Why Must You Taunt Me, Mystery Burger?

A fast food restaurant incessantly advertises on the cable stations around here. It sounds really good, too. Now apparently they have some type of luau burger. That comes with pineapple! It's as if they reached right into my dreams and pulled out a burger. Topped with pineapple!

Unfortunately, I don't think this burger place actually exists. I have never in my life seen one, and it sounds totally made up. (I mean, really. Who puts pineapple on a burger? Except for a burger GENIUS, that is.) Why? Why do they keep advertising imaginary burgers at a nonexistent restaurant? Oh, the humanity!!!!

-----

In other restaurant news, I think I need to move. There are lots and lots of great restaurants around here, and I've been eating out every Friday night for a long time. Lately, though, everything is booked solid all night long. I went to the Salvadoran place to eat los platanos y un tamal, and those bastards told me there would be a one-hour wait. So then I went to the seedy Tex-Mex joint with the extensive margarita menu to eat Mexican wienerschnitzel, which sounds wrong but is so so right. And they told me it would be a two-hour wait! So then I went to the classier Tex-Mex place that just opened to eat enchiladas...and by that point there was a three-hour wait. I ended up at a nouveau "New Mexico" style place where I had to eat some weird pie thing and blue corn chips and the tables were so close that I practically had to sit in the lap of a Mad Max reject and felt totally uncomfortable attempting to carry on a conversation, which was pretty much impossible anyway given the loud music. But the wait was only 45 minutes. Sweet!

It's no wonder so many of my outings end up at Chili's. I am not hating on the Chili's; it is good and the drink menu yummy and at least I can get a table (eventually). But if I have to eat one more southwestern eggroll I think I will go mad.

It has been suggested to me that if we were to go to dinner at 5:30, all our problems would be solved. That's rich coming from people who can leave work at 5 and have no commute. On Fridays, I leave work at 6 (risking serious scandal and imminent unemployment) and, if I'm lucky, get home by 6:45. Then I want to change because I have to wear an uncomfortable suit to work with hose and heels (again, unknown experiences to those who spend Fridays in jeans and flip-flops).

Anyway, I want good food, goshdurnit. I want to dine on Indian curries and Japanese steak and Venezuelan cachapas and really just about anything as long as it tastes good (just no fish 'cuz eeeew). And is it asking so much to want to do so at 7:30 on a Friday night?

-----

Ho hum. The last time I got on this computer was three weeks ago. It just seems like so much of an effort to, ugh, walk into the room and turn it on and wait for it to load. And my laptop-on-lap idea – undeniably brilliant thought it was – simply won't work in my house because I don't have wireless Internet. I'm left to scavenge for it elsewhere while watching the Super Bowl.

By the way, I watched the Super Bowl – and really enjoyed it. I hate sports, but I hate Tom Brady more. That made it fascinating, and oh so satisfying. I thought I was the only one, but I've since uncovered a vast cult of outraged womanhood that banded together last Sunday to root for his downfall. That's really kind of special, don't you think?

I KNEW It!

So please, for the love of God, stop with the double dipping, people! You disgust me.

-------

I discovered a really totally cool thing. See, if you take your laptop computer, and put it on top of your lap, you can use your computer in all kinds of cool places besides at your desk in your office! It's AMAZING. I'm sitting in front of the TV right now. I am sure you are as stunned as I am. You should try it. No, really, no need to thank me. I am a true humanitarian.

Too Rich

Apparently I, along with pretty much every unmarried lawyer, am too rich for the "middle-class" tax rebate.


That's fine. Just fine. Go stimulate your own frigging economy. I was planning on doing some really good stimulating, but whatever.

Elegy for an Eggroll

O my town's eggrolls
You taste so bad.
I wish I could love you
But you make me sad.

I would like to eat you
But instead I just cry.
Why can't you taste good?
"Why?" I wail. "Why?"

I've been to Chicago.
Their eggrolls are yummy!
But instead I live here
Where eggrolls are crummy.

Those Chicago eggrolls
Have fried dough for a shell.
The filling is heaven.
Here eggrolls are hell.

The shells are too thin.
The filling is yucky.
I'd eat them for dinner
If they weren't so sucky.

A Chicago eggroll
Puts me in a good mood.
I've eaten eggrolls here.
Those are days that I've rued.

But I'm not giving up.
I won't be bitter.
I want tasty eggrolls
And I'm not a quitter.

And so I now have
a question or two.
If you know a good eggroll
Please tell me, won't you?

