No tomatoes, please

Yeah, this as nothing to do with food. But I can’t get back to the important things in life until I tackle this first.

OK. So, since I moved to the Chapel on the Hill permanently, I was hoping that I would write in my blog on a regular-enough basis for it to be entertaining. Unfortunately, I have been caught up in this horrible cabin fever/lack of motivation/horrible depression/even more horrible anxiety/low self-esteem spiral, and have had no motivation to do anything but sleep late, watch Maury and take naps while simultaneously trying not to cry all day and remember to take the dog out so the doesn’t piss on my rug.

Yeah, I’m crazy. But only a little. And it comes in waves. Unfortunately, a bad wave was coming and I attempted to stave it off by taking the semester off and going home to Charlotte to rest and recoup, but then my life kind of completely imploded and changed in crazy ways that would leave most people a trembling bundle of nerves and tears.

So, in an attempt to make myself feel better and not sabotage my relationship with anxiety and craziness, I’m gonna pull myself up by my damn Birkenstock flip-flop straps and be happy. I’m not gonna let this bullshit win and ruin my life. And the first thing I’m gonna go is make a list of reasons why I am totally awesome and deserving of amazing, wonderful lovely things and happiness and feelings and LOVE. This will stay here for me to look at and add on to periodically. If you have any other ideas, let me know. So here goes:

• I love that I put together my ikea queen-sized bed in 45 freakin minutes with only a screwdriver and picture-only instructions. And that I can put together any desk, table, bookcase or chair you put in front of me.
• I love that I look good with no make-up and in jeans and a v-neck t-shirt, but when I decide to do it up right and wear make-up for a special occasion, I look so super bangin’ and beautiful that it blows everyone away.
• I love that I have awesome taste in movies and can thoughtfully dissect and discuss any movie I see. And put it on paper for money, bitches.
• I love that I can bake cakes, rolls, bread, souffles, pies, baklavas and myriad other fancy pastries and also scramble an egg or boil pasta and cook pretty much anything I feel like without fear of failure (if only I could extend that to other aspects of my life).
• I love that I can actually truly succeed at anything I set my mind to. The problem is setting my mind to something besides wallowing in sadness.
• I love my ass. Not gonna lie, it’s really amazing. And no one believes me until they get a nice good look and I wear my yoga pants, and they’re like, damn. I also love my eyes, my lips, my hair, my ears, my calves, my feet and my little lady stomach pooch. Yeah, I like it. It means I’m soft and lady-like. And awesome.
• I love that I can answer at least half of the questions on Jeopardy! every night without even really paying attention.
• I love that I can totally rap along to Kanye West songs and do a not terrible job. Seriously, I totally got “Gold Digger.”
• I love that I can do shots of whiskey like a dude and not complain about it.
• I love that I know how to knit and iron and do dishes and hang a picture and use a drill and check my oil.
• I love that I can knock out an awesome 10-page paper the night before it’s due, and that I can help friends do the same thing.
• I love that I obsessively buy books. I love that I’m surrounded by books that I love or would love, if I ever got around to reading them.
• I love that I can do the Monday crossword in about 15 minutes. And that I can get at least some of the clues on the Sunday crossword.
• I love that I know a lot about clothes and shoes and purses and cars and feminism.
• I love that I can sing opera.
• I love that I loathe “Grey’s Anatomy,” like “Sex and the City,” and love “How It’s Made.”
• I love that I don’t complain about how fat I am around others or feel the need to eat a salad (or worse, nothing) in front of a dude.
• I love that I’m horribly clumsy and drop things and cut myself and poke myself in the eye, and that I can walk in high heels.
• I love that I love anything on VH1 Classic that has anything to do with heavy metal.
• I love that I’ve never done anything more hardcore than alcohol and a few puffs of a clove cigarette. (But I still love you if you do other stuff. Just don’t make me do it.)
• I love that I’m not high maintenance and that I can just hang, or chill, or be cool.
• I love that I could probably still beat you with a stick (or large piece of metal, either way) even though I haven’t fenced in years.
• I love that I can make really awesome pool shots.
• I love that I can string words together in an awesome manner that lend a gravity to my thoughts and feelings that others find humorous and interesting and can relate to.
• I love that I can use big words. And would probably win at Scrabble if I weren’t playing my mom. Or if it didn’t make me want to claw my eyeballs out.
• I love that I’m completely awkward and can’t dance at all, but I’m totally willing to let you teach me anyway.
• I love my sense of humor. I love that I make people laugh, heartily and in large numbers. I love that I can parlay my horrible awkwardness into funny, and that I’m cool with people laughing at me. As long as I’m laughing too.

