Nom, nom, nom!

Rootcrops part whateveritis, OXTAILS!

2009-01-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

Woooooo, GOBAMA! <-- first major offtopic veer ever to make it on here, please recognize.

Okay, Oxtails:
Oxtails used to be cheap trash meat but it's another thing like happened with black beans: the food of the lumpen has been taken on by the elite and rendered all expensive when it shouldn't be. Ain't it always the way?

Anyway, they make a stand-up borscht! Turns out.

I was recently told not to eat them by an anonymous commenter named blang gatang or something to whom I say, "Nothing doing, Flang Orang Atang, I am eating oxtails."

All they are is the tail of the cow; it's like eating necks or something. Who among us has not eaten a neck or two? Calm down about OX TAILS, people.

You simmer them in your stock for a while and take them out before they're too cooked to death. Pick all the meat off the bone. Discard the bone, reserve the meat.

A bunch of stuff is supposed to go in borscht, but basically you'll do fine with onions and beets. I didn't have any cabbage, so I put in a head of cauliflower (weird-seeming but actually pretty innocuous) and a broccoli stalk. No way was I putting in the flowerettes: I knew that would bitterify it pretty bad. It did not turn out too bitter.

The recipe calls for one pound of shredded beets, so I shredded a pound of beets, but the thing is, why do you want obliterated beets? The whole thing is that they're so satisfying to bite into. So at the last minute I diced another pound and put them in--late enough, you know, so they wouldn't be cooked to docility.

I used the recipe from Nothing Beets Borscht! a book of slavic cookery techniques that has like three to five borscht recipes in it. I don't know why I bothered because I ignored most of the instructions. I probably shouldn't even call what I made "borscht," since it doesn't have sausage in it. Okay, so I'll call it boosch. I was going to call it "Boosh," but that's probably copyright infringement (google Frisky Dingo® + Boosh®). Anyway, I'm not going to tell you how to make borscht or boosch because it's just soup, God! But basically the basic technique with the OXTAIL! YUM! is to take the shredded cowtailmeat out of the fridge and fry it up in a lot of butter and garlic and onion and salt and add it at the last minute. Deglaze the butterfried OXTAIL pan with some of the borscht or boosch or bosch broth and add the deglazins.

Durn. I mean "deglazins" to look like "squeezins," as in "corn squeezins," a term I stole from the Simpsons. But "deglazins" doesn't look right, it looks all hifalutin. If I put in an apostrophe, it looks like a possessive, not a dropped G. I hate our language. Only Obama can use it inoffensively. He is the only one allowed to talk or write in our language from now o

Focus on root crops, Part III, not wasting beets

2009-01-16T09:38:00.001-08:00

Not wasting beets is really hard. Beets are so hard to process.

I made garlick-ey greens out of the stocks and tops and threw them in the fridge in a glass bowl with a plate on top. I finished eating the last of these today. (Greens by themselves often seem too virtuous to deal with: if you scramble them into a lot of butter and eggs they may turn into something you actually want to eat.)

The last bunch of beets I had, the ones that didn't go into the root crop medley, those I broke down and boiled. I have some kind of ancient aversion to boiling: my belief, which may be apocryphal, is that all the goodness goes into the water, which you then throw down the drain. But beets are damn impossible, so I boiled them.

The boiled beets were really good! The skins came off in like two seconds, I cut them into wedges and threw vinegar on top and dill and ate them and they were just fine.

This latest bunch is becoming a problem. They keep a long time, but they don't keep: FOREVER. They're still in the fridge because my plan was to make borscht, but to do that I have to break out the oxtails I'm going to use for stock and I have to get into a whole thing. Meanwhile the tomatoes I bought at the market to go into the borscht are about three times as many tomatoes as I needed and they're going soft. Kitchen panic. Kitchen paniiiiic.

Root Crop Medley

2009-01-15T07:07:00.001-08:00

Did I already post about this before? how do people remember what they already posted about before? Well, I must not have because I've only been doing this since the summer and there weren't root crops when I began it.

Root Crop Medley:

get a lot of roots, including:

carrots
beets
parsnips
sweet potato

Cut them into slices. Put the slices in a bowl and pour olive oil over them. Toss. Oil a cookie sheet. (There can't be too much oil, basically.) Put the oiled root slices on the oiled cookie sheet. Roast at 500 'til they're soft. Cut into 1/2-inch cubes. Cut some blue cheese into similarly sized cubes. Mince basil or dill or both. Mix together. Store.

Use instead of croutons on salad, in co. with balsamic vinegar. Or not: the jury is still out on this Q. because root crop medley is really sweet and so is balsamic. It might be a sweet overload.

It freezes well, but don't do what I did and freeze a whole truck-sized bucket because what's the point of that, you have to defrost the whole entire thing and what, you're going to re-freeze in individual portions? Don't be a daft monkey: freeze your root crop medley in small, single-day portions.

My medley always has too many sweet potatoes in it. Beets can also overload it; you want to be a bit sparing or they'll dye the whole thing fuchsia and it won't look like amazing confetti. Carrots? A-OK. Parsnips? PARSNIPS ARE GREAT! WHY DON'T PEOPLE EAT THESE THINGS ANYMORE? THEY ARE GREAT!

Focus on... root crops! Part ONE.

2009-01-12T13:36:00.000-08:00

Over the holiday break we featured: The Carrot.

The carrot is orange. Which is a bonus.

With the carrot I paired fresh turmeric, which showed up in the market. Turmeric is also orange. O, how it is orange. It made my lovely little blue-and-white apron orange forever. Now it is an Apron of the Gator Nation. (Titletown, woo.)

More on aprons to follow in a later post.

Turmeric doesn't have much taste to it. But they say it has the antioxidants or what have you. You got to figure anything that brightly colored has to be doing something, good or bad. So I sliced it up with the carrots and threw it in a pan with some butter and oil and baked it. I put other stuff in there that was orange, namely kumquats. It made an interesting, marmeladey side dish.

Then later I baked up a bunch of carrots without the additions and pureed them and made pumpkin pie out of carrots. You know how people will try to pass off sweet potato pie as pumpkin pie and it is forever the saddest thing? Well, that has happened in our family the past couple of Christmases to everyone's great sorrow, so I decided to take action to ensure it will never happen again by passing off carrot pie as pumpkin pie. I think I have dealt the death blow to the yam pie gambit.

RESOLVED:
Carrot pie? Not a substitute for pumpkin pie.

OTOH?
Carrot pie: weirdly not bad!

It's surprising. Neither carrot nor sweet potato makes a bad pie. Nevertheless, if they are handled like pumpkin, both carrot and sweet potato make a disappointing pie.

So some out-of-box thinking needs to obtain. A wholly new and separate pie modality for orange, pasty things that aren't pumpkin must be developed. One possible solution might be citrus.

Spaghetti Sauce, Part the last.

2009-01-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

Then when you have your stewed tomatoes and your tomato paste, you take a few Italian sausages with the fennel seasoning, you know? And you de-case them and hurl them in your big sauce pot with onions and cook gently 'til the onions are defanged and the sausage nibs are browned. Add garlic and cook 'til the garlic is right... for you. Add all the usual seasoning: more fennel seeds (which you can whirl in the coffee grinder in order to render more potent), oregano, marjoram, basil and yadda whatever. Then you mix the three stages together. Or before you do that, if there's more than one way that garlic is right... for you, you can add more garlic toward the end. Like say you like the taste of cooked to hell garlic, the taste of gently cooked garlic, and the taste of basically raw garlic. You would make sure all these garlic modalities make it into your sauce.

Then you gently simmer and stir your three stages 'til the flavors have an opportunity to "meld." Scrape the results into some storage receptacles and put those into the refrigerator to allow their contents to continue melding.

Make lasagna and so on out of this. Lasagna is really the easiest thing in the world. One you don't need noodles, two, even if you're still carbified, you know you don't have to cook the noodles, right? You don't. Just put the dry noodles in the glass pan with the various sloppy stuff and when they come out of the oven, they'll be cooked. But you don't need to eff wid no noodles in the first place: they are a waste of your life.

Giant Latin eatsplosion!

2008-12-23T13:50:00.000-08:00

Continuing in the fine holiday tradition of cutting corners (eating out everywhere and turning random weblather into a blag), we have:

"this is bizaaaare! this is only the second time I've heard of pupusas in my life, the first time being about... three hours ago when I was paying for my pozole at La Tienda Latina.
Q. Donde esta las pupusas en mi hometown?
A. Ain't nans."

If you want to know what a pupusa is, go to here. I don't know what a pupusa is, having never seen one.

Pozole is red soup with hominy and meat and fresh vegetable shakings and lime.

Giant Asian eatsplosion!

2008-12-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

Orlando sucks as hard as it is possible TO suck, except for the little Saigon neighborhood. Here are two reviews of the restaurant where we surfeited ourselves. The first one is mistaken on a few points, the second one points that out.

User Reviews for Chan's Chinese Cuisine

What a trip

10/11/2008 Posted by hello0420
My family and I went to Chan's three weeks ago. Some background info on myself. Born in Hong Kong (where the dim sum is delish) and I own a dim sum restaurant in the northern part of Florida. We decided to go to Chan's to compare the food and the service, and see how we could improve ours. After reading such wonderful reviews in this site, I was hoping to get amazed..but unfortunately I was not. After going to Chan's, I came to understand that mines is the best. In the parking lot-small of pieces of glass and big chunks, so beware where you walk. When we entered we were served tea and we did not know that they charged you 50 cents per person. We were seated near "the bar". Honestly, the atmosphere is a bit tacky and dirty. I did not even bother to ask for water because their glasses looked uncleaned. The food had the same aspect as the restaurant, tacky (old shredded lettuce as a garnish for some stale fried tofu) and the plates has residue on them. After ordered four plates we were out of there. When it was time to pay we received the check of $25 and take into account that we had ordered only four small entries. The owner seemed bothered when I asked her the price of each dish. I'm into the restaurant business myself, and even when I'm really busy... I will treat every costumers nicely if they ever have any inquiries. I warn every person who has the slightest thought of going into Chan's. No offense to the people who wrote previous reviews, but they are just enchanted with the thought of eating Dim Sum. If they ever had really good Dim Sum food and service, their reviews wouldn't be the same . I know that they see a lot of Asians families whenever they eat at Chan's, but most likely they are people like me who were there the only and the last time. I have my Dim Sum restaurant in the northern part of Florida, I don't advertise much because I have plenty of locals who already know of us. Good food and great service makes food yummy and satisfying = )

Chan's is good.

12/22/2008 Posted by NomNomNom
If you want to quibble over having to pay 25 cents for a bottomless cup of jasmine tea, better drive on to downtown Orlando as directed by the gigantic Houlihan's "Ur not a style-obsessed bravenewworld moron, ur axshully a foooodie!" billboard looming over little Chan's. There at Houli's you can get the handcrafted Mrs. T's long island ice teas you're used to in comfortably generic surroundings designed for discerning consumers such as you, all for your comfy accustomed price of $7 or something. If, however, you want to eat some divine dumplings, dump your vehicle somewhere in the substandard parking lot and cast your eyes at something more interesting than the ground as you walk into the place. That way you might observe something other than the broken glass that is underfoot everywhere in every slummy bit of every big glitzy dumb city like Orlando. You might see what is good (and not just good: superior) about that part of town. For instance, that Chan's has planted calamondin trees for hedges. This is particularly valuable when you leave the place packed to your back teeth with deliciousness and need a little eye opener citrus burst to avoid falling into a food coma and tumbling into the street. I love Chan's forever. It (and the other stuff in its environs) is the only reason I can think of to go to that benighted city.
Pros: it's like heaven.
Cons: it's in Orlando.

See, I just don't get this hello0420 attitude about restaurants--that plates and glasses have to be rubbed with a rag 'til they look clean or he will not deign. Does not anyone read. Is my question. Did not Orwell tell you that your glisteny steak on your immaculate plate that all looks so perfect was in fact dropped on the floor and stepped on ten seconds ago? Do you want your life run by people like Gordon damn Ramsey?

In our little town we just lost our best Chinese restaurant because of hello0420 attitude. The health inspector noticed a few roaches and some slime, so they threatened to close the place. It wasn't as if the food was transcendent, but it was pretty great to get a big shovelful of duck for $6 of a Sunday morning. The owner fled town in the dark of night without paying thousands of dollars in back rent before the health department could close him. No more $6 bottomless Sunday duckbowl. Thanks, hello0420.

Across the street from Chan's is a huge supermarket (but not the hugest) where you can get advice about boiling live crabs (paralyze them by putting them on ice), durian fruit (there's one in my car, now, getting all warm and gooshy!) and mangdana essence. Mangdana essence is waterbug squeezins. They're useful in Thai cooking, apparently. If you can't deal with dirt and bugs, stay out of restaurants, especially the ones that look clean: they are trying to hide terrible things from you. Best to eat at the places where they whip the lids off and show you the cooked chicken feet or maybe the bowl of batterfried these. (Image from here: http://duckfatandpolitics.blogspot.com/2008/01/mang-da.html)

spaghetti sauce, part II: I should've done part II for part I

2008-12-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

This isn't going to build, now, there's no arc, because part II is less interesting than part I. I was thinking temporal, "beginning, middle, end," when I should've been thinking emOTional. That's the trouble with this "blogging."

Part II is stewed tomatoes. You just cut up a bunch of tomatoes and cook them for less time than you cooked the tomato paste tomatoes. If you add olive oil and garlic, your stewed tomatoes will have "depth!"

You do the same thing and don't bother to blanch and remove skins, just obliterate in the food processor about an hour or so into the cooking process when they're all amorphous and gooshy. Cook them 'til they look like the stuff in the cans.

I can't wait for part III: part III is going to be a real nail-biter!

spaghetti sauce, part one (of three): TOMATO PASTE

2008-12-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

Tomatoes are way out of season, but the 'ponic tomato people at the market are keeping on keeping on and they have some interesting varieties worth investigating despite their lesserthan ponic-ness. I got four different kinds, including those 'Cherokee purple' (cultivars go in single quotes) ones. Everybody raves like they're great, and perhaps they are, but I prefer a more acid tomato, myself. Nevertheless I invested in the 'Cherokee purples' acause they are purple and I figured that feature coupled with their low acidity would make them superior paste tomatoes.

See, 'cause I was gonna make my own paste.

Which I did: I made my own tomato paste.