I Will Live to Blog Another Day

Finally managed to get my test results. It is very confusing, providing lots of abbreviations and cryptic numbers and the normal range for each item. One level was really high over "normal," red-flagged even. Decided was dying. Set out onto Internet to determine meaning of the I'm-dying abbreviation.

Turns out that "HDL" = "good cholesterol," and having a really high number over the normal range = I shall live forever. Hooray!

Old

It was my dad's 65th birthday on Saturday. That means he is all old and stuff. I will add some nice pictures as soon as I can spend some quality time with the scanner....

We had a great dinner at a steak place, per his request. It was very far north from where I live (I won't specify since I'm trying to be, like, anonymous, but if you know me maybe you can figure it out).

I haven't been up to that area in years, not since I looked at an apartment up there back when I was in college – I was trying to find an apartment with a yard for my big dog, and you pretty much had to go up there to find that.

Back then, there were those apartments and the headquarters of some corporation (which grazed and/or grazes livestock on its massive campus, for some sort of farming tax break) and absolutely nothing else. Now there is an entire really gorgeous area with condos and faux-urban streets and tons of restaurants and stores and trees with Christmas lights. I thought it was great. I would totally move there if it wouldn't make my already extremely excessively obscenely long commute at least twice as long.

The dinner was really great. A sat on my lap and ate more of my delicious duck (I suffer from steak aversion ever since the tragic steak overdose of 2003) than I think I did. And a lot of my mother's steak as well. I would wonder how she stays so skinny if I hadn't seen firsthand how she does nothing but run around maniacally for all hours of the day. Sometimes if she has nowhere to go she'll just run around and around in circles.

Anyway, shortly after we sat down, a woman came up to us and asked me if I was, well, me. And since I am me, I said yes. It turns out that she was my dance teacher from over a decade ago. This probably won't be of interest to anyone but D, who took dance with me (and is in fact where I met her fabulousness), but there ya go. It was so random and funny. I thought it was so nice of her to actually come over like that. She looked very different from what I remember her but still very slender and dancer-like. She said she is now a stay-at-home mother to her 8- and 3-year-old children. She seemed very happy.

This is all well and good, but dude, how are people recognizing me from back then? For crying out loud, I like to think I look DIFFERENT, and maybe even BETTER. (Because, for all that I danced back then, I didn't work out and primp like I do now, and I like to think that maybe just maybe I am THINNER and possibly PRETTIER but c'mon who am I kidding?)

Plus I think I haven't aged well in general, like all the stress over the years has shown itself around my eyes, and my predilection for straw-usage has left its mark on my upper lip as if I were a smoker, and basically I'm just plain OLD.

And, to be perfectly honest, I have, in typical holiday fashion, gotten really fat over the last month. As in...oh, I can't believe I'm admitting this, but if I can't tell the truth to you, random Internet stranger, can I be honest with anyone????...I have gotten fat to the tune of about 10 pounds in the last month. I would be worried about that – I AM upset about that – but to an avowed yo-yo dieter like myself, that's just par for the course. Just, alas, the HIGH part of the course. If she could but have seen post-surgery me....! Give me a month and all will be right as rain. As soon as I get rid of that awesome gift basket from one of my clients. It's got almond toffee AND walnut fudge! So nice when people know the real you.

So, I was a little bit sad that I was so incredibly recognizable even after so much time. Okay, people I haven't seen since the seventh grade have recently recognized me, but still. Still.

---------------

Meanwhile, I went in for a bunch of medical-type stuff and tests last month. No concerns; just a general wish to be more attentive to my health following the great health scare of 2007 (just as tragic, but with more psychotropic medication, than the steak incident of 2003). They told me test results would be available at a particular website using the provided username and password, right about...now.

I tried logging in tonight for the first time.

The website won't load and won't load and won't load. Maybe they're upgrading because it's Sunday night – that's reasonable, right? – but it would be nice to know if I'm dying before I toddle off to bed.

Life is just way too hard sometimes.

Fair or Fowl

http://www.garfield.com/comics/comics_archives_strip.html?2007-ga071226

So, the thing is, I really love Christmas. Like a whole lot. Like more than you do. Neener neener, so there.

No, wait, come back. Let's not fight. I don't mean it, any of it. I'm just lashing out in a pathetic attempt to avoid the pain of post-holiday letdown.

It's simply my favorite time of year. I love the decorations and the special foods and toasty fires and gaudy Christmas sweaters and cheesy Christmas movies and the excitement and the happiness and really just about everything.

