even my dads pickled taste buds woke up. He was lucky, of course; he had a car and money, so he just started eating dinner before he came home from work in the evening.
But yeah, this was something she started when I was about midway through 4Th grade, and she'd return to this tactic every time she was good and pissed off about something I'd done, which was more often than not. Deliberately destroy a meal and then scream at me to eat it. Over and over and over again. It took me years to figure out what was going on. Wanna know why? You want to know the punchline? The kicker? The really good part?
Started right after I hit puberty.
Happened about once a month.
So yes, there's a reason I've never been worried about where this womans' remains are buried. Just knowing that they ARE BURIED is more than enough.
****************
My mother could have provided an entire career's worth of valuable data for someone specializing in the effects of poverty, abuse, malnutrition and rage over the long term. To describe the woman as having been 'warped' is simply to describe her in part. Her every waking moment was spent in a state of seething hatred and resentment. The entire world was her enemy and her coping strategies were that of a prisoner of war who had given up all thought of escape:
1. Life was shit, was never going to be anything other than shit and was in fact SUPPOSED TO BE shit because you were bad and were being punished.
2. Suck up to the strong
3. Trample the weak.
Yes, it was a barrel of laughs.
Now, despite having been employed in her fathers Greek restaurant for a number of years, and despite having been known as an excellent cook by all their navy friends, the woman I ended up with by the 1960's didn't cook so much as she simply opened cans and boiled the contents to death. Period. It took me years to associate the stories I heard about the dinner parties she used to throw and the food she used to cook with HER personally...it just never computed.
Not one meal-not ONE-ever landed on our table without having been complained about bitterly. 'Slaving over a hot stove' was a phrase she used frequently. So...three meals a day over 18 years is...a fuck of a lot of bitching about how she was nothing but a maid around this place and nobody ever lifted a finger to help because I was nuttin but lazy and boy, I'd sure have another thing coming once I grew up because POW comes the revolution etc etc etc WHATEVER, MOM, OK.
This is not to say that I was welcome in the kitchen (or that my help was even needed; after all, we had an electric can opener.) Neither would it be accurate to say that she ever taught me how to do anything in the kitchen except stay out of the way (I had to learn how to cook off the television from Graham Kerr) but the insinuation was, that were it not for me and my laziness, we would be eating fine cuisine off linen and silver.
...Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The story I heard most often was how she and her brother never had nuttin to eat but oatmeal. How all she can remember was standing on a chair next to the stove stirring the oatmeal. That much is probably 100% true....right up until the point where she went to work in her fathers restaurant, of course. So deprivation doesn't cover it, and lack of skill wasn't the issue.
It was power.
For example, she liked to brag about how, back when they were first married, every time my dad pissed her off, she took a dish that he liked off the menu.
He pissed her off a lot.
Their early marriage, from what I've been given to understand, was pretty much one long drunken slugfest. All that became a way of life. A perpetual grudge match. Nobody quite remembered why it was that way, only that it had to be that way.
I think that, in her mind, food meant love.
You pissed her off, you lost something you liked. Forever. The end. That'll fix ya.
Then I came along, and the grand tradition continued. On top of losing a favorite item off the menu for good, though, you got in trouble for 'wasting food'. Not that it makes any rational sense; when you were just sitting there as this shrieking harpy suddenly jumped up and went screaming around the room brandishing hot bowls and plates and emptying the contents into the trash; you MADE her do that so it was your fault. (And remember,we were Catholic! Wasting food was also a sin, which meant THAT was one more reason you were going to hell! Two for the price of one! What a deal!)
Now, not one-NOT ONE- single specific incident or misdeed or transgression comes to mind. Not one triggering incident or episode. She'd just jump up and start in, apropos of God only knew what, and that was that. Goodbye anything you liked. Spaghetti. Goodbye hamburgers. Goodbye forever. Goodbye Franz bread. Goodbye blueberry jelly. Goodbye cereal. Goodbye.
What happened to the stuff that still remained? I have no earthly idea whatsoever. I've wondered about that for years. Did she sit and gorge on it like an ogre gloating over its hoard while no one was around? I kind of suspect that's exactly what happened. It makes a kind of weird, mythic sense. Heaven knows, everything else that ever came into that house REMAINED unto all eternity, particularly if it was food.
I've written about the hoarding. Huge 10 lb tins of flour absolutely alive with weevils and castings. Sugar turned into solid bricks in the bag, stuck to the shelves. Cans and mixes from 1963 that nobody was allowed to touch. Cases of capers in the basement.
Food was stashed all over the house. Behind books on the shelves. On the top shelf of the linen closet. In the buffet. Ancient candy stolen out of my Easter baskets and Halloween bags. Her purse, her coat pockets, all her sweater pockets were full of old hard rolls, bread sticks and crackers, packets full of every condiment known to civilization, creamers and old fortune cookies. We never left a restaurant without a doggie bag. Doggie never saw it. She even ganked food off other peoples plates once they'd left the table. If we went to a buffet, she brought an extra purse and a scarf. My father and I were press-ganged into going back for more, more, more. When we left the restaurant, that purse was full. There'd be a scarf lying on top of all the greasy napkins full of fried chicken and dinner rolls.
Now, I belong to two online groups dealing with hoarding and having grown up with a hoarder, and I'm still at a crossroads with the issue. They tend to see it as an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and for some people it definitely is. But that explanation doesn't cover it all. Not by a long shot. Compulsion does NOT describe what I grew up with. It's my contention that it wasn't OCD at all... it was warfare. SHE won. You LOST. SHE got the food. You didn't. SHE had it, not you. That was her attitude. Nothing was more blatantly obvious. She wasn't stressed or fearful about starving...that old 'child of the Great Depression living in fear of the next market crash' bullshit doesn't wash in her case. She was going to WIN and you were going to LOSE. The way you kept score was by the number of stale fortune cookies in your purse.
I have had nightmares about the sound of a pressure cooker. Remember them? They had a little round thing that went over the steam vent on the top of the pot, and when the steam would reach a certain pressure that metal thing would rattle and hiss and shake. I remember that noise going on for HOURS at a time. Literally.
Anything that came out of that pot was a crime against nature.
Particularly a dish she liked to call "stew".
It started out innocently enough. A cheap cut of beef, potatoes, yellow onions, maybe some cabbage, and carrots...other things that had started out green; and here I'm assuming beans or peas or something along those lines...some salt and pepper.
All of it hacked into fist sized chunks.
All of it sealed up in this iron lung of pressurized horror together where it screamed and cried and beat its little fists bloody against the hard, unyielding walls of its prison to no avail.
And then the heat was turned on, and it was left there.
For HOURS.
What came out of that pot was something that I had to wait years to see again, not that I was waiting with bated breath, mind you. The next time I saw it again was when I opened the door to a refrigerator in a house that the tenants had abandoned, where the electricity had been shut off for a month.
The contents were MELTED.
It was like opening a sealed coffin. It was SOUP. The only way it could be identified as food was that some of the wrappers were still recognizable. The food inside had not decomposed in any sense that you'd ordinarily recognize; it had simply turned into a chunky, indescribably foetid, LIQUID.
The same sight greeted you when the lid was finally taken off the pressure cooker, and God help me, something of the same warm, armpitty, bacterially active smell. Now heaven knows there was nothing left alive after that kind of treatment; you could have packed it into an open chest wound and not worried about infection because whatever else it might have been it sure'n the fuck was STERILE.
She would serve it up with a mean, mean grin as the loooooong strands of translucent onion slithered off the spoon like dead angleworms after a hard rain. In fact its that slithery texture, that texture of decomposition and slime that comes back clearly across the years. That, and the SMELL. Oh my God, that smell, like bad, bad breath, like boiled fat, like a sink full of dirty dishes on a hot day.
"Your favorite thing!" she'd chirp, and my father would laugh. Then the screaming would start, and the threats, no television, no going outside, no phone calls, no friends until I stayed there and ate everything on my plate and no getting up until someone gave me permission and I'd have the same thing for breakfast and on and on and on and on. I mean, as the night follows the day. That pot would come to the table along with the grin, and then the yelling and freaking. Meanwhile I'm just sitting there. Counting the days left until I'm 18.
Now there was a period of time when we saw that shit come to the table every single evening. Even my dads pickled taste buds woke up. He was lucky, of course; he had a car and money, so he just started eating dinner before he came home from work in the evening.
But yeah, this was something she started when I was about midway through 4Th grade, and she'd return to this tactic every time she was good and pissed off about something I'd done, which was more often than not. Deliberately destroy a meal and then scream at me to eat it. Over and over and over again. It took me years to figure out what was going on. Wanna know why? You want to know the punchline? The kicker? The really good part?
Started right after I hit puberty.
Happened about once a month.
So yes, there's a reason I've never been worried about where this womans' remains are buried. Just knowing that they ARE BURIED is more than enough.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Green Cow Is Destruction: Have The Black Light Poster!!
Yeah, there will eventually be a recipe-several, in fact!- and yeah, I'll give the link for the conversion table thingie so that people who aren't American can cook it too and learn how to eat like normal people.
___________________________
Middle of summer? Check!
Hotter than Kilauea? Check!
WHY NOT BAKE SOME MEATLOAF?
You know you want to. In fact, mix up a basic batch of this and then use the handy variations to make Albondigas and Italian Meatballs!
************
I grew up with the worlds worst cook. Basic dysfunction aside, this woman made the same mistake many women in that era made: they relied on the recipe booklets handed out by the modern convenience food industry for new ideas. This is the same source which gave us American classics like Tuna Wiggle with Green Peas. I've talked with friends who grew up in the same era and compared notes... we all grew up eating the same horrific dishes, in fact, prepared in exactly the same ways, no matter what the region.