Ok, whew, that’s a lot to love. Hopefully this can get me through. Hopefully anyone out there loves these things too!

So, apparently, Gordom Ramsay is even gettin in on the whole quick meal craze. Here’s a really interesting story I found on slate.com about his new quick cookbook. It brings up some interesting points about how the recipes completely don’t translate over to American palettes (blood sausage in less than half an hour, anyone? yum), and how American armchair cooks won’t even bother trying the recipes anyway, opting to instead look at all those purty pictures and drool. I don’t do the whole recipe thing, and though I have some cookbooks, I really don’t care about looking at pretty pictures.

Can I just say though, that as long as there are plenty of pictures of Ramsay, I might be in the market for a new cookbook. Seriously, I know this dude is kind of a total douche bag, but look at the man! He’s beautiful. And on the show on BBC where he transforms failing restaurants in a week, there’s always a lovely shot of him with his shirt off while he’s changing into his chef’s jacket.

Even though he’s super mean, I really like that he encourages people that he really believes in, and even though he’s definitely got the tough love going on, you know when he’s nice to you that he really means it and that it means more to the person to have impressed someone with such impossibly high standards. Also, he’s super hot. The fact that he curses like a sailor only makes him more attractive.

So, cookbook. Warm blood sausage in 30 minutes? No. Gordon Ramsay for half an hour? Yes, please.

Man, I think I just realized the completely obscene amount of food blogs that exist on this here interweb. I mean, I’ve always known there were a lot of people out there writing about their food exploits, but it’s suddenly just hit me that there about, oh, 6 million Web sites out there with recipes and ridiculous pictures, and people commenting about how gorgeous the photography is, and how much they want to make that dish.

Today I plucked up the courage to again visit delicious:days, the crazy food Web site of a lady in Munich who makes beautiful Web sites and beautiful food that she takes beautiful pictures of. Honestly, this lady makes me feel like a complete failure, what with her “50 Coolest Websites” award from Time magazine and her BOOK DEAL and her really cool, easily navigable site. Damnit. Not that I’m expecting to be that awesome right out of the gate, mind you, but honestly, I feel like I could never get there.

Then, I kinda realized that I don’t really want my Web site to be like hers, because that’s not really even what I’m going for. I mean, I’m not out there to give recipes with crazy close-ups of the corner of whatever artfully disheveled dish I’ve made. Honestly, I rarely, if ever, use recipes, and only for crazy things that I know I can’t just wing, like bearnaise sauce or candy-souffle-cake or something. So why would I be kinda hypocritical and totally untrue to myself by putting a blog out there that consists of mostly recipes? I wouldn’t, which is why I’m not going to.

I’m really attempting to do a little more than that here, and though I have yet to really settle into what I’m trying to do, I’m working on it, and hopefully soon I can make it there when I stop being a lazyass and feeling bad because I don’t take beautiful pictures of amazing dishes. Can I just say that cropping and resizing pictures in Photoshop is a total pain in the ass, especially if I’m trying to do like, 10 of them, and trying to crop out the blurry part when all I really want to do is write. But I do the pictures because I like to have something more to look at, and I’d like to think that they are endearingly terrible in a funny way. Maybe?

Unlike most food bloggers out there, who have other careers first, and just happen to write about the stuff they make for dinner, I’m a writer. That’s what I am. That’s what I want to do with my life. And writing about food makes me just about as happy as cooking and eating. I want to have crazy food adventures and explore the crazy and not-so-crazy stuff that people stick in their mouths. I want to delve into more than just writing down a recipe, and, above all, I want to be funny. And recipes are just not funny. I’m sorry, it’s a truth. I think they tried recipes a few years ago on SNL, but it didn’t go over so well. Will Ferrell kept tryin’ to improv and just throw crap in willy nilly, and the dishes just never came out right.

So, OK, I’m going to stop feeling bad about myself because I don’t make these ridiculous dishes randomly for dinner and take ridiculous pictures, because I’m way more than that, and it’s gonna be awesome. I always knew that Rachael Ray was so obscenely famous, not because she can cook, or is cute or funny or is some sort of culinary genius, it’s because she had a hell of a gimmick and she milked that baby all the way to the bank and up Oprah’s ass. So, I guess I need a gimmick. Hot and funny. Ooh! And being a picky eater. We’ll go with that one. Yeeeah.