But once again, it's zipped right by me, and all I have to look forward to are months and months of Not-Christmas in which I feebly attempt to recreate the holiday spirit by adorning my house with seasonally appropriate hearts or shamrocks or bunnies or flags that do little to fill the gaping Santa-shaped void. Alas, that this day has come! Woe to us all!!!

I've decided that my ideal job would be running a year-round Christmas store. If it were at all a viable business model where I live, I'd go for it. I can't express the sheer rage I felt when I heard that this is precisely Linda Tripp's current endeavor. Why, a grinch like her simply does not deserve to live my dream! Bah, humbug!

-----------------------

Anywho. A few years ago I found a great recipe for coq au vin. I've been making it for Christmas Eve dinner ever since, and it's been a big hit. 'Cuz it's all yummy and stuff.

This year, I was in a huge rush to buy all of the ingredients on the 23rd. I had so little time that, rather than copying the necessaries to a shopping list, I just ran out with the recipe in hand. The store was a madhouse, and though I wielded my shopping cart with full battering force, sending old ladies and small children scattered trembling in my merciless wake, it nevertheless took so long that I ended up missing the movie I was supposed to see that night. In all the hubbub, I somehow left my precious recipe behind.

Fortunately I realized it before I got home, and I went racing back into the store in full panic mode, only to find it innocently lying at the register where I had forgotten it. But for a few moments there, I knew the fear, that chilling ice-water gush of fear that everyone experiences at some point in their life – that of a Christmas without fancy French stew! The horror, it truly is too great to contemplate.

And the worst part is that, while I usually type out my recipes so that they are incorporated into my fancy self-coded, fully-searchable-by-multiple-parameters, cross-referenced, really-really-pretty Recipe Database (it's called OCD – deal with it), I somehow neglected to do so with this one.

So you see, the recipe would have been lost! Lost, I say! Lost beyond all recovery!

In the interest of preventing such a dreadful disaster from ever occurring, I decided to present the recipe to you.

It's from Parade magazine, but I note that recipes are subject to limited copyrightability, and only to the extent that they encompass some creativity beyond that of listing ingredients with basic factual instructions for preparing the dish. Ahem. In that regard, I have taken some liberty with the recipe.

(Comic strips, well, those are, like, copyrightable and stuff. I figure that there is an exception somewhere southeast of fair use, covering permissible reproduction in the event of post-Christmas depression....)

Coq au Vin

3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 pound bacon, cut into 1/4 inch pieces
4 pounds chicken (I buy chicken breast strips that are easy to trim and cut into manageable pieces; the recipe calls for 2 chickens of 3 pounds each, simply quartered)
3/4 cup chopped shallots
2 pounds carrots, cut into appr. 1-inch pieces
3 tablespoons chopped garlic
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 pounds white mushrooms, quartered with stems removed (I omit the mushrooms)
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups defatted chicken broth (fat-free canned is fine)
2 cups Burgundy wine
1/4 cup cognac
1/4 cup tomato paste
1 tablespoon red currant jelly
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried
1 bay leaf
Salt and black pepper, to taste
6 tablespoons chopped parsley
Parsleyed potatoes or egg noodles

1. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add bacon and cook for 10 min. until slightly browned. Remove with slotted spoon to paper towel-lined bowl to drain.

2. In the same pot, brown the chicken pieces (about 4 minutes per side). Set aside.

3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

4. Add shallots and carrots to pot and cook over medium-low heat, about 10 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook 5 minutes longer.

5. Add butter (and mushrooms, if including mushrooms) to pot and cook for 5 minutes. Sprinkle the vegetables with flour and cook for 2 minutes longer.

6. Add chicken broth, wine, and cognac. Bring to a boil, cook until the sauce thickens, about 5 minutes. Keep stirring throughout, scraping bottom of pot occasionally.

7. Stir in tomato paste, red currant jelly, brown sugar, thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper. Add bacon and chicken and incorporate into the sauce. Bring to a boil.

8. Cover the pot and cook in the oven for 30 minutes.

9. Remove the cover and cook in the oven for an additional 30 minutes. (I left it in much longer at a lower heat this time when people were late for dinner, and it turned out better than ever – I'd almost recommend letting it stew for an extra hour or more at very low heat, then increasing the heat for serving.)

10. Stir in parsley and adjust seasonings as desired.

11. Serve with potatoes or noodles. Can be cooked beforehand and reheated later.


Now it is saved for all posterity.