The two main malefactors in the horror story that was American home cooking in the early 60's were the Hunts Corporation and the Campbells Soup Company. Their evil minions were the church/school fundraiser cookbook...where these 'recipes' were re-printed and handed along by the type of woman who insists that everyone loooooooooves her food, and who thought that topping something with miniature marshmallows represented the pinnacle of fine dining. I have proof of this too...I collect old cookbooks. They tell a sad, sad tale.
Anyway, this was eventually going to lead to meatloaf. OK. So.
The archetypal recipe for bad meatloaf was perpetrated by the Hunts corporation. The things that made it so very, very bad were the use of CUBED WHITE BREAD, COARSELY CHOPPED RAW VEGETABLES; SPECIFICALLY GREEN BELL PEPPER AND YELLOW ONION, and a topping of either CATSUP or TOMATO SAUCE. * You can see that the entire thrust of the recipe is toward the 'sweet' setting on the taste-o-meter.
By following the recipe to the letter, which meant using a medium-grade ground beef and baking it under a covering of tinfoil at 375 for 50 minutes, you ended up with something that was very soft and had a distinctly stewed flavor, as the loaf essentially spent all that time boiling in its own copious juices.
Now I'd had this prepared by people who actually cared about what they cooked and who followed the recipe, and at best its edible. Barely. In the hands of an enraged 4-pack a day smoker who used food as punishment....no. I cannot adequately describe the fear and loathing that rose in my throat when, opening the door to my room, I smelled the distinctive aroma of DEATHLOAF shambling down the hall like a victim of wet leprosy. **
Folks, meatloaf CAN BE delicious. It doesn't have to be frightening.
I figured there had to be a way to make this stuff edible. The idea was to stretch a given amount of minced meat economically, without killing members of the immediate family. And really, there was nothing particularly wrong with the ingredients; just the combination.
The tomato topping, the cubed white bread, the green pepper and the yellow onion were the first things to go. There is no reason in the world to have all that 'sweet' in there.*** The idea I came up with was to simply add in the most emame (savory, meaty flavored) ingredients I could, things that harmonize with cooked meat, things that you'd be making a sauce out of anyway if you were serving a bland cut.
Once the main ingredient was treated with a little respect, flavor wise, I twiddled with the cooking method in order to eliminate the 'soupy' flavor. The idea here is that you're eating meat, not drinking it. You want some browning to occur. That caramelizing is what makes meat delicious.
Here's what I came up with. It's pretty simple, and it's not 'fine dining' chow, but I promise that nobody will be traumatized by it. Really.
_____________________________________
Yes, you have to use your hands to mix this up. Pull on your big girl panties and deal with it.
RECIPE CONVERSION TABLE THINGIE FOR FOREIGN PERSONS:
http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm
I lb ground beef, room temperature
1/2 cup dry, toasted bread crumbs
combine in a large bowl, set aside.
now, this is important:
Minced-yes, MINCED. The same size as the bits of ground beef. Not chopped coarsely. Not LIQUIFIED either or put through the Cuisinart....just MINCED....
1/2 cup each:
carrot, celery, WHITE onion, mushrooms
Saute in a little oil - in batches so that the pan isn't crowded- until soft and liquids are reduced. A nonstick pan is good for this since you aren't looking to create a fond.
Cool, then add to ingredients in bowl, combine.
Mix together: 1 egg
Sprig oregano, rosemary, thyme, basil
Soy sauce
(or Braggs liquid amino...same ingredient, no 'boozy' taste) used judiciously; it's salty
...this stuff. yeah, i know, the packaging makes it look like plant fertilizer but it's not. maybe they use the same advertising firm that Dr. Bronner does. anyway, its delicious. tastes like soy sauce but not fermented.
combine using a hand blender (Bamix), add to ingredients in bowl, blend.
Let mixture sit for 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 425
Mush the mixture around a little bit...what you want is a material that you can form a ball out of, one that holds its shape. If it feels too soft, add some bread crumbs....too stiff and dry, add water, maybe a little more soy sauce, stock, milk, red wine..whatever. If you've never made this before, play it safe and just use water. (Remember...you can always season something UP once its done; but once seasoned, it can never be seasoned DOWN.)
Now plop it into a loaf pan. Don't bother greasing it. Just plop that sucker right in there. Dome the top all nice and make it look pretty. I smooth it so that it makes a nice brown, shiny appearance when its cooked. I do not require that you emulate my dorkiness, however.
DO NOT PUT KETCHUP OR TOMATO SAUCE ON IT.
DO NOT COVER IT WITH A LID OR TINFOIL.
NO NO NO NO NO.
Just put it in the nice oven.
At about 15 minutes, take out and dump off juices. Most of it will be fat. (Save these aside for your dog or cat.)
Replace in oven and finish cooking. This will take about 15-20 more minutes, or until the interior temp is 160f.
The top should be nice and browned and not cracked. The loaf will be shrunken away from the sides of the pan a little, and have a little juice in the bottom. That's fine. Leave it there; it will soak back in. You've already gotten rid of most of the fat.
Let loaf rest for 20 minutes
Serve! I like it sliced, with cream gravy over the top, and mashed potatoes with. Oh yeah!
_____________________________________________________
Now, you could mix that all up to the point just before you correct the texture, plop it in the pan and put it in the oven...and make instead
ALBONDIGAS!
by simply adding...
1/2 cup leftover white rice
1 tsp sambal oelek (oh you do TOO have it, Brits; sheesh, look in the 'oriental foods' section.)
and
Quite a bit of fresh mint, chopped finely. I use about 1/4 cup of strong, rank old field mint and it's perfect.
Combine and let set for 1 hour
Form into balls the size of a walnut
Place on a flat, ungreased pan
Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, giving the meatballs a shake to roll them around about halfway through.
Turn off the heat, open the door, and let them cool in the oven until you can reach in with your bare hands and pick up the pan.
Drop them carefully into soup that is just at a bare, bare simmer...not even tiny bubbles. Leave them for about 1 hour, checking them occasionally and 'sinking' them. When they stay sunk, the soup is done.
(the soup is a basic, regular soup stock...carrots, onion, celery and parsley with a chicken base, with a can of chopped tomatoes and 1/2 cup of refries added to it. Easy!)
**********************
OR...........
you could make ITALIAN MEATBALLS instead!
Just add twice the amount of rosemary and oregano-fresh, please
and 2 tbls -yeah, get over it- of garlic confit (a paste of olive oil and ground fresh garlic)
mixed with the egg and soy sauce (or Braggs, which I prefer)
Form and bake as for Albondigas
Place into marinara, same temp, and hold for 1 hour (or place in cooled marinara and hold overnight in the fridge. Bring up to serving temp and droooooooooooooooool all over the place because it smells so good!)
Eat it all up and don't share any of it.
NOW HERE IS THE CONVERSION SITE ONE MORE TIME:
http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm
__________________________________________
* Later 'improvements' also call for barbecue sauce, something called 'chili sauce' (that I recall as kind of a chunky catsup with a little extra ascorbic acid thrown in), chopped sweet pickle, lima beans and white rice.
No no no no no no no no no. No. Just NO.
**Second only to PRESSURE COOKED STEW. I've been to the dump and smelled things that didn't arouse that kind of nausea. I think it was the combination of the smell, knowing that I'd have to sit at the table until I was actually seen to put some of it in my mouth, and the....visual. Stew isn't an attractive dish at its very best. After spending over an hour in the pressure cooker it resembles what must have poured out of the rum cask that Admiral Nelson was stored in.
***ever notice that about American cooking from the old days? Everyfucking thing was sweet. Everything. They put sugar in GREEN BEANS for heavens sake. What the hell? Just because you can, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
I also blame this on Germans. At least the ones I knew. Man, if you could put sugar or caraway in it, there it was. When I caught my husband (German, taught to cook by Germans) putting BROWN SUGAR into spaghetti sauce and chili we had several long, long talks about who should do the cooking and who should stay the fuck out of my kitchen if he was going to go dumping all brown sugar into shit.
___________________________
Middle of summer? Check!
Hotter than Kilauea? Check!
WHY NOT BAKE SOME MEATLOAF?
You know you want to. In fact, mix up a basic batch of this and then use the handy variations to make Albondigas and Italian Meatballs!
************
I grew up with the worlds worst cook. Basic dysfunction aside, this woman made the same mistake many women in that era made: they relied on the recipe booklets handed out by the modern convenience food industry for new ideas. This is the same source which gave us American classics like Tuna Wiggle with Green Peas. I've talked with friends who grew up in the same era and compared notes... we all grew up eating the same horrific dishes, in fact, prepared in exactly the same ways, no matter what the region.
The two main malefactors in the horror story that was American home cooking in the early 60's were the Hunts Corporation and the Campbells Soup Company. Their evil minions were the church/school fundraiser cookbook...where these 'recipes' were re-printed and handed along by the type of woman who insists that everyone loooooooooves her food, and who thought that topping something with miniature marshmallows represented the pinnacle of fine dining. I have proof of this too...I collect old cookbooks. They tell a sad, sad tale.
Anyway, this was eventually going to lead to meatloaf. OK. So.
The archetypal recipe for bad meatloaf was perpetrated by the Hunts corporation. The things that made it so very, very bad were the use of CUBED WHITE BREAD, COARSELY CHOPPED RAW VEGETABLES; SPECIFICALLY GREEN BELL PEPPER AND YELLOW ONION, and a topping of either CATSUP or TOMATO SAUCE. * You can see that the entire thrust of the recipe is toward the 'sweet' setting on the taste-o-meter.
By following the recipe to the letter, which meant using a medium-grade ground beef and baking it under a covering of tinfoil at 375 for 50 minutes, you ended up with something that was very soft and had a distinctly stewed flavor, as the loaf essentially spent all that time boiling in its own copious juices.
Now I'd had this prepared by people who actually cared about what they cooked and who followed the recipe, and at best its edible. Barely. In the hands of an enraged 4-pack a day smoker who used food as punishment....no. I cannot adequately describe the fear and loathing that rose in my throat when, opening the door to my room, I smelled the distinctive aroma of DEATHLOAF shambling down the hall like a victim of wet leprosy. **
Folks, meatloaf CAN BE delicious. It doesn't have to be frightening.
