...it feels colder inside when it's colder outside, even though the inside temperature is exactly the same as always? I find this most perplexing.
It snowed here last week – TWICE – which basically means that I snacked a lot in order to fortify myself to survive the long, harsh winter. The good news is that I should be all set to weather a famine lasting approximately ten years.
Okay, so this is in direct contravention to my previous post, but a few days ago I began severely restricting the amount of caffeine I drink.
I used to have some Diet Coke during the day at work, maybe some tea, but ever since I was sick, the taste of Diet Coke just doesn't appeal to me anymore. (I wasn't drinking anything but water and milk then, and by the time I felt better, it just seemed too syrupy.)
Of course, I still enjoy a certain caffeinated beverage at night – as some of you who followed me from my previous blog may recall – and I would drink, oh, two or three or ten a night. Fine, maybe not ten, but as many as five a night. And then just water all day at work. And EVERY frigging workday, I get a headache in the afternoon.
It wasn't until I went out to lunch and drank a ton of iced tea – and had NO headache that day – that it occurred to me that there might be a connection. Withdrawal hurts.
I decided to limit myself to one Most Delicious Caffeinated Beverage in the World That Shall Go Unnamed Here for Anonymity Purposes per day. I hope to reap great health-related rewards in the near future.
But meanwhile, my world is a dark and bleak place.
So sorry for the lack of posting. I've been traveling for work, which features all of the frustrations and discomfort of traveling for pleasure with none of the blinding drunkenness.
On the way there, of course I had the window seat next to a sumo wrestler. I don't know if he actually was a sumo wrestler, but I kind of suspect he was. He was wreathed in an intriguing scent I think I shall dub "eau de delicatessen," 'cuz he kinda smelled like bread and 'cuz he kinda smelled like a day-old-meat filled dumpster. He had the armrest raised, and when I sat down I could not avoid the mounds of clammy flesh that moistly abutted my own and encroached ever further into my space no matter how intimately I hugged the window.
In retrospect, I should have immediately approached the flight crew the moment I saw what was going on, because it's possible they could have moved me. But the aisle was full of people, so I waited until the plane was in the air before looking around for other seats, and by then all that was left were middle seats (probably because people spread out into open aisle seats as they found them). I don't think people would be happy about me moving into a middle seat when they had all that open space.
Plus I didn't want to be rude to Mr. Sumo, who for all that he took up half my seat wasn't necessarily a bad guy. What's the etiquette of switching seats to escape the obesity of the person sitting next to you? What, if anything, do you say to the person when you retrieve your carry-on? And why the heck doesn't the airline require people like that to buy two seats to begin with instead of permitting them to adversely possess half of my seat?
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Out at the client's, first thing in the morning the client wants to do is visit Starbucks. Which is actually located within their office. I've never seen that before, but I guess I should have seen it coming. There's one in my building, but why suffer the indignity and pain of going all the way down the elevator when you could just lean out your door and shout your order down the hall?
I hate Starbucks. Actually, I hate coffee, and you go to Starbucks to get coffee; ergo, I hate Starbucks. But if a client says, "Let's go to Starbucks," you go. My usual I-hate-coffee Starbucks mainstay is the milkshake. It has some fancy name, like frappelattedelicioucino, but really it's a milkshake. However, that has lots of calories, and I'm a fattie who doesn't deserve lots of calories.
So I ordered the chai tea. I love tea, but I hate getting it at Starbucks 'cuz you pay $5 for something I could make at home with a little dunky teabag, which is exactly how Starbucks makes it anyway and then what's the point?
I get my chai tea, and...oh my God, it was awesome. It was the best most delicious chai tea ever, all creamy and sweet and aromatic. It made me weep.
Later in the day, when the client wanted to return to Starbucks, of course I went along and again ordered my chai tea. Only what I got in return was stupid chai tea, teabag and all. No creamy or sweet or aromatic yumminess. Just tea.
This was a most perplexing turn of events, causing much consternation on my part, until I was informed that I am an idiot. I guess the thing I got in the morning was chai tea latte (not what I had ordered, by the way). I would never order a latte because I hate coffee and latte is coffee. I was again informed that I am an idiot, and "latte" means "milk," and the chai tea latte has no coffee in it. Oookay, I knew "latte" meant "milk" in Italian, but I thought that in English coffeehouse jargon it meant a kind of coffee drink containing lots of milk. So for years I have avoided everything at Starbucks with "latte" in the name, except for the aforementioned milkshake which I long ago determined had no coffee in it and now that I think of it probably isn't called a latte anyway.
Whatever. The point is that I was wrong and the chai tea latte is yummy and I am now ADDICTED to Starbucks. I ordered a huge one at the airport when I was still on the firm's dime.
Unfortunately, my newfound obsession poses various problems. Namely the fact that I am el cheapo, and I don't want to pay $5 for glorious chai tea nectar when I can drink perfectly good algae-bloomed tap water in the office for free, dagnabbit. I've been pathetically reduced to scrounging for free Starbucks. I already filled out a survey to receive a $5 Starbucks gift card. Who knows what dark paths my addiction will lead me down next....
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!!!!
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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?
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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?
So please, for the love of God, stop with the double dipping, people! You disgust me.
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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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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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.
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!
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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)