I also make a punch that is loved throughout the land. Might as well throw it in while I'm at it....

Poinsettia Punch

Pour together into a punch bowl:

2 cups cranberry juice
5 ounces Cointreau or Grand Marnier
2 bottles sparkling wine (I find that the sweeter the wine, the better – I prefer Asti Spumante)

Bowl Full of Jelly

It would be nice to know someday what it's like to experience Christmas without that sick stuffed feeling and the resultant coma.

Several years ago, we discovered Christmas Day buffets. All the hotels have them; apparently they're fantastic money makers. They're always quite lovely, with live orchestras and beautiful decorations and all the mimosas you can drink. And food. I hear they have food.

We've enjoyed them a lot – they're great for keeping the Christmas festivities going a little longer. Nice to have an excuse to get dressed up, too.

The only problem is that the new Christmas tradition is for me to make myself desperately ill, each and every time. I will never learn.

Other than that, Christmas was good. I got lots of great presents. Even Santa himself slipped one under the tree – a margarita maker! How DID he know? I've been experimenting with recipes that will work given the amount of shaved ice that's added to the mixture. Any suggestions? The one I tried is too bitter, and I don't want to use the recipe that came with the machine, which calls for a big heaping splash of the margarita-maker maker's own margarita mix. I'd prefer to make it from scratch if I could get it to taste right.

No Lawyers Were Harmed

The Christmas party somehow went off more or less without a hitch. People came, they ate, drank, and made merry, and then they went home. The convergence in the same room at the same time of my lawyerly colleagues and my compatriots from bygone days of yore did not cause the universe to implode. I am fairly certain nobody mentioned my shameful predilection for unlawfully obtained libations. So, all in all, a SUCCESS.

I also totally cleaned up with hostess gifts, a delightful twist I hadn't expected. Maybe I should have. I've had parties before, but not holiday parties. Since it apparently means people give me PRESENTS, you can rest assured that this shall become a tradition. (Next year, however, I will write down what people bring as they enter the house – I have no idea who most of the stuff came from, and few included gift labels. This would not have helped with the people who entered on their own and just set their gifts down somewhere, which apparently happened at least once.)

One snag...slight miscalculation with respect to the amount of food needed. No biggie. Just thirty or so giant sandwiches left over. Five pounds of dip. Three cakes. Ten crates full of assorted beverages.

Anyone wanna come over and raid my fridge?

Festive Frenzy

I think I am slowly going insane. Except by slowly, I mean "really quickly."

I've been running around like nuts all week, and in particular all day today. There is work to be done and deadlines that must be met and things that clients must sign by Christmas Day but OOPS ha ha they are going on vacation starting Thursday afternoon so gee, can't you just shoot the stuff their way right now? Hmmmm, maybe if they had actually responded to my numerous other communications over the last 6 months about this issue, then golly, I might have it ready, but now? NOW I need to prepare these things from start to finish along with all the other people's things and we had a firm-wide section conference/powwow all day today so when I am going to find time to do things hmm maybe RIGHT NOW? Guess so.

And I had to bake a cake tonight because I promise things I can't deliver. And then I did a favor for my brother whom I love. And I still have to clean up the cake stuff in the kitchen and for some crazed reason I decided -- on MONDAY -- to have a Christmas party -- on FRIDAY -- so that is just adding to the stress. And if you're coming to the party that includes people from work please use discretion with respect to issues you raise about me about which work people might be unaware, up to and including the existence of this blog because otherwise I might have to kill you and that would also cause me STRESS.

Oh, and a client offered this great deal for the purchase of a certain item that I decided I wanted to get my dad for Christmas, thinking I could just go pick up the item at one of client's many convenient locations. But then client informed me that I had to go to client's headquarters, which are Far Away, oh, and only during these two hours Thursday afternoon, not a problem, riiiiight? So I have to be at work at 6 a.m. tomorrow so that I can leave really early to pick up the thing which is being offered at a pretty awesome price but I'm starting to think I'd rather pay extra and avoid the trouble plus it's big and so I had to borrow a bigger car. From my dad. Whose gift it is. Who is now being inconvenienced for the sake of his own gift.

And for some reason I can't stop shaking. I can't imagine why!

I can't wait for the holiday. Then I'll have nothing to do all day except relax. And buy presents, wrap presents, bake ten different types of cookies, cook Christmas dinner, run around to all the appointments I put off all year and finally managed to schedule, get my hair cut, do some landscaping, find a cure for cancer, bring about world peace....