Martha Stewart for the New Millennium

I had a thought while I was cooking dinner tonight.  The world needs a new cooking show.  One that represents, not the woman we all want to be, but the woman we all actually ARE.

 

A woman who often begins her Sunday with a long to-do list full of plans for household chores, home improvements, and things that have to be done before work on Monday.  A woman who has the best of intentions, but realizes by the time she has made her breakfast and sipped her coffee while watching CBS Sunday Morning that she has a limited window in which to run to Meijer/Big Lots/Kmart/Lowe’s before the good stuff comes on NPR for the afternoon.  A woman who has a major crisis of interior design while shopping for new drapes for the bedroom and can’t commit to a tomato plant, but scores 600-thread-count sheets for $40.  In short…a woman who is only about halfway through cleaning the kitchen when she HAS to start dinner if she wants to eat it before breakfast.

 

My cooking show would be shot with handheld cameras and begin by entering my front door, startling me as I kick the clean-but-as-yet-unfolded undies that currently reside on the floor out of the shot. Wobbly pan past the Dining-Room-Table-of-Unfinished-Projects  and Curtains-Yet-to-be-Hemmed to watch my very careful chopping on my tiny chopping block (which is of such size because my kitchen has zero functional counter space) so as to avoid bits of vegetable escaping onto the yet-to-be-cleaned counter.  My cooking show would involve me dropping things onto said counter or the floor, and audibly debating the 5-second rule to myself before erring on the side of caution with a sigh.  I mix a martini.

I am a woman whose mire poix sometimes involves celeriac because she discovers her celery is furry.  I bet that never happens to Martha.  But it should.

As we go to commercial, I sit down and put my feet up, sipping a now highly-watered-down martini because I had just mixed everything when I realized my shanks were brown and I needed to de-glaze my pan.  I am not wearing impeccably crisp and well-pressed white clothing.  I am wearing a grease-stained t-shirt and the Jeans That Fit Right Now.  I am considering folding that laundry.  But…you know…Bravo is marathoning “Real Housewives of New Jersey.”  My horror at any human being ordering “half Coke, half red wine, with a lot of ice” (Seriously, how did this become a Thing???) is captured on film for all eternity as we fade out.  Please be sure to get my digital picture frame that displays every photo at a 90 degree angle NO MATTER HOW MUCH I SHAKE IT into the frame.

…

AND…we’re back.  To find me…right where you left me, only 2 hours later.  And maybe a whole lot drunker.  What?  I’m braising, bitch.  We hear the unmistakable sound of breaking glass from the bedroom (I say unmistakable, because many years of teaching chemistry labs has trained me well in distinguishing between the sound of Falling Glass vs. Breaking Glass).  Our heroine has finally gotten around to hanging pictures in her bedroom, only to find that apparently one has a faulty hanger on the back of the frame.  She suffers only one mild puncture while CLEANING THE BROKEN GLASS OFF OF HER BED.  Good thing she bought new sheets today!  She emerges back into the living room.  Laundry is still there, but looking even more rumpled (if that’s even possible).

I begin to prepare my celeriac for puree.  Loosely following an Eric Ripert recipe.  Ah, I’m out of lemons.  Will make do.  Prepare the celeriac and go back into the fridge for the…ah, shit…seriously, I KNOW it’s in here…it may not be GOOD, but it’s IN HERE…THERE it is…cream.  Which is well past its date and has solidified on top (seriously, I bought this shit for Mardi Gras and it’s almost Easter).  Solid cream layer tastes fine, but what about the liquid beneath?  Pour some into my little tiny dish that is only ever used for testing Suspect Dairy Products, and…IT’S GOOOOOOOD!  Shake that bad boy up and USE IT!  Chop up my celeriac and…wait…IS THAT A LEMON THAT WAS HIDING UNDER THE CELERIAC????  SCORE.

Wow.  Lemon juice does NOT feel good on that one mild puncture.  Ow.

(Has anyone else noticed that the cattiness of any “Real Housewives” show increases exponentially with the percentage of interviews shot in soft focus?  No?  Just me?  All right then.)

I pour a glass of my cooking wine while everything finishes.  WOW, does that stuff suck.  Seriously, wanting my $12 back.

Finally, everything is ready.  The celeriac puree has been truffled, the salad made, the shanks braised to delicious tenderness.  I pour a glass of the marked-down-on-clearance wine and find it to be much better than the on-serious-sale wine for the same $12 that I opened a couple of days ago and thus used as cooking wine. 

I may have a chaotic apartment, but I have one hell of a delicious dinner.

 

Fade out as I carry my new sheets across the parking lot to wash them so I can get through the night without shedding blood.

 

My cooking…nay, LIFESTYLE show will not air on the Food Network, nor on PBS.  This shit SCREAMS Bravo.  Seriously, Andy Cohen.  This…THIS is a real housewife.  Call me.

Letter to the Editor

Pardon me, regular readers, while I go public for a sec.

 

Khao San Road, a restaurant in Toronto that I consider a friend was recently reviewed by one of the national Canadian papers.  This reviewer visited on the seventh day of business at this particular restaurant, and wrote this review on the basis of one (and only one) visit.  For those of you not familiar with the general ethical code for those who have an inordinate amount of power to impact a business such as a restaurant, the general idea is this:

1.  Do not review a restaurant until it has been open at least a month.

2.  Visit multiple times before posting a review, so that you can:

3.  Sample most, if not all, of the menu items.

4.  Pay your own way.

 

This particular reviewer did…um…one of those things.  I think.  But let’s be honest, she is KNOWN for doing this sort of thing – she would rather write a review with no credibility than be the…<gasp>…SECOND person to review a new place!  So I will not take too much issue with this particular bad habit of hers…everybody knows she does it, and most people whose opinions matter put little stock in her reviews for that very reason.  But her review offended me on a completely different level, one that has nothing to do with my desire to see this restaurant succeed, and thus I wrote my very first…Letter to the Editor.  Since there is no guarantee this letter will be published by the paper in question, I am posting it here.  I even started using Twitter in order to make sure it gets seen by a few people, and you KNOW how much I hate the Twitter!!!  So without further ado…

 

In a world where print journalists have to battle for face time with online bloggers and message board riff-raff, print reviewers are constantly fighting to prove their relevance and status as the true tastemakers.  So why, exactly, is Gina Mallet going to such great lengths to set this battle back?  In her review of Khao San Road, she has committed two cardinal sins of restaurant-reviewing: 1) she reviewed a restaurant that had been open only a few days and 2) she only visited once before publishing said review.  These alone would be unforgivable - or at least wildly damaging to her credibility as a reviewer in most circles (although Ms. Mallet’s track record would indicate that she cares more about beating bloggers to the punch than about her own credibility) - but what truly disturbs me about this review is the racial comments made, aside from the food.  

“Our server, who wears a black teeshirt with a glittering skull and crossbones, laughingly owns up to being Chinese.  The server at the bar is Filipina, but the kitchen is all Thai.”

In a city as multicultural as Toronto, what does it matter if your Thai food is brought to you by a waitress of Chinese descent, or your tea is brought to you by a Filipina?  Her implied criticism of this establishment for having a multicultural staff is astounding.  Does the waitstaff have to be Thai in order for the food coming out of the kitchen to be authentic?  When one of the world’s most respected students of Thai cuisine is a white man from Australia, why do I need a Thai person carrying my noodles to believe that they are made correctly?  Does the authenticity somehow evaporate off of them when handled by a person born in Canada?  If this is the case, I guess I have never had authentic takeout of any ethnicity other than my own.  Does she inquire as to the ethnic heritage of her servers in an Italian restaurant as well?  David Lee never seems to come under fire for making Continental food, so in this day and age, I have a hard time understanding why the ethnicity of a chef, let alone of a server, bears any relevance when judging the food.  She notes that the kitchen staff is, indeed, all Thai, but proceeds to blame errors in her order on a language barrier:

“It’s awfully good, but we’re sure we ordered it with shrimp — and we don’t much care for the beef. Uh-oh. Seems the server doesn’t speak Thai and the kitchen doesn’t speak Chinese. We wonder whether we shouldn’t give the server a refresher in Morse Code and tap out SOS.”

This comment is condescending, rude, ignorant…and flat-out racist.  The waitress in question, while being of Chinese descent, is a native English-speaker, with absolutely no trace of an accent, let alone a problem understanding other English-speakers.  The entire kitchen staff also speaks English.  Any brand-new restaurant makes errors in order processing in its first week - miscommunication happens with a new staff trying to find its rhythm - why should ethnicity be brought into the discussion when it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand?