I figured there had to be a way to make this stuff edible. The idea was to stretch a given amount of minced meat economically, without killing members of the immediate family. And really, there was nothing particularly wrong with the ingredients; just the combination.
The tomato topping, the cubed white bread, the green pepper and the yellow onion were the first things to go. There is no reason in the world to have all that 'sweet' in there.*** The idea I came up with was to simply add in the most emame (savory, meaty flavored) ingredients I could, things that harmonize with cooked meat, things that you'd be making a sauce out of anyway if you were serving a bland cut.
Once the main ingredient was treated with a little respect, flavor wise, I twiddled with the cooking method in order to eliminate the 'soupy' flavor. The idea here is that you're eating meat, not drinking it. You want some browning to occur. That caramelizing is what makes meat delicious.
Here's what I came up with. It's pretty simple, and it's not 'fine dining' chow, but I promise that nobody will be traumatized by it. Really.
_____________________________________
Yes, you have to use your hands to mix this up. Pull on your big girl panties and deal with it.
RECIPE CONVERSION TABLE THINGIE FOR FOREIGN PERSONS:
http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm
I lb ground beef, room temperature
1/2 cup dry, toasted bread crumbs
combine in a large bowl, set aside.
now, this is important:
Minced-yes, MINCED. The same size as the bits of ground beef. Not chopped coarsely. Not LIQUIFIED either or put through the Cuisinart....just MINCED....
1/2 cup each:
carrot, celery, WHITE onion, mushrooms
Saute in a little oil - in batches so that the pan isn't crowded- until soft and liquids are reduced. A nonstick pan is good for this since you aren't looking to create a fond.
Cool, then add to ingredients in bowl, combine.
Mix together: 1 egg
Sprig oregano, rosemary, thyme, basil
Soy sauce
(or Braggs liquid amino...same ingredient, no 'boozy' taste) used judiciously; it's salty
...this stuff. yeah, i know, the packaging makes it look like plant fertilizer but it's not. maybe they use the same advertising firm that Dr. Bronner does. anyway, its delicious. tastes like soy sauce but not fermented.combine using a hand blender (Bamix), add to ingredients in bowl, blend.
Let mixture sit for 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 425
Mush the mixture around a little bit...what you want is a material that you can form a ball out of, one that holds its shape. If it feels too soft, add some bread crumbs....too stiff and dry, add water, maybe a little more soy sauce, stock, milk, red wine..whatever. If you've never made this before, play it safe and just use water. (Remember...you can always season something UP once its done; but once seasoned, it can never be seasoned DOWN.)
Now plop it into a loaf pan. Don't bother greasing it. Just plop that sucker right in there. Dome the top all nice and make it look pretty. I smooth it so that it makes a nice brown, shiny appearance when its cooked. I do not require that you emulate my dorkiness, however.
DO NOT PUT KETCHUP OR TOMATO SAUCE ON IT.
DO NOT COVER IT WITH A LID OR TINFOIL.
NO NO NO NO NO.
Just put it in the nice oven.
At about 15 minutes, take out and dump off juices. Most of it will be fat. (Save these aside for your dog or cat.)
Replace in oven and finish cooking. This will take about 15-20 more minutes, or until the interior temp is 160f.
The top should be nice and browned and not cracked. The loaf will be shrunken away from the sides of the pan a little, and have a little juice in the bottom. That's fine. Leave it there; it will soak back in. You've already gotten rid of most of the fat.
Let loaf rest for 20 minutes
Serve! I like it sliced, with cream gravy over the top, and mashed potatoes with. Oh yeah!
_____________________________________________________
Now, you could mix that all up to the point just before you correct the texture, plop it in the pan and put it in the oven...and make instead
ALBONDIGAS!
by simply adding...
1/2 cup leftover white rice
1 tsp sambal oelek (oh you do TOO have it, Brits; sheesh, look in the 'oriental foods' section.)
and
Quite a bit of fresh mint, chopped finely. I use about 1/4 cup of strong, rank old field mint and it's perfect.
Combine and let set for 1 hour
Form into balls the size of a walnut
Place on a flat, ungreased pan
Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, giving the meatballs a shake to roll them around about halfway through.
Turn off the heat, open the door, and let them cool in the oven until you can reach in with your bare hands and pick up the pan.
Drop them carefully into soup that is just at a bare, bare simmer...not even tiny bubbles. Leave them for about 1 hour, checking them occasionally and 'sinking' them. When they stay sunk, the soup is done.
(the soup is a basic, regular soup stock...carrots, onion, celery and parsley with a chicken base, with a can of chopped tomatoes and 1/2 cup of refries added to it. Easy!)
**********************
OR...........
you could make ITALIAN MEATBALLS instead!
Just add twice the amount of rosemary and oregano-fresh, please
and 2 tbls -yeah, get over it- of garlic confit (a paste of olive oil and ground fresh garlic)
mixed with the egg and soy sauce (or Braggs, which I prefer)
Form and bake as for Albondigas
Place into marinara, same temp, and hold for 1 hour (or place in cooled marinara and hold overnight in the fridge. Bring up to serving temp and droooooooooooooooool all over the place because it smells so good!)
Eat it all up and don't share any of it.
NOW HERE IS THE CONVERSION SITE ONE MORE TIME:
http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm
__________________________________________
* Later 'improvements' also call for barbecue sauce, something called 'chili sauce' (that I recall as kind of a chunky catsup with a little extra ascorbic acid thrown in), chopped sweet pickle, lima beans and white rice.
No no no no no no no no no. No. Just NO.
**Second only to PRESSURE COOKED STEW. I've been to the dump and smelled things that didn't arouse that kind of nausea. I think it was the combination of the smell, knowing that I'd have to sit at the table until I was actually seen to put some of it in my mouth, and the....visual. Stew isn't an attractive dish at its very best. After spending over an hour in the pressure cooker it resembles what must have poured out of the rum cask that Admiral Nelson was stored in.
***ever notice that about American cooking from the old days? Everyfucking thing was sweet. Everything. They put sugar in GREEN BEANS for heavens sake. What the hell? Just because you can, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
I also blame this on Germans. At least the ones I knew. Man, if you could put sugar or caraway in it, there it was. When I caught my husband (German, taught to cook by Germans) putting BROWN SUGAR into spaghetti sauce and chili we had several long, long talks about who should do the cooking and who should stay the fuck out of my kitchen if he was going to go dumping all brown sugar into shit.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Ooo baby baby!
Baby Garlic!
...these are the top setts off my serpentine garlic. It's almost a shame to harvest them; they're so odd and pretty. The little 'Kremlin dome' at the end of the stalk contains tiny little new garlic bulbs. If the garlic were left in the ground and the stalk to dry, eventually the 'dome' would split, and the dry stem would topple over and shatter the little cluster far and wide. Each little bulb would then become next years underground garlic cluster, send up a tall stalk, form setts....and so forth. When I harvest my garlic I hold the unfinished setts in water until the capsule splits. When the cluster is ready to shatter I scatter them wherever I think they might look interesting in the garden. That's all there is to planting this kind of garlic!
Unintentionally arty shot of baby Hazelnuts!
This year I just may put up a scarecrow or some tin cans on strings or something...last year the crows robbed me blind and I WANT BAKLAVA DAMMIT.
Baby 'Early Girl' beefsteak tomatoes!
HURRY HURRY HURRY HURRY HURRY!!!
Baby 'Connecticut Field' pumpkin for grand kids Jack 'O Lanterns!
Ditto 'Small Sugar' for daughters pumpkin pies...only the fruits were too bitty to photograph.
YES MJ I SAID BITTY YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH ALREADY.
Speaking of MJ; stand back, girl...the pumpkin vines are headed your way. Fast.
Baby acorn squash!
According to my Yummy Biker, these seeds were from the most delicious acorn squash he has ever eaten. So I saved the seeds from it and grew it. When they come ripe and I serve it up to him he will have no idea what I'm talking about. None whatsoever.
Baby sunflower!
This is from the 'mixed' row. It could be anybody, and blossom out any color, too. I'm hoping it's a double selection called 'Teddy Bear'.
Baby 'Bradford' pears!
Remember the pear tree that used to give me only one lonely pear every year? Not any more. I like to see these come on...they start out sticking straight up into the air, with the spent blossom end pointing up toward the sky. They look like little hot air balloons. As they get bigger they turn downward and the entire limb takes a half-twist with them. Then HUNDREDS OF CROWS LAND ALL OVER THE THING AND TAKE BIG NASTY VICIOUS SNIPS OUT OF ALL THE FRUITS AND FLING THEM ALL OVER THE GROUND AND CRAP ALL OVER EVERY THING AND TAKE OFF AGAIN.
Baby potatoes!
Actually the baby potatoes are under the plant there. Under the dirt, under the plant. Out of shot. Never mind.
Baby blueberries!
Gazillions of them. I have two blueberry shrubs and the branches are just sagging, heavily laden with fruit. The long, cool spring wasn't a bust for everyone out in the garden, anyway. In fact, this shot was taken after I harvested this afternoon...
Ripe Blueberries!
This is about a quart and a half of big, fat, roly-poly blueberries, cleaned and stemmed. Last year I took three harvests off my plants and I'm expecting to get at least that much this year, providing the robins don't get there first. Oh yes; I've caught them out there teaching their robin children how to rob the bush; fling yourself flapping straight into the center of the thing and then gobble the fallen berries all up off the ground until you're too fat to fly. I've tried it. It works.
...these are the top setts off my serpentine garlic. It's almost a shame to harvest them; they're so odd and pretty. The little 'Kremlin dome' at the end of the stalk contains tiny little new garlic bulbs. If the garlic were left in the ground and the stalk to dry, eventually the 'dome' would split, and the dry stem would topple over and shatter the little cluster far and wide. Each little bulb would then become next years underground garlic cluster, send up a tall stalk, form setts....and so forth. When I harvest my garlic I hold the unfinished setts in water until the capsule splits. When the cluster is ready to shatter I scatter them wherever I think they might look interesting in the garden. That's all there is to planting this kind of garlic!