I made paste out of the purples and stewed tomatoes out of the other three kinds. (I didn't pay too much or any attn to what they all were, but they were essentially your basic snooze-a-rama store tomato, your on-vine tomato, and your high shoulders tomato, in red. I could've gotten yellow high shoulders tomatoes, but I just didn't go for it this time. I just wasn't feeling it for the yellow high shoulders tomatoes. Next week will it be their turn?)

So to make tomato paste what you do is this: cut your purples or plums or whatever into one-inch dice (That implies you have to be precise, but actually you don't. Three-inch wedge works just as well as one-inch dice. Just bash 'em up anywayworks). Put them in a steel stockpot and crank the heat 'til they start jumping around (do not burn). Turn the heat down and simmer for a long time, like an hour. Cool, blast in the food processor, return to boil, simmer 'til you achieve paste. Note that you do not have to parboil and remove the skins. You just obliterate the skins in the food processor. Time saving and less depressing in these scary economic dayz because you're using the whole tomato.

You can't imagine how fulfilling it is to see six pounds of big purple monsters slowly mutate into a cup and a half of delicious paste. You wouldn't think the paste would be so delicious on its own, either--it's just tomatoes boiled down. But turns out you can't resist it! Making tomato paste is really really fun.

Surprise! (The surprise was more clams.)

2008-12-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

They were a new kind that is good raw or cooked.

Did you know that I'm not paying for these dozens of clams I'm eating?

Actually I am getting paid to eat these clams.

That is what I am trying to say about get hooked up.

In a economic downturn such as this, it's hard to beat getting paid to eat.

More CLAMS today!

2008-12-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

And possibly a secret surprise item. I hope it's not more innovation from the geniuses that brought us the oyster powder we had that one time. Evidently somebody thought it might be a good idea to turn oysters into a ramen-flavor-packet-type powder so people could, I don't know, throw it in soup? Mix it into ranch dressing? Sprinkle it in their trail mix? Oyster powder not a good plan. Oyster tasters say NO TO THAT.

I shall report on the clams and the mystery item.

it is possible to eat raw clams

2008-12-04T10:58:00.001-08:00

They're really good, too.

If you've had a cooked clam and if you've had both raw and cooked oysters, then when you're thinking about what a raw clam would be like, you're probably close to right texturally, but you might be off on taste. You're also probably thinking, "ew." But it turns out no! They're less "ew" than cooked clams, which have that jaded, raspy-voiced, "left ajar all afternoon on the hot, tar-specked beach" quality we so often find in hard-living bivalves. And raw clams are far less "ew" than raw oysters. They are much more complex than an oyster, too, visually, texturally and tastily. An oyster is just sortof a gray morass. Not so our friend the clam. Not to dis the oysters, cause I love 'em, but boy, these raw clams! They're just great.

Dark Meat, EXPLOOOOORED

2008-12-02T09:32:00.001-08:00

Now, when we haul off, as I recently did, and recommend people start eating on the darker side of poultry, we mustn't get all rose-colored-glasses about it, as I recently did, and imply that a person can just switch hit just like that, no problems, no setbacks, no period of adjustment.

Because dark meat represents a hurdle for whitemeat devotees.

I've seen a lot of terminology bandied about lately:
-not so fresh
-greasy
-brown

The implication being that white meat is:
-fresh
-not greasy
-white

Let's take these one at a time, and let's take our time, the better to open our eyes to a new kind of way.

First, fresh.

If white meat is fresh and dark meat is not so fresh, the implication is that the legs of the capon, the goose, or the ostrich, died before the breast of the capon, the goose, or the ostrich. Wait, we need to decide on a species. A partridge. We are fixing to eat a partridge. Let's make it Danny Partridge--he's a good gateway free-range bird, since he's the Partridge most similar, phenotypically, anyway, to the Butterballs we're used to.

Okay, so picture this: it's Thanksgiving Eve in Alaska, and Sarah Palin has once again been required by the media to render up a fat load of soundbites. People are bored by her wackedout eyeglass frames by now, so she'll need a dynamic background for her mammerings. That, of course, means her unpaid illegal immigrant farm hand must hoist Danny Partridge up by his Keds, upend him in the giant metal funnel poultry-dispatcher and relieve him of his onerous life.

Consider that done. Now imagine we are looking at the brined, trussed body of Danny Partridge, ready for roasti-

-you know what, this is depressing; I have nothing against that poor little redheaded kid. He had a hard life. Plus the joke is getting old. I'm changing species again.

So Sarah Palin's had one of her howevermany children roast the bald eagle she got from the dude Bush just pardoned last week for shooting all those bald eagles, and the whole Palin clan is sitting down with forks and knives in hand, all ready to eat a really patriotic meal when suddenly the pregnant one's boyfriend pipes up:

"No dark meat for me, thanks, it's never seemed quite fresh somehow."

But all the meat on the bird died when the bird died. So all the meat is exactly the same age as all the rest of the meat. It is all of the exact same freshness!

Plus I'm pretty sure a bald eagle is entirely dark meat. Dark meat is simply muscle that gets used, as opposed to white meat, which is muscle that lies flabbily and unnecessarily and uselessly against the bone merely because it has been bred to be there. Eagles, being wild and free Americans, have not been bred to have useless meat on them. They use their breast muscles to do all kinds of wild free American stuff like fly in whenever they see a knot of buzzards on the side of the road so they can kick ass and get way more than their share of decayed armadillo.

Bristol's boyfriend sure is lucky he signed on with the Palin babymill. He must have spent his whole youth palling around with old washed up terrorists if he thinks it's okay to say the meat of the symbol of our nation is "not so fresh."

Offing the grid

2008-12-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

Michael Pollan was on the TV last weekend. I am glad he will not be Agriculture Tsar because he can't differentiate between lie and lay and I know Our Leader can't stomach too many grammatical idiots in his administration. Despite the intellectual inadequacies and unfortunate resemblence to Hank Paulsen that render him unfit to serve this great nation, however, the Pollanator is right about one thing, and that's Victory Gardens. We spent about.... mmmmm... $25 putting in a couple of little gardens. We now have more bok choy and so on than we can jam down. The neighbor at the community garden has more you-name-it than he can eat, so we trade around. We spend maybe... an hour a week? max? messing with these little gardens. In exchange we have food to throw away. We're not using any inputs, we're just pulling weeds and eating whatever manages to grow without fertilizer. We're not doing anything to prevent freeze damage, other than maybe throwing a sheet over the plants. Totally inefficient. No concept of economies of scale. And here we have more food than we can eat for next to no money and less labor than it takes to drive to Walmart, park, and schlep-ass around the store dodging the gargantuae on their little rascals. Life is sweet! (That's a good movie. You should watch that movie.)

Dark meat

2008-11-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

That's the whole premise of this blog in two words. Dark meat is better eating and dark meat is better for you. Dark meat is also more expensive to produce. Which explains why it’s widely advertised to be fattening and nasty-tasting. Ads for McNuggets that tout their “all white meat” constitution as if it were an advantage are a lovely example of the big lie. Bigbreasted turkeys, too, are easy to make, and if you can convince the buying public that the breast is best, you can sell a ball of cheap dry fluff as a ball of butter. Agribusiness would like us all to adopt a trough mentality; they would like to feed us the same way they feed the animals they breed to feed us–biggest bang for littlest buck. That's your butterball: trough slurry. Chow.

Take a trip to Walmart and you can check out the success of the “feed people like livestock” plan so far. (There must be someplace other than WalMart to see people so fat they can’t walk, but WalMart is probably the closest.)

This must not stand. It may be looking a lot like Animal Farm around the ol’ homeland of late, but even so, we are not livestock. People do not eat chow.

We should all eat as well as we possibly can tomorrow, so that our thanks will be genuine.

Conventional eating, part V: what to do when they're not total skinflints

2008-11-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

This'll be a short one, since the answer is blindingly obvious.

In the case that they're actually feeding you and the food is not wretched and you aren't having to pay for it, you'll tuck away all you possibly can. Eat as if you were at a friend's house, except inasmuch as you needn't worry you're insulting the hotelier if you don't eat your mashed potatoes or your rice or your rolls, and further inasmuchas you don't know these people and won't see them again, so there's no reason to pretend to be civilized and restrained and keep your fork out of the roast beef platter. Stock up now for a leaner later! You'll digest the massive fat and protein bolus eventually, but if you make the experience spectacular enough, your stomach acids will never burn away its memory...

Let's break from convention-talk for a moment

2008-11-21T07:43:00.000-08:00

to discuss an idea from treasured commenter, Robin P, who, I'm sorry to have to report, has taken to calling himself "Uncle Robbie."

He's right: this thing

http://www.nudjit.com/2008/08/19/aerobie-aeropress-coffee-and-espresso-maker/

is great. My co-worker has one, so I know. It's small and light, so you can pack it, and it makes perfectly acceptable coffee.

Sadly, though, Robin is incorrect that you can rely on a hotel-room coffee maker to heat water sufficiently for this or any other coffee-making method. Sometimes this might work, sortof, but sometimes those things are made out of petrified bullshit whipped into a froth and they won't even sortof heat water--by the time it dribbles into the miniature mug, it's tepid. The ground beans recoil from it and refuse to release their intoxicating oils. That's no hill for a stepper, though, because our Robin has come to the rescue again. His idea about the risk-addicted-college-student in-cup electrical coil has real legs. I mean to thrift one asap and try it out.

I am happy to report that Robin is also right about French presses. How hard do those things suck?

Conventional eating, part IV: "lunch on your own."

2008-11-20T07:25:00.001-08:00

In the highly likely event that the people who purchased this week in wonderland for you are seeking to save a pile of money by evicting you from the hotel for all the major meals other than "continental breakfast," you will need to find food that does not suck in the tourist wastelands surrounding your particular tower of PowerPoint. To do this, you need to find the people in the hotel who eat food that does not suck and ask them to tell you where that food is.

Steps to Lunch:

Ignore the concierge.

Remember the kindly old bellhop in the elevator who asked you were you coming for the convention and you squealed and threw money at him/her? Throw more money and ask where's good and cheap and nearby to eat.

If you can't get past "Checkers" and "Olive Garden" with the bellhop, try the chambermaid, the bartender, the guy schlepping towels and beverages poolside. Keep trying 'til you get something good. Mostly it's a matter of waiting out the wall-of-schlock concierge talk they've all been trained to deliver because the distant dwellers on Park Avenue who own this place believe you are the lumpen and Olive Garden breadsticks is what the lumpen eat. Try telling the people in the hotel where you eat when you're at home, which, if you have any sense, is where the Mexican migrant workers in your area eat because that stuff is currently the best cheap food available in the U.S.A., unless there's something even better and cheaper I don't know about in which case please bust off and comment because I need to know immediately.

Basically? Where are the recent immigrants eating? That is what you need to know, and since the hotel is staffed by recent immigrants, that is what you are uniquely positioned to discover. Your luxury hotel looks like simulacraland, but in fact underneath its plasticky skin it is a real place with real people in it. It is little Haiti or little Havana or Chinatown under a veneer of American corporate spackle. Bust through and partake.

Conventional eating, part III: maintenance coffee

2008-11-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

Obviously it's inconvenient to have to keep returning to your room at intervals throughout the day to do surgery on the crappy little coffee packets for your in-room set-up; you need to be down there on the floor learning, growing, networking! Presenting and being presented to! Who knows what life-changing PowerPoint slide might flit by while you're waiting for the elevator, what hottie you've been following with your eyes all weekend might duck into what breakout session on what subtopic of what plenary theme.

Usually as long as you jump start with one solid, strong cup of your own stuff in the morning you can make do with the convention coffee in the big urns they stick out in the mill-around areas outside the dimly lit, freezing cold little minitheaters where the PowerPoint lurks. But sometimes you can't because the convention coffee is spectacularly bad or because they're stingy with it.

In that situation, you need to know how to pass*.

First, understand that it is not possible that there is NO good coffee anywhere in the tower. Somewhere, somebody, guest or host, is enjoying something hot and strong and black and delicious. It's only the conventioneers that are being served the tepid brownwater. So you shake off your conventioneer skin and you go and get some of the good stuff, and you don't pay for it.

This takes some pre-planning.

Soon after you arrived at the hotel, as you were riding up to your floor with your luggage, did the kindly porter say, "Are you here for the convention?" Of course. And what did you say? Water under the bridge now, of course, but what you ought to have said is, "Oooo, what convention? How exciting!" And then you ought to have tipped the porter as lavishly as possible.

When you unpacked those bags. What did you find inside? Not drab conventionwear, please. The look you want to aim for is upscale and relaxed. Your clothes need to say "on my honeymoon!" or "ready to shop!" or "please direct me to the humidor!" Bring along one convention blazer to put on over your resortwear and render it network-appropriate.

When you descended and registered for this sojourn in corporate limbo, they handed you a pile of badswag. A name tag, an ugly shoulder bag, a stack of literature, possibly a logo-slathered beer coozey or potmetal lapel pin. Most of this stuff should be shoved somewhere out of sight and left there forever, but you are usually required to carry the name tag around. The name tag marks you as Someone Undeserving. Put it on your convention blazer. Carry--do not wear--your convention blazer down to the convention floor and find a place to stash it when you wish to leave the convention floor. Behind a potted palm. In the drop ceiling in one of the restrooms. You will wear it ONLY when you are at play in the fields of the lord of PowerPoint. It will not leave that area until you are ready to pack to go home. Jettison the shoulder bag they give you immediately. Throw it into the hotel pool. You must not carry it, not now, not ever. You will have brought something appropriate to put your various printed-out PowerPoint shows and other essential convention claptrap in. Something that says, "Could you get me a taxi to the theater district?" rather than screaming, "I'm the kind of Willy Loman who will wear any godawful thing, as long as it's free!"

When you go down in the morning, take along a mug from your hotel room (because the room mugs are branded separately from the public area mugs; the public area mugs make you look like a conventioneer) and stash it where you stash your blazer. When you're ready to go for coffee, ditch the blazer, grab the mug and stroll, don't stride, to the restaurant or bar area--wherever they have the good stuff. If you can't find the urn and serve yourself, feel free to ask a hotel lackey--look affable and slightly drowsy and explain that you can't drink the stuff in the room, or better yet, your new spouse can't, so you're down here on a mission. Grin ruefully during the explanation phase and both thank and tip effusively upon receiving satisfaction. (Don't get in a swivet about all the tipping I'm recommending because no matter what, you're spending less than you'd spend if you had to pay Starbucks every day.) Do this regularly and they will allow you to fill your own cup or thermos from home, if you had the foresight to bring one.