I have never thought highly of Gina Mallet’s writing before, as she has a long documented history of racially-loaded comments...dripping with sarcasm, yet having nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the restaurants she reviews.  To wit, from a 2007 review:

“They didn't speak much English; we spoke no Chinese. To them, we undoubtedly all looked alike. We joked about being hungry again in an hour, a quip that has since been amended by the avalanche of cheap Chinese products. Now it's "I hardly finished eating before my made-in-China sweater started to unravel."”

Offensive racial stereotypes such as these have no place in a national paper.  As someone who values responsible print journalism, I am starting to find the bloggers and riff-raff much more credible than Ms. Mallet’s tabloid-style sensationalism.

Laid back.

It seems all I do anymore is rant, so I figured I’d just tell y’all about my day this time instead.

A few years ago, my parents decided to institute “Fishy Fridays” in their household.  It began before they retired, but after my dad had taken over “weekend cooking” duties, something that happened well after my brother and I left home.  I’m sure it was partly motivated by years of my mother’s belief that the Catholic abstinence from meat on Fridays during Lent meant that we are supposed to suffer…I think Dad took the reigns on Fridays in general mostly thanks to his Protestantism during Lent. (For those who are curious, I lie somewhere in between – I do abstain from meat during Lent, but often feel like I’m going to hell for enjoying it too much.  Not a problem since the move, since there is not one place in my town that sells sushi.)

In my household, I think I have inadvertently developed a similar tradition…namely, “Surf-and-Turf Saturdays.”  Exhibit A (from a few weeks ago):

Surf…                  and Turf…

And this week I revisited the theme.  Except “surf” was grilled mojo shrimp with a Napa cabbage slaw, but the “turf” was still roasted bone marrow.  Mmmm…meat butter.  I can get used to this.  I’m not sure “turf” is ever going to branch out – the parsley salad really makes for an amazing dish, and marrow bones are one of the few ingredients I can always be guaranteed of getting here that is truly amazingly delicious.  Even if my one reliable source sells them in a bag labeled “dog bones.”

There is something so deliciously primal about scooping out all of the good stuff inside a bone that is about 5 inches long. <drool>

If I’m being completely honest, I only made the shrimp to avoid making an entire dinner out of meat butter.  (The speed with which the drippings from inside a bone solidify is somewhat terrifying, but I’m told it’s Good Fat.)  Well, that, and the fact that my grill emerged from the snowbank on my deck earlier this week and I’m trying to get as much use out of it as I can before it disappears again tomorrow.  The only sure sign of warmer weather I can cling to is the cocktail of the evening…a slightly more sophisticated version of gin & juice or a greyhound. 

Therefore, I shall call it a Snoop Dogg:

1.5 oz freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice over ice

1.5 oz gin (or vodka if you’re like that)

splash of grapefruit bitters

top off with club soda

Simple.  Refreshing.  Delicious.  I can see myself drinking a LOT of these come summertime.  In fact, I can see myself doing ALL of this come summertime.  Surf and turf on my deck is mighty appealing…

Hmm…can you grill marrow bones?

Pardon My Pretentious Ass.

Since I don’t teach on Fridays, Thursdays are my Friday nights.  Before you commence slapping me for being obnoxious, I assure you, I put in my 40-50 hours/week.  I simply relish being able to put in as many of them as possible from my apartment, and Friday is the one day I have the luxury of doing that all day.  Although, more often than not, Friday is the ONE day of the week I do NOT work – I’ll admit that it’s nice being able to take care of all of my personal errands on a weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday when the grocery store is mobbed, I’m happy as a clam staying home with my lecture notes and lab reports.

Anyway, I digress.  Tonight, I felt like making myself a Nice Dinner, so I stopped at the one place in my small town that sells Nice Ingredients.  This guy has a complete monopoly in town on any kind of premium protein, and while his intentions are good, I have already figured out that he doesn’t always have the knowledge to back it up.  The man carries good meat, makes EXCELLENT sausage, and always stocks good beer, but there’s a reason I rarely buy wine there.  He advertises on Facebook, and while I perk up to see what fresh fish he has on Fridays, and what new beer he is carrying, I inevitably end up rolling my eyes at his wine specials.  He seems to fall for the siren song of mediocre, well-marketed, slick-labeled mass-market wines.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that in this particular market, but personally, I’m just not going to get hard for a wine from “Cupcake Vineyard” or “Menage a Trois.”  Don’t even get me STARTED on “Mommy’s Time-Out.”  Most of the wines in his shop that I would drink can be purchased at Meijer at better prices, and thus…I do.

But this evening, I was doing my shopping, and he offered up that he had just made some fresh Italian sausage (and andouille…and brats…I DO love this man’s brats…) so I got some.  And decided, what the hell, I’ll pick up a bottle of wine for my Friday night dinner of sausage and peppers.

Oh, have I mentioned that I have already picked out a couple of cheeses (curds and string cheese…are you getting the general idea yet?) and two kinds of sausage?  Okay.

Him: “Do you need any help with the wine?”

Me: “Nah, I think I’m okay.”

<short interval of undisturbed contemplation>

Him: <popping around the corner> “What do you like?”

This man is DYING to help me.  This is part of the reason I love him – the drive to please is strong with this one.  I don’t have the heart to let him know that he cannot possibly read my tastes better than I can – he just does not have the skillz.

Me: “I like a lot of things.  Just trying to figure out what I want with my dinner.”

At this point, he leaves me alone.  I think he gets it.

I pick out a cheap, but not Cheap, Italian red to go with my dinner.  Also grab a 4-pack of Good Beer to have around, and head to the register.

He cards me, rather demonstratively, and proceeds to explain that his daughter earned him a rather hefty fine earlier in the day by not carding a decoy sent by the authorities.  Also is a bit too forthcoming in the details, explaining that he needs to make $1500 in alcohol sales in order to recoup the costs of the fine…I’m guessing that means he was fined about $500.  Okay, maybe $1000.  He only needs about 49 more of me to come through to make that up.  Considering what he charges for his meat, I think he’ll recover.

So I come home and have a little pre-dinner nosh of some curds (to find out if they were squeaky…they were not) and string cheese and a Founder’s Backwoods Bastard (caramelicious!!!).

A couple of hours later, I work up enough appetite to make my dinner, and open my wine.  This process starts in rather mundane fashion…pulltab to open the foil on top…

…but under the foil is what appears to be…a screwcap? 

I’m not used to screwcaps with foil, but whatever, I proceed with the unscrewing…

…only to find glass underneath.

Not a glass neck.  There is a glass top as well.  Clear glass, while the bottle is green.

What the fuck?

My wine bottle has a glass stopper in it.

Are we seriously doing this now???

I have had bottles of wine that were clearly corked.  It is unfortunate, and unnecessary.  I have absolutely no qualms or snobbery about screwtops on my wine…I’m actually a fan, as long as the wine contained by them is tasty.  One of my favorite winemakers is actually doing studies on AGING wine with screwtops…I’m not sure he has a leg to stand on, but I admire the science.

This…is not science. 

This…is Marketing Genius at work.

Seriously, Marketing Geniuses (please note the sarcasm, dear Reader…): I would MUCH rather have a regular old screwtop on my $11 bottle of wine than try to pry an awkwardly tiny glass stopper out of the bottle.  This is the single most bizarrely awkward bottle opening I have ever personally witnessed.  And I have SEEN people sabre bottles of bubbly.  Badly.

In my perplexed state, I updated my Facebook status to say, “<Wahooty> is puzzled by her wine.  Are glass stoppers what we’re doing now to prevent corking?  I’d rather have a screwtop.”

One of my more worldly friends “like”d that almost immediately.

One of my childhood friends (who, just for the record, still lives in our hometown and is some sort of equipment mechanic now – I did not grow up in one of THOSE DC suburbs…) commented, “need to let your wine breath it will bring out the taste”

<THWACK>

That would be the sound of a forehead slap at the very moment my head hits the keyboard. 

Certain groups of people…the lovely locals in the small town in which I live or the people I grew up with… will never cease to make me feel like a completely pretentious ass.  Because they mean so well, and have no idea how completely and utterly ignorant they are about…oh…absolutely everything I enjoy.  As an educator, I think I can say with absolute confidence that the biggest problem with stupid people…is that they don’t know they’re stupid.