Unintentionally arty shot of baby Hazelnuts!
This year I just may put up a scarecrow or some tin cans on strings or something...last year the crows robbed me blind and I WANT BAKLAVA DAMMIT.
Baby 'Early Girl' beefsteak tomatoes!
HURRY HURRY HURRY HURRY HURRY!!!
Baby 'Connecticut Field' pumpkin for grand kids Jack 'O Lanterns!
Ditto 'Small Sugar' for daughters pumpkin pies...only the fruits were too bitty to photograph.
YES MJ I SAID BITTY YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH ALREADY.
Speaking of MJ; stand back, girl...the pumpkin vines are headed your way. Fast.
Baby acorn squash!
According to my Yummy Biker, these seeds were from the most delicious acorn squash he has ever eaten. So I saved the seeds from it and grew it. When they come ripe and I serve it up to him he will have no idea what I'm talking about. None whatsoever.
Baby sunflower!
This is from the 'mixed' row. It could be anybody, and blossom out any color, too. I'm hoping it's a double selection called 'Teddy Bear'.
Baby 'Bradford' pears!
Remember the pear tree that used to give me only one lonely pear every year? Not any more. I like to see these come on...they start out sticking straight up into the air, with the spent blossom end pointing up toward the sky. They look like little hot air balloons. As they get bigger they turn downward and the entire limb takes a half-twist with them. Then HUNDREDS OF CROWS LAND ALL OVER THE THING AND TAKE BIG NASTY VICIOUS SNIPS OUT OF ALL THE FRUITS AND FLING THEM ALL OVER THE GROUND AND CRAP ALL OVER EVERY THING AND TAKE OFF AGAIN.
Baby potatoes!
Actually the baby potatoes are under the plant there. Under the dirt, under the plant. Out of shot. Never mind.
Baby blueberries!
Gazillions of them. I have two blueberry shrubs and the branches are just sagging, heavily laden with fruit. The long, cool spring wasn't a bust for everyone out in the garden, anyway. In fact, this shot was taken after I harvested this afternoon...
Ripe Blueberries!
This is about a quart and a half of big, fat, roly-poly blueberries, cleaned and stemmed. Last year I took three harvests off my plants and I'm expecting to get at least that much this year, providing the robins don't get there first. Oh yes; I've caught them out there teaching their robin children how to rob the bush; fling yourself flapping straight into the center of the thing and then gobble the fallen berries all up off the ground until you're too fat to fly. I've tried it. It works.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Wax The Rambler Once Bird
Mid-20's? Can't draw? Start a webcomic!
...aaaaaaaaaaaaaand I think I've made my point.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Lenny and Curtis' Search For Meaning: The Thrilling Conclusion!!!!!
When last we met the Baby Jesus was searching the countryside for Pinks lost pig, Calliou, assisted by a crack team of infant crime fighters!
Mr. Swithers, owner of the haunted amusement part, came under brief suspicion but was ultimately rejected for being 'too sexy'.
Mu Tai Dongs establishment came in for a surprise raid
And though the menu featured pork, it was either fresh or salty...and Caillou was known to be a perfect gentleman at all times.
The search continued on.
Slowly and horribly, like a giant neck-wen the approximate size and shape of an obese toddler, a dark suspicion began to take form.....
CAILLOU HAD BEEN THE VICTIM OF AN ALIEN ABDUCTION!!!!!!!!!!
All the evidence gathered thus far pointed in that direction
...and that direction was someplace off to the right.
Now it remained merely a question of which alien, and for what purpose?
The Vietnamese Cacti-Women of Regulus 3 were known to be performing hybridization experiments involving pigs and lighthouses
The Tall Persons of the Greater Magellanic Cloud were known to abduct and cache small smelly creatures in the hollow trunks of large trees
And the Technologically Retarded Hippies of Saturns' 4th moon occasionally took a farm animal and put it in a basket and then flew around in their interstellar biplanes with it for no good reason that anyone would figure out.
In an effort to locate our purloined porcine pal, the most sophisticated technological listening devices known to man were turned toward the stars!
Suddenly a white streak tore across the heavens in a blinding flash....!
IT WAS CAILLOU! WITH A BLEACH JOB!
YES, Caillou...wayward bacon bit in a sea of stars, sorely missed and dearly beloved, had come back, but only for a brief time. As he hovered overhead he delivered a message of comfort to the friends and family he had left behind on Earths' distant shore.
There comes a time in a young pigs life when the urge to migrate becomes too strong to resist. Calliou had finally given in and answered the call that seemed to sound in his blood like a siren, one of the whoopy types that go oooooOOWWEEEEOOOOOOOooooo and not the nee-ner nee-ner ones or the ones that go WHOOPWHOOPWHOOPWHOOP like that.
Yes, he had returned to his point of origin on the dark side of the moon
...to seek a mate.
To fall in love.
To start a family.
And with that he zoomed off into the heavens again
Leaving us all just a little bit older...sadder...and wiser.
Now wasn't that a nice ending for little Caillou? Yes! Yes, it was!
Because you know and I know all too well
...it could have been A LOT worse.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Teal Worm: Regulating Become The Final Blue Lake Bean!
I was looking out the window this morning at my obnoxious willows, remembering how just the night before I'd had to knock them back again, and not looking forward to having to rake up and break down the leafy mess today, either. That was when the thought crossed my mind that the Elves of Middle Earth-particularly the ones living in Lorien-must have spent 3/4 of their doomed yet beautiful lives raking leaves. Seriously. When they weren't wafting around in their designer sneakers reflecting on how much better than everyone else in Middle Earth they were, they must have been dealing with some fairly serious compost issues.
Frankly, it'd serve them right. The elves had a really annoying attitude. Every time someone needed help they had to bitch and plead and coax and flatter up the stupid elves until they'd deign to lend a hand, but oh hell yes if the ELVES said 'Jump' you better ask 'how high'. So I like to think of Galadriels husband out grousing and sweating, riding the lawn mower around the Naith. Of course I like to think of Galadriel crouched up on her flet beaning passers-by with water balloons too. I would have.
Still, someone must have been doing the landscaping. Lorien and Rivendell seemed pretty well maintained. The Mirkwood elves were just a disgrace, though. Their woods were all dusty and infested full of cobwebs and sticks and pine cones and deer crap all over the place. Then some random shadow of evil comes along and and blots out the sun and all the animals turn black and the water turns into Lunesta; hell, they don't care. Why should they? They've a bunch of alcoholics. They don't drink water. They've got a castle full of wine. They only go outside at night to have bonfire keggers so they could care less about some lingering shadows.* It never occurs to them to sneak out of frame and do a little landscape maintenance like the other elves (because it wouldn't do to be seen actually sullying ones hands, of course. They're ELVES.)
Anyone that does yard work in Middle Earth seems to get treated like a high-functioning tard, though. Farmer Maggot ends up with the entire Nazgul coterie tearassing through his magic mushrooms and nobody even offers to hold a damn box lunch social for the man afterward. And forget poor Samwise Gamgee. Sam gets totally shafted. He puts up with Frodo's increasingly useless ass halfway across the continent, risks his life numerous times, and in the end what does he get? Jingly Jack Snot is what he gets. "Oh, yes, well, ahem....I mean, of course you did manage the entire expedition, tote luggage, cook all the meals, go hungry, fight monsters, and finally carry Frodo AND THE RING up the side of Mt. Doom just so he could punk out at the last moment, but, um....see...that doesn't count, exactly. No, Frodo was the designated RingBearer. HE gets to sail off to Club Med. You were just the kitchen bitch."
What he did get, was he got to see the last of Frodo, which I'll bet was more than a small relief. After all that whining and complaining and fainting and staggering around muttering about giant eyeballs and being a useless pain in the ass, once he's finally back home Frodo basically sits there like a bowl of cold oatmeal and plays that 'Ah me, I am a broken, broken man' shit for all it's worth. It's a beautiful day, but he's all huddled up next to the fire with the blinds drawn sipping weak tea and milk and please flump up my pillow and would you mind picking up my newspaper it fell on the floor there. Meanwhile Sam's outside pulling Frodos' weeds and mowing Frodos' lawn and you notice how there's never any mention of him drawing a paycheck for any of this either. You know Sam was thinking "Holy shit, get over yourself already. Is it really that bad? You're the best connected Hobbit in history; I mean geeze, hit up Gandalf for some magic powder or something. Seriously."
And the older I get the more this bothers me. For some reason it seemed perfectly reasonable when I was a kid; well, Sam was a devoted servant, right? So naturally he was satisfied with a pat on the head. Now that I'm older I can see what a fantasy of the entitled classes this crap actually was. What I would really like to see is someone write "The Further Adventures of Samwise Gamgee: The Quest For Back Pay". Or maybe "Samwise Opens a John Deere Dealership In Laurelindorian and Refuses To Accept Credit" because you totally know the elves would try and pay him off with fruit and magic vials and shit. But Sam would say "Cram it up your beautiful doomed ass, bucko."
Lengthy digression:
As long as I'm on the subject, what the hell was up with Tom Bombadil? Yes, I read the Silmarillion, I know all that. But I mean, what was he on? One minute he's being all intense and cryptic and acting like an asshole, and the next hes Mr. Rogers on acid, dipshitting around all over the landscape like he's forgotten to take his Ritalin.
This was possibly the stupidest, most annoying character in the entire Trilogy. I may be the only person alive who thinks this too. Everyone else just loved him. I thought he was a mental case.