*From the OED: pass, v. 43. intr. d. To be accepted as or believed to be, or to represent oneself successfully as, a member of an ethnic or religious group other than one's own, esp. one having higher social status; spec. (of a person of black ancestry in a racially segregated society) to be accepted as white. Later also: (of a transsexual) to be accepted as a member of a different sex.
1929 N. LARSEN Passing II. ii. 38 ‘I see. They were “passing” too.’ ‘No. They weren't. They were white.’ 1953 E. H. BROOKES S. Afr. in Changing World vii. 147 Because of the permutations of nature, a coloured man white enough to ‘pass’ can have children or grandchildren who look ‘Coloured’. 1963 M. MCCARTHY Group xiv. 319 ‘Freddy's parents were trying to pass,’ she went on sombrely. ‘Like so many rich German Jews.’ 1994 City Life 24 Aug. 61 The author documents hundreds of cases of individual women who lived most of their adult lives as menwomen who managed to ‘pass’ in all kinds of situations.

Conventional eating, part II: breakfast

2008-11-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

RESIST THE CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

You may be tempted because what the hotel serves in the morning and insults the French by declaring continental is usually free. But let's take a moment to examine the fare.

-boiled orange juice
-picked-green napthalene-ripened juiceless fruit
-a selection of Otis Spunkmeyer factory baked goods made out of oses and vapidity
-hard boiled eggs from out of a bucket. It's too much trouble to boil eggs and peel them. So the hotel has Sysco truck in five-gallon plastic barrels full of hundreds of pre-peeled eggs submerged in preservative brine. When and where and by whom were these eggs laid? Boiled and peeled? Sealed in their bucket? You will not be able to find anyone at the hotel who knows. They are "fresh" only inasmuch as the subaltern who ladeled them out of their bucket grave did so this morning. They taste like depression.

RESIST THE CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

Conventional eating, part I: coffee

2008-11-16T15:38:00.001-08:00

How do you keep body and soul together in a convention center if you're there for days on end? It's scary even to think about it. They feed you at these things sometimes, but not always--you can't count on it when you sign up, and anyway, you don't want to eat what they feed you in the first place! You're hardly better off when it's "lunch on your own," since your Radissons and your Doubletrees are always located in the fajitaMojito districts in their host cities--rank nests of tourism where nutritive food that can be purchased for less than the cost of a used car is all but impossible to find.

The first thing to do is take care of coffee. In a pinch you could live on that alone, but not if you're stuck with nothing but the stuff in the hotel.

Grind a ziploc full of your own the morning of your flight. Roll it up and stuff it in a shoe or something. Sometime in the last ten or fifteen years a federal law must have been passed requiring hotels and motels to put a little crappy coffee maker in all the guest rooms, because now they're always there. They're not normal coffee makers, though, since it came out on TV that those things are universally put to use to make methamphetamine and burn down the building. Fox usually shows footage of some flaming fleabag on a back street, but it has to be going on at the DoubleTree, too, because normal coffeemakers have fallen out of favor in the big towers and have been replaced by these truly awful tiny carafe things that take little pre-sealed sacks of Juan Valdez's floor sweepings.

Convention-savvy coffee-lovers know the workaround. Find a sharp--if Homeland Security took your nail scissors, fashion a shiv from a piece of the desk chair. Use this to slit the packet open. Dump out the mummified stuff in it and pour your own in. You'll need to doctor at least two of these packets because the Biscayne Bay Hilton wants the guests on weak coffee so they have to race out of the hotel to find a coffee shop before the grueling morning breakout sessions instead of using that precious free time to get in the manager's face over the fact that a gin and tonic costs $11.43, the elevator call buttons don't work, the construction noise keeps everyone awake all night and the pool they advertised on the website is closed for repairs. Well, not you! Pour yourself a cup of ambition like Dolly Parton says, and head on down to the front desk for a little chat.

NOTE: It is wrong to take out conventional rage on rank and file hotel staff: they are suffering, too. Tip freely and generously, and offer them a decent cup of coffee when they come to clean the room.

another mayo triumph

2008-11-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

Oh, I wander and stray and have wild adventures with other condiments, but I always come back to mayonnaise. What better way to use the eggs you're getting from the backyard flock in your life?

I finally quit messing around and used the Cuisinart like Julia Child CLEARLY SAID I SHOULD about A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. And I used almond oil, not olive oil. The problem with olive oil I examined in an earlier post: it has too strong an olive tang: it overwhelms your mayonnaise.

Since I was planning to use this stuff as salad dressing, I quit mixing in oil when it got the right consistency. My plan is to use the resultant "salad cream" as a base for a variety of delicious dressings. As is, it tastes exactly like the store mayonnaise that has the royal blue lid and used to have lemons on the label before they changed the label and now it's all white space with like a red onion and some other mess on it. (Mistake! Contact the Obama campaign, you mayo morons: maybe now that he's won they can loan out the outerspace genius agitprop savant who came up with the sun sign. That's the only way you can bail your mayonnaise out now that you've wrecked it on the NewCoke rocks.) My mayo is maybe a tiny bit better than that stuff, but I haven't tasted the two of them right together, and my slight preference for mine may be psychological, because I know it's made with almond oil not soybean oil.

Because it's willing to taste like traditional store mayo, my almond-oil mayo base is perfect just as it is for when I make a bacon lettuce and tomato salad; obviously a garlic-ey aioli would be Wrong For America in that situation. When I want aioli, though, I just throw whatever I haven't used on the BLT salad back in the cuisinart with a pressed clove of garlic. When I want thousand island (which is never), I whizz it up with some ketchup. When I want "ranch" (also never), I throw in whatever they put in "ranch." Ramen noodle flavor pacs?

Woooooo! I am so golden right now!

Unless I'm not.

Because maybe it's at the accessorizing stage when trouble enters paradise because maybe it curdles?

But all that trauma is in the future, though: for now, the potential mayo problems that had me crippled with fear (curdling, tasting like olive diesel, being an off-putting green color, being a pain in the ass to try to make) are vanquished. And that makes this? Another mayo triumph.

Get hooked up, part III

2008-11-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

I get eggs from a individual at my workplace whose family keeps chickens. This keeps me out of the grocery store. Know what else? If I didn't get eggs there, I got two, three other places I could get local eggs, aw yeah. I just use this source 'cause it's the most convenient, mmmhmm. And plus two of the chickens from whose cloacas (cloacae?) my eggs issue (I hope you'll pardon the appallingly graphic sentence we're immersed in right now) come from a friend's former backyard flock. Well, they comprised her backyard flock. She couldn't maintain her backyard flock anymore, so I told her about another, larger flock they could join and still keep their street cred, you know, still be backyard flock birds from around the way, noamsain? So since I'm so dang hooked up I was able to hook up my friend and that increases my own hookedupness by two chickens, a'ight, two chickens, noamsain?

Sometimes it helps to talk like that guy in Slingblade who says "mmmmmhmmmm," and sometimes it helps to talk like the guy on Trailer Park Boys who says "noamsain?" These kinds of little tricks can really help loosen you up when you're blogging. Never say I didn't have good tips in this blog. Okay, never say that.

Yours respectfully,

Nom, nom, nom!

Get hooked up! Part two.

2008-11-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

Sure, it's great to be an American these days what with all the modern conveniences and all. But! What about...

after the lights go out?

Neener neener, neener neener, Bwaaaaaaaaaaaammp! Bwaaaaaaaaaaaammp! ... Plink plink plinka plink plong!

^
(Hello, duh? It's the theme from The Twilight Zone? Like, of course? You poor kids. It's got to feel bad when you find out you postdate your own country's cultural apex.)

What will you do for food after all the grocery stores go dark and the shelves are picked bare of food but for a couple of half-eaten granola bars being guarded by the wall-eyed homeless dude who, in somehow getting his hands on a howlitzer, has proven he has the right skillset for today's jobmarket after all?

How will you get those granola bars from that cranky ol' Tommy Crazy Eyes?

Well, take heart, loyal reader! Because you don't have to. You don't eat granola bars because you've been following the advice of this blog for so long that you've forgotten they--and the grocery store istelf--even exist. You'll be happily unaware that the grocery store has gone dark in the first place. You'll be going about your eating life just as you did before, though with fewer forays into the wild and wonderful side alleys of the WWW for Valomilks and the like, since portals to the WWW will long since have disappeared from the lives of regular people.

But enough dystopian scene setting! To the topic!

Right, okay, so the first way to get hooked up was... oh yeah, oyster tasting. Well guess what! next week we're trying raw clams. Evidently people eat them! Clams are even more mineral rich than oysters, or so I've read. So that's even more nutrition I don't have to pay for. And I have a few more up my sleeve to tell you about in the months ahead. Don't worry! We're all going to be fine.

My stomach hurts

2008-11-05T14:15:00.001-08:00

I ate all the rest of the pistachios in a vain effort to stay awake so I could watch Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose is the worst host in the history of the world. Why does he invite seventyfive people on his show and then let each of them talk for .07 seconds before waving his hand in the camera and starting to grunt and bark offscreen to interrupt them? Why not have a reasonable number of guests on so that they could all get a chance to talk? Huh, Charlie? Also, why is the background deep, infinite black and the light screamingly bright so that all the people look like they're sitting with Charlie at a table that is zooming through outer space and is on fire? This effect is dopey and obvious and it causes more eye strain than it creates gravitas. Take note, "Inside the Actor's Studio," or whatever that crap is called: no more black backgrounds comboed with blazing bright lights on PBS shows! Nobody is fooled!

Also: America, do not stay up late to watch Charlie Rose. Staying up late makes you fat, and the fatter you are, the more food it takes to lull you into a state of sleepiness: you can see how this could become a vicious cycle and lead to bad, depression-unready eating and spending habits. Take note, everyone! Our Leader needs our help to stave off the coming economocalypse (boy, does that coinage ever stink. It's no "simulacra-p," that's for sure): He cannot do it alone.

Halloweeeeeeen, boooooo, woooooo, eeeeeeek.

2008-10-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

Preliminary thoughts:
On a FRIDAY? WHY? Who has time to put together a worthwhile costume after working all week? Why can't we just make it a paid holiday? It's the last holiday of the year that doesn't make 87% of people want to kill themselves, so it should be paid. So should the day after it.

Candy:
I've already said too much on this subject this week. I want to try this one candy called Valomilk. You should google that.

Watermelon brains:
There are two easily googled watermelon brain recipes on our friend, the WWW.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Halloween_Melon_Brain/

http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain/2007/05/frozen_watermelon_brain.php

Conversations... in Fruit!

2008-10-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

I got three cherimoyas from the Fruit Viking. One I gave away. Another I gave away and then snatched back, having second guessed myself. I decided the giftee was going to leave the cherimoya in the fridge 'til it turned into a cherimoya liqueur. You should never "Indian-give" fruit. It's like the ultimate sin in the world. Luckily, she to whom I Indian-gave the cherimoya came over to work on a project and we split the cherimoya, so I may not go to The Lake of Fire. Probably just some boring Dantean circle where you have to account for all your time using S.A.P. or PeopleSoft or any one of those demonbastard softwares.

"This is great!" said my fellow projecteer, upon her first taste of cherimoya.
"Ain't it?"
"It's like a banana... kindof."
"They say it's like a pineapple, but I don't think so."
"No, it's not acidic like a pineapple. At first I thought it was custardy, but it's not, it has sugar crystals."
"Sugar crystals? Are you eating the skin? Because I don't think you're supposed to eat that part."
"No, the sugar crystals are in the pulp."
"They also said it was like a pear, which I agree."
"Yes, it's like a pear."
"It's better than a pear."
"It's not better than a pear."
"I say it is."
"A ripe pear is very good."
"That's true."

And so we came to a shaky accord. Ah, fruit! Most elegant of food groups! Prized bringer of peace!

What reminded me, I'm eating a pear burrito. The recipe is like this:
One Ezekiel 4:9 tortilla.
These things take getting used to, but once you give up on the notion that they're the same as a corn tortilla or a flour tortilla and get into the fact that they're basically horsefeed in a flattened state, you start to like them. (If you've ever stuck your head in a big bucket of that sweet feed they give horses and taken a good long molassesey chevalsnort, you'll know why that idea is appealing.)
One point five slices of basic factory provolone cheese
Paperthin slices of superripe pear, to taste

Arrange cheese and pear on surface of asphalt tortilla, roll into a cigar and eat.

This would be probably a lot better if you broiled it, but who has the patience for that? Well. You know who. MFK Fisher, that's who. But she puts her tangerine slices on the winter windowsill and waits for them to dry just the perfect, perfect amount. Mere mortals cannot approach obsession on this level.

Honest crap vs vile, lying, craw-sticking simulacra-p

2008-10-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

(omg, before we begin please note "simulacra-p." If it were only the 1980s and if I were only a recent PhD in literary theory, I could so get my dissertation published by a university press just for that coinage.)

Now, reader, as you know, normally I am not one to drag little disputes from the blaaaagcomments all up onto the front page like SOME blaaaaggers. But some things push you past your limits, and one of those is bad candy, for instance the Ferraro Rocher fakety fakewads recently advocated by otherwise reliable commenter, Robin.

They come in gold foil with like a painting of Mozart on them
They are nevertheless not a good thing
They are unmitigated garbage
Do not buy them

These things are meant to LOOK like food but they are not food. Like, okay, McDonald's has salad on the menu, now. Ha, ha! Would you eat that? Ha ha haaaaa! On the other hand, McDonald's also has french fries, and despite the fact that they've messed them ALL up in recent decades, they're still McDonald's fries, and anybody with a brain would eat McDonald's fries. The salad is made to LOOK like food, but it's lying, craw-sticking simulacra-p. The french fries are honest crap, and they're great. Sure: they'll kill you. But they're good. See? McDonald's and WalMart are merchants of honest crap, and when they try to be something they aren't, it's a scary thing. If you want good ch0colate, you have to get out of WalMart and go online or head over to the little annoying hippiemart and buy single-origin stuff. If you can't deal with that, I surely sympathize, but fakety fakeballs are no kind of answer: I'm afraid you're stuck with crap chocolate, so you might as well get the best of that you can and spend a reasonable amount of money for it, not toss over your last few coins for a lipsticked pig in Mozart pantaloons.