Seriously, if you ever feel stupid…you aren’t.  Questioning your own intelligence is, in my opinion, a sign of having some.  I feel stupid on a regular basis – it’s what drives me to seek out information and learn things, and thus grow as both an intellectual and a human being.  There are those who offer recommendations based on their knowledge of what I know, and what I don’t…and then there are those who just think they know shit when they’re actually clueless.  And these are the people who, if I tell them what I’m really thinking, would label me Pretentious, and possibly, depending on my tone, an Asshole.  Because they simply don’t know that you’re not being pretentious if you actually KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.  They can not fathom that you know so much more than they do about the topic at hand.  I had a friend in high school who hung out with the nerds…not because he was all that smart, but because he was in most of our classes and we were the ones that were nice to him.  But somewhere along the way, he allowed this to convince him that he WAS smart, and he regularly tries to engage in intellectual banter with me on my Facebook feed. 

Depending on who you ask, it was Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill who said, “I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.”

I am not so noble.  In fact, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally just smack his ass down to shut him up.

And this, dear friends, is why I am an asshole.  Sometimes, I just can’t help myself. 

But I will always…ALWAYS be nice to the sausage man. 

You can’t be pretentious if you know what you’re talking about, but you also can’t be an ass to a man with good meat.

I teach, therefore I drink.

Did you ever wonder when you were in college…what things you might have done that pissed your professors right the fuck off?

 

Case Study #1:

I receive an e-mail from a student informing me that she has plans to leave for spring break on Thursday of the preceding week.  I have a test scheduled for that day, and she asks about rescheduling.

I ask WHY she is leaving early for spring break.  Students trying to leave a day early for any break is annoying, but two days is really stretching the limits of my patience.

“Well, my family already bought the tickets, and it was cheaper to leave on a Thursday…I can bring in proof that they were purchased back in September…”

I’m sorry, but what exactly the fuck is wrong with your parents that they decided, MONTHS before you even knew your class schedule, let alone exam dates, that “oh, it’s okay, we can pull her out of school a couple of days early to save a few hundred dollars.”  Sure, vacations are expensive.  But so is…oh…A COLLEGE EDUCATION.  How much are they spending on tuition this semester vs. the cost of this trip?  And which of those two things is more important??? 

I am not a complete asshole – I did allow her to schedule the test for a day early.  But I almost made her cry first.  Because SERIOUSLY????

 

Case Study #2:

We had our first test about a week and a half ago.  Now, I seem to be physically incapable of writing easy tests.  I want to know what my students know, and I get a lot more usable information out of a hard test.  It spreads them out, and having a low average is more than made up for by the massive grade-padding they receive from their labs and homework assignments.  If all of the grades are clumped together, you can’t tell who really understands the material and who is just really good at memorizing your lecture examples/homework problems.  And if you know me even a little bit, you know that I care much more about the former.  If I didn’t, I’d be a lazy-ass teacher.

And the last two weeks, I have had the same two students in my office, bitching about how hard the test was. 

Last week, I felt I talked them down.  But this week, they came to my office hour to ask some questions about their lab, and they were still clearly pissed off.  They asked what the average was…I told them.  It just so happens that percentage-wise, the average is a failing grade.  I have already given them an opportunity to earn back enough points that the class average is now a passing grade, and there will be another.  Have I mentioned that their grades are HEAVILY padded by lab reports and homeworks?  But they are hung up on the lowness of my test average.  They ask, “the average is failing.  If the entire class fails (at this point, I resist the urge to point out that this only indicates that HALF of the class has, in fact, failed – my students are even worse at statistics than they are at chemistry), then doesn’t that indicate that something is wrong?  Have you ever seen that before?”  I say, “yes.”  “In a 100-level class????”  I say, “yes.”

I pretty much end this conversation with a, “trust me, I know what I am doing.  You are not, in fact, all going to fail this course.  Now, do you want to actually talk to me about the lab?” 

Later, a math professor who lives in the next cubicle over told me, “I admire you for holding your ground there.  I have had tests where the class average was a failing grade.”

I asked, “in a 100-level class?”

“Math 126.  I wanted to come in and back you up, but figured that would just escalate the situation.”

SWEET, SWEET VINDICATION, YOU ARE MINE!!!

I’m a big girl.  I can admit I make mistakes.  My students catch at least one mistake every lecture when I write faster than my brain/mouth can keep up.  I would much rather be the sort of professor that can admit such things rather than the sort that blindly defends an answer that is clearly wrong.  However, THIS WAS NOT A MISTAKE.  The only mistake here is you convincing yourself you understood the material when it is PLAIN AS DAY that you did not.

 

Lately, there have been a lot of whisperings and full-on gnashing of teeth in academia due to a recently-published book.  A long-term study of college students determined that the majority of students are now graduating college, with degrees, not having made any appreciable improvements in their writing or critical thinking skills.  Students graduate saying things like, “I thought college was going to be harder than high school, but it turned out to be easier.”  In other words, you no longer have to learn anything to graduate college.  That’s FOUR YEARS, after which you are SUPPOSED to have a deeper understanding of at least ONE topic than the average person.  FOUR YEARS that are completely lacking in academic rigor.  I don’t know yet if I am part of the solution, but I for DAMN sure refuse to be a part of the problem.

 

So you wanna piss me off?  Ask me to dumb down my class for you.  Go ahead.

Customer Disservice

When people ask how I’m adjusting to small-town life after four years in Toronto, my answers are generally positive.  “Small-town Midwesterners are lovely people.”  “My students are so sweet and awesome.”  Etc.  And the thing is, I actually mean it.   I have received some of the best customer service of my life since I moved here.  That is, until I came home tonight, too exhausted to even make a grilled cheese for dinner.  Em suggested I just order pizza, and even though it didn’t sound good, it sounded easy, so I did.

 

Half an hour later, my phone rings.

“Hi, this is Caitlyn (or Kaitlynn, or Katelinn, or Kaetelynne or whatever new spelling of that name is en vogue today) from Mancino’s.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t really want to get out and walk around in the cold looking for your apartment, so could you tell me exactly where it is?  I mean, is it like, on the first floor…or second floor…or what?”

Keep in mind, my apartment complex consists of only about four buildings, arranged in a straight line.  It has exterior markings that look like this:

It really requires extraordinary powers of deduction to find apt. 201C in said complex.  But whatever, I give Cate…Koete…oh whateverthefuckhernameis directions.  I do this thinking she’s calling from her cell in the parking lot, so go to open the door for her to make it even easier to give me my damn food.  Nope, no delivery vehicle yet – she has called from the pizza place.  This is also about the time that I discover that whoever built this complex decided that there should be a height requirement for rented housing, as my peephole is located a good three inches ABOVE THE TOP OF MY HEAD. 

I NEED A STEPSTOOL TO SEE WHO IS KNOCKING AT MY DOOR.

My apartment is so secure I won’t even know what my potential rapists look like.  Note to self: does Lowe’s carry very small periscopes for emergencies?

Katie eventually arrives and hands over my pie with a “sorry about that…”

I bring it inside and open it to find this waiting for me:

Now, I probably do not need to remind you, dear reader, that I do come from Midwestern stock.  And have also lived in Canada for a while, where I underwent an extensive training program in Non-Offense.  I am NOT a complainer.  But seriously, this thing is inedible.  This is a cheesy Elephant Man in a cardboard box.  I ordered a pizza with extra cheese, not half a pizza with quadruple cheese and the other half bread and sauce.

<sigh>

I’m going to have to make a phone call now, aren’t I?  And I do so hate doing that.

“Hi, Mancino’s.”

<insert politely-worded complaint about mangled pizza here>

“Um…hang on.”

(heard in background after a loooooong pause):

“Phone for you.”

“Who is it?”

“Complaint.”

“Hello?”

<insert ever-so-slightly less polite complaint about mangled pizza here>

“Okay, I’ll re-make it and send it over to you.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, but I’m going to need you to give back the pizza you already got when it comes.”

Um…excuse me?  You fuck up my pie, and now you’re accusing me of filing a false pizza disaster claim?  When did FEMA get hold of the Italian-American delivery industry?

Whatever.  I’m not kidding when I said the original was inedible.