This weekend I went to Trader Joe’s for the second time in my life, but actually shopped there for the first time ever. The first time I went, it was right after the one in Charlotte had opened (and broken fire code), and it was a friggin zoo, and my mom and I were so freaked out by the sheer amount of hippie overwhelmingness that we just kind of ran away and wrote it off as a weird store filled with generic-brand organic food.

For those not in the know, which, apparently, was just my mother and I until this weekend, Trader Joe’s is basically a private-label grocery store that sells organic and interesting foods for super cheap.

But alas, I gave it another try. I went in with an open mind and a basket, and I shopped. I looked around at everything, and I bought too much. I even got some of the infamous “three buck Chuck,” (chardonnay and shiraz) and it was delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I kind of drank most of the bottle of chardonnay and was then unable to attend a rockin’ show that I wanted to go to. Almost kind of worth it, though.

Everything we have eaten from there has been surprisingly good, and of really good quality, and it was super cheap too! The best thing ever in the world that they sell are these 1-pound bags of frozen shrimp that are huge (16-20/pound) for like, $7 per bag. Though I thought the shrimp would be tough or otherwise completely fail to meet my expectations in some way, they defrosted really quickly and were so tender and beautiful, it made me really happy that I didn’t pay much for them. I kinda feel like I got away with something there.

So, anyhow, the other night, I used the shrimp to make a super delicious dish with some frozen artichoke tortellini we also bought. I basically just cooked the pasta, and in the time it took to cook it (7 minutes), I sauteed up a bunch of garlic, quickly sauteed the shrimp and finished it all off with some white wine and lemon juice and bam, done.

It took less than 10 minutes, seriously, and probably cost less than $15 altogether, and it was really really good. We also made a killer chicken curry last night and made some frozen naan from Trader Joe’s too. Like, srsly, it was awesome. I think there’s one in New York thank Odin.

Related:

Trader Joe’s [Web site] 

They like curry so much, they’re even starting a chain of Indian food restaurants. Not the British people as a whole, of course. I mean, just some of them. How many millions of dollars do you bet that the people starting the chain are not Indian? Just a thought…

Though some people are admittedly pissed, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I’d probably eat there if I lived in Britain, at least once. For me, Indian restaurants are so hit and miss, if the food is good to begin with, the uniformity would be refreshing.

I love Indian food. I mean, no joke, I super love it. They have Indian food at the dining hall twice a week, and when I lived on campus, I ate it every day they offered it. Twice a week. All semester. And it was just as glorious every week. As long as they have some Tikka Masala action or some lentils or even chickpeas, I’m so there.

As much as I abhor sub-par chain restaurants, I’m not sure I can get behind this. The best part about family-run Indian restaurants is that they’re all different. Even the worst Indian restaurants are still infinitely more delicious than any meal I’ve ever had at Chili’s or Macaroni Grill.

Related:

Can curry chain stand the heat?: [bbc.co.uk]

Picture Credit: [King of Curries]

My love for the wonder that is the rehydrated, powdered-cheese-sauced boxed scalloped potato can only be expressed in that most perfect of poetry forms: the haiku.   

Cardboard Potatoes

Dried chives and powdered cheese sauce

So damn delicious 

So much sodium

Preservatives, additives.

Alas! I love you.  

New Feature yay! So, the point of this Advanced Studies feature is basically to try and make some of the things that people are generally super afraid to try. I’ve already got souffle down, so why not try other crazy things, just for the halibut (get it? hyuk. also, has anyone else realized how awesome halibut is? wtf)?

I’ve never really been afraid to jump in and try stuff (only when it comes to cooking things, that is). Cooking is such a fun thing for me, and I truly enjoy the process of the making so much that I really don’t even think about failing at something. This probably explains why I was making bread at 12, while my mom is afraid to mess with pre-made pie dough. The thing I always tell her, and would tell anyone else who bothered to ask is, you just really have to dive into things. You can’t be afraid to mess something up because it will just become this horrible self-fulfilling prophecy and you will fail. Food is like a horse or a dog or something, it can smell the fear, or, uh, a snake. Believe me, the pie dough is more afraid of you than you are of it. Maybe. Wrong metaphor? (more…)

 Ya know what I really hate? When people pronounce Bojangles like it would be in Spanish. If If I have to hear one more frat-boy douche nozzle be like, “Hey dudes, let’s get some ‘Bo-han-gless’,” I might have to do some face-punchin’.   

