I like me some butternut squash. But I do not like the tedious peel/skin-removal process. I inevitably underestimate how long it will take and get panicky about dinner not being ready in time and end up nearly slicing of my fingers. Because I am an idiot and did not realize until yesterday that instead of getting all crazy with little slippery chunks and a paring knife I could just skin the whole damn thing with a vegetable peeler before I cut it up.
Last night when I had this revelation I felt like a genius for about 10 seconds. Then I just felt embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it sooner and probably all the cool kids have been doing it that way forever. Then I redeemed myself with another awesome idea: I discarded the skin and kept on a-peelin’ until I had a heap of squash flesh ribbons. What a phrase. SQUASH FLESH RIBBONS. And they were awesome. They cooked to a state of delicious tender-but-not-mushy-ness after only a couple minutes in the frying pan with some sage and walnuts, and were the perfect gnocchi topping. Best of all, they looked all fancy. Thanksgiving ’08 here we come!
Apologies in advance Clebilicious, I hope you don’t take this personally…
So, it’s primary season and all, and as always I’m making at least a passing effort to be Well Informed about candidates and the latest crop of mysterious Native American gaming ballot initiatives and all that. And yes, I’ll show up at my polling place Tuesday morning, if for no other reason than to get that li’l braggy-smugtastic “I Voted” sticker. Right now I’m trying to make up my mind about Hillary and Barack. I’m not pumped about either one. I feel like I’m supposed to be pumped about Barack, but he got on my bad side during the debate in Iowa when, on more than one occasion he did that “I’m going to try so hard to be gramatically correct that I’ll over-correct and say ‘I’ and ‘we’ when it really would be appropriate to say ‘me’ and ‘us’” thing. That shit makes me CRAZY. Crazy. crazy.
I was just about ready to forgive and forget, when his overenthusiastic supporters sent things back down the tubes for him this week. I ride my bike to work every day around 7:45. It’s usually chilly; I’m usually wishing I had gotten up 5 minutes earlier so I could have had enough time to drink more coffee, but on the whole I’m not a non-morning person, and I kind of like rolling along my usual route. There’s the crossing guard at Grand and MacArthur who always waves to me and says “Hi sugar” or “Hey doll”; there are my goose buddies holding up traffic while they trundle across the street by the library; there’s the tempting odor of fresh black and white cookies from the Grand Bakery.
Let me tell you what there has been the past several days: a clot of ruddy-cheeked, sign-toting young adults clogging up the corner by the 580 on-ramp. This is a corner where I inevitably have to wait for a couple minutes for the light to change, and where I’m usually quietly enjoying the bakery aroma. Not today. Not yesterday or the day before. These kids wave their stupid signs and shout “Obama!” Then some stupid car driving onto the freeway honks. Which makes more cars honk–uh Yeah! I’m cool too! I like Barack! HOnnKHOOOOONKhonk! Which makes the stupid kids shout “WOOOOOO! Right on!” about 3 inches from my ear. Which makes even more cars honk, also very close to my ears. I have steadfastly pretended I cannot see or hear the Obamites, but I have silent fantasies about nudging them into traffic with Alan Alda’s * front wheel, or using a lot of curse words.
Barack, I haven’t seen Hillary’s peeps causing any noise pollution in my neighborhood if you know what I’m getting at. But my vote could perhaps be purchased with a black and white cookie or two…
*In case you are confused, Alan Alda is the name of my bike. Don’t make fun of me. Or him.
Would it be awesomely delicious or barftastically nasty to make bread pudding using day-old doughnut holes rather than bread? The concept came to me on Monday as I was biking to work and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. Was it a divine revelation or was it the Devil himself the sowing seeds of culinary mayhem in my weak little brain?
The Yankee Fan voted in favor of the divine; maybe I’ll test it out on him. Happy Valentine’s day baby!
Am I the only person under 30 who totally digs marmalade? My impression is that people of my generation just aren’t that into jam in general. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I mean, toast and jam, that’s a darn tasty olde tyme snack! I don’t even have a toaster and it’s still one of my favorites. Yes, I’m killing the earth by turning on the broiler just to make toast.