What he really should have said was, “I’m sorry.  It’s Wednesday, and students get a 50% discount tonight, and nobody complains when they’re 18 and dinner is half price, and the dinner rush is over, so the A-team isn’t on duty.  We’re the…<counts on fingers and removes shoes and socks> J-team.  We carry pizzas vertically and don’t get out of our cars to find your apartment if it’s cold outside.  And the J-team doesn’t get fed on-duty and thinks the elephant man will go over really well when we bring him home to our stoned roommates (duuude…pizza on a spoon!  sweeeeeeeeeeeet…).  And have I mentioned I’m an 18-year-old pre-pharm major that will someday a) make more money than you and b) be fucking up your prescription medications to this very same standard?”

New pizza arrived shortly thereafter, and the swap made.  I realized too late that if they can ask for their pizza back, I can and should ask for my tip back. 

And I ate my pristine pizza. 

But it was neither good nor easy.

I could do 12 days of Christmas in 12 hours.

Note: this post was originally started about a week ago.

Today was just all kinds of awesome.

 

The last couple of weeks have been insanely stressful.  Like heart-palpitations-every-time-I-do-something-as-strenuous-as-walking-to-my-car stressful.  I tried cutting caffeine entirely, and no improvement.  The only thing that helped was this week.  It’s the last week of classes, and I had a week built into my syllabus just in case we had a weather cancellation that would require making up a lab.  That means all I have this week are lectures, office hours, and catching up with grading.  And today, I actually have…<drumroll>…A DAY OFF.

 

Not only do I have a day with no classes, I got my lecture notes fully prepped for Thursday on Tuesday morning, so I can truly take the day off.  SO I DID.  Sure, I have lab reports and quizzes to grade, and a big game-show-style review to prepare for Friday’s last lecture, and a quiz to write, but dammit, I am doing NONE of that today.

 

Today, I shop.

Correction: Today, I drive an hour to find places in which to shop.  I did most of my Christmas shopping online last night, but there are some things that simply must be done in-person.  It began with an eye appointment.  I have not had one of those in nearly 6 years.  I have been wearing the same 2-for-$99 glasses for SIX YEARS.  While I can tell my prescription hasn’t changed much at all in that time, my sense of style certainly has, and my optical coverage DEFINITELY has.  Of course, that is also enough time for me to have forgotten how agonizing this process can be – nothing emphasizes the asymmetry of your face quite like applying stage makeup or shopping for glasses.  And I tried on absolutely every pair in LensCrafters and could not find a damn thing I liked.  SO discouraging.  Luckily, this mall also has a JCPenney optical and Sears optical, where the glasses are cheaper and…well…less stylish.  But seeing as how the current trends in eyewear are all tiny, rectangular things that look absolutely ridiculous on my incredibly large head, I’m okay with being out of fashion.  At Sears, my final stop, I found not one but TWO pairs of frames I actually liked, both of which were on clearance which means I didn’t even spend enough to use up the allowance on my optical plan.  WIN.

On my way out of the mall, $7 boots.  WIN.

Still getting over a sinus infection, so hit the appropriate part of town to get Asian groceries and a bowl of pho.  WIN.  On my way there, passed a World Market.  Found an absolutely perfect and very reasonably priced little wine bar that will most likely be lovely in my apartment.  Also picked up a couple of clearance wines and some spices I needed for Christmas present projects.  DOUBLE WIN.

Stopped at health food store to get essential ingredient for homemade cocktail bitters, which are going to be made into Christmas presents for Dad.  WIN.

Stopped at fancy cigar shop to get some good tobacco for a culinary experiment.  Very helpful salesdude had no idea why I wanted to make tobacco-flavored cocktails, but allowed me to sniff my way through the pipe tobacco jars until I was satisfied.  WIN.  (Also, got to this part of town 10 minutes after the meters became free.  WIN.)

Made my way home, and stopped for remaining project ingredients.  This involved a stop at the party store for a bottle of rye and a cigar.  As I pondered the stock and made my choice, another (perhaps chemically enhanced) customer at the register said something along the lines of, “firing up a cigar tonight, huh?  nice…” to which I replied, “not exactly.”  He responded with a nod of understanding, a chuckle, and an, “I gotcha…”

I can probably guess what he thought I was doing tonight, but I’m quite certain his thought process WASN’T, “duuuuude…she is totally going to make bitters out of that.”

 

I finally arrived at home, and started putting up all of my Christmas decorations, including my Tiny Tree:

Awww…isn’t it cute?

 

In short…I found my Christmas spirit. 

You know what else I found?  The fine print in the Target commercials.  I have been DYING to track down the music they’re using this year, but since I generally watch TV as background noise with my laptop or a stack of papers in my lap, I have never noticed the button at the end that tells you that you can download the music FOR FREE from their website.  Seriously, go.  Get it.  Best Christmas album I’ve found in AGES.  It’s hard to find such a good blend of miraculously non-cheesy and delightfully over-cheesed-in-a-good-way holiday music.  I particularly love the Toy Jackpot commercial (WHY OH WHY ISN’T THERE MORE GOOD CHRISTMAS HIPHOP???), but as a single girl living alone, Tiny Tree Christmas is kind of my theme song.

What?  My dad once found his Christmas spirit via an impulse purchase of “A Polka Christmas.”  I shit you not.

 

And now, a week after I started writing this post, I have given my final exam and am now unofficially on Winter Break, and those online presents have started to roll in:

Look!  Tiny Santa has come and left Tiny Presents!

 

So at this point, my bitters are brewing, my present-making supplies are en route, the ice has finally all been chipped off of my car, and perhaps most importantly, all of my brick-and-mortar shopping is DONE.  I even had to go back to Grand Rapids to go to a MALL… on a SATURDAY…and managed to keep my spirits up.  There are cookies in the dining room, egg nog in the fridge, and the new bar is well-stocked.  So when are you coming over?

Disassemble? No disassemble!

Dear World Market,

 

As a single girl, I have put together a lot of flat-pack furniture in my day.  I am no longer fazed by the words “assembly required”…nay, I am thrilled by them because it means I can buy furniture that fits in my car, and enjoy the satisfaction of putting it together when I get home.

 

When I got my prized purchase home this evening, my first sign of trouble should have been the box.  The only easy way to open it is at the end.  The first rule of Flat Pack is…you don’t talk about Flat Pack.  But the SECOND rule of Flat Pack is that the box opens at the top, so that you lift that gorgeous big flap and find the directions at the top of the stack, nestled comfortably in among your flat parts and looking like they are quivering in anticipation of seeing daylight for the very first time inside your apartment.  They should NOT be found at the bottom of the box, after you have carefully extracted every other piece via the small end.

 

Little did I know, my ordeal was only beginning.

 

I don’t know what the official language of World Market is.  Perhaps in your language, “assembly required” actually means “apprenticeship in cabinetry required and ownership of power tools may be for the best.”  But this was the single-most difficult flat-pack I have EVER assembled.

 

While I do appreciate the fact that this assembly was done with a screwdriver instead of the ubiquitous hex keys that Ikea holds so dear, and that you actually include some extra hardware just in case, I do have a few bones to pick with you.  First of all, your pilot holes are not all in the correct places.  You have no idea how disorienting that is when you have counted your pieces and counted your hardware, but neglected to count your holes.  Second, why do you call it part A when it is the last one to be installed?  Third, why, DEAR GOD, WHY? do you force me to install my own hinges?  I will gladly pay the sweatshop-dwelling orphans an extra 5 bucks if it means my pilot holes will be properly located and I don’t have to install hinges.  Their tiny hands will probably do a better job of it than mine anyway.  At this point, I would have been happier had you just packed up a bunch of boards and assorted power tools and let me go to town.  DAMN YOU, YOU FAIR-TRADING SONS OF BITCHES!

 

Perhaps this is karmic retribution for opening a bottle of wine and watching Celebrity Rehab before assembling my bar.  But seriously, should it have taken THREE HOURS to build this???

 

 

Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.

One of the great things about my Thanksgiving trip was the revelation that I could take a train from Grand Rapids to Chicago.  Any time I plan a trip, I always check the Amtrak just in case.  Just in case it’s cheaper, or easier, or just plain better than a TSA patdown or a full day in the car.  And it never is.  Like, NEVER.

 

But this time it was!  I could take a train directly from GR…no transfers!  The train station is right off of the highway, which is a straight shot from where I live!  The train takes 4 hours…less than an hour to get to the train station…this is not looking like a bad alternative to my 4 1/2 hour drive to my aunt’s house in the ‘burbs in unpredictable holiday weekend traffic!  And it’s under $100!