Everyone with a little unexplainable 'extra income' back in the early 70's invested in a tavern and named it T. Bombadils** and they were always, invariably, without fail, PURE HIPPIE SUCK. I swear to God there must have been a hundred Tom Bombadil-themed taverns all over Portland and they were all draped in asparagus fern and barn board and served lousy sandwiches on whole wheat bread that had too many alfalfa sprouts on them. They all sold Red Hook beer and Heineken and Guinness and nobody ever drank it. One place up around 20th and Burnside even went so far as to have lovely murals with 'Fayre Ladie Goldeberrie' and 'Thom Bombadil' yeeeech it is to cringe. You'd expect a place like that to be full of lovely flower children, but you'd be wrong. Nobody but secretaries ever went to these places and they all died slow, lingering deaths. The places, not the secretaries.
______________________________________
*The Mirkwoodians had a really shitty-ass attitude in general, though. You say a dragon is attacking? Sucks to be you, huh. Oh wait, its attacking our WINE SOURCE? Well why didn't you say so Holmes? Hand me my trebuchet-oh wait, giant diamond? You'll have to excuse us for a second while we go chase down that shit.
*Or something totally 'offbeat corporate wacky' like Clinkerbunker, Buggerasshole and Frinks, or Mr. Boppies Electric Turtle Prison Ltd. or some shit like that. Again, always full of secretaries, these places. Portland was a really strange, sad place in the early 70's.
Frankly, it'd serve them right. The elves had a really annoying attitude. Every time someone needed help they had to bitch and plead and coax and flatter up the stupid elves until they'd deign to lend a hand, but oh hell yes if the ELVES said 'Jump' you better ask 'how high'. So I like to think of Galadriels husband out grousing and sweating, riding the lawn mower around the Naith. Of course I like to think of Galadriel crouched up on her flet beaning passers-by with water balloons too. I would have.
Still, someone must have been doing the landscaping. Lorien and Rivendell seemed pretty well maintained. The Mirkwood elves were just a disgrace, though. Their woods were all dusty and infested full of cobwebs and sticks and pine cones and deer crap all over the place. Then some random shadow of evil comes along and and blots out the sun and all the animals turn black and the water turns into Lunesta; hell, they don't care. Why should they? They've a bunch of alcoholics. They don't drink water. They've got a castle full of wine. They only go outside at night to have bonfire keggers so they could care less about some lingering shadows.* It never occurs to them to sneak out of frame and do a little landscape maintenance like the other elves (because it wouldn't do to be seen actually sullying ones hands, of course. They're ELVES.)
Anyone that does yard work in Middle Earth seems to get treated like a high-functioning tard, though. Farmer Maggot ends up with the entire Nazgul coterie tearassing through his magic mushrooms and nobody even offers to hold a damn box lunch social for the man afterward. And forget poor Samwise Gamgee. Sam gets totally shafted. He puts up with Frodo's increasingly useless ass halfway across the continent, risks his life numerous times, and in the end what does he get? Jingly Jack Snot is what he gets. "Oh, yes, well, ahem....I mean, of course you did manage the entire expedition, tote luggage, cook all the meals, go hungry, fight monsters, and finally carry Frodo AND THE RING up the side of Mt. Doom just so he could punk out at the last moment, but, um....see...that doesn't count, exactly. No, Frodo was the designated RingBearer. HE gets to sail off to Club Med. You were just the kitchen bitch."
What he did get, was he got to see the last of Frodo, which I'll bet was more than a small relief. After all that whining and complaining and fainting and staggering around muttering about giant eyeballs and being a useless pain in the ass, once he's finally back home Frodo basically sits there like a bowl of cold oatmeal and plays that 'Ah me, I am a broken, broken man' shit for all it's worth. It's a beautiful day, but he's all huddled up next to the fire with the blinds drawn sipping weak tea and milk and please flump up my pillow and would you mind picking up my newspaper it fell on the floor there. Meanwhile Sam's outside pulling Frodos' weeds and mowing Frodos' lawn and you notice how there's never any mention of him drawing a paycheck for any of this either. You know Sam was thinking "Holy shit, get over yourself already. Is it really that bad? You're the best connected Hobbit in history; I mean geeze, hit up Gandalf for some magic powder or something. Seriously."
And the older I get the more this bothers me. For some reason it seemed perfectly reasonable when I was a kid; well, Sam was a devoted servant, right? So naturally he was satisfied with a pat on the head. Now that I'm older I can see what a fantasy of the entitled classes this crap actually was. What I would really like to see is someone write "The Further Adventures of Samwise Gamgee: The Quest For Back Pay". Or maybe "Samwise Opens a John Deere Dealership In Laurelindorian and Refuses To Accept Credit" because you totally know the elves would try and pay him off with fruit and magic vials and shit. But Sam would say "Cram it up your beautiful doomed ass, bucko."
Lengthy digression:
As long as I'm on the subject, what the hell was up with Tom Bombadil? Yes, I read the Silmarillion, I know all that. But I mean, what was he on? One minute he's being all intense and cryptic and acting like an asshole, and the next hes Mr. Rogers on acid, dipshitting around all over the landscape like he's forgotten to take his Ritalin.
This was possibly the stupidest, most annoying character in the entire Trilogy. I may be the only person alive who thinks this too. Everyone else just loved him. I thought he was a mental case.
Everyone with a little unexplainable 'extra income' back in the early 70's invested in a tavern and named it T. Bombadils** and they were always, invariably, without fail, PURE HIPPIE SUCK. I swear to God there must have been a hundred Tom Bombadil-themed taverns all over Portland and they were all draped in asparagus fern and barn board and served lousy sandwiches on whole wheat bread that had too many alfalfa sprouts on them. They all sold Red Hook beer and Heineken and Guinness and nobody ever drank it. One place up around 20th and Burnside even went so far as to have lovely murals with 'Fayre Ladie Goldeberrie' and 'Thom Bombadil' yeeeech it is to cringe. You'd expect a place like that to be full of lovely flower children, but you'd be wrong. Nobody but secretaries ever went to these places and they all died slow, lingering deaths. The places, not the secretaries.
______________________________________
*The Mirkwoodians had a really shitty-ass attitude in general, though. You say a dragon is attacking? Sucks to be you, huh. Oh wait, its attacking our WINE SOURCE? Well why didn't you say so Holmes? Hand me my trebuchet-oh wait, giant diamond? You'll have to excuse us for a second while we go chase down that shit.
*Or something totally 'offbeat corporate wacky' like Clinkerbunker, Buggerasshole and Frinks, or Mr. Boppies Electric Turtle Prison Ltd. or some shit like that. Again, always full of secretaries, these places. Portland was a really strange, sad place in the early 70's.
Monday, July 07, 2008
OK, enough of that.: UPDATED
Instead, here is a brief treatise on the fried oyster.
I am fortunate enough to live nearby the source of the most prized oysters in the world. I happen to like oysters anyway, but I can tell you that I had no idea what an oyster could be until I first ate one of these little miracles .
Raw, they are otherworldly. Unbelievable. Sweet, clean, meaty, light; a hundred shifting, changing flavors move across your tongue. If you've ever had a really good wine you know the kind of flavor experience I mean; it turns and flashes like a coin dropped in a pool of water. It leaves a faint memory of itself behind that begs for yet another taste. Yes, they really are that good. I have eaten 30 0f them at a sitting. They are so amazing and delicious that they leave me close to tears. Seriously. Tears.
The Chuckanut Bay (Rock Creek to you gourmets) oyster lives in the shallow, rich, muddy margin where fresh and salt water meet, at the base of Chuckanut Mountain on Puget Sound. The area is one of the most clean, beautiful, otherworldly environments you can imagine; pristine, temperate, green.
The oyster is not outwardly beautiful, of course, in its rugged shell, nor is it easily had once raked from its bed of clay and stones. It runs small. It hardly seems worth the effort, in fact. But once the creature is removed from its shell it is as tender and mild as a foggy day, grey and moist and pearly.
It is the lamb of the oyster nation. Where other oysters reek of conjugal excess or tidal wrack, the Chuckanut Bay oyster only hints at love, salt and sea. You taste fresh water, sashimi-sweet fish, warm milk, Douglas fir, salt, granite, grass dried in the sun.
The flesh is like soft bread in the mouth.
Of course, all this is simply a matter of selecting a good oyster and making sure that the shortest possible time elapses between ocean and plate. Cooked, the oyster is another matter entirely.
It takes a lot of restraint and discipline to cook an oyster correctly. Unfortunately, far too many cooks treat it like just another protein, and that is the reason that people who do not like oysters don't like them. Too much heat destroys an oyster. It becomes a rank, rubbery, wretched mess. The stomach swells and the contents become bitter and musky and taint the entire creature. The muscle parts weep and turn into strips of rubber. All this happens in an instant.
A properly cooked oyster is not dark. It should not be swollen fat and round in the middle. It should not be smoking hot. It should not be buried under a hard brown shell of fried starch, nor should it be lost in a gummy mass of greasy batter.
A properly cooked oyster should just be....set. The flesh should merely be somewhat firmer than when it was raw, and of a uniformly lighter color throughout. It should be oval and flattish. All it wants is a light breading; and by this I mean a fast toss through some plain white bread crumbs mixed with a little cornstarch-no water, no batter, no egg. Then onto a lightly oiled surface that is not smoking hot, but one which has just passed being too hot to lay ones' hand on. It should spend mere seconds to a side; front, back and then front again, and then onto the plate where the heat of the cooking will continue to set the flesh.
Thats it. It takes just about as long to read about as it does to cook.
A run of the mill oyster benefits from proper treatment, of course, but a Rock Creek oyster becomes something completely new. It still greets you with a multitude of changing flavors but they have all blended more closely, become something milder and deeper. This is an oyster that you can eat with enthusiasm without worrying that you'll be moved to tears (at least if you're a big dork like I am.)
I had a couple of these this afternoon for lunch, in a nice, light foccacia sandwich. Some aioli and some mixed greens accompanied them, and that was all that they needed. It was like biting into a delicious cloud.
Every now and then you eat something that is perfect. Today I did. I came into that place with a bad attitude. What I received was a blessing.