Pistachios

2008-10-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

They sure do rule. If you're ever in some crapvortex of a store and everyone around you is buying, like, pizza-flavored Combos and Little Debbies, look for the nuts and see if you can find something other than peanuts, namely pistachios. The peanuts tend to suck and be boiled in gnarly oil or else dry-roasted to a powder, but they can't seem to mess up a pistachio.

post III, the riposte

2008-10-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

Robin! How dare you post in some ancient comment thread! I almost missed your crazed diatribe and let it stand unchallenged. Let me TRY to deal with the worst of your atrocious misstatements.

"Powdered milk is not as evil as Om Nom thinks it is, but it does not compare to regular milk unless put in baked goods or disguised in hot chocolate."
Powdered milk isn't "evil," it's merely revolting. It is not possible to disguise it--well, I guess you could bake with it probably. I never tried. It is the only problem with milk chocolate as most mortals know it: you can taste the sour powdered milk. I now know from reading Candy Freak that it's possible to get candybars made without it, but you have to spend like $46/bar.

"You see, food and its tastes are all a matter of two main things: how open-minded you are to new tastes and what you are used to, taste-wise."
If this were true, we would all prefer powdered milk hot chocolate, because we all grew up on Swiss Miss. In fact, food and its tastes are a matter of one thing: whether you have the sense enough to know what's good when you run up on it.

"Several years ago, I decided on to 'eat to live,' not to 'live to eat.'"
Madness.

"Eating to live entails figuring out the bare minimum of foods you like and can live with, both money-wise and nutrition-wise."
Then swiftly loading up your trusty handgun and dispatching yourself because if you're eating to live you got no reason to live.

"...Can humans manufacture the vitamins they need from the foods they eat and the sunlight they receive (vitamin D is manufactured by the body due to sunlight expose amounts)? Children who lived in Swiss valleys tended to get rickets much more frequently than those who lived higher up on the mountains. The children in the valleys were vitamin D deficient. So the answer to the question of whether humans can manufacture most of the vitamins they need is 'Mostly, yes, they can, but not entirely.'"
No, given the evidence you provide, "mostly but not entirely" is not the answer to the question you asked. Rather, it's the answer to the question, "can juvenile Swiss valley-dwellers manufacture all the vitamin D they need?" Mostly (they ain't dead), but not entirely (they all done come down with the rickets). About no other nutrient can we tell a gatdamn thing from your example. I must tell you that Juan Valdez concurs with me: he has a mean headache right now despite the fact that he gets plenty of sun. He has been unable to manufacture the vital nutrient, caffeine, and he doesn't get it from his diet since I put him on Postum instead of coffee. (Sue me! I was tired of listening to him crack his knuckles early in the morning.)

"I decided to try to buy as little as possible at the grocery store as I could."
Excellent!

"The rub? I don't really like to cook all that much."
Ay. There is the rub. Learn, yo.

"I am more of an information guy. Ideas are like food to me."
I wonder if the rickety Swiss kids could manufacture vitamin D... from ideas? (You're supposed to read "from ideas" the way George W. reads "from Africa" in that little speech he gave that time about the yellow cake.)

"If a kid grows up only drinking powdered milk (I did not), he is going find regular milk to be a greasy, odd beverage that takes some getting used to."
Wait up because here's another of those ideas for Heidi et al to munch on: what if all milk is revolting? Yes, Pippi! Think on't long and build strong bones the better to ride Mister Nilsson (or was that the name of the monkey? Hell, I can't remember Pippi for beans). Milk sucks. Milk sucks, and that's not just an "idea," it's an obvious fact. Milk sucks. Cream is okay. Whey is bearable. But milk sucks except when it's straight out of the cow. And I know this because my parents tried to get me to like regular milk and they tried to get me to like powdered milk and they made me try chocolate milk and they made me try milks of all butterfat percentages and I hated it all. I did not like anything dairy except yogurt and ice cream and whipped cream and cheese and, of course, glorious butter. I hated milk categorically 'til I tried it fresh-out-of-the-udder, when I loved it, but you can't get it that way in this godforsaken country unless you own a cow, so I maintain that for all practical purposes, milk sucks. O, I drank it when they told me to: one eats what is put in front of one. I ate to live in those days because I had no choice. Now that I have a choice, I live to eat, and I don't drink milk... because it sucks. All those "eat to live" years I drank the stuff, I always knew that it sucked.

"The opposite food plan, 'living to eat' ...says that tasting is one of the most important things a person does. But is it?"
Certainly.

"I find this approach to life to be a materialistic one."
No, it isn't. It's merely sensible. The opposite approach is a self-loathing one. Why would you put something that sucks in your mouth unless somebody bigger than you was making you?

"It is also very expensive to eat that way."
Quite, quite the opposite. Living to eat is far cheaper than eating to live. Take butter, for just one instance. Butter is astronomically better tasting and mouthfeeling and all that than margarine. Margarine's one true advantage over butter is price. My lifelong dedication to butter saved my circulatory system. Now my blood flows free, unobstructed by petrified Country Crock. I don't need a coronary bypass. I save the big money.

Okay, here's today's real post:

2008-10-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

Eating at Your Friends' Homes!

It's very important not to piss off your friends. Because: if you don't make them mad, they might invite you over to eat! Now, when you eat at your friends' homes, your little rules about "this or that is off limits" should go where? That's right, out the window or up your undsoweiter. Because following these little rules might what? That's right, piss off your friends. And that brings us right back to the beginning where we did not want to be, damn it. I don't know how to blaaaaag!

Anyway, dinner at your friend's house is the one time when rules like "no supermarket chocolate," and "I do not drink of the orange juice: I only touch virgin citrus with unbroached, blushing peel" are not to be followed unless it's some outlandish kind of crazy situation like your friend tries to get you to drink Crystal Lite or however you spell that crap. MAN that stuff is nasty, OH my god don't drink it. Accept it with huge smiles and glad cries and then pour it in a houseplant at the first op.

Remember: at friends' houses YOU LOVE EVERYTHING!

booga schooled

2008-10-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

This one comment from one of the better commenters on this blog was so awesome I decided to "reduce, re-use, recycle" by using it as today's post! I know, right? I am so going to heaven now!!!

Without further A., here is its glorious ass:

In response to one "booga," who said that it's unPalin-like to eschew free "yeast rolls" at trough-style family dining establishments, the commenter wrote as follows:

They're counting on you to eat the yeast rolls. Just try not eating the yeast rolls one day and see what happens.
"Are you not yet enjoying those yeast rolls, Mr. or Ms. Booga?"
"Can I tell the chef you're going to be eating the yeast rolls he made for you with his own hands out of love, Mr. or Ms. Booga?"
"Mr. or Ms. Booga, how can we here at Golden Calf get you around a couple or six of these fresh, warm, free yeast rolls today? How can we do that for you the fastest and the bestest? Would it help if the rest of the waitstaff and I all gathered here around your chair and sang and clapped so that everyone in the restaurant could be alerted to the situation, so that everyone could join in encouraging you to fill up on your warm fresh hot delicious gratuitous yeast rolls and quit hitting the buffet roast beef so goddamn hard? Did you somehow miss the four-foot-high neon 'Three Roll Minimum' sign on your way into Golden Calf this evening? Would you like me to call Kevin the Oven Man out here to 'reason' with you, Mr. or Ms. Booga? Because we can make that happen."

Aw, hell yeah, commenter of the gods! Here's hoping we see more of the same sort of golden-baked goodness from you! And thank you, too, booga, for your contribution.

Why not just eat all free food?

2008-10-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

Because sometimes free food is not worth the calories it takes to chew it. Included:
-doughnuts at work
-melamine supermarket chocolate
-dopey free "yeast rolls" at feed trough places like Ryan's and Golden Corral
-that orange soupy stuff that they say is "nacho cheese" and it comes in one of those woven wooden bowls at the gringo "fast casual" restaurant before your sucky gringo chalupafajitaplaaaatter or whatever bunk thing you ordered because there was nothing on the menu that was NOT bunk. Don't eat that glue, damn.
-all stuff like the above

See the thing about all this stuff is, it is designed to be not all that great but nevertheless make you ravenous so you eat more food that costs money. It is like if you go to the gentleman's club, what they do on the stage in order that you should order a lap dance and then have your Lancelot urge kick in and get into a bad marriage and end up driving around in a sad kind of "married people" type car. That's what those chips and orange "cheese" really represent. Stay away.

How to make hot chocolate. Fast.

2008-10-21T09:21:00.001-07:00

Bring to boil 3/4 mug of water for each person who will be enjoying hot chocolate today. Throw in some baker's chocolate--about two squares per cup, more or less according to personal preference/how much chocolate you have (or you can add 70%+ dark chocolate). Whisk around 'til it's all blended nicely. Turn down the heat some during this part of the process so that the chocolate doesn't boil. Add sugar and vanilla to taste. Throw in some of that pricey cinnamon, too. Now take the chocolate off the heat and pour it into the mugs, to 3/4 full.

Here's the patentable part: treat it like coffee. Add whipping cream (half''n'half if you're a lightweight, but it's 200x better with cream) 'til it's the right color. Add whiskey or your favorite adulterant until it's the right strength. You can add the whipping cream while the chocolate's still on the stove if you want your hot chocolate to burn the roof of your mouth off, but you must keep this brief and get the pot off the stove before you cook the cream. This is the only way to avoid that gnarly boiled milk taste hot chocolate always has unless it is my hot chocolate. Do not add alcoholic adulterants while the stuff is on the stove, duh.

Do not allow powdered milk to touch any part of your person at any time. Powdered milk is why we do not eat the crappy supermarket chocolate offered to us free at shrimp tasting. Powdered milk is foul, and if living through a depression means eating powdered milk, let's just agree now not to live through it.

Good Free Food, Bad Free Food

2008-10-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

Important to know about free food: you shouldn't just accept all of it without regard to propriety and without regard to the quality of the food.

For an example, let's look at my behavior at shrimp tasting last week. I walked into the lab, selected my two cupsful of shrimp and ate them. You don't HAVE to eat the shrimp to taste them. We have chew 'n' spit going on in the tasting lab, especially when there are spawny oysters. But I always eat the proteinaceous free food unless it is clearly septic.

When I was finished with the taste test, I went over and punched the clock. (We don't actually have a clock, but I like to imagine we do--I'd like it to be like the clock in the Warner Bros. cartoon with Ralph and Sam, the coyote and the sheepdog). Near the clock, I noticed a bowlful of crappy supermarket chocolate. Because two of my fellow shrimptasters were having a spirited discussion about one of their co-workers and how she is an idiot and has an idiot boyfriend and how this idiot and her boyfriend, in cahoots with an idiot boss, have managed to fry three+ motherboards in the past year; because, I say, because of this spirited conversation, I was unable to simply walk out of the shrimptasting lab. Instead, I leaned against the wall next to the time clock and ate a wad of crappy supermarket chocolate about the size of a ground squirrel.

BEWARE!

Shrimp: Good Free Food
Crappy Melamine Chocolate: BAD Free Food.

Eat Good Free Food
Don't Eat Bad Free Food.

Gettin' Mingy in the Kitchie

2008-10-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

Issue one! /McLaughlin
How (and why) to re-use paper coffee filters.

Maybe you have a coffee maker, in which case you should barter it for a parsnip or a couple of week-old radishes because coffeemakers suck. Or maybe you make coffee with one of those doom-dealing, bisphenol-A-leaching plastic Melita filter holders... like me!

If you can't barter your coffee maker because nobody wants it or because it is the last thing you have from your dear, departed great aunt Sal and if you don't have a gold filter for it, go to garage sales 'til you find one. You will find one. The worse the economy gets, the more truly useless things people try to sell. So saddle up and ride out to the more desperate and refi-ed-to-the-hilt of the subdivisions in your area and you'll be a goldfilter owner sooner than you thought possible.

Unless you use preground coffee flakes, the gold filter will let in grounds and the bottom fifth of your pot of bad coffeemaker coffee will be a stygian, bitter swamp. So you want to double up with a paper filter. (You don't use preground coffee flakes because that's disgusting. If you have any Folgers around, barter for some potato peels.)

Either way, whether you make grody coffeemaker coffee or you make Melita coffee like a civilized person, you still want to scrounge up a goldfilter. It will take the weight of the wet coffee grounds off your delicate paper filter and allow you to use it six or eight times, for a savings of $0.0007*.

Here's what you do:

Put your precious paper filter in your filterholder
Put your goldfilter in on top of it
Thow in your coffee and pour water over it or flip the Mr. Coffee switch
When the brewing process is complete, carefully lift out your goldfilter and discard or, preferably, compost, the sodden grounds
Leave the paper filter in the filter basket until it is completely dry (some say this step is a little obsessive, but the fact is, a wet paper filter is more fragile than a dry one, and if your paper filter tears, you won't be able to use it again, and that's anywhere from $0.0001* to $0.0007* down the drain! Just THROWN AWAY! Lost forever! Have you checked the Dow today? HUH?)
Carefully rinse your filter and allow it to air dry

*Actually, it's more than that you'll save, me hearty. Perpend:
The individual filter isn't worth much, granted. But coffee filters are a staple, the kind of horribly necessary thing you sometimes have to go into the store to buy. If you go into the store, the chances that you will spend money are much greater than if you do not go into the store. It is possible to go into the store and buy just coffee filters, but no one ever does. If you go into the store, you will buy, say, a pack of watermelon gum. That's a pack of watermelon gum you wouldn't have bought had you not gone into the store. Right? Right: it's simple logic. And that is why you should re-use coffee filters and why you should purchase the sort of toilet paper that comes in bales and lasts forever. You want that kind of toilet paper despite the fact that it's not recycled. The recycled stuff is always all fluffy and loosely wrapped on the cardboard tube, so that a roll lasts only about a fifth as long as the fat, dense rolls that come in bales. The stuff that comes in bales will keep you out of the store longer. Staying out of the store is very valuable. The toilet paper that keeps you out of the store is going to save you so much money, it's worth bringing on The Day After Tomorrow to get it.

Postscript:
Twice I have found paper coffee filters at estate sales. I bought them both times. Does it creep you out to think of anyone using The Paper Products of the Recently Dead? No problies, princess, more for me. In a month or two when the lights go out, you might find your attitude has undergone a change.

A Warning!
You may be tempted to buy a re-usable cloth filter from the store. Do not get the type made of muslin. After about five uses, they clog hopelessly, and no amount of soaking in vinegar or laundering will get them functional again. Perhaps, like me, you have a friend who is a genius with the sewing machine. Try not to torment this friend by asking over and over and over and over and over if she could please please please please make you a functional, non-clogging re-usable cloth filter. Bear in mind that talented seamstresses are much in demand these days. If you keep asking and asking and asking and asking, you may traumatize your friend, and then where would you be!