Perhaps if all of young America had my dad as a dad there’d be more jam/marmalade love. The man can’t get through the day without his fix. I remember there always being a jar of King Kelly orange marmalade in the fridge when I was a wee lass. Weekday PB&J lunches for got the questionable Smuckers “reduced sugar” strawberry or grape gunk, but on Saturday, which was frequently biscuit-making day, we’d all dig into the K. K. These days there are usually four or five open jars of something at my parents’ house–the ever-faithful King Kelly, something berry-ish, something weird, something homemade by one of my mom’s coworkers. I was talking to my mom last night and she complained that my dad had blown through an entire half pint of pomegranate jelly (a gift to her) in a couple days without her getting so much as a taste. I think he could subsist hummingbird-style, sucking down black currant jelly by the gallon.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago I decided to make marmalade. My parents have not one, but three ridiculously productive Meyer lemon bushes, and every time I’m in Davis they try to unload a few bushels on me. They’re darn good lemons, sweet and juicy, but even I can’t use 5 a day. So I looked on the internet, and yes, there is such a thing as Meyer lemon marmalade. Flavored with brandy! mmmm…I’m no expert canner, but my friends, this stuff was amazingly easy to make, and it came out all thick and pretty and golden yellow. I started out with just 6 jars in case it turned out to be nasty, but IT’S SO GOOD!!!
I got all fired up to make millions of jars. Then I thought, who the hell am I going to give lemon marmalade to? I could think of two for-sures and a couple maybes. But you know what, I’m going to boil it up anyway. If nobody in my admittedly miniscule social or work circles wants any I’ll just give it all to my dad. I’m sure he can handle at least 5 jars a week.
Seeing as my anxious nature leaves me more or less constantly resolving to do or improve X and Y while simultaneously agonizing that I have failed to do thing Z that I resolved to do 2 weeks ago, I’ve never been too excited about New Year’s resolutions. Last January I did decide that I would make a concious effort to refuse plastic bags unless absolutely necessary, and tenderly wipe clean and reuse little clear plastic produce bags. And I have to say, I stuck to it. There ain’t no wad of SafewayLongsThankYou bags under my sink, friends. But now that it’s 2008, and I’ve already single-handedly saved the environment, and things at work are slow as molasses, I thought I’d kill some time pondering self improvement.
Here’s a great resolution I thought of: NO PUBLIC WHISTLING UNLESS YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON IN EARSHOT OF YOU. This resolution is not for me, because I don’t whistle. It’s for all the people who whistle both tunefully and intentionally untunefully in proximity to me, usually in a situation where I can’t really bolt for the exit. Like I’m at work or something. Dude. Shut UP! And also stop clicking your clicky pen for no reason while you whistle. I realize I could resolve to be more tolerant of others, but I gave up on that a long time ago.
Here’s a resolution I thought of for me: HAVE HOT CEREAL FOR BREAKFAST 80% OF THE TIME NOT COUNTING SATURDAYS BECAUSE THAT’S FRIED EGG SANDWICH/FRENCH TOAST/WAFFLE DAY. I do eat a lot of hot cereal already; more than the average American, I’d venture to say. And I like it. I like oatmeal (the real kind, not the nasty packet kind). I like Cream of Wheat. I like oatmeal and Cream of Wheat mixed together (no, it’s good! really!). I like thinking, as I eat my oatmeal, that my breakfast only cost me 15 cents to make. But many times when I arise from the warm coocoon of Morning Edition and 3 layers of blankets, I find myself disinclined to boil water and stir things. I’m ensnared by the TJ’s Honey Nut O’s crooning their siren song from the top of the fridge. Not this year! Shut it, O’s! Come Sunday night I’m making a big ol’ pot of the finest oatmeal-Cream o’ Wheat blend and parcelling it out into little tupperwares, one for each workday. 52 weeks x 5 workdays x 15 cents=$39 for a whole year of weekday breakfast.
Heh. We’ll see how long that lasts.
I also just decided to resolve to get rid of all my million year old socks with holes. I think I can manage that one. If nothing else it’s a good excuse to go to Target.
A 9th grade education comes in handy…
Published December 21, 2007 Simple Pleasures for Simple Minds 1 CommentYesterday at work I used the Pythagorean theorem to avert an awning-related disaster! Thanks Ms. Wade.
Exactly a week ago the Yankee Fan and I were cruising north on I-24, headed from Chattanooga to Nashville with a styrofoam cup of boiled peanuts in the cup-holder and country music on the radio.
We were in Tennessee for 10 days. Not for any particular reason. Just absorbing the low-key wonders of the Volunteer State. We ate too much pie, too many biscuits and sweet potato fries and deep-fried pickle chips and Waffle House waffles. We saw a hawk owl sleeping in a beech tree along the Appalachian Trail. We saw Andrew Jackson’s grave, a horse-powered sorghum mill and country superstar Alan Jackson being mobbed by women with big hair on the streets of Nashville. I acquired two new thermometer magnets for my collection. The Yankee Fan acquired some sexy new J. Crew outfits at the outlet mall in Pigeon Forge (birthplace of Dolly Parton and home to an apparently infinite number of pancake restaurants and miniature golf facilities). We didn’t get severly lost. We barely squabbled. We didn’t get sick of each other.