 

Beside the not-having-to-drive factor, and the comfy-seats-with-lots-of-legroom factor, and the not-having-to-be-there-2-hours-early factor, and the fear-of-heights factor, the best thing about taking the train is that I officially had two things:

1) an excuse to hang out downtown for an afternoon.

2) an Exit Strategy when leaving town.

 

Regarding #2…I dearly love my aunt and uncle.  But the Princess is VERY bad at hiding her disappointment.  She thinks she is very low-pressure, but as soon as the last day of your stay arrives, it’s all, “do you want to come to church with us?  We were thinking we’d go out to breakfast after.  Don’t you want to stay for dinner?” 

 

She has a hard time letting go.

 

Enter, “My train leaves at 5:00.”

This is substantially less negotiable than, “I want to hit the road in time to get home in time to do such-and-such” or “I want to beat the traffic.”

 

Regarding #1…I also dearly love the city of Chicago.  And hadn’t been there in almost 2 years.  I would move there in a heartbeat. 

And I LOVE eating there.  Hot dogs and pizza to haute cuisine, and absolutely everything in between.  I now have a good reason to…<drumroll>…HAVE LUNCH IN CHICAGO. 

Whatever.  If you lived where I live, you’d be excited at that prospect too.

Perhaps most importantly, Chicago is home to Rick Bayless, one of the only celebrity chefs at whose temple I actually worship.  I love the man, and I love his food. 

So I send an e-mail to the local cousins.  Say that I am taking the train into town.  Ask if it’s okay if I take a commuter train out to see them that night in their new lovely home that I haven’t seen yet.  One writes back to say that she will bring her toddler out so we can have a lunch date and take the train home together.

THIS IS WHY I LOVE MY COUSINS.  Truly effortless social planning.

 

While I’m waiting for their train to get in, I take a wander through the French Market…and WISH it were going to be open on Sunday so I could pick up some things to take home.  (I’m not going to haul charcuterie around the Midwest in my luggage when I am headed to homes with fridges already stuffed to capacity.)  Because I am deprived, I pick up a couple of pastries and some macarons.  The pastries are meh (but WAY better than what I can get at Meijer), but the macarons are actually rather good.  I am a happy camper.

On the way back to the main train concourse, a random dude on the street stops me to quietly let me know that there are…um…strings hanging between my legs.  I explain that those are just from my scarf.  He is suddenly very embarrassed, because he thought they were…I’m sorry, what, exactly?  Did he think that I had some sort of turbo tampon with several pieces of YARN coming out of it that was actually escaping from my pants of its own accord?

(Seriously, based on his level of embarrassment when I clarified the situation, I think he thought it was some sort of alien feminine hygiene product trying to crawl out of my crotch.  I shit you not.  But he still had the balls to let me know.  Thank you, crazy courteous stranger.)

While waiting for Cousins’ train, I decide this is the time to buy some Garrett’s popcorn.  (If you haven’t had it, then you DON’T KNOW.)  Unfortunately, they are having production issues.  Namely, it will be 15 minutes before they have caramel corn.  Which is a shame, because all I want is a small order of the mix.  This would be a mix of caramel and cheese popcorn.  Like I said…you DON’T KNOW.  It’s one of Oprah’s Favorite Things, and you would be too if you contained that much butter.  So I leave.  And come back.  Behind a woman who orders three giant bags of caramel corn.  You know what that means?  15 minutes before they have caramel corn.  BITCH.  Note to self: NEVER.  GET OUT OF LINE.  NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOUR SHOULDERS ACHE FROM YOUR LUGGAGE.

I get up to the head of the line.  I can SEE more kernels in the bin than I need for my tiny order, which is only half caramel anyway.  I ask the guy if I can please have what I want.  He says no.  I say fine, just give me cheese, with the saddest, most resigned sigh you can possibly imagine.  He thinks better of his response, saying he will give me as much caramel as he can, and somehow I wind up with a medium order, perfectly mixed.  Can we say, “Wahooty was right”???

After my cousin extracts herself from the bizarre automated doors at the platform, we make our way to lunch, braving the sleet to walk 20 minutes with a stroller filled to capacity.  Read: Cousin keeps her eye on the road and kid, I keep eyes akimbo for scattered mittens.  Luckily, Frontera Grill is toddler-friendly – they have crayons, and should you ever go there, take a kid because the kid’s order of guacamole is the perfect appetizer for two adults for only $2.50.

(Said toddler is impossibly adorable, btw.  Rather than eating the guac, she dipped chips and handed them to us.  At one point, I ducked my head under the table looking for dropped blueberries, and looked up to realize she was mimicking me perfectly from her booster seat.  She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she was helping, goddammit.)

Despite our desperate pleading with the cabbie, we miss our train out to the ‘burbs by about 5 minutes.  So we pack ourselves into the next train, which doesn’t leave for half an hour (no small feat with said toddler, stroller, and all of my luggage and..um…how exactly did I amass this many snacks, anyway?).  Cousin gets a call from her husband (who is my actual, biological cousin) and suddenly decides she needs to run out and pick something up for me before our train leaves.

“<Husband> just had a GREAT idea for an anniversary present for you.” (I first met her on one of those long-ago days-after-Thanksgiving bar nights, a few years before she married into my family, when she was just the “awesome, awesome girl” my cousin swore he wasn’t serious about.  Sucker.)

The Awesome, Awesome Girl returns with a cold tallboy of Bud Light. 

“<Husband> and I like to drink a tallboy on the train home on Fridays.”

What can I say?  We are Classy Broads.

I arrive in the ‘burbs toting an empty tallboy of crappy beer. 

I am Home. 

Thank you for letting me be myself again.

Thanksgiving always seems to be good fodder for blog posts, whether they be of the nostalgic or culinary variety.  And this year is no exception.

 

I miss Toronto like crazy.  Seriously, sometimes in fits of homesickness I wonder if I should have stayed there unemployed rather than moving here to take a job.  Oh, sure, reality eventually sets in when I realize how much I love my damn job and how little I actually hate the small-town Midwestern life, but I do miss Hogtown dearly.  But the one time of year that always made me second-guess moving there in the first place was Thanksgiving.  I had four Thanksgivings across the border, and they were hard.  I’m not sure I realized just how hard until I came back.  One of the perks of moving back to the Midwest is that I am now close enough to Chicago to go back to my old Thanksgiving routine.

 

Unfortunately, my old Thanksgiving routine is no more.  Gone are the days of big dinners at my aunt’s house, and nights on the town the day after.  Most of the cousins are now married off and procreating.  So my weekend is more about making lunch dates downtown with toddlers when my train gets in, and packing up the car for a trip to Green Bay to see the twins I haven’t met yet and the cousinlets I haven’t seen in more than 2 years.  One of them, at 6 years of age, remembers the monkey noises I made on the monkey bars when she was 4.  Her little sister channels my grandmother with eerie authenticity.

 

And even through the cold/flu/sinus infection I’ve brought home with me (courtesy of one half of that set of twins), the memory of a redheaded 2-year-old lighting up on a Sunday morning as she notices you in the room and exclaims, “<Wahooty> is awake!” makes me unbelievably thankful.

 

I give thanks for my job.  I give thanks to the people who took care of me when I didn’t have one.  I give thanks for my beautiful new nephew.  And I give thanks for a family that remembers that they love me, no matter how long I go without visiting them.

Request Week: Stop trying to make “fetch” happen.

Courtesy of Melissa Davey:

“Lindsay Lohan.”

To be honest, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Lindsay Lohan at this point.  Sure, I think she actually has a great talent somewhere under all of the booze and blow, and it’s sad to see all of that go to waste.  And Mean Girls is still a movie I will watch any time it’s on TV (although, to be fair, that probably has more to do with my devotion to Tina Fey than anything else…I will also probably end up watching Baby Mama every time it’s on TV as well, even though it was fairly awful).  But who knows, maybe someday she’ll go the way of Robert Downey, Jr., and I LURVE him.

In the meantime, I can’t say I’m capable of working up a whole lot to say about her, aside from my fervent wish that she would just go away, get help, and make another movie with Tina Fey.  I anxiously await my invite to the premiere of Mean Baby Mama Girl.

But, while I’ve been putting off this particular request until I could think of something appropriately clever and insightful to say (because I happen to dig Melissa D’s blog, she’s brave enough to use her full name on the internets, and she’s one of only two people to make any requests for RW), I’ve been occasionally checking in on my webcounter to see how many hits I’m getting (answer: not many, but far more than I should given that I never post), and what keywords people are Googling to get here.