It made my life better.
________________________________
update:
This is the place we went to for the wonderful sandwich:
http://www.sycamoresquare.com/Suite130312th.htm
Mambo Italiano in Old Fairhaven.
The website needs to be updated; the place has been redesigned and the ambience is a lot more sophisticated.
The food is excellent without being overdone. The service is very professional, without being fawning or condescending. Far from being chi-chi or annoying or trendy (like many places in Fairhaven), it is simply a pleasant, adult place to have a grown-up meal of excellently prepared food.
I am fortunate enough to live nearby the source of the most prized oysters in the world. I happen to like oysters anyway, but I can tell you that I had no idea what an oyster could be until I first ate one of these little miracles .
Raw, they are otherworldly. Unbelievable. Sweet, clean, meaty, light; a hundred shifting, changing flavors move across your tongue. If you've ever had a really good wine you know the kind of flavor experience I mean; it turns and flashes like a coin dropped in a pool of water. It leaves a faint memory of itself behind that begs for yet another taste. Yes, they really are that good. I have eaten 30 0f them at a sitting. They are so amazing and delicious that they leave me close to tears. Seriously. Tears.
The Chuckanut Bay (Rock Creek to you gourmets) oyster lives in the shallow, rich, muddy margin where fresh and salt water meet, at the base of Chuckanut Mountain on Puget Sound. The area is one of the most clean, beautiful, otherworldly environments you can imagine; pristine, temperate, green.
The oyster is not outwardly beautiful, of course, in its rugged shell, nor is it easily had once raked from its bed of clay and stones. It runs small. It hardly seems worth the effort, in fact. But once the creature is removed from its shell it is as tender and mild as a foggy day, grey and moist and pearly.
It is the lamb of the oyster nation. Where other oysters reek of conjugal excess or tidal wrack, the Chuckanut Bay oyster only hints at love, salt and sea. You taste fresh water, sashimi-sweet fish, warm milk, Douglas fir, salt, granite, grass dried in the sun.
The flesh is like soft bread in the mouth.
Of course, all this is simply a matter of selecting a good oyster and making sure that the shortest possible time elapses between ocean and plate. Cooked, the oyster is another matter entirely.
It takes a lot of restraint and discipline to cook an oyster correctly. Unfortunately, far too many cooks treat it like just another protein, and that is the reason that people who do not like oysters don't like them. Too much heat destroys an oyster. It becomes a rank, rubbery, wretched mess. The stomach swells and the contents become bitter and musky and taint the entire creature. The muscle parts weep and turn into strips of rubber. All this happens in an instant.
A properly cooked oyster is not dark. It should not be swollen fat and round in the middle. It should not be smoking hot. It should not be buried under a hard brown shell of fried starch, nor should it be lost in a gummy mass of greasy batter.
A properly cooked oyster should just be....set. The flesh should merely be somewhat firmer than when it was raw, and of a uniformly lighter color throughout. It should be oval and flattish. All it wants is a light breading; and by this I mean a fast toss through some plain white bread crumbs mixed with a little cornstarch-no water, no batter, no egg. Then onto a lightly oiled surface that is not smoking hot, but one which has just passed being too hot to lay ones' hand on. It should spend mere seconds to a side; front, back and then front again, and then onto the plate where the heat of the cooking will continue to set the flesh.
Thats it. It takes just about as long to read about as it does to cook.
A run of the mill oyster benefits from proper treatment, of course, but a Rock Creek oyster becomes something completely new. It still greets you with a multitude of changing flavors but they have all blended more closely, become something milder and deeper. This is an oyster that you can eat with enthusiasm without worrying that you'll be moved to tears (at least if you're a big dork like I am.)
I had a couple of these this afternoon for lunch, in a nice, light foccacia sandwich. Some aioli and some mixed greens accompanied them, and that was all that they needed. It was like biting into a delicious cloud.
Every now and then you eat something that is perfect. Today I did. I came into that place with a bad attitude. What I received was a blessing.
It made my life better.
________________________________
update:
This is the place we went to for the wonderful sandwich:
http://www.sycamoresquare.com/Suite130312th.htm
Mambo Italiano in Old Fairhaven.
The website needs to be updated; the place has been redesigned and the ambience is a lot more sophisticated.
The food is excellent without being overdone. The service is very professional, without being fawning or condescending. Far from being chi-chi or annoying or trendy (like many places in Fairhaven), it is simply a pleasant, adult place to have a grown-up meal of excellently prepared food.
not a real cheerful one. might want to skip it.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are all delicious and lovely and I lust after you all to varying degrees in my secret heart, but lately I just aint feeling the blogging vibe. The reason for this is that my father in law has been declining in health steadily and my rage and impatience with this whole process is eclipsing everything else.
I wish he'd hurry up and die.
I swear to God, this makes me feel like the most evil human being on the face of the earth, too. He's not a stupid man and I know he guesses why I don't spend very much time hanging around him lately. But there it is. Everyone involved knows that he isn't going to get better and everyone involved-him most of all, probably-is sick and tired of the whole hopeless interminable process. I am not feeling the compassion any more; what I feel is anger and impatience and aversion, frankly. None of which are just. It's not like he's doing this on purpose, right? It's just happening. I'm so tired of the constant, constant SUCK factor. I don't want to be fucking bothered with it any more. And I know how shitty and low that is of me to feel yet thats how I feel anyway. Probably because its easier than pity and regret and helplessness, which is also what I feel...and hate feeling.
This is tearing my husband up. This is going to have a permanent effect on him. Not only the process, but dealing with all the unacknowledged issues that he has with his dad..yeah, this shit is aging him. And I'm really hating it. I'm really wanting to have our lives back. I'm tired of this man dying for the last fucking two years.
How's that for perfectly selfish?
I have my own issues involved here too. The people who adopted me were less than thrilled with my chronic illness and finally decided to treat it as thought it were all imaginary on my part; they stopped taking me to the doctor for it. Just stopped. The story I was supposed to believe was that they thought that I was just making myself sick to get attention...and that they were doing this whole big tough love thing, right? They would 'toughen me up' by 'not giving in' to my 'spoiled behavior'. The hard, evil truth of the matter was they simply wanted to be shut of it, and me. Fuck it. We're done with you and your annoying problem. Thats something I finally had to come to terms with about a year ago, and it was no treat making myself face that either. Kind of a relief, but still, knowing that your family would really like you to be dead because they're sick of your problems sucks pretty bad, too.
Now here I am, and I feel the same exact way about my poor father in law.
It's true. I'm so done with him and his annoying, lingering death. Die already. Just get it over with and die. Quit being helpless and sad and depressing and just DIE.
Would I deny him medical care? Hell no; every time he has the least little issue we all jump and see that he's got the right thing happening. We've marshalled our resources like an invading army. The medical community fear us. And he's being treated really, really well as a consequence.
So he can continue to die slowly.
I'm so tired of caring. I really am. It scares me to death to see him lose everything by slow, agonizing degrees...everything except his mind. No, that he retains. Perfect awareness. Yes, he gets a front row seat to this. It's like watching someone disappear beneath quicksand. You don't 'cheer someone up' out of this shit. I can't even take him out for a drive any more because his system is so delicate.
I want someone to come into his room with a really bad cold, like the Angel of Death.
Not me, though. I could never do something like 'help him over'. Like go in myself with a bad cold. But here's the deal... on the one hand, I've thought about it every time I've gotten one. And on the other hand, I simply cannot do it. It isn't in me....and yet I am happy with a cowardly kind of relief that when I do have a cold, because it means that I CAN'T go take care of him.
Thats the whole deal right there in a nutshell. It's a perfect self-cancelling equation and it fucking persists and persists and persists. And at the very center of it all is a man that I've really come to love. Yeah, its just excellent.
So. How was your day?
I wish he'd hurry up and die.
I swear to God, this makes me feel like the most evil human being on the face of the earth, too. He's not a stupid man and I know he guesses why I don't spend very much time hanging around him lately. But there it is. Everyone involved knows that he isn't going to get better and everyone involved-him most of all, probably-is sick and tired of the whole hopeless interminable process. I am not feeling the compassion any more; what I feel is anger and impatience and aversion, frankly. None of which are just. It's not like he's doing this on purpose, right? It's just happening. I'm so tired of the constant, constant SUCK factor. I don't want to be fucking bothered with it any more. And I know how shitty and low that is of me to feel yet thats how I feel anyway. Probably because its easier than pity and regret and helplessness, which is also what I feel...and hate feeling.
This is tearing my husband up. This is going to have a permanent effect on him. Not only the process, but dealing with all the unacknowledged issues that he has with his dad..yeah, this shit is aging him. And I'm really hating it. I'm really wanting to have our lives back. I'm tired of this man dying for the last fucking two years.
How's that for perfectly selfish?
I have my own issues involved here too. The people who adopted me were less than thrilled with my chronic illness and finally decided to treat it as thought it were all imaginary on my part; they stopped taking me to the doctor for it. Just stopped. The story I was supposed to believe was that they thought that I was just making myself sick to get attention...and that they were doing this whole big tough love thing, right? They would 'toughen me up' by 'not giving in' to my 'spoiled behavior'. The hard, evil truth of the matter was they simply wanted to be shut of it, and me. Fuck it. We're done with you and your annoying problem. Thats something I finally had to come to terms with about a year ago, and it was no treat making myself face that either. Kind of a relief, but still, knowing that your family would really like you to be dead because they're sick of your problems sucks pretty bad, too.
Now here I am, and I feel the same exact way about my poor father in law.
It's true. I'm so done with him and his annoying, lingering death. Die already. Just get it over with and die. Quit being helpless and sad and depressing and just DIE.
Would I deny him medical care? Hell no; every time he has the least little issue we all jump and see that he's got the right thing happening. We've marshalled our resources like an invading army. The medical community fear us. And he's being treated really, really well as a consequence.
So he can continue to die slowly.