So, by popular demand, I have finally gotten around to eating the friggin blueberry sausage. Every week in the newsroom, while I was busy eating other gross things, my editor, Bryan, was always badgering me about eating the damn blueberry sausage. I had never seen, nor hear of this before, and, honestly, I doubted its very existence.    But lo and behold, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the curious sausage while shopping at the local Teet. I was excited. Probably too excited. My shopping partner was confused. So after bringing it home and throwing it in the freezer, I finally extracted it the other day so I could see if it was, in fact, nearly as disgusting as it looked.  So, there were many things this sausage had going against it. First of all, I don’t like sausage. Plus this is chicken sausage, which I don’t even care to think about. I mean, I can’t even stand sausage that is made of delicious and perfect pork, why would I want to eat sausage made of a lesser protein? Because it’s healthy? First of all, ew, and second of all, when you’re gonna ruin some sausage with dang blueberries and maple syrup, why not just make it out of pork to make it palatable?  Since I didn’t have any of the ingredients to make any of the lovely dishes suggested on the back (strawberries in an omelette? fuck you Al Fresco All Naturals), I decided to do a simple fry-up.  So, when I took it out of the package, it kind of looked like tiny diseased hot dogs. Or diseased penises of small mammals. Either way, it really doesn’t look appetizing in the least. Seriously, Al Fresco All Naturals, what was the thought process in your product meetings?! I can just imagine the pitch meeting. Blueberries have protein, I guess, and so does meat, so mix them two and make them sausage-shaped? I can just imagine the dude pitching it saying it with the question mark. This must have come at the end of a very long, very desperate brainstorming session. I can’t even imagine the shit they must have turned down.  Honestly, it didn’t taste that bad. It just kind of had a weird, mealy texture and tasted mostly overwhelmingly of maple syrup. But not even in a good way. It kind of just tasted like fake pancakes. Shaped like tiny, diseased penises. Ew.   

So last time I wrote about drinkin’, I was not yet of the legal age to drink. Now I’ve been 21 for more than a month, and let me tell ya, it is seriously awesome. I really didn’t think it would be that much different, since I can pretty much drink any time anyhow. I mean, I’m in college, let’s face it, if I really wanna get drunk, I can find a way to drink. But the moment I turned 21 (literally, I went to a bar and started drinkin at midnight) I really realized the awesomeness that comes with being able to go somewhere, order a drink, and punch the bartender in the face with your smugness when they all wanna see your license. So, in celebration of being 21, I’m sharing with you guys my most favoritest drink recipe ever ever ever. I’ve always tried mixed drinks that my mom has ordered, and usually they’re way too alcoholic-tasting for me. I can’t stand vodka (the usual base of such frilly drinks), and all I can taste is usually the flavor of rubbing alcohol when I drink other mixed drinks. So, this lovely recipe is for a daiquiri, but not the gross frozen mixed kind with strawberries and myriad other ingredients reminiscent of drunken 40-year-old Jimmy Buffett fans in Pensacola. This is the real thing, which was apparently invented in 1905 in Cuba — way before frozen drink machines existed. It’s basically sugar, lime juice and rum, and it’s freakin awesome. I add a few more ingredients to give it some color, and make it more awesome, so here’s the recipe:You’re gonna need a cocktail shaker, or just one of those large metal cups they use and a tumbler to put on top. I also use a cocktail strainer because it makes it easier to pour into the glass. So fill the metal shaker with ice and add the following:

• 1 1/2 oz. Rum (preferable Bacardi, definitely the clear kind, not the dark kind or that stupid spiced jive)
• 1 1/2 oz Sugar Syrup (equal parts sugar and water, boiled until the sugar dissolves and cooled)
• 1 oz freshly squezed lime juice (it’s not that much effort to squeeze a damn lime. Don’t use the bottled kind)
• 1 oz Whisky sour mix (in the drink aisle next to the ginger ale and bloody mary mix
• 1 oz Roses’s Sweetened Lime Juice (adds a little more sweetness and color. Probably sitting on the shelf next to the sour mix)

Mix all together in the shaker, pour into a martini glass, top off with a cherry with a stem and drink up. These things taste like candy, and will get you sauced in like, 2 seconds. I drank the one I made to take pictures of at like, 2:30 in the afternoon, and halfway through, I kinda thought it was a good idea to take my shirt off. So be careful with these.