Foodie

Getting together this weekend with some friends to have a tapas party. Food. All kinds of little foods. Lots of little tiny foods with big flavors. So, I get to eat a lot of little food.

A lot of food. The chorizo. The olives. The shrimp. The scallops. Grilled asparagus wrapped in Serrano ham. And did I mention the sangria?

I wonder sometimes why food excites me so much? I am heading out to Wegman’s on my lunch hour to shop for the tapas dishes I will be preparing and I am excited beyond belief. The produce aisle. The seafood. The bread.

So tomorrow afternoon, the girls will be preparing all sorts of foodstuff while the guys will be downstairs, practicing for their first surf music gig in a year.  I wonder how that will go….cooking Spanish-inspired food while listening to Dick Dale-inspired music?

Food…I even wrote a poem about it a while ago. Here is the abbreviated version:

Comfort Food

What does it mean when
Coffee is more comforting
than an embrace,
And wine more than words?

On a cold winter’s night
Mashed potatoes
Osso buco
That’s all I need.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity. ~Voltaire

Frogger

If I can make my 40-minute commute to work each morning unscathed, I consider myself lucky. Driving in New Jersey is hazardous to your health. It causes rapid heart beat and palpitations. It causes stroke-like symptoms of numbness and brain fog.

Yesterday morning I was almost T-boned.

I didn’t even have time to blast my horn. I literally had only seconds to swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic to avoid his front end from slamming into my passenger side. I was saved only by the fact there was no oncoming traffic in those few seconds. I was shaken and flabbergasted! Especially when I looked in my rear view mirror after returning to my own lane, and the guy was steadily making his turn, not batting an eye. No hesitation or braking. Just going where he wanted to go. There was a stop sign right in front of his face but of course it wasn’t meant for him.

Driving in New Jersey you always have to be on the defensive. You have to know there are people out there driving who should not be driving. There are people without car insurance. There are people without driver’s licenses. There are people who have failed driving tests. But they just keep on truckin’.

Inconsideration. Inconsideration and a real-time game of Frogger. That’s what you get when driving in the great Garden State.

Automobiles are not ferocious.... it is man who is to be feared. ~Robbins B. Stoeckel

Devil's Food

Last week I embarked on a “clean eating” plan. Eat no processed food. Eat from the earth. If man created it, do not eat it. In theory, it was a good idea, and great for my health. And I was able to do it for three days, until someone at work shoved a chocolate covered donut down my throat.

Okay, so she didn’t shove it down my throat. But she did pick up the Entenmanns’s box from the food table I had managed to avoid all day, carry it to my desk during the three o’clock danger hour, and hold the box of glossy-chocolate sugary-smelling orbs in front of my face. That’s equivalent to holding a gun to my head and making me eat it. That’s even worse than the devilish serpent offering me fruit from the forbidden tree - because at least eating from the tree of forbidden fruit would have been “eating clean”.

There’s food everywhere. How do you escape it? I just now found out Entenmann’s is even in my spellchecker. I had it spelled wrong. How do brand names of processed food products end up in Microsoft’s spellchecker? Food is everywhere. You cannot escape it.

So I have decided to still eat clean - at least 75% of the time. That is practical. That is doable. At least I think it is.

High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us? ~Annita Manning

So Long

Goodbye Michael. Goodbye Walter. Goodbye Farah.

Goodbye Jon. Goodbye Kate. Goodbye plus-eight.

Goodbye Guiding Light. Goodbye Dirty Sexy Money. Goodbye Lipstick Jungle.

Goodbye Circuit City. Goodbye Pontiac. Goodbye Starbucks on every corner.

Goodbye two-salary households. Goodbye savings account. Goodbye George Bush.

Goodbye property tax rebates. Goodbye Homestead rebates. Goodbye Jon Corzine.

Goodbye 2009.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. ~Hal Borland

The Cat Ate My Homework

Recently our cat Susie has been crazy hungry. She has a thyroid issue and extreme thirst and hunger are part of the symptoms, and she has been on medication for it quite a few years. But lately something has really gotten into her. She is cat, dog, and mouse all at the same time.

She begs for food while my husband and I are eating dinner. I thought it was fun at first, letting her sample from my plate after I was done, to see what she would eat - onions, broccoli, tomato vodka sauce. She ate it all. But now I push her away from my plate, regretting having started that bad habit.

There was a loaf of cranberry bread on our table, still in the pan and covered with aluminum foil. I had to chase her off the table after I caught her trying to scratch away the foil to see what was underneath. A few hours later I heard a crash and a tinny-sounding muffle. I came downstairs and there it was, loaf pan knocked to the floor, crumbs and nuts and cranberries skewed all over, Susie the cat munching away.

That next day I was taking a pumpkin pie out of the oven, and was just about to set it on the table to cool, but then there she was, hopping right up on the chair, her nose sniffing the cinnamon air, and I knew what was bound to happen were I to leave the pie there to cool. So, I lifted it high on the top of the refrigerator, almost spilling the hot mushy goodness in the process.

While food shopping Sunday morning I had picked up a loaf of “yoga bread” for a friend to try, and had it sitting on the landing by our front door so my husband would remember to drop it off to her. The next morning I awoke early and went downstairs to feed that hungry begging bugger of a cat, and what did I see? The plastic bread bag gnawed open, crusty crumbs all over the place.

Let me tell you, she’s damn lucky she’s cute.

Over the weekend my dashboard light for “check tire pressure” came on. Finally on Tuesday morning on my way to work I stopped at my trusted, tried, and true gas station to put air in my tires. I parked, grabbed a couple quarters from my console, got out into the brisk morning air and took the cap off the tire valve, grabbed and untangled the always-tangled dirty tubing and turned to put my money in the air machine and then I saw it. A tiny note taped to the machine – “out of order”.

Later that same day on my lunch hour I went to the ATM to deposit a check. I pulled up and the screen was black and guess what? Out of order. The whole bank was out of order, actually. They had a power failure for no apparent reason.

It reminded me of a show I used to watch – I think it was on ShowTime. The main character was played by Eric Stoltz and on each and every episode there was a point where he was trying to accomplish some task or errand and inevitably when he went to do it, there it was, a sign that read “out of order”. The show was actually called Out of Order. I thought it was a great show, but it only ran for one season.

Recently my life has been out of order, as much as everyone’s has been this past year or so to some extent or another. I am glad the year is coming to a close. Winter is the perfect excuse to hibernate from the world, curl up with a big book and mug of peppermint tea and dream of spring, and sun, and newness. Rebirth.

Rebirth. Like my irises. They are blooming in December. Even Mother Nature is out of order.


“The elevator to success is out of order. You'll have to use the stairs... one step at a time.” ~Joe Girard

Hi Honey, I'm Home!

What’s wrong in the world when the wife gets up in the morning and goes to work, while the husband and his friends go hang out at Starbucks?

This recession has really flip-flopped things. Women have become the breadwinners. Statistics show it, and I have seen it my own world.

Is it wrong of me to want to go back to the 1950s? Wearing a cotton dress each day with a cute frilly apron. Luncheons with the ladies. Game of pinochle anyone? Bridge, perhaps? Keeping house. Starching a shirt collar or two.  Bonbons at 3, only for me....

...Sweetly idling the day away until it came time to have the husband's cocktail ready in hand and kiss ass the minute he walks through the door after a hard day’s work?

“I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy.”
~Marilyn Monroe