I'm so tired of caring. I really am. It scares me to death to see him lose everything by slow, agonizing degrees...everything except his mind. No, that he retains. Perfect awareness. Yes, he gets a front row seat to this. It's like watching someone disappear beneath quicksand. You don't 'cheer someone up' out of this shit. I can't even take him out for a drive any more because his system is so delicate.
I want someone to come into his room with a really bad cold, like the Angel of Death.
Not me, though. I could never do something like 'help him over'. Like go in myself with a bad cold. But here's the deal... on the one hand, I've thought about it every time I've gotten one. And on the other hand, I simply cannot do it. It isn't in me....and yet I am happy with a cowardly kind of relief that when I do have a cold, because it means that I CAN'T go take care of him.
Thats the whole deal right there in a nutshell. It's a perfect self-cancelling equation and it fucking persists and persists and persists. And at the very center of it all is a man that I've really come to love. Yeah, its just excellent.
So. How was your day?
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
UPDATED: Absent excuse
Seriously. Like you'd be inside sitting at the computer. Please Mathilda.
Click on it already, geeze.
Rosa 'Jackie Kennedy' and clematis 'Radar Love' fighting it out to a draw.
...OK fine. Truth be told the rose and the clematis are actually holding me hostage in the back yard UNABLE TO REACH MY COMPUTER. They are demanding money, guns and German scheisse porn.
....If you gank this image and set it as wallpaper on your desktop, they say they will release me unharmed.
I'd do what they say. They seem desperate.
Ghostly, graceful papaver somniferum against a background of gooseneck loosestrife.
If Ratly Stud Frobisher would be pleased to send me the 'recipe' he mentioned a couple of posts ago I would be happy to give it a try (and probably a lot happier afterwards. More than likely constipated too. Still, thats why the Baby Jesus invented bran cereal, right? Papaver somniferum: the dedicated gardeners' dirty little secret.)
More rose than shrub going on here. How do I do it? What's my secret?
I say, why buy blood meal at $6 the bag when Jehovahs Witnesses are free...and deliver themselves right to your door?
Since the big tree out front came down I have half the green material I used to so now I cold compost. I finally finished my first turning of the year (no thanks to whoever used this as a garbage bin)...worked my way down to the bottom of last years heap by degrees as need and weather dictated. Now that its all piled against the side I'm ready to begin layering green and brown material at the far end again. But I'll have to be careful. Here's why-
Check out what I found at the bottom of last years heap...
...a BUMBLEBEE NEST!
See the two round holes? Those are the two main entrances to the bee nest. The shiny stuff all around it that looks like slug slime is actually dried bee spit; what the bee uses to reinforce the walls of its little home. The entire hive extends downward, beneath the old holey blue tarp there that I use as the turning floor of my compost heap.
Cool, huh?
Lets poke it with a stick!
SUDDENLY AN ANGRY, MADDENING BUZZING BEGINS AND MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF ENRAGED BEES AWAKEN FROM THEIR NIGHTMARE DREAMS OF WORLD DOMINATION AND STREAM FORTH, DRIPPING CAUSIC VENOM AND HUNGRY FOR HUMAN FLESH OH MY GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
...SUDDENLY A BAZILLION MILLION ANGST RIDDEN TEENAGE BEES HURTLE OUT FROM THEIR
Um....
MILLIONS OF ENRAGED BEES SURGE FORTH LIKE A DEVASTATING TIDAL WAVE OF
ok wait.
Ok. Now.
...ONE!
ONE VERY EXTREMELY PSYCHOTIC MURDEROUS PISSED-OFF PREMENSTRUAL BEE ERUPTS FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL WITH FIERY CAUSTIC VENOM DROOLING FROM ITS ASS-MOUNTED LANCE OF DEATH AND
...oh never mind.
___________________________________
UPDATE:
those pix were taken at 8:30 am this morning. nice day, suns out, blue sky...
yeah. look at it now, at 2:45 pm...
that, my friends, is humidity.
not fog. not dust. HUMIDITY.
all together now: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.
and you folks in the south? shut up. i hear you. you're all 'oo, you think you have it bad? the clothes rot in the closets here! oh, wah wah wah, we have 90% humidity all the time!'
fine; you win the pissing contest.
so lissen: once you finish playing your banjo and raping up Ned Beatty there would you please come get your mutated suckass weather already?
Click on it already, geeze.Rosa 'Jackie Kennedy' and clematis 'Radar Love' fighting it out to a draw.
...OK fine. Truth be told the rose and the clematis are actually holding me hostage in the back yard UNABLE TO REACH MY COMPUTER. They are demanding money, guns and German scheisse porn.
....If you gank this image and set it as wallpaper on your desktop, they say they will release me unharmed.I'd do what they say. They seem desperate.
Ghostly, graceful papaver somniferum against a background of gooseneck loosestrife.If Ratly Stud Frobisher would be pleased to send me the 'recipe' he mentioned a couple of posts ago I would be happy to give it a try (and probably a lot happier afterwards. More than likely constipated too. Still, thats why the Baby Jesus invented bran cereal, right? Papaver somniferum: the dedicated gardeners' dirty little secret.)
More rose than shrub going on here. How do I do it? What's my secret?I say, why buy blood meal at $6 the bag when Jehovahs Witnesses are free...and deliver themselves right to your door?
Since the big tree out front came down I have half the green material I used to so now I cold compost. I finally finished my first turning of the year (no thanks to whoever used this as a garbage bin)...worked my way down to the bottom of last years heap by degrees as need and weather dictated. Now that its all piled against the side I'm ready to begin layering green and brown material at the far end again. But I'll have to be careful. Here's why-
Check out what I found at the bottom of last years heap...
...a BUMBLEBEE NEST!
See the two round holes? Those are the two main entrances to the bee nest. The shiny stuff all around it that looks like slug slime is actually dried bee spit; what the bee uses to reinforce the walls of its little home. The entire hive extends downward, beneath the old holey blue tarp there that I use as the turning floor of my compost heap.
Cool, huh?
Lets poke it with a stick!
SUDDENLY AN ANGRY, MADDENING BUZZING BEGINS AND MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF ENRAGED BEES AWAKEN FROM THEIR NIGHTMARE DREAMS OF WORLD DOMINATION AND STREAM FORTH, DRIPPING CAUSIC VENOM AND HUNGRY FOR HUMAN FLESH OH MY GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...SUDDENLY A BAZILLION MILLION ANGST RIDDEN TEENAGE BEES HURTLE OUT FROM THEIR
Um....MILLIONS OF ENRAGED BEES SURGE FORTH LIKE A DEVASTATING TIDAL WAVE OF
ok wait.
Ok. Now.
...ONE!ONE VERY EXTREMELY PSYCHOTIC MURDEROUS PISSED-OFF PREMENSTRUAL BEE ERUPTS FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL WITH FIERY CAUSTIC VENOM DROOLING FROM ITS ASS-MOUNTED LANCE OF DEATH AND
...oh never mind.
___________________________________
UPDATE:
those pix were taken at 8:30 am this morning. nice day, suns out, blue sky...
yeah. look at it now, at 2:45 pm...
that, my friends, is humidity.not fog. not dust. HUMIDITY.
all together now: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN.
and you folks in the south? shut up. i hear you. you're all 'oo, you think you have it bad? the clothes rot in the closets here! oh, wah wah wah, we have 90% humidity all the time!'
fine; you win the pissing contest.
so lissen: once you finish playing your banjo and raping up Ned Beatty there would you please come get your mutated suckass weather already?
Monday, June 30, 2008
TOTAL LOSER COP-OUT POST but I really would appreciate any answers...
Ok here's the deal:
Lately we have been getting an annoying series of popups in red frames-and supposedly we HAVE multiple popup blockers working already...saying that we have this computer virus and that our computer is under attack etc. This is patent bullshit. We ran our legit cleaners and everything is 'ku. We are fine.
This exact same thing happened about 4 months ago. When my husband clicked on the OK it crashed his computer. Demolished it. Wiped out our pictures, everything. It is something calling itself WinSpyware and it came through with an 'office' type application we had uploaded. Now this might even be the name of a legitimate outfit; but its been stolen and is being used as part of an attack. The consequences of clicking on this 'version' are devastating.
How do you get rid of something like this? Has anyone heard of it? Is anyone familiar with this kind of thing? HOW THE FUCK DO WE GET RID OF IT? Because sure as shit, my husband is going to be unable to control himself and click on the bastard and then whammo, another computer bites the dust.
Lately we have been getting an annoying series of popups in red frames-and supposedly we HAVE multiple popup blockers working already...saying that we have this computer virus and that our computer is under attack etc. This is patent bullshit. We ran our legit cleaners and everything is 'ku. We are fine.
This exact same thing happened about 4 months ago. When my husband clicked on the OK it crashed his computer. Demolished it. Wiped out our pictures, everything. It is something calling itself WinSpyware and it came through with an 'office' type application we had uploaded. Now this might even be the name of a legitimate outfit; but its been stolen and is being used as part of an attack. The consequences of clicking on this 'version' are devastating.
How do you get rid of something like this? Has anyone heard of it? Is anyone familiar with this kind of thing? HOW THE FUCK DO WE GET RID OF IT? Because sure as shit, my husband is going to be unable to control himself and click on the bastard and then whammo, another computer bites the dust.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
updated!!!: ARE YOU BITING YOUR TOENAILS IN SUSPENSE YET?
....hell, I'll get around to it. Promise.
The Playboy of the Western World is doing poorly. I've been busy chasing down doctors and trying to find out what's going on with the man. Meanwhile he's been in the hospital going on three weeks now, unable to leave his bed without passing out cold. The poor guy has COPD and six arterial occlusions...and those are the ones near his heart. Heaven only knows what kind of a log jam is going on elsewhere. One minute they tell him they're sending him to a full-on extended care facility, the next minute they tell him they're transporting him to the University Hospital in Seattle. Then they wander away and nobody tells anyone anything or notes it down in a chart. What the fuck kind of bullshit is this to pull on a sick, 83 year old man? He gets scared and depressed and calls me, and something is always lost in the translation, so I have to track down the real story...yeah. Onward through the fog.