Basically it was one of the best trips I’ve been on, but when I try to tell people about what we did and why we went it sounds like boringness squared, or at least a strange locale on which to squander vacation days. Certainly the Tennesseans we met along the way, especially in small towns, were a little perplexed. Likewise, the security guard at the Nashville airport was a little perplexed when the threatening, liquid-filled mass in the Yankee Fan’s carry-on turned out to be boiled peanuts in canned form. I’m just glad I ended up with someone else who makes the Museum of Appalachia a high priority on his intinerary and thinks boiled peanuts are a good souvenir.
Right now it’s hot and bright in downtown Oakland. But at 7:45am things were perfectly autumnal; the tops of the office buildings melted into fog, and it was nippy enough that I wished I worn tights instead of just knee-highs. A week or two ago I started seeing coots bobbing around on the lake, and realized it wasn’t summer any more and I needed to drag my brain out of July and into the present. The past couple months have passed by at such exhausting gallop that I find myself still daydreaming about beach trips and tomatoes and peach tart when it’s time to be thinking about soup and apple pie.
Lately I’ve been sleeping uneasily and dreaming strange dreams that, according to the Yankee Fan, make me tremble and whimper in my sleep. I think my little coot noggin is so overloaded with ideas and worries it can’t sit still. I wish I could get by on 4 hours sleep. I wish I had the willpower to stick to my stacks of to-do lists. I wish I had the willpower to cancel my Netflix subscription and thus eliminate the temptation to watch 80 consecutive X-Files episodes instead to sticking to my to-do lists. Maybe I just need the willpower to not make a to-do list every time I see a scrap of paper.
Some days, like today, when my right sock keeps riding down in my shoe, and I know the grapes I brought for lunch are neither sweet nor crisp, and the sound of my coworker’s typing makes me want to gouge my eyes out (what’s the point of typing 7,000 WPM when I can HEAR you backspacing constantly to fix all the typos you wouldn’t have made if you typed at a more dignified speed?!?!), I medicate myself by drinking Diet Coke and hot coffee at the same time. Not mixed in the same cup or anything. More like alternating swigs. There’s something about two sources of caffeine plus carbonation plus the hot-cold contrast that makes me less angry. My theory is that it’s kind of like an oral version of that wintertime invigoration thing where you go in the sauna and then go in the snow and then back in the sauna. I might get an ulcer but at least I’ll be relaxed!
Me vs. The Legion of Pears turned out OK despite some tense moments. My original two-pronged scheme (give a lot away as fresh fruit, dry a lot in the oven) was aborted when I discovered that A) It takes 30 hours of oven time to dry pears and B) Most of the little dudes had been tunneled into by bugs, which rendered them, while still totally edible, not fruit-basket-worthy.
Garth suggested an Iron Chef Oakland Pear Battle, which would have been a lot of fun if my apartment was larger and I knew anybody besides myself who was stubborn/foolhardy enough to spend hours grimly peeling and coring and de-bugging. In any case, I turned to various pear advisory board websites, rolled up my sleeves, and made some tasty things–Pear Orange Marmalade, Ginger Pear Bundt Cake, Rustic Pear-Riesling Tart and I don’t even remember what else. There are a few sorry looking specimens still bagged up in the fridge and I think those are destined for Pear Oatmeal Cookies. Which don’t really sound THAT good, but seem like a good venue for mushing up over-the-hill fruit.
Besides pears, the other thing that’s been haunting me is fruit flies. Perhaps, you say, there is some connection between having a million pounds of overripe fruit in your home and the arrival/population explosion of fruit flies. You might well be correct. The more general problem is that fruit flies and I like the same things: fresh fruit in abundance, fresh air, composting, wallowing in glasses of white wine. I kind of hoped that once the pears had been dispatched they’d fade away, but it’s summertime, and I have open windows with lousy screens and piles of peaches and tomatoes and stuff on the counter. So the flies remain, partying on the cabinets and the counter and everywhere else. I’ve been thinking obsessively of an appliance I saw years ago in a Sky Mall catalog: the Bug Vacuum. Here’s the description from the website:
This cordless insect vacuum quickly captures bugs from up to 2′ away. Flies, bees spiders and other insects are suctioned by a 22,400 rpm motor, sending the insect through a one-way valve in the extension tube to an electric grid in the handle that instantly kills the pest.
The extension tube removes to place dead bugs in the garbage, shutting off the electric grid in the process to protect curious fingers from electrical shocks or burns. Without the use of toxic chemicals or vacuum bags that can serve as breeding grounds, this handheld device has an extendable nozzle to reach insects in high ceilings, while the flexible rubber suction cup compresses to fit in tight corners, and the lightweight plastic design allows complete control while chasing flying insects.
Includes a charging stand that plugs into AC and the unit has a LED charge indicator light to monitor battery life.
Sweet! Too bad it costs 50 bucks. By the by, my half birthday is coming up.