Get hooked up.

2008-10-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

I was going to talk about free food today, but I'd rather talk about the larger issue of which free food is only a part, and that's getting hooked up locally.

This is sortof an amorphous concept, but it's way key. Here's one aspect of it: I get free shrimp and free oysters and occasionally free all sorts of other sea creatures because I signed on to be an oyster taster over to the aquatic foods lab.

Every few months they'll do another experiment where they, for instance, compare oysters from all over the continent to determine whether there are any qualities specific to oysters from a certain area.

Or the industry will come up with some revolutionary (and always revolting) method of processing oysters for shipping or storing and we oyster tasters will be required to eat the proceeds and report the patently obvious: "freezing oysters and then hurling them at a wall to bust them out of their shells and then sweeping up them and a few bits of their pulverized shells and throwing the whole mess in a big ol' plastic bucket, refreezing it, and trucking it halfway across the country may save you $0.03 per oyster in shelling/shipping costs, but it loses you money in the long run because unless they're a stressed out middlemanagement demon tasked with stocking the buffet table for a cocktail party in the ninth circle of hell, there is no one on earth or below who will buy that nasty 'product.'"

By declaring myself willing to eat swill occasionally, I make myself eligible for the occasional supertreat. For instance, sometimes the oysters are good. If you like oysters, good oysters is a reason to eat bad oysters, and that's really saying something, because there is nothing worse than a bad oyster. Nothing. I don't mean "bad" as in "spoiled"--a spoiled oyster isn't the worst thing in the world; eating it would bring on merciful death. I mean bad as in gravely mistreated. But good oysters make it worth it.

Sometimes? They have extras? And they send us home with bagsful. Bags full of live, fresh, salty, happy, icey, bivalved darlings. Two, three, four dozen.

It is worth it.

So that is one of a few ways I'm hooked up. Get hooked up. Find out what's around locally. Nose around. Take all offers.

sour cream and coffee

2008-10-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

Treasured commenter Robin P. reminds us all that sour cream and coffee are essential to life. Say, that reminds me: commenters, please bear in mind, "it's your [comments] that make the show go." (That's stolen from a local radio show.)

Sour Cream
Sour cream makes everything better. Robin suggests putting it on "toast" and "jam or preserves." Of course we wouldn't recommend doing that since toast + jam is death to a neodepression eater (kindling carbohydrates stoke hunger, ramped up hunger --> increased food expenditures, increased food expenditures--> no money, no money --> starvation, starvation --> dEaTh). However, sour cream is an early-depression essential, and it brings us to an important tenet:

Some Luxuries Are Essentials!

It seems counterintuitive, but it is true: some expensive food items are absolutely necessary to successful depression eating, especially in the early days. Sour cream is one of these. Why, I have 1/3 of a pint container in the refrigerator right now, and I use it nearly every day. Here's the basic recipe:

Onions
Any vegetable or bean
olive oil
butter
sour cream
an exciting spice

Prep:
saute onions in oil til translucent
add vegetable either before or after onions depending on its cooktime
when stuff is done, add sour cream and butter to taste ("to taste" will = buckets of both at the outset, dwindling to smaller and smaller amounts as you get used to this cuisine/as sour cream and butter disappear from the national larder. YMMV, of course, especially if you acquire a blackmarket cow.)
Add your exciting spice. It could be curry powder if you like that, or marjoram if you like that, or maybe you like chipotle and chile pepper.
Stir and eat hot. MMMmmmmm!

Coffee
Robin P. also mentions "single-pour coffee." I'm assuming that's your Melita filter coffee? This is my method:

Fill mug, dump mug in kettle. Crank burner.
Grind up pricey beans.
Put ground beans in melita filter baskey over cup.
Water is boiling; dump over coffee.
It drains directly into cup.
Drink.
Is good.

Filter re-use is possible. Scroungy kitchen re-uses you may not have considered: that's another post. Have to go eat free shrimp. Free food: that's yet another post.

Ort report

2008-10-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

The first, best tenet of the religion of not starving is not to throw calories away. Eat them or freeze them. Meat scraps left on your plate when you're done with your steak can go in the stock bag. Peels and any oddities you cut off your vegetables as you prepare them for ingestion can go in the stock bag. Everything goes in the stock bag. When the stock bag fills up, make stock and make soup with the stock. Eat the soup. Begin again.

I got some books on freezing at a garage sale for 5 cents each. They show you how to wrap things and stuff and tell you handy tips like for instance, "don't freeze lettuce." Some absolutely fascinating recipes for desserts, since these came out in the 50s. While I can still afford to shop, I should experiment with these desserts and report. Okay: that's what I'll do!

Pineapple Fro-YO passes the test!

2008-10-10T13:24:00.001-07:00

You don't need no banana! Pineapple Fro-YO is not too sour, it's delicious!

This morning I cut up:
One red pepper
One green pepper
One tomato
Two two-inch cubes of dried out parmesan I found kicking around the fridge (small dice)
I put all this in a plastic container and threw pesto on top of it.

Here is what you need to make pesto:

$10 bag of fresh basil from the Fruit Viking
1/3 of a $10 bag of pecans from the Lady With The Short Fingers

two or three cloves of garlic. Sometimes The Greek has garlic, sometimes not. Random people have garlic at random times.

A $5 hunk of parmesan from the snobby cheese shop or a $2 hunk of lesser quality romano from That One Store

Wash the basil, spin it in a spinner, sit down in front of the thrilling and terrifying TV news and pick the leaves off the stems. Save the stems. Freeze them in your soupstock ziplock.

Grind everything up in the food processor, adding olive oil to taste. Get that one kind of Cali olive oil. B-something, I think. Barrini or something, whatever, it's good.

You'll get a hoarkload of pesto. Eat several spoonfuls right away. Then freeze half, fridge half. Or freeze half, fridge 1/4, give 1/4 away.

Okay, so $10 on leaves and $3+ on nuts seems like a whole lot of money, but the fact is, a tomato, a red pepper, and a green pepper cost about $2 and that plus a dollar's worth of pesto equals more than enough food to last me the entire day. And it is goooooohoohoooooooooood. It's so good you won't even care that Obama is laughing at you because your 401K is a 101K. Ha ha-mmmmmmmm! That's what you'll say.

Process the perishables. STAT!

2008-10-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

Chances are you have a few little comestibles here and there left over from The Old Times, when you could still afford to buy foodstuffs. Some of these may have a short shelf life. You may be feeling so dispirited and frightened you hesitate to approach these precious, precious fresh food items. "The Last Lemon," you might be saying to yourself. "I mustn't touch it, there shan't ever be any more, and we will need it for the winter!"

But this is wrongheaded.

Job one in your Desperation Kitchen is to either consume or preserve what will go bad before it goes bad. Do not, in sadly hopeful effort to feed a future which may never come, toss precious, life-giving calories into the inexorably oxidizing maw of the terrible present!

(Instead, eat 'em your ownself.)

Pineapple Fro-YO! A neoDustbowl Receipt!
(See? I spelled it "receipt" 'cause that is the kind of nonsense spelling they used to get up to back in the days of Glen Miller)
I awoke this morning and remembered that there's a depression on. Heart seizing, I rushed to the kitchen, wild to eke out another day or two of hardscrabble existence. "Hellfahr," I said to myself, "there are three fresh pineapples left over from my massive fruit party, and that was like two weeks ago, what am I thinking??"

And it was true: I got these three pineapples for decoration (Nutritive food! As decor! That's actually how we used to think back then!) from The Fruit Viking, whose stall is at the other end of the Saturday farmar from Ditchweed Guy and who is as different from Ditchweed Guy as night is from noontime. The Fruit Viking might also be called the Luxuries Viking. He has greenhouses and can grow anything that occurs to him. So he he outsells everyone at the farmar because he has nothing but amazing and unexpected edible delicacies. Cherimoya once? Okay? Five different kinds of basil? That's the way the Fruit Viking rolls.

So I had been eschewing the Fruit Viking's stall because I had been on that damnation diet for that godforsaken contest I won and then got esscrute out of my prize for by the demonic gym people, and the Fruit Viking was a little disgruntled because I had not been coming around. (When I told him I couldn't buy any fruit because I was on a diet, he said, "We're not allowed to discriminate against different races anymore, but praise heaven we can still abuse the thin." Then he made as if to spit on me.)

The Fruit Viking was finally mollified when two weeks ago I bought three pineapples and a $10 bag of basil to make pesto from. (In the morning! In the Evening! Ain't we got fun! In the meantime! In between time! Ain't we got fun!) (That is what I was singing while I blithely tossed $12 at the Fruit Viking like $12 was of no more consequence than an offbrand Tic Tac) (I was singing it because it is a song of the Gatsby era, I am pretty sure. Anyway, I ain't singing it now, I can tell you that! 'cause we ain't got fun and we ain't got no $12 to spend on no luxury food items from no Fruit Viking!)

So this morning I cut the armor off the aging pineapples. To do this, you whack the top off the pineapple and the bottom. Throw away the bottom (unless it's further into the depression, in which case you might consider retaining it and making a watery, unpleasant soup stock from it). Retain the top and plant it in a pot in a sunny window, or, if you live in a pineapple-friendly climate, in a carefully guarded corner of a brownfield somewhere that only you know about. It may grow into a pineapple. But probably not.

Luckily when I cut off their skins, which is the next step, I found that my three were still in good shape despite my hideous profligacy of the previous two weeks.

You take your knife, which is either a short chef's or one of those nice Chinese knives (or it's a sharpened piece of a drainpipe left over from when you went out and cannibalized the deserted, half-built subdivision for metals to sell at the recycling plant) and you slice down the sides of the pineapple, removing just the barest minimum of skin. there'll be a regular pattern of "eyes" all along the pineapple, and these you pare out with your paring knive (or your scrounged shiv). In this fashion you reduce waste to a minimum.

Now cut the pineapple into rounds and dice. The Fruit Viking sells "edible core" pineapples, so I include the core section with the rest, but let me tell you something, champ: whether your pineapple core is edible or not, you eat it. This is no time to quibble over "edible/not edible." If it's not POISON, you eat it. That's the rule these days.

Freeze the pineapple.

Put about, say, a cup of frozen pineapple chunks in the food processor and grind up. Add enough yogurt or buttermilk to make your froyo the consistency you like. This is liable to be waaay too sour--if you can afford a banana, freeze that, too, and add it.

(But you probably can't afford a banana.)

If you have cinnamon left and it's really good cinnamon, that will sweeten it some. Really good cinnamon is just amazing stuff. It's too bad we won't be able to get ANY cinnamon soon because soon the Internet will go dark and we'll burn the libraries for heating fuel and forget all human knowledge including the route to the spice islands or how to navigate. Better lay in a good supply now!

Frozen fruit + yogurt is an excellent and delicious dessert item. Add whatever sprinkly things you've got around. If you have any Fage, the Greek yogurt, left over from the happy days of yore, your fro-yo will be just that much more creamy and delicious and amazing. Do not fear Fage because it is so butterfatladen. Very soon fat of every sort will be rationed and soon after that there won't be any more fat full stop. Then won't you rue every day you didn't eat that delicious Fage! Certainly you will!

Changin' the project.

2008-10-08T11:43:00.001-07:00

Here was my old intro text. I'm just going to stick it here in case I want to go back to it. It went like this:

"I inflated myself to 150 pounds, deflated to 117 and won a weightloss contest. But the evil Gym People running the contest reneged on the prize. They done me and everybody else in the contest wrong, and now it's time we got a little justice on the diet frontier. Are you one of the millions who suffer from infestations of Gym People? Read on and prosper, for I will not rest until I lead us all to a glorious vengeance upon their noisome, hardbodied tribe."

But since the time I wrote that, my resentment for the gym people has- not lessened! oh no!- but paled in comparison to my resentment of the bankers. This is not to say that my resentment of the bankers has grown, for it has not--there is not room in the universe for it to grow any larger. It's just that I hadn't taken it out to admire it for a while. You know how sometimes a beloved fashion accessory gets shuffled to the back of the closet. It was like that. I was going around everywhere sporting my gym people resentment and all of the sudden I thought to myself, "Whatever happened to my towering hatred of the rich? So timeless! Always in style! Where'd I put that?"

More drama and cannings among the Gym People!

2008-10-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

You may recall that early on in this epic the Gym People canned Stan, who was the annoyingly gung-ho trainer guy whose personality stylings first galvanized my rage to the dangerous levels at which it remained for the duration of the contest. I was annoyed by him and much more intensely annoyed by the loss of him, and it all worked to burn off calories and fuel my furious races across the landscape. It was Stan and the canning of Stan, in other words, that sparked the three-month rage that enabled my stunning success in the overall diet war.

The reason Stan was canned was not made clear to us; he simply disappeared. It became obvious, though, that the longtime gym rat types all knew the score, so, quietly and subtly, using a combination of poke-in-the-ribs e-mail queries and gentle hinting around the scale at the weekly weigh-ins, my friend and I teased out the story. It was not, as I earlier speculated, that Stan's no holds barred approach to weightloss put the gym in potential legal jeopardy if some too-avid dieter destroyed a vital organ or simply died of starvation. No, Stan was fired because he was having an adulterous affair, and the Gym People--or more accurately, one Gym Person, let's call her Oxana--found it distasteful. So Stan had to go and Oxana needed a patsy to take on the responsibility for the weightloss contest. The new guy needs a name. Let's call him... Scooter? No, no, he's nothing like the infamous Scooter you're thinking of. How about Doogie? Doogie is better. The new guy is earnest, very young and puppycute, and concerned with health, just like the original Doogie.

Okay, so poor Doogie assumes the heavy mantle of Wellness Director and begins to try to govern in a poisoned atmosphere of mingled resentment from the Stan factions and lickspittle fawning from the anti-Stan factions. The exercise classes are tough to lead, the weekly weigh-ins chilly and awkward. Doogie begins to find mornings increasingly difficult. The joy he used to find donning the crisp new polo with the gym logo stenciled on the breast is fast draining away.

Meanwhile, all unaware of the torment in Doogie's heart, of how he is being torn this way and that by Oxana and the Stan and anti-Stan factions, the majority of contestants are wildly losing, losing, losing, ignoring the prominent posting of nutrition advice, ignoring the moralizing e-mail bulletins about how we're all in this for our health. Just keeping our collective, sweat-blinded eye on the $750 prize to come. Until the end when we can no longer delude ourselves about the prize because the prize... does not exist. What is in the envelopes at the awards ceremony is not what was supposed to be there. Our hearts break, and some of us, apparently, start complaining pretty hard.