In my keyword analysis, buried amongst all of the variations on “agnes, agatha, jermaine, and jack” and “wahooty blog,” etc….one entry that read:

“orange granny panties”

You know what the first hit is when you Google “orange granny panties”?

A story about Lindsay Lohan.

Best. Birthday present. Ever.

I.  LOVE.  THIS WOMAN.

 

Watch the full episode. See more Mark Twain Prize.

You’ve got a bright future in sales…

Dear Maurices,

 

Why is it that you (and other clothing stores) seem to require my name, rank, and serial number before you will sell me a t-shirt?  When I was living in Canada, I never had to have the following conversation when purchasing clothing:

 

Well-Meaning Salesgirl: Phone number?

Wahooty: um…<racks brain and eventually comes up with phone number>

W-MS: First and last name?

Wahooty: No.

W-MS: <confused and mildly distressed look> (her manager never told her how to handle this in training) It’s just so we can keep track of…

Wahooty: No.

W-MS: <more distressed> Do you know what it’s for?

Wahooty: I know what it’s for.  There is no reason my stores need to ‘keep track of’ anything.  I just want to buy my t-shirt in peace.  I am a big girl – if I need to return something, I will either find my receipt or suck up the loss.  I will not, under any circumstances, just turn over my first and last name and my unlisted phone number.  Your corporate marketing team will just have to respect the fact that I like my privacy, and my identity-theft-free existence.  Here’s the thing – I pay with a credit card.  If you keep records of your transactions, like you are supposed to, YOU ALREADY HAVE MY FULL NAME.  IT IS PRINTED ON THE RECEIPT.  Why on earth would you have any need to manually enter my identity into your computer for any other reason than for tracking my purchasing habits, which just happen to be MY OWN DAMN BUSINESS.

 

Okay, so I usually stop around that second sentence.  But really, darlings, as though your hard-sell salesgirls weren’t irritating enough.  “Do you have a Maurice’s card?  How are you doing?  Is there anything you’re looking for today?  Well, just to let you know, we’re running XXX promotion right now.  How did that work out for you?  No luck?  You’re still just one item away from <insert special promotion>!  No seriously, didn’t you want to pad my commission just ONE MORE TINY BIT????”

 

As far as I can make out, this is the only store in my town that pays on a commission basis.  It is also, unfortunately, the only halfway decent place to purchase clothing.  But I will suck it up.  I will resign myself to driving my ass to Grand Rapids to purchase clothing, and to tolerating the Bitchy Banana Republic Guy because at least I’m not worried about him asking for my social security number the next time I want to buy a scarf.  I will not buy anything else from your store.

 

Even though you make my all-time favorite t-shirt. 

 

It’s over, buddy.  Don’t call me, don’t e-mail me, don’t peek inside my window to try to get a glimpse of me naked.  And above all, don’t try to sell me a damn thing.

 

love and kisses,

Wahooty

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."–Kurt Vonnegut

 

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear me-eee, happy birthday to me.

 

I am now in my 33rd year.  That’s right, my Jesus Year.  While the answer to WWJD? remains to be seen, let’s at least hope that I’ll manage to skip that whole crucifixion thing.

It has been a hell of a year (emphasis on the Hell).  This is a weird birthday since I think mentally I’m still somewhere in early October.  I’d usually spend about a month buying myself birthday presents and planning the dinner I’d make myself (or, alternately, make my friends take me out for)…instead I find myself saying, “huh?” when the cashier at Meijer wishes me a happy birthday after carding me for my wine.

 

So in case you’re wondering, this is how I will be celebrating #33:

1.  Sleeping in.  Making omelet/home fries breakfast with Good Coffee.

2.  Department meeting.

3.  Lecture.  I suspect my students are up to something, as one of them asked me about a month ago when my birthday was and what my favorite color is.  And today said student asked again in class, then sent me an e-mail with the subject “random question” and the text merely read, “So we were just wondering what you favorite candy is haha”

Cute little buggers, ain’t they?  Regardless, in spite of their best efforts, I will try to teach them something about dipole moments and valence bond theory.

4.  Office hours.  Hoping nobody shows up.  May cancel – we’ll see.

5.  Home.  Birthday bicerin.

6.  Birthday boilermaker and smoked fish.

7.  Steak.  Mac and cheese nirvana.  Rapini.  California cab from Meijer clearance rack.

8.  Glee. 

9.  Possibly a cookie with a candle in it for old times’ sake, since this is feeling like a Lenny year. 

 

And that’s about it.  Such is a midweek birthday in a new town, when you really don’t have people you can call friends yet.  Single girl empowerment and all that shit.  Whee.

I was born a poor black child.

I recently made a new online friend.  No, not Friend, just friend.  I now live in a small town in Michigan, where there is no Fine Dining.  Hell, there’s barely Dining – this is a place where people merely eat.  Luckily, I am less than an hour away from Grand Rapids, second-largest city in Michigan, and home to, among other things, a damn good brewery and….<drumroll>…RESTAURANTS. 

 

Okay, not terribly EXCITING restaurants, but places where people will bring you food on which you will not regret spending $15-20.  The problem is that if I’m going to drive nearly an hour for dinner…I’m going to need company as part of the deal.  So I rustled up someone to have dinner with me.  And as part of the dinner conversation, I mentioned that I have, in the past, written a blog (as I sometimes do when talking to people whose only knowledge of me is my online persona).  The response was an excited, “is it a food blog???”

 

No.  As a matter of fact, it most definitely is not.

 

Oh, sure.  If you read my posts, you can tell I am mildly obsessed with sustenance.  But as a general rule, this blog has no theme.  Thus my very small readership.  I learned back in college when I figured out every e-mail account came with a certain amount of bandwidth for building a personal webpage that, if you want to attract readers, you need…a Focus.

 

I, however, despite my best efforts, have never been very good at staying On-Topic.

 

But tonight…TONIGHT, I will be a Food Blog.  Because dammit, there is something the world (i.e., the five of you) needs to know.  And that thing is:

 

Jerk Chicken.

 

Every time I decide it’s time to make jerk chicken, I nearly talk myself out of it.  I try my hardest to convince myself that it is not worth the time and effort involved.  Not worth juggling chicken parts on my tiny grill.  Not worth the day of marination.  Not worth choking myself to death trying to chop extremely hot chiles.

 

And every time I am incontrovertibly, indubitably, undeniably…WRONG.

 

Here’s the thing…I had heard about this “jerk” stuff when I still lived in Indiana.  The Food Network was my primary source for information on dishes I had never tried.  When something struck my fancy, I would look up a recipe and try to make it.  But the problem was, I never knew if the way I was doing it was Right.  I had made “jerk pork” once upon a time.  Perused several recipes, figured out what they all had in common…picked one that seemed a strong candidate for the all-important title of Authentic…and tried it.

 

The ingredients went something like this:

 

1 tablespoon cracked black peppercorns
3/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 tablespoons salt
1/4 cup muscovado or dark brown sugar
3 to 9 Scotch bonnet or habanero peppers, seeded and chopped
4 teaspoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 bunches scallions, finely chopped (green and white parts)
1/2 cup oil
Zest and juice of 4 limes
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup dark rum

 

(This particular recipe is lifted from the L.A. Times – there are many variations, but this one strikes a reasonable balance between too-simple and too-damned-complicated-to-ever-have-been-developed by-island-people.  The directions are pretty much “Combine all ingredients in food processor.  Careful, the chiles are burn-y.  Marinate for ~24 hrs.”)

 

The result?

 

A resounding, “Meh.”

Here’s the thing about the recipes…here’s what they don’t tell you: jerk…is BARBECUE.  And I don’t mean throwing hunks of meat on a grill and daubing it with sweet tomatoey sauce, I mean actual, honest-to-God BBQ.  JERK IS MEANT TO BE SMOKED.  Now, not necessarily 6-hours-low-and-slow BBQ, but this is meat that is really meant to be prepared over coals.  Preferably coals resulting from the burning of Jamaican pimento wood, aka the allspice bush.  Recipes will tell you you can either grill it “or just bake it.”

No.  No, you most definitely can NOT “just bake it.”  It will be “meh.”  Is that what you want???