Here is how I've been coping:
I have been doing a lot of gardening. My arms are so buffed out from digging and etc. that the veins stick out on my biceps now. I'm also doing the home improvement thing....building a fire pit,
...clickie for biggie
prepping one of the bedrooms for paint and paper, cleaning up and throwing out, and rounding up supplies to paint the house this August. Busting down junk and hauling it off. Turning compost. Making medium. De-chroming my new El Camino. Listening to a lot of Rob Zombie, Powerman 5000, NIN, and Snake River Conspiracy at eye-bleeding volumes. Dyed my hair blue. Switched from beer, which was making me tubby, to tequila and diet 7-up, which does not, but still tastes good.
Now when I was younger and gave less than a full-grown fuck about anything I would have, say, picked up a tire iron and taken out a public restroom. Glassed some cars, fucked something up. And it would have worked, too. You want to reach that clean, peaceful center of calm where everything just lines right up and makes sense? Take out a television with a ten-pound hammer. Seriously. It's much better than drugs. There's a couple of you out there that know exactly what I mean, too.
See, but I can't do that shit any more. Well I mean I can but I shouldn't.
I want to, though.
The Playboy of the Western World is doing poorly. I've been busy chasing down doctors and trying to find out what's going on with the man. Meanwhile he's been in the hospital going on three weeks now, unable to leave his bed without passing out cold. The poor guy has COPD and six arterial occlusions...and those are the ones near his heart. Heaven only knows what kind of a log jam is going on elsewhere. One minute they tell him they're sending him to a full-on extended care facility, the next minute they tell him they're transporting him to the University Hospital in Seattle. Then they wander away and nobody tells anyone anything or notes it down in a chart. What the fuck kind of bullshit is this to pull on a sick, 83 year old man? He gets scared and depressed and calls me, and something is always lost in the translation, so I have to track down the real story...yeah. Onward through the fog.
Here is how I've been coping:
I have been doing a lot of gardening. My arms are so buffed out from digging and etc. that the veins stick out on my biceps now. I'm also doing the home improvement thing....building a fire pit,
...clickie for biggie prepping one of the bedrooms for paint and paper, cleaning up and throwing out, and rounding up supplies to paint the house this August. Busting down junk and hauling it off. Turning compost. Making medium. De-chroming my new El Camino. Listening to a lot of Rob Zombie, Powerman 5000, NIN, and Snake River Conspiracy at eye-bleeding volumes. Dyed my hair blue. Switched from beer, which was making me tubby, to tequila and diet 7-up, which does not, but still tastes good.
Now when I was younger and gave less than a full-grown fuck about anything I would have, say, picked up a tire iron and taken out a public restroom. Glassed some cars, fucked something up. And it would have worked, too. You want to reach that clean, peaceful center of calm where everything just lines right up and makes sense? Take out a television with a ten-pound hammer. Seriously. It's much better than drugs. There's a couple of you out there that know exactly what I mean, too.
See, but I can't do that shit any more. Well I mean I can but I shouldn't.
I want to, though.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Lenny and Curtis' search for meaning, part deaux
OUR STORY SO FAR:
Lenny and Curtis, two madcap vagabonds living the simple life in a world they never made, have decided to embark upon a quest in search of The Meaning of Life.
Fueled by fried shallots and a strong willingness to use alternative modes of transportation, they set out across the lonesome prairie.
...Never suspecting that the evil GRAVY MASTER and his evil dugong sidekick BLUBBATOR (now clad into the hideous semblance of Will Smith) were plotting to thwart their plans!
"Ah, the library...repository of all human knowledge! An excellent place to begin our quest, wouldn't you say, Curtis? If there is indeed a meaning to this reckless romp we call life surely a hint of it must lie 'twixt these-
"Yee haw! I think I found it, Lenny," said Curtis. "H'it looks like one a them there Rastafagrarian books. Toke- ology, see? Them Rastafarnarnians know all about secret mysterious stuff!"
Lenny was skeptical.
Meanwhile the Gravy Master and his evil sidekick Blubba-Will were in the Gravy Masters' secret underground car collection!
"Already we have lost too much time! Choose one of these metal steeds and hunt them down like helpless larvae and mush them and stomp on them until their guts all squish out! Quickly! Choose any one of my super-turbocharged lovelies you wish and stop them, Blubba-Will!"
The first car was too small.
And something told him that he might be better off to walk on past the 'Vanilla Gorilla'.
And then he saw it.
"I have made my choice!" he cried triumphantly. "Yo Jeeves, smell ya later!"
But little did he know that he had chosen the Gravy Masters own stuntbike, dearest to his heart, the Golden Jupiter III!
The Gravy Master flew into a rage and called to his terrible watchdog Sponcrunchador!!
"GO! FIND HIM AND DESTROY HIM, SPONCRUNCHADOR! DESTROY HIM BEFORE HE DESTROYS US ALLLLLLLLLL!
Back at the library, Lenny and Curtis were about to open the pages of a mysterious book.
"I have my doubts about this, Curtis," said Lenny.
"
Oh quit 'cher bellyachin and help me with this gol durned thing. H'its a big ol' motherfucker! We'll jest open her up and.....
..............HO LEE SHIT.
"Now. Arent you sorry you didn't listen to me? But nooooooooooo. 'Hep me with this big ol motherfucking Rastafarian book, Lenny! Oh, the meaning of life's gotta be in here, Lenny!'
"What in tarnation.....oh."
Little did they know that close at their heels Will Smith was racing across the prairies like a bolt of lightening on the Golden Jupiter III! It had the speed of ten thousand speeding Ferrari Porches!
It was so fast that Will decided to stop for awhile and do a couple of stunts.
He did the Magoo Ga GooGoo stunt!
He did the Funky Cornholio!
But just as he was about to try the Double Top Secret Wango Tango Grind, most daring and dangerous stunt of all..........
...He was seized in the mighty jaws of Sponcrunchador!! He disappeared down the monsters horrible maw to a gastric grave!!!!!!!
Back at the library Lenny had made an important discovery.
Curtis was not impressed. "I dont see how no got-damn book about beer is gonna have anything worth botherin' to read about when a gol-durn book about tokin' didnt. I hope its fulla pitchers a horse butts."
________________________________________
NEXT TIME: THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!
WILL LENNY AND CURTIS FIND THE MEANING OF LIFE OR WILL THE DASTARDLY GRAVY MASTER FIND A WAY TO STOP THEM?
Lenny and Curtis, two madcap vagabonds living the simple life in a world they never made, have decided to embark upon a quest in search of The Meaning of Life.
Fueled by fried shallots and a strong willingness to use alternative modes of transportation, they set out across the lonesome prairie.
...Never suspecting that the evil GRAVY MASTER and his evil dugong sidekick BLUBBATOR (now clad into the hideous semblance of Will Smith) were plotting to thwart their plans!
"Ah, the library...repository of all human knowledge! An excellent place to begin our quest, wouldn't you say, Curtis? If there is indeed a meaning to this reckless romp we call life surely a hint of it must lie 'twixt these-
"Yee haw! I think I found it, Lenny," said Curtis. "H'it looks like one a them there Rastafagrarian books. Toke- ology, see? Them Rastafarnarnians know all about secret mysterious stuff!"
Lenny was skeptical.
Meanwhile the Gravy Master and his evil sidekick Blubba-Will were in the Gravy Masters' secret underground car collection!
"Already we have lost too much time! Choose one of these metal steeds and hunt them down like helpless larvae and mush them and stomp on them until their guts all squish out! Quickly! Choose any one of my super-turbocharged lovelies you wish and stop them, Blubba-Will!"
The first car was too small.
And something told him that he might be better off to walk on past the 'Vanilla Gorilla'.
And then he saw it.
"I have made my choice!" he cried triumphantly. "Yo Jeeves, smell ya later!"
But little did he know that he had chosen the Gravy Masters own stuntbike, dearest to his heart, the Golden Jupiter III!
The Gravy Master flew into a rage and called to his terrible watchdog Sponcrunchador!!
"GO! FIND HIM AND DESTROY HIM, SPONCRUNCHADOR! DESTROY HIM BEFORE HE DESTROYS US ALLLLLLLLLL!
Back at the library, Lenny and Curtis were about to open the pages of a mysterious book.
"I have my doubts about this, Curtis," said Lenny.
"
Oh quit 'cher bellyachin and help me with this gol durned thing. H'its a big ol' motherfucker! We'll jest open her up and.....
..............HO LEE SHIT.
"Now. Arent you sorry you didn't listen to me? But nooooooooooo. 'Hep me with this big ol motherfucking Rastafarian book, Lenny! Oh, the meaning of life's gotta be in here, Lenny!'"What in tarnation.....oh."
Little did they know that close at their heels Will Smith was racing across the prairies like a bolt of lightening on the Golden Jupiter III! It had the speed of ten thousand speeding Ferrari Porches!
It was so fast that Will decided to stop for awhile and do a couple of stunts.
He did the Magoo Ga GooGoo stunt!
He did the Funky Cornholio!
But just as he was about to try the Double Top Secret Wango Tango Grind, most daring and dangerous stunt of all..........
...He was seized in the mighty jaws of Sponcrunchador!! He disappeared down the monsters horrible maw to a gastric grave!!!!!!!
Back at the library Lenny had made an important discovery.
Curtis was not impressed. "I dont see how no got-damn book about beer is gonna have anything worth botherin' to read about when a gol-durn book about tokin' didnt. I hope its fulla pitchers a horse butts."
________________________________________
NEXT TIME: THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!
WILL LENNY AND CURTIS FIND THE MEANING OF LIFE OR WILL THE DASTARDLY GRAVY MASTER FIND A WAY TO STOP THEM?
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