Because guess what!!

Well, first of all, you have to know that the (alleged) girlfriend of Stan has been sending e-mail the entire contest fomenting for the Stan faction to desert. Actually, many of them did desert in the first weeks after the Stancanning, quite without any urging. I was not in the Stan faction or the anti-Stan faction: I was a stateless, lawless mercenary out for number one. But I nevertheless sent a few sympathetic e-mails to Stan's (alleged) girlfriend implying I was in the Stan faction, simply in order to get all the delicious gossip I could out of her. I think I'll call her Iris.

So! After the final weigh-in, Iris writes a jaunty note asking me what happened and who won. So I explain in minute detail all the woe occasioned by the treachery of the Gym People, I express my sympathy for poor Doogie, who was pulled to shreds, and I also explain that on top of it all, I'm probably going to die of organ failure from all the hotboxing and spitting and chemical abuse I put myself through in an as-it-turned-out-totally-unnecessary struggle to lose eight and a half pounds in ten days to defeat Slick, whom I would have defeated anyway without any of it simply by maintaining bla bla blaaa! Basically, I do everything but come right out and announce I'm taking the Gym People to small claims court (I'm not, since that would be supremely idiotic), and then I ask in a roundabout way whether Stan is hiring a lawyer. Iris ignores that question but she does write back and let me know that Doogie deserves no sympathy since he was nothing but Oxana's puppet,

AND!

That Oxana got fired!

AND!

That Doogie put in his notice Monday and is quitting!

So Doogie will be free at last.

And now we know that there is a power behind even Oxana. She was Darth Vader and we trembled before her lest she stop our breath. We thought her invincible, but all the time there was a shadowy entity calling bigger shots than even she. The Evil Emperor of The Gym People!

Bait and switch!

2008-09-29T11:44:00.001-07:00

Those bastards!

Okay, I renounced the prize money, right? Because after having cheated in, I counted, five different ways for three months, I not only lost a larger percentage of body mass than anyone else, I also achieved a kind of moral nirvana in which I became more honest and true to principle than anyone else in the contest at least and probably the entire country. And once again all because of horseracing, the sport of spotless saints.

At the "awards" "banquet," I found out from the hastily appointed leader of this farcical affair (a sweet, harmless boy who should never have been saddled with this nightmare--he hardly qualifies as a Gym Person, and it is my hope that he will escape before he becomes... Like The Others) that even had I not lost a single pound during that final ten days when I ramped up the cheating to heights never before achieved except by jockeys who are dead today, I still would have beaten Slick. I had only to maintain. So no spitting, no hotbox, no evil, cynical blood donating, no renal failure. When I heard that and thought about the chunk of change I was giving up in refusing to sign the purity pledge, I almost collapsed, and not just because all I'd had to eat that day were a couple loaves of bread and a pineapple and a turkey. I thought I would have to spend the rest of my life kicking myself. But I was very wrong in this surmise. In fact, I have never before been so richly rewarded for momentarily declining to indulge in the delicious falsehoods that are my usual fare. To say I dodged a bullet would be a crime not so much because "dodged a bullet" is a cliché but because it would be such a monstrous understatement.

This post is about what happened at the potluck awards banquet.

First, here is all the bad stuff I nipped neatly around:

*The feeble opener: they announced that they'd changed the rules. Now instead of a first place winner and a second place winner, there would be an overall male winner and an overall female winner. Translation? No glory whatsoever. I could've shambled along in low gear the whole way and been two points behind Slick and still won top honors. Pa to the thetic.

*The bombshell: They announced that they weren't going to award cash prizes. Apparently, any prize over $600 they have to fill out forms with the IRS and you have to report it on your tax return. So why didn't they give the first place winner $600 and $150 worth of Rice-a-Roni? Why didn't they give the second place winner $350 as per the original contract? Because they are a bunch of shifty double crossing GYM PEOPLE, that's why! I shouldn't have trusted a word they said from the get-go!

*The nuclear warhead: the "prize" to the first place winners, plural, male and female, was nine months free GYM MEMBERSHIP and a few hours of time in the company of your choice of the know-nothing personal trainers (Earlton excepted from the know-nothing class). I could have colleagued with Satan and signed their purity pledge. Then I'd've won nine months more of going to Step, Jump and Pump and PowerJamz "classes." Nine months of being told to "engage your core." Nine months of looking at other patrons' CoolerThanThou steel water bottles. Nine months of yogablab, which is Hindi translated into English and then re-translated into new millennium Americanese about breath. I don't want to listen to you tell me to listen to my breath, Gym People. I don't want to hear you say the word "core" or the word "breath." I don't want to hear you tell me to "take it to a march, take the march to the right, now give me a knee for four! Grapevine left!" I don't want to hear you Gym People. I don't want to hear you. Ever. Again. (Earlton excepted. I love Earlton.)

Next, great stuff that happened!

* My friend won! My friend (who didn't cheat in any of the five ways or any other ways that I know of) won FIRST PRIZE! And my friend likes the Gym and the Gym People--all of them, not just Earlton! So the nine months plus training sessions are actually an okay prize, though, of course, bullshit compared to the $350 that would've been the prize had the doublecrossing bastards stuck with the original contract we all signed.

* My friend and I had the wrong guy pegged as Slick! The real Slick was not the demonic blancmange I had been thinking, but this totally inoffensive quiet chappy with a ponytail who never made a moment's trouble for anybody. The other Slick was also pretty inoffensive and quiet and also made no trouble, but somehow the difference in haircuts enabled me to pile on the hate for the imposter Slick. Bizarre, and probably the result of decreased lipids to the brain.

* A little consolation prize: I signed up to bring a quiche to the "awards" "banquet", but the quiche in Q refused to set up in the oven despite the fact that I left it in a full 40 minutes longer than it said to in the recipe. Which meant that I brought something that looked delicious and all Martha Stewart but that nobody obsessed with healthy eating could touch, since it was essentially a panful of lightly browned raw eggs. So I, the purest of conscience and the paragon of low bodymass, wronged, deprived of my prize by the throngs of lesser-thans surrounding me, I at last revenged myself by eating everybody else's food. And I did not have to share my own perfect food with the tiresome children and significant others of a bunch of low-percentile gobblers of steel-cut oats who could not reduce their body mass if they had both hands tied behind their back and their hair was on fire. I went home with my quiche unmolested and put it back in the oven and my friend the prizewinner and I ate a pile of it while we watched the debates and drank elephant liquor (recommended). Then for the next several days I and my other beloved friends and my dear, cherished family polished the quiche off and no Gym Person had so much as a crumb of its delicious pecan crumblecrust. This is my kind of Gym People potluck.

Seabiscuit awhirl in its grave

2008-09-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

My conscience slumbers undisturbed again. Upon advice from counsel I am going to renounce the $750.

Do not weep, beloved reader. My attorney says the money is probably "full of white snow. Spiders. SPIDERS!" I don't know what he means, but it sounds negative on the balance.

(That's me in the hat.)

Today I'm having some field peas! You boil them and while that's happening you sear a red or yellow pepper in butter and then you throw the cooked peas in with the pepper and shake on salt and curry powder and grind some black pepper and the whole thing takes maybe ten minutes. The pepper is so sweet it gets candied.

There is still the end-of-the-contest banquet to go to, and I mean to go to it with my quiche. I will report what transpires when I renounce the dough.

I won! But...

2008-09-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

I beat Slick by over two percentage points, scoring a victory for dead jockeys everywhere.

But.

But now they want us to sign a pledge that we didn't "dope" by doing anything unhealthy or ill advised. As you may have deduced, my last week was pretty much the director's cut of the documentary exposé of everything unhealthy and ill advised. So now I'm in a new competition: a competition with my conscience. Even though they should have made us sign this pledge BEFORE we entered the contest and they did not. Even though the contest is a continuation of a completely amoral and cynical television circus farce where neither health nor morals were considered for a moment. Even though it probably was not just me but a lot of people in the contest who found ways to stretch the concept of "healthy" to include praxis at which Lance Armstrong would recoil.

None of that matters because my conscience is completely perverse. It lies all curled up like a little snoozy worm for months all the while I'm doing something godawful, and then right when I'm about to reap the bounty of my evil ways, it leaps roaring to its feet and suddenly it's the size of the Empire State Building and louder than Megadeth. I may be forced to do something drastic and very unLanceArmstronglike like give back the dough.

There are two things I keep asking myself.

One, do I have renal failure? (It can take a few weeks to show up.) In that case, moral considerations go out the window: I'll need the money for my dialysis treatments.

And two and most of all:

What Would Seabiscuit Do?

Now we wait.

2008-09-23T08:50:00.001-07:00

We won't know until the big gala Friday who won, me or Slick. I myself don't care. After I ate the six tacos lengua and the quart of guacamole, I ate a chocolate bar and two garlic knots and I drank a Newcastle and part of a Yuengling tallboy and I started to eat a pizza but then unaccountably I stopped after half a piece. I just didn't seem to want to continue with the project. Weird. Anyway, right now I'm having a nice salad with ginger dressing that I made my ownself with fresh ginger and tahini and then couldn't touch for a whole week because it had soy sauce in it and soy sauce has salt and salt might make me retain water and lose to Slick. After my salad I'm going to have some cold pizza. When the pizza is finished, I will desist with the carbohydrates in an effort to go from bloated stunted highschool girl to robust highschool gir, or maybe even totally ripped highschool girl. But I am not going to throw away perfectly good pizza. I hope that Slick is right now tucking into a plate of fajitas or a cheese souffle or a Boston cream pie, and I hope it is delicious. Now that I am living decently again, all of my animosity is gone. I feel a great fondness for the meringue formidable. He never tried to be no jockey, that's for sure.

Maybe I could be a jockey, after all.

2008-09-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

All I'd need is a sauna and I could definitely make weight. I'm obviously crazy enough. The only thing is, I'd rather clip my toenails than ride Poppy's Little Candy Legs in the Preakness. So there's still a hurdle, there, I guess. I guess you're supposed to be a little more motivated or something. Also, I can't read Seabiscuit. If that's a requirement, forget it. And then there's the fact that I'll stab myself in the eye with a shish-kebob skewer before I do competetive weightloss again. That, as well, would constitute a stumbling block.

I weighed in a few hours ago and found that I have achieved the mass of a stunted high school girl. Of course, now I've had six tongue tacos (sans shells) and a pint of guacamole (sans chips), so now I have the mass of a bloated stunted high school girl, and man, does it feel good!

My co-workers are busy stinking the place up with microwave popcorn and various frozen Stouffers preparations. If I had to be them, I'd read Seabiscuit and develop an interest in the fortunes of Poppy's Little Candy Legs, just so as not to have to eat anymore.

Eight and a half pounds in 10 days. All thanks to horseracing. If Slick beats that, then I will be sanguine and shake his hand: he's a champion cheater.

It's STILL not over.

2008-09-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

Well, first of all, I don't think I will ever become a jockey.

I'm scared of horses, I'm too tall, and I am no good at spitting or hotbox. I didn't try flipping--there was nothing to flip--but I'd bet I'm pretty bad at that, too. Another career avenue closed.

I spent the weekend not eating and trying to give myself renal failure. WHY? Because they moved the weigh-in date up to Monday. Today. Another two days of bending abruptly from the waist to get my head below my knees so as to avoid passing out cold in the grocery store (where I was buying not groceries of course but "Smart Water." It has calorie-free electrolytes!!!). Another two days of not being able to do more than one flight of stairs without a rest or lift heavy things like my car keys.

This morning I awoke at 4:30 and prepared my weigh-in outfit by cutting off all labels and any unnecessary decorative elements. (There weren't any.) Then, since the weather is deliciously cool, today, and thus I can't do poorman's hotbox by sitting in my rubber raincoat in my car with all the windows rolled up in the noonday sun,
I put on my winter silk underwear under some flannel pajamas and layered several blankets on the bed and tied a thick babushka sort of thing over my head and climbed in to roast for a few hours before it was time to go to work. I raised my heart rate by listening to a little NPR about the Mother of All Bailouts. At eight I arose and threw away all the bedding, pausing several times to bend at the waist to avoid unconsciousness. I prepared a simple breakfast of: nothing and drove to work, practicing "spitting" on the way.

Spitting is disgusting, so I won't describe it, but it traditionally involves Jolly Ranchers. They didn't have any normal Jolly Ranchers at the grocery store, just the hot cinnamon kind, and I'm pretty sure you need citric acid to do it right, so I used some "country time lemonade" lozenges I got at the Big Lots. Worked fine, but I had trouble keeping it up longterm. Because it's nauseating.

In fact, this is the most disgusting thing I have ever done.

As a rule I don't like to tell people what to do*, but I'm just going to come out and say this: Don't ever do this crap. Never never never no matter what. Trying to get into a wedding dress by June? Get a bigger wedding dress. Want to be a jockey? Be a really short guy. Do not do this thing that I have done.

Finally, champ, if you're here trying to find out how to give yourself renal failure, forget about it--that's not the sort of coveted information you can get online for free.

*That's a huge lie.

Reverse Vampirism

2008-09-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

I donated a pint of blood today! Everyone should do it, it is so fun and easy and you can help your fellow man while watching Sarah Palin speak in tongues on Fox News!!! Why I personally today in the year of our lord two thousand and eight donated a pint of blood for the first time since I donated a pint of blood under duress from my high school civics teacher in nineteen and eighty five is that I wanted to support our troops. Okay, sorry, no, I lied again. That wasn't it. I donated a pint of blood today because I wanted to commemorate my deceased aunt Louise who was a thirty-galloneer- whoops, no, I don't have a deceased aunt Louise. All my aunts are alive today praise heaven, and this may be because they are the self-absorbed variety of aunt who prefers to hang on to her bodily fluids to use for her own purposes. No, the truth is, I donated today because it has been a long time since I've seen my blood, and I missed it. Also, incidentally:

A pint's a pound.

A pint's a pound the world around. Slick don't seem too literary. He might not know the little rhyme.

Now, though, of course, I've eaten two bananas to keep from fainting dead away in the blooddonor Laz-E-Bwah and being taken to the hospital and hooked up to a disastrously nutritive IV, so now I've got bananas to deal with. Never fear about those bananas, concerned reader. I shan't give you any details, but recall the image of the elephant falling from a great height into a tiny pool of water. It may be a little obscure or enigmatic, but it does offer some clue into what will happen to the bananas. I'm sorry to any delicate first time readers.