You grill it.  Over charcoal.  Indirect heat.  For a long time – I do, at minimum, 20 minutes per side indirect, then direct heat for crisping it up.  This works well for drumsticks, but thighs take longer.  Don’t even talk to me about breasts – this is a strictly dark meat dish as far as I’m concerned. 

Now, here’s the thing.  You need smoke while you do this.  Right now, I’m using oak chips and allspice berries (the closest you can come in most of North America to actual pimento wood is to just use the berries and…other wood).  I’ve also been known to use hickory for its spiciness, but that’s as heavy as I’ll go.  Mesquite is just too overwhelming.  But all of that time on indirect heat is sloooowly cooking your chicken while that spicy coating on the skin is absorbing all of that delicious, spicy smoke.

Baste with some reserved marinade and crisp up over the hot part of the grill.  It turns out looking something like this:

It ain’t necessarily pretty, but it is DELICIOUS.  Smokey, and juicy, and damn-near-pullable in tenderness.

Serve it with a fairly basic slaw, some rice and peas (aw, crap…that’s another post), and a basic lager.  We’re going for thirst-quenching, heat-cooling beverage, not a pairing here.  I happen to like a Dark ‘n Stormy for dessert.

Now…if you don’t like it this way…you just don’t like it.  End public service announcement.

Contact.

I know you’re out there.

 

Requests have been made.  My webcounter is suddenly showing hits again, from all sorts of interesting places.  Among other things, there appears to have been a sudden resurgence in interest from Down Under…you people have GOT to get lives.  But your cries are not falling on deaf ears.

 

I’m just busy as all hell.

 

Soon, things will change.  Soon, I will be SO.  FUCKING.  BORED. that I will have no choice but to write.  Soon…I will have my furniture.

 

But in the meantime, bear with me.  I am too busy writing lecture notes and quizzes and unpacking boxes to write blog posts.  But my views on Slurpees and Lohan and teenage fashion can only be contained for so long, and I am bursting…positively BURSTING.

 

Cheers,

Dr. Wahooty

Request Week: Over the River and Through the Woods…

Growing up, my mom was always very frugal.  It was a revelation somewhere around 9th grade when she told me it was okay to do my back-to-school shopping at…gasp…the MALL instead of K-Mart, and that I was getting to an age where I wouldn’t be growing out of things as quickly so it was okay to invest a little more in my clothing and buy a little more of it.  But, to keep things in perspective, my local mall still laid claim to the title of World’s Largest Outlet Mall at the time, and this was a time when Outlet Malls contained knock-off versions of the real stores that sold mostly factory seconds, and didn’t even bother knocking off GOOD stores.  There was no Gap…no A&F…no Bath & Body Works at my mall.  I still remember that one of my favorite shirts that I wore through most of high school came from Ross Dress 4 Less. 

 

But even on our Fruit of the Loom budget, my underwear drawer had long ago graduated from briefs to…well…high-leg briefs.  Just fashionable enough to avoid emasculation in the locker room.  It wasn’t until my first year of college that two of my best friends introduced me to the joys of Victoria’s Secret.  One worked for Express, which got her an employee discount at VS and Bath & Body Works.  The other firmly believed that every woman must own a pair of black silk panties.  So guess what I got for Christmas that year?

 

*blush*

 

And so began my new addiction: Good Underwear.  They created a monster, really.  Like so many women before me, I fell victim to the so-called “sales” that inevitably lead to an underwear drawer so overstuffed that, in the event of zombie apocalypse, I will surely survive because I can go approximately eight years before emerging to do laundry.  Even plain cotton underwear, when well-made, is SO MUCH BETTER THAN K-MART UNDERWEAR.

 

But somehow…during the lightheaded, frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy of a Semi-Annual Sale, I wound up with…

A pair of bright orange.

Cotton.

GRANNY PANTIES.

 

In retrospect, I think I know how this happened.  In a previous visit to Vickie’s, when I needed a black bra to go with my black silk panties, some sort of evil 2-for-one or buy-one-get-one-half-off deal had convinced me that I did, in fact, need a bright orange satin bra.

 

Nothing goes with a bright orange satin bra.  Certainly not any of the underwear I had at the time.  So come sale time, when hideous orange things turn up in large, poorly sorted bins…you grab whatever goes with that damn bra.  And when you are young and inexperienced…sometimes you forget to check the style as well as the size.

 

This is how the giant panties end up in the back of your underwear drawer. 

 

Oh, they got worn.  Every now and then, when it was getting a little too close to laundry day or I REALLY wanted to wear underwear that was completely unflattering to everything about my skin, hair, and eye color.  Once I came home to my parents’ house for fall break, and in a panicked laundry emergency threw them into the washer with a forest green sweater.

 

I now had a pair of…shall we say…burnt sienna granny panties.

 

I wish I could say that this is where I threw them out.  But back in the drawer they went.  Even though they no longer matched ANYTHING.  Because, let’s face it, every woman has at least one pair of grannies haunting their underwear drawer.  For a while, I think I had four – Ms. Burnt Sienna, and three pairs given to me by, of all people, a college boyfriend’s MOTHER (strangest. present. EVER.).  There are just times when you want them – when you’re PMSing and feeling too bloated for your thongs and string bikinis, or in the event of those apocalyptic laundry days.  And I think we all know that those bitches REFUSE TO WEAR OUT.  Underwear, or undead?  Too close to call.

 

But…wear out they did.  Slowly, but surely.  Or at least they got thrown out, one at a time, to make room for a couple of younger, cuter pairs of underwear.  There may have been a cricket bat involved…I’ll never tell.  Such is the circle of life.  But Burnt Sienna hung on.  Due to her quality and superior breathability, she was the last survivor of the Granny Panty Apocalypse in my underwear drawer.  Until a few months ago, when she too succumbed to the great Trash Can in the Sky.  The same scaling-down process that led me to give away half of my furniture in anticipation of a major move meant Burnt Sienna finally bit the dust. 

 

Or did she?  A cold, lifeless waistband may have just scurried out of my suitcase, muttering something about “BRAAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNS…”

Finally got a piece of the pie.

With apologies to Em and granny panties and slurpees everywhere (topics that will be addressed soon)…I have an announcement.

 

Ahem.

 

The aforementioned verboten topic of “Jobs” is once again open for discussion.

Since we last left Wahooty, she has, quite frankly, been through a lot.  Made friends, lost friends, remade lost friends, made money, lost money, made dinner.  But to make a long story short, she has applied for, interviewed for, and received an offer for…<drumroll>… an Actual Paying Job. 

 

I know.  About fuckin’ time.

 

This APJ was posted around the time I last posted…here’s how things went from there:

 

Aug. 1 – job posting closes

Aug. 4 - phone interview

Aug. 10 - on-site interview

Aug. 14 – hired. 

 

Oh, and on August 11, I became Aunt Wahooty.  Please, adore the sacred child:

He is precious.  And already smarter and better than your niece, nephew, hedgehog, whatever the case may be.  (On an unrelated note, I am still trying to figure out if my brother and sister-in-law actually deliberately placed the crib in the front window because it has FABULOUS lighting for flash-free pictures.)  He will henceforth be addressed as Roo ‘round these parts.

 

So anyway, the timeline continues:

Aug. 16 – begin househunting and dialogue with potential landlady

Aug. 16 (continued) – begin to think potential landlady is potentially certifiable landlady

Aug. 17 – resume househunting

Aug. 18 – fly to hometown to (theoretically) pick up Mom and Dad’s old car but (in reality) visit Roo.  Take many, many pictures, most of which are flash-free.  At least they are when I remember to turn the flash off when the little bugger starts to look alive.  Want to hug him and squeeze him and call him George, but…

Aug. 18 (continued) – have to drive out to Mom and Dad’s to get theoretical reason for visiting.

Aug. 19 – drive back to Toronto.  Leave @ 5:30am.  Sweaty arrival @ 5pm…swanky dinner with friends @ 6:30.  Brutal.

Aug. 20-22.  No idea.  Seriously…total blur of car-based errands and teary goodbyes.

Aug. 23 – drive to undisclosed location of new job.  Will only reveal that I am in small town in Michigan where beef jerky can be purchased in parking lots in front of mattress stores.  And Leinenkugel’s Red is readily available.

Aug. 24 – report to work.  Open bank account.  View potential (non-certifiable) apartment.  Purchase first BlackBerry (Torch.  You want one, you just don’t know it yet.) as it will be major guilty indulgence of new job.  Commence getting my head around the fact that I have to stand in front of actual students on Monday.  Go to BW-3 because it is across the street and it is Wing Night.