Finally, has anyone read _Seabiscuit?_ this is not a plug for that excrescent piece of offal. One of my living aunts tried to get me to read it one time and she almost became a not-alive aunt after I read the first two pages. WHAT was she THINKing? Anyway, the relevant part of the foul thing is available online, as are many other valuable resources. Google jockeys + Jolly Ranchers or jockeys + hotbox or just jockeys + potassium deficiency/agonizing death and you'll get some fun tips for how to lose 13 pounds in 10 hours and then be so weak you fall out of the saddle and have to give up the race to some naturally pipsqueaked jerk and retire and have horrible arthritis for the rest of your life. My God but jockeys have it rough.

I tried consulting the ana kidz, too, but they turn out to be useless in the short term. They are all about the journey. They want you to post pics of dying jockeys and African famine peeps on your fridge to inspire yourself to eat and then heave a quarter of a Hershey's kiss each day for 7 months. I don't need inspiration, you useless damn ana kidz, I need a miracle and I need it yesterday.

THE SHOWDOWN IS FRIDAY!

2008-09-16T14:22:00.001-07:00

FRIDAY! THIS FRIDAY! DO NOT MISS A SINGLE SCINTILLATING UPDATE!

HORRORS! TRAGEDIES! MAIMINGS! MEDICAL MYSTERIES! IN FACT, I CAN FEEL A STRANGE BUZZING SENSATION IN ONE EARLOBE... ALREADY!!!!

HAVE YOU SEEN THAT SCRATCHY OLD BLACK AND WHITE FOOTAGE OF ELEPHANTS JUMPING FROM HIGH DIVES INTO TINY MAKESHIFT WOODEN POOLS OF WATER FAR BELOW?

READING COVERAGE OF THIS EPIC STRUGGLE WILL BE LIKE THAT ONLY WITHOUT THE DISTRACTING VIDEO!!!!!!!

(SO IT WILL BE LIKE JUST IMAGINING THAT AN ELEPHANT IS JUMPING IN SOME WATER. SEE HOW MUCH BETTER?)

pizzullin' out the stizzops

2008-09-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

That marshmallow atrocity lost five more pounds last week to my two. He is going to win this contest unless I do some seriously ill-advised things. Imagine you had no fear, logic, sense of perspective or moral code and wanted to lose five or ten pounds in a couple of days. That's what I'll be up to this week. Short of cutting off a limb, I intend to do everything in my power.

Catch you on the flip side!

We joined the Dance, Dance Revolution Revolution

2008-09-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

I went with my friend and we got on these crazy dance pads and tried to move our feet in the way indicated. My friend did well, but it turns out I am "over traditional age" for this exercise modality. Next time I'm going to forget about trying to win and just crank it up to eleven and GO!

I made mayonnaise.

2008-09-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

I used the Julia Child recipe, which turns out to be needlessly complicated and panicky because it's based on the stoneaged technology of the whisk. If you have a stick blender you don't really need to psyche yourself out with fears of curdling.

Problems I had:

I should've made it in a big mug instead of trying to mess with a bowl. The stick blender wants a narrow, tall container, not a wide, flat container.
Julia wants you to use yolks only. This means you are left with whites. You make an egg white omelet. You realize eggwhite omelets really suck.
My free-range egg yolks are really yellow. My extra virgin cold pressed twice dated $7/oz California-hippy-excreted olive oil is really green. My mayonnaise was chartreuse.
I was remembering the delicious warm aoli salad dressing I had at the French restaurant where my cousin that married the Smith girl had his wedding reception. But I used the juice of a crone of an old lemon I found lying around, and that plus the robust hairyleggedhippylady tang of the muscley olive oil I used and the oops, a little too much mustard made a real deisel-fueled product. Not a Smith girl mayonnaise. Sturgis girl mayonnaise, moreso.

Behind, ahead, behind, ahead--it's a NIGHTmare!

2008-09-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, so now I'm ahead again by a teenyweenybeentzie weentz. I gotta say this does not fill me with the pure light of joy, it just makes me more and more fearful. Recently a co-worker who for some reason has an issue with my almost fainting every time I stand up mentioned that part of my little obsession problem might be capitalism. I said, "O, heavens, no, it's not the money, the money is only $750, I just want to WIN." She nodded sagely and inclined her head gracefully to mutter something to her slender clavicle about competition and capitalism. But you know what? Whatever! She's a bald-headed buditist, so what does she know. (She's not really baldheaded but may as well be, as budditist as she acts all the damn time damn.) In a minute she'll be asking me to spend my exercise careens through the trackless brownfields sweeping the path before me with a special broom to clear insects out of the way of my thrashing cross trainers. Actually, dag, that would get in a ton of upper-body work, wouldn't i? Say... maybe being a budditiss is not such a bad strategy. You basically don't eat anything until you prostrate yourself before the meager bowl 47 times for each compass point or something, and even then you're probably supposed to joyfully gift half of your thin chick pea gruel to the koi pond in order that the koi within can attain higher states of koi consciousness on their journey to meet bodhi satvah or whateverthehellitis. Damn! Buddhism is an excellent diet and exercise regimen! No wonder that lady has those krazy klavicles goin' on.

A friend has agreed to try my diet (not this crazy bullshit I've been doing since June in order to slaughter all competitors and achieve Capitalist Nirvana, but my real, sane, how I lost all the weight I gained in my 20s diet). Another friend is cautiously interested. I am lobbying a certain family member hard. I sent that individual some links to terrifying studies today. Next step, the horse head in the bed. Soon everyone I know will be eating ditchweeds and achieving metabolic stasis. And all because of the tenacious Mr. Slick!

The Path to Enlightenment

2008-09-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

When you go for a meditative walk (or, if you're in a weightloss contest, a meditative deranged, hip-dislocating careen), you tend to figure a few things out.

Today what I figured out was that I can't know what shocking abuses Slick is capable of putting himself and his opponents through in his crazy, obsessive effort to win this contest. All that is out of my hands. All I can do is relax, forgive other people their excesses, and get to work on me. Be the best person I can possibly be!

To that end, from now until the final weigh in I shall eat nothing but steamed greens, soft-boiled eggs and water. And espresso. And diuretics. And amphetamines. And emetics. And laxatives (but not the chewables! They have sweeteners).

I have found a way to avoid walking across the sweltering commuter lot on my way around the lake! It involves walking through the woods where they filmed the Blair Witch Project. In same woods today I saw a persimmon tree whose persimmons I had to shun. And I saw a black racer and a pileated woodpecker. These ran from me, of course, because I look like the Crypt Keeper, now. But I don't care if I'm risking death by [SPOILER ALERT!] ghost-of-creepy-ol'-child-molester-who-makes-his-victims-stand-in-a-corner-while-he-murders-his-other-victims-and-breaks-their-university-supplied-video-cameras-they're-using-for-their-dopey-J-school-project-gone-bad. And I don't care if I'm causing a silent spring by frightening the area fauna to death. I'm sticking with the woods. My walk route is immeasurably improved. Anyone reading this who knows which commuter lot I'm talking about and wants to do my walk with me one day, perhaps in combination with a little Dance, Dance, Revolution, Revolution, which I can't help noticing we still haven't done, is cordially invited to accompany.

Worst Fears part Deux: the MURDERING!

2008-09-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

I knew it!

Slick cheats like a Louisiana politician! How do you tell if Slick is cheating? TAKE HIS PULSE!

He posted a zero result last week because he didn't weigh in. This week he's posted with a five-pound loss. It's not surprising: he's built like a damn beachmaster.

Meanwhile, I'm nearly out of discretionary pounds. I'm starting to look like the Crypt Keeper. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO??

DAMN it I should've gained more at the outset. WHY didn't I go to Krispy Kreme? WHY WHY WHY? I look back now on all those nights I spent peacefully asleep in bed. Okay, sure, I missed a few hours of sleep most nights fighting the reflux, and I had to sleep around my island of a stomach, and sure: now and then I was up half the night from indigestion pains. But there were so many hours when I lay there quietly snoozing away packing in the REMs and fending off the pounds.

WHY WASN'T THE TV ON?
WHY WASN'T I EATING CHIPS AND FROSTING?

WHY AM I JUST SITTING HERE TYPING?????

GOODBYE!

Fears

2008-08-29T13:34:00.001-07:00

What if Slick just didn't weigh in last week and in fact he has lost seven pounds and is 3 percentage points ahead of me?

What if one of my thigh muscles snaps? You know how when you were in gym class with some sociopath like for instance Earlton and they told you to duckwalk all over the gym and then they told you to run sprints? You know how you feel like your thigh muscle is going to snap? What if it did?? If my thigh muscle snapped, I'd be paralyzed and then how would I get my cardio?

What if Ditchweed Guy NEVER comes back?

Awwwwyeeeeeeaaaaah!

2008-08-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

Bye bye, Mr. Slick.

I'm ahead by a teeny tiny little fraction. Now all I have to do is cuddle that newborn baby lead close and water it with my starving tears so it will grow up big and strong.

Plus I today found more puffballs in the neighborhood on the way to the bus stop. Just a little nesting in front of a once-proud cottage now surrounded by condos and abandoned.

I have a plan: when I find a puffball in the spore stage out in some random inconvenient field, I'm gonna stick it in a ziplock and take it home. Then I'll take it out of the ziploc and let it poot its lil spores in likely spots on the way to the bus stop. If it works, I'll end up with a little secret commute farm. People say you can't grow wild mushrooms because they're so picky, but puffballs don't seem that picky, in fact they seem to be opportunists. I think these worksite puffballs might enjoy a little diaspora action.

Puffballs

2008-08-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

Puffballs are a fungus that is among us at this time of year. I found several of them yesterday while slogging around at noon in my quest to beat Slick and win $750 at the price of not drinking a daiquiri in what feels like ten thousand years. But you know what? Serendamndipity. In seeking great suffering I find great joy. It's worth not drinking a daiquiri for ten thousand years if it means you find that many puffballs. I took them home and made them into a delicious scramble using this crazygood butter I found at that one store. It's called something like vermontchurned special great butter or something, I don't know the name, but it comes in yellow paper printed with little cow heads, and inside that is a plastic tube with metal closer thingies, like how braunschweiger is packaged. It is the best butter, like the March Hare said. So you cook your puffballs in that til they're browned a bit and then you throw in your eggs and stir it all around. Salt and pepper, keep it simple.

Puffballs are so fantastic because they don't go all watery. They stay firm and meaty and good good good. You can take your old rubberyass morels and be damned. I'll always love puffballs best.

Obviously you don't want to go out and just start picking a pile of mushrooms and frying them up because you'll die. If you know exactly what a puffball is, you don't need to be reading this and if you don't know at all, you sure don't need to be reading this, either. But if you're kindof halfway familiar with the concept and you want to do a scramble, you better find somebody who really knows. You can get a book or look online, but bear in mind, it's probably going to lead to a shockingly fast and painful death because of the similarity between puffballs and baby amanitas. You cut them in half and look at them to be sure you don't see a creeeeepy little outline of the amanita-to-be in the creeeeeeepy fetal thing you plucked, all thinking it was a delicious yumyummity when really it is THE DESTROYING ANGEL!

I really lucked out last night: I'm still alive! I was also able to jam down a round of cruddy American brie and some inferior Greek yogurt (only Fage total cream for me, now and forevermore). All while watching Trailer Park Boys, season 9 or whatever it is, in which we discover that the show has finally and completely jumped the shark. Mozart's Requiem.

Bacon, lettuce and tomato salad

2008-08-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

I certainly couldn't eat one of these today, what with Slick breathing down my neck and Earlton cancelling classes right and left, but back in the early days of the competition, I ate a number of these delicious bacon, lettuce and tomato salads. Here is how it is done:

Get a big mixing bowl and fill it with bitter greens--mesclun or what have you. I get from the farmers' market, where they have such as baby mustard.* Chop up a b-load of tomatoes, fry some bacon, maybe say four strips, throw on mayonnaise, crumble your bacon over, salt and pepper, stir, consume.

Two more pounds down. No notion what Slick is up to. Results supposed to go up tomorrow. I'm nervous, but I still got a couple tricks up my sleeve.

*"Such as" used that way is stolen from Roast Beef.

wrst F33rz 2tlly r3@lizd!

2008-08-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Ditchweed guy was not there
and neither were the ditchweeds. I was forced to buy zucchini and cucumber instead. Zucchini and cucumber of dubious pedigree, too. My heart is cold with fear: what if ditchweed guy is kaput for the whole summer? I will be forced to SUPPLEMENT with MAINSTREAM FOOD!

More Bulletins:

Slick is STILL in first place.
I walked up some stairs.
Earlton's Klass is tonight!

I got nuttin'

2008-08-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to exercise at lunch today but I didn't. Later I'm supposed to go to step jump and pump or slap kick and tickle or powerjamz or whatever the $#%* is the dumbass name they came up with for it, but you know what?

I ain't.

I ain't goin'.

FORGET ABOUT IT, GYM PEOPLE.

The.
End.

Green on Green Violence

2008-08-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I explained about how to make pesto with kale (actually collards). So then what you do, you have your pesto in the 'fridge and you're using it in omelets and such, and then one day you make

Green on Green Violence
You wash some kale (actually collards) and rip it into random sized pieces and sear it. Then you put it in a dish and you put your pesto on that and some green pepper chunks and some chunks of parmesan. So it's just a MESS of green. Onto that you pour a little more olive oil and maybe some salt and you stir that around.

CONsume.

Economy Nosh
It's true how it costs more per unit of vegetation at the farmers' market than it does per unit of vegetation at the grocery store. It costs astronomically more per unit of cheese-shop parmesan than it costs per shake of dehydrated whey-influenced Dilithium Kristilz(R) or whatever the crap is in the shiny green cardboard cylinder with the yellow plastic shake/pour top. Or maybe it is a red plastic shake/pour top. Anyway, this is all true, about how you pay more for the edible comestible.

However, when you eat nothing but farmers' market fare and snob cheese, you eat far less. So a couple of units of vegetation will last you the week. So you come out better off moneywise. Mmmmhmm, you sure do.

For the past week I have lived on:
home food:

1 bunch chicory
1 bunch some other kind of lettucey ditch weeds
2 bunches collards
4 green peppers
1 can of sardines
about two Tbs feta cheese
pesto
eggs, 4+ per day
about 3 cups dry-roasted mixed nuts
4 peaches
parmesan
various fresh herbs

restaurant food:
1/2 a roast duck
a tilapia, fried hard like they do it at the good Mexican places
roasted vegetables
seared tuna
three oysters

You notice how there's no WHOLE GRAINS in there? That's 'cause I'm not eating them. That's why I'm not hungry. That's why I'm not spending $200/week on food. And that's why I'm going to win.