Aug. 25 – attend first faculty meeting.  Deal with minor BlackBerry-related crisis.  Confirm that will not be homeless as of about one week from now.  Congratulate self at happy hour at hotel Bennigan’s.

 

WhatEVER, bitches.  It’s $2 domestic drafts.

 

So…yeah.  I now live in a place that doesn’t have a mall, but does have a farmer’s market where the farmers actually wear overalls in a non-ironic fashion.  “Ethnic food” is not even a vague category of cuisine, let alone a culturally insensitive generalization.  There aren’t liquor or wine stores, so much as Walgreen’s and places with signs proclaiming them to be “Party Stores.”  But the people are insanely nice, Evan Williams is $11.99/bottle, and I am gainfully employed.  I have good benefits, and my apartment will be about twice the size of the basement cave I had in Toronto for the same rent.  AND I have a dishwasher.  AND a balcony for my grill.  AND I can even have a puppy if I want.

And I won’t have to leave the apartment to get to my bathroom.

 

I started this blog when I moved to Toronto…to document an entirely new phase in my life.  I’m starting yet another, so it would seem it’s time to truly reboot The Alchemist.  I’ll start with granny panties and Slurpees as promised, but I’m thinking I’ll have a lot of free time on my hands now, so I’ll try to channel all of my small-town angst constructively here.  I’m going to be crazy busy for the next few weeks while I get settled…but football season is imminent and it’s going to be a loooooooooong winter.

 

Bear with me folks.  But in the meantime, I am still taking requests if anyone other than Em is still reading.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman. Nor an Empire. Discuss.

So I’ve been a little verklempt lately.  I suppose it's time for me to explain myself.

If you've been reading for any period of time, you've probably noticed that my posts can generally be grouped into the following categories: Shit That Amuses Me, Shit That Pisses Me Off, and Shit That Makes Me Very, Very Sad.  Sometimes, I can even manage to be Very, Very Sad about something that Pissed Me Off and tell you about it in an Amusing manner.  I’m a good little multi-tasker.

I put things out there - it's who I am.  Talking about my shit helps me deal with it, and for some reason, talking about it publicly is much more cathartic than writing it in some squirreled-away journal that only I can see.  But I try to only put my shit out there to the people who will care to read about it - if you're here, it's because I told you how to get here, or you were curious enough to try to find me, or you Googled something one day and found either something that amused you or a trainwreck you couldn't look away from.  I have a Facebook friend (who is really just an acquaintance) who puts all of her shit right there in her feed - between her status updates and notes, I know how nasty her divorce has been, what medication she is on, and just how often she drinks for the wrong reasons.  These are things I don’t know her well enough to know, and never asked to know – it just comes to me.  This is what is known as Oversharing.  I don't smear my neuroses all over the Facebook feeds of 250 people on a daily basis.  My psyche is more like a speakeasy - you have to either be invited, or at least try to figure out the password, secret knock, and supercool handshake.

So why haven’t I been writing?  Well, it started for good reasons.  Last fall, I was just too damned busy to write.  Running a course I had never taught before for over 100 students meant that between lecture prep, lab supervision, and answering the constant e-mails from students and TAs I was working 50-60 hour work weeks, sometimes more.  And loving it.  Add about 2.5 hrs of commuting time every day, and the occasional bit of socializing, and there’s just not much time left to write pithy observations about the meaning of life or the vast metaphysical paradox known as Tila Tequila.  It also doesn’t leave much time for searching for a new job come the end of the semester.  Not that there are many academic jobs that start in the middle of the year anyway.  But I digress.

And since then…well…most of my life just hasn’t been For Public Consumption.  I used to have a fairly no-holds-barred, warts-and-all approach to talking about my life, but when everyone’s conversational opener at every social occasion is, “so how’s the job search going?” I really don’t feel the need to explain yet ANOTHER time that it fucking sucks.  And I think you all might understand why I’m now keeping my personal life…well…personal.  As entertaining as the soap opera of all of my crushes and near-misses has probably been, it’s not really something I want to put out there at this particular time in my life.

The problem with all of this is, in addition to the complete silent treatment you’ve all been receiving, I have now completely lost track of who might still be reading, and what you might want to read about.  And I miss writing.  And quite frankly, I’m starting to go nuts and feel as though I might require something more stimulating than the Tyra show to keep my days occupied.  So I’m going to try something I attempted once before and never fully succeeded at.  We’re going to try All-Request-Week again.  Except this time, I will write on any and every topic* you people suggest.  I can’t guarantee they’ll all be long.  I can’t guarantee they’ll all be good.  But at least they will all BE.  And I think that will be good for me.

Talk amongst yourselves.  Give me a topic.

 

*Excluding aforementioned verboten topics.  Any subject matter that falls under categories including but not limited to: Jobs, Boys, Boys with Jobs, or Giving Jobs (of any sort) to Boys will be immediately disqualified.

We Are Not Alone.

You know, I find that the way I write changes based on who I think/know is reading.  And lately, I've been so caught up in my own head that I'm back in a place where I find myself writing as though I don't really think anyone is reading at all - kind of like how I write my Chowhound posts (it still always strikes me as weird finding out anybody is actually READING those damned things).  You know what happens when you do that?

 

Really boring blog posts.

 

I mean, let's face it.  I am, when it comes down to it, an entertainer at heart.  I thrive on feedback.  So I figured maybe I needed a little reminder that there are, in fact, people out there.  Well...that is, if any of you still are.  In order to find out, I thought it was high time to see what sort of Googling people were doing to land themselves on this here blog.  Now, my Google hits have been pretty quiet due to a lull in publication, but there have been some interesting trends of late.  Let's begin, shall we?

 

1) By far the number one Google that gets people here is some iteration of the phrase "like agnes, agatha, jermaine and jack."  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE.  You should KNOW where that comes from.  The man...the poet...the damn bard himself...Biz Markie.  In the immortal classic, "Just a Friend."

It's not so much a rap song as spoken-word poetry.  If you landed here trying to find out what happened to Biz, my deepest apologies for landing on a post full of my 30th-birthday navel-gazing.  The last I saw of him he was still spinning and did a season of Celebrity Fit Club.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  I still love ya, Biz.

 

2) Lately (and by lately, I mean in the last two days or so - WTF?) there have been a flurry of hits based on the following phrases:

"blerg spelling"       "blerg ikea"          "blerg umlaut"

Okay, was there a 30 Rock rerun on in the States that I missed?  I can't imagine why so many people have such a sudden, desperate need to know how "blerg" is spelled.

For the record: it has an "e" not a "u" and an umlaut over the vowel.  And I silently judge you if you spell it wrong.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding - ain't nuttin' silent about it.

 

3) Mike L. - someone I sort of knew in college.  Am now feeling mildly guilty about including his last name in a post, something I make a policy of never doing.  But he was kind of a celebrity...if you went to UVa from 1994-1998.  I feel better if I imagine him Googling himself.  More pathetic for him, less for me.

 

4) There is no #4.  Sadly, this phrase has never turned up in my keyword analysis, although it certainly should have.

 

5) Once again, many searches for Wahooty.  {waves} Hiya!  Guess you found what you were looking for!

 

6) Many more for "pennsic onion dome beth."  Um, see above.  {eyebrow raise}

 

7) "cheating on boyfriend with labmate." Wow, that is weirdly specific.  Thankfully, I have never done that.  But I'm DYING to know who did...apparently somewhere in Tennessee.

 

8) "the alchemist porn"  I have no idea what that would be.  Some sort of allegorical porn where some really well-hung dude starts a journey to find the perfect silicone lay, learns to use a set of ben-wa balls to make decisions and turn dildos to gold, only to find that Jenna Jameson was [SPOILER ALERT] lying spread-eagled under a tree in his hometown the entire time?

On second thought, I should TOTALLY make that movie.

These last couple, BTW, land you square on my homepage.  Um, not sure what that says about me exactly.

 

9) And, in the "um, what?" category, we have a tie:

       "bengay scentless"     and     "breaking up is hard to do clapping"

Yes, actually, it is.  It is always difficult to break up with someone, but even more so if they are applauding while you're doing it.

 

10) Finally, the one that showed up TWICE today and inspired, nay REQUIRED me to write this post:

"is it safe to eat cheese that smells like feet"

 

This has been Wahooty, at your service.  Thank you, and good night.