The Devious Mr. Slick

2008-08-18T06:50:00.000-07:00

The other day in Earlton's* Klass, I observed my rival, Slick, minutely to determine what occult powers have enabled him to reach 1st place (for now) in this competition. I discovered that at all times, whether at work or at rest, be he standing, sitting, or lying on the floor groaning and not doing his core strengthening moves, Slick sluices great cataracts of sweat from his every pore.

So! I have discovered your secret weapon, Mr. Slick!

All I have to do is spend the last week of the competition up to my neck in a sealed, heated barrel sucking ice chips and spitting out the meltwater. I'll get plenty of cardio batting away the flying toads and other hallucinations I'll start to have once my brain begins to shrivel in my skull like an oyster left ajar in the noonday sun. Hell, jockeys and Ana kidz do this type of thing all the time. Piece. Of. Cake.

Speaking of cake, after I win I am spending my $750 on cake.

*Not his real name.

I am in second place.

2008-08-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

There is one dude, I'll call him "Slick," ahead of me by... 00.34 percentage points. I think. Unless I messed up the math, which is possible: I lied last week when I said I lost 18 pounds. I've only lost 16 so far. But whatever: out of 35 people, I am second from the top. I shall destroy "Slick." He will not win. He cannot win. I will win. The end.

Here's how to make hard boiled eggs:
Boil a bunch of water.
Gently lower eggs, cold from the fridge, into the water. Use one of those wire baskets on a bamboo handle that they sell at the Asian marts.
Bring water back to boil.
Turn it down so they're just simmering.
Wait 13 or 14 minutes.
Immerse eggs in cold water.

My Greatest Fear
When I get to the farmers' market today, ditchweed guy will have quit selling ditchweeds. Then what? THEN WHAT, AMERICA?

How I Done It:

2008-08-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Preamble

First off, I'm not even sure yet that I done it, the contest not being over, yet. But I think y'all should know some of my methods because even if I ain't done it, I done something purt near it.

I don't know if I done it because I don't know where I'm at in the stats right now. And that's because five weeks into this thing there was a big legal shakeup; the guy running it, I'll call him "Stan," got canned, no one knows why, they didn't update the sheets for a week, and then the bulletin board where they'd been posting our standings faithfully, week after week, was suddenly wallpapered all over with giant, 20-pt-type, "Your Rights As a Weight-Loss Contest Entrant" legal blab. Amusing, since this is week six or seven and up to now we have heard exactly zero about the (obvious) health liability represented by a contest based on how much weight you can lose and how much muscle you can gain in a two-month period after living life like a hibernating grub for the previous six years. Gym people are like this, though. All, "Damn the torpedoes, fatass!" regardless of the danger of lawsuits or getting either fired by administration or kicked in the nads by an outraged "client" driven past civility by the constant heckling to "engage your core."

Here's an example of typical gym-people thinking:

I have a paralyzed serratous anterior muscle in my left upper arm/shoulder/back. It's the muscle that keeps the shoulder blade in tight while you lift your arm so that you can lift your arm over your shoulder. Mine's been out of commission since I was 12 years old, as a result of a demonic summer P.E. session in which the various psych-experiments running middle school gym made everybody, regardless of ability, hang from the chin-up bar and try to do ten chin-ups. Not every 12-year-old can do even one chin-up straight off; some of your weaker 12-year-olds will need to build up upper body strength before they can haul off and do a chin-up. But they didn't take that into account, and now I will NEVER be able to do a chin-up--or at least, I won't until I build up my right arm to Pop-Eye proportions and can do a one-arm chin-up. At 12, I hung from the chin-up bar struggling for two or three minutes or whatever was the coach-mandated torture interval until "blip!" My arm went out. Everybody heard the "blip!" They shielded themselves with their Starsky and Hutch lunchboxes. Now one of the muscles necessary to raise my arm over my head has ossified: it is no longer a muscle. It has become... fibrous tissue. I wonder... if you pay for private school for your kid is that one of the perks? The meatheads running P.E. won't partially paralyze your child out of pure, rocklike stupidity? Might be worth a look-see.

So but anyway, what I've noticed, the meatheads running the grown-up gyms are the same old meatheads, lightly varnished with an all-over layer of Susan Powter blab. There are a bunch of classes that feature the push-up; until such time as I get my right arm to PopEye, I can't do a push-up any more than I can do a pull-up. The gym is plastered with CYA signs encouraging you not to do anything you don't want to do and to modify any exercise until it's no more strenuous than needlepoint. So they can't yell at me to just do the push-ups, wimp, like in the good old days. But every time we get to push up time and I make some candy-ass modification, depending on who it is running the class they either look at me as if I've got the Munchausen's real bad, or they come up all dripping with sympathy and announce that we'll get that shoulder back shipshape in a matter of months. They all think one of exactly two and only two things is the case: either I'm awash in sloth or I have a rotator cuff injury from too much tennis. Very limited imaginations, I'm saying.

Despite them, I have managed to prevail.

What I Done:

I lost 18 pounds; I'm now three pounds under where I was before I began the DeNiro Coke 'n' spuds weight-gain diet. And there are a few weeks to go.

A Very Little Bit about How I Done It:

Besides fattening up beforehand, which was an EXCELLENT idea, by the way, despite the fact that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the WORLD told me it was stupid, here are a few things I did:
I ignored party line about eating breakfast.
I ignored party line about whole grains.
I ignored party line in general.
I made sure to get a lot of sleep.
Most of all, I did things gradually--I added exercise in increments and I took away calories in increments.

You could do this, too! Anybody can win a weightloss contest simply by ignoring pretty much everything they tell you to do to lose weight and doing what works, instead.

Larry McMurtry

2008-08-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

When you're eating to win, you have to cook all day. The way I manage, I listen to Larry McMurtry books while I chop and chop and chop and chop and dice and mince and sauté and bake and stew and steam and blend and stir and eviscerate and wash and spin and rinse and drain. It is just verb verb verb verb verb when you're in the kitchen, and it's hot and dull in there. And in my kitchen they put the sink and counter in a stupid place nowhere near the window, so you're trapped standing in the same spot for hours, staring at tile. Also the lighting sucks and I lack the inclination to do anything about it. But for Larry McMurtry, I would die in there. Unfortunately, the version I have of All of My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers isn't read by Wolfram Kandinsky, if that is how you spell it. I hope it doesn't mean anything happened to Wolfram K. I would cry.

I've developed a rhythm with this. I lose weight Wednesday through Friday, hold steady Saturday through Tuesday, lose more weight the following Wednesday through Friday. So far it's working a treat. I was in fourth place last week because of all the Red Stripe you have to drink when you're on vacation, but I expect to see some movement this week.

Hey-Wow Things To Do With Kale!
You know, it turns out kale soup blows. But there is another hey-wow thing you can do with kale that doesn't. You can chop it up coarse, flash fry it 'til it's bright green (it's inedible at this point because it's still all fibrous), then snatch it out the pan and throw it in the food processor. It will be much reduced in bulk. Grind it all up, add basil, nuts, garlic, olive oil and cheese, grind some more, and you have pesto with greater food value than pesto without kale. It tastes mighty fine and is jewel green. These days I'm actually doing this with collards and the various weird ditchweeds sold by Ditchweed Guy at the farmers' market, not kale, because it's so hot nothing but collards and ditch weeds will grow. There's still basil, though, so I'm good.

Thank you, Larry McMurtry (I know you're reading this). I love you.

Somebody said, "Have you been working out?" today.

2008-07-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

Then he said I was "cut." Sounds so violent.

Meanwhile the clueless personal trainers running the weightloss contest are harrassing everyone about keeping a "food journal" and attending the group rock-climbing jaunt. This weekend they are taking us to the grocery store for a good old fashioned label-readin' sesh. They are going to lead my hapless competitors direct to the Kashi and rolled oats aisle. We are going to learn about Splenda and stevia!!! I hope there's time for an independent study jaunt. I'll come back with my cart full of pomegranite juice and get all kind of extra credit. Everyone will copy me, drink the stuff and gain five pounds. Meanwhile, I'll use it to brighten up my fishtank and dye my socks. My numbers will continue, inexorable, to fall.

I'm going on vacation again, but here's a diet tip: the reason we don't eat oysters in the summer is not that they will give us the listeria but that they spawn in the summer. Do you like to suck cold undiluted mushroom soup direct from the can? Then you will love oyster spawn.

Diet Challenge

2008-07-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

I consumed a gigantic bottle of beer at a pub that prides itself on stocking beers of all nations and that has the kind of proud and knowledgeable waitstaff I've come to fear, all wielding the right kind of glass for each beer and serving them at the right temperature and bla bla bla. The menu had six or eight closely printed columns of beers to choose from and I went for a Bock beer from the oldest still-beer-brewing monastery in the world (extant since 1050 and just brewing their hearts out the whole time: I learned all this later, from the label the monks had chiseled into the pre-cambrian stone bottle). I also learned that Bock is the Manwich of beers. You see, it is specifically formulated to provide the calories to fuel all the pre-dawn ablutions, prayer and self-flagellation performed by monks during Lent. Monks who, in that holy season of deliberate deprivation, would otherwise starve to death since they consume nothing but Bock beer the whole time. So fantastic: I chose the sweetest, densest beer on the entire thousand-beer menu. It was good, too, but a little on the Aunt Jemima side. When you get down toward the bottom of the bottle it starts to cloy a little if you haven't just spent a long day a-flaggelatin' of your hindside.

The Porkalogical Congress

2008-07-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

According to a highly reputable source, I am in second place, with an 8 pound loss in one week.

It was not my intent to show my hand this early: this is a marathon, not a sprint. I can only hope that my (apparent) jackrabbit start will cause some sensible turtle contestants to panic and try to become hares. A slim chance: they seem an unflappable bunch.

So I'm worried. On the other hand, at the weigh-in I heard some very encouraging talk about "free days."

"This is my free day! I'm going to Moe's!"

HEY, GOOD IDEA!

Now, today I ate at the poly-Latin place. I had the awesome pork chunks and vapid salad, of which I ate the tomatoes. There is no point in eating that stuff they call lettuce. There's no point ordering salad at the poly-Latin place in the first place: you need to get yucca or plantains or beans. But I'm not tryna lose my edge over no plate of fried Spanish bananas, I tell you what.

Fourth of July I had ribs and ribs plus ribs.

I'm going to make pork stock out of the bones and out of that I'm making kale soup. It's my own recipe that I wrote last night. I may share it if it turns out not to be pizen.

(I frikking hate Moe's.)

Hooraaaay!

2008-07-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

It worked!

The contest people calipered my various flab, and they told me I'm 33.8% lipids. Wikipedia assures me that's solidly obese.

I thought I would have a lot to say, but I'm still so overwhelmed. I want to run and jump and put my arms around the whole world. $750, you are mine!

Upshift!

2008-06-27T06:36:00.000-07:00

Operation Sirloin

Back in the saddle after my day of rest.

I began Operation Sirloin with a can of salmon last night at around 11:30. (Eating when you should be sleeping is a great way to gain!) I made the salmon into a simple "salad" by adding delicious, versatile mayonnaise, the condiment of champions. Some people think that this kind of salad needs things like relish or celery or capers or chopped walnuts or whatever other horror-nubbins they can scrape off the fridge floor or their back teeth. Those people are what I call nutjobs. Tuna salad is tuna and mayonnaise. Chicken salad is chicken and mayonnaise. Salmon salad is salmon and mayonnaise. Ham salad is ham and mayonnaise. Egg salad is egg and mayonnaise. What makes a wad of animal byproduct into what the human community has agreed to call a "salad" is the addition of mayonnaise; lipsticking the pig with your little bit of pickle is just nothing but sad.

Hey, check it out: you can get good canned fish at your small independent grocery store where they sell the Dr. Bronner's and the green algae toothpaste--see if they have it. That salmon was seriously good for canned fish, and according to the blab on the can it was sustainably caught wild Alaskan salmon. The tuna from the same people was good, too, and just as bleedyheart. We ought all to be eating sardines, of course, and that's what I aim to do as soon as I can find some that haven't been drowned in mustard.

This morning thanks to the decent food of yesterday I managed to get out of bed in the morning and do what I have been trying to get up and do all week: I brought my beloved mechanic a box of brownies from the yuppie bakery. I also dumped the leftover Mexicolas on him--he's got three sons and they're at the shop on their feet all day playing monkey in the middle with spent car batteries: I figure they can handle six Coca-Colas between 'em with no lasting ill effects.

I had breakfast at Steak 'n Shake: two flavor-free eggs; four sad, limp bacon strips; two wagon wheels of insipid sausage. A modest effort, but I'm just starting out. I did manage to shake about a tsp of salt on the eggs, which should help with my endgame effort to retain water. Steak 'n Shake is perfectly calibrated to appeal to my demographic. The air conditioning is freezing cold; it's all diner-ey inside--black and red and white and steel and tile and glass; and they play, like, "Roxanne" and "Karma Chameleon" and stuff. So it's like the fifties as imagined by the eighties! Which is great: Steak 'n Shake can make even the dreadful, inexorable passage of time all warm and bite-sized and batter-fried.

Downshift!

2008-06-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

I am eating oranges and drinking black coffee, and I am happy again.

I was going to do this gradually by trending off swill onto "healthy whole grains," but when I looked at the maniacally grinning multiracial yuptastic couple on the Kashi box this morning, I Just. Could. Not. Go there. "Good Friends" my fat, raddled ass. Tonight the brown rice, the whole wheat bagels, the bread, the rotini, they go. They all go. Out, you bastard Kashi. Out! I'm glad I managed to finish the challah. But the storebought sourdough is untouched and I don't care: it's going. It's all going, probably to the home of a certain underweight lad I know. I dumped what was left of the carton of OJ down the sink, though. I couldn't inflict that stuff on any lad, no matter how underweight. Nasty weird opaque boiled tasting swill. Down the drain and straight to hell with you! Away! Away from me and mine.

Coca-Cola epilogue and fry rant

2008-06-25T14:18:00.001-07:00

--- warning --- chatty blog post --- warning --- chatty --- warning --- chatty blog post --- warning --- chatty --- warning --- chatty blog post --- warning --- chatty

I think I drank five today. My head is kindof killing me a little bit, and I have a backache that I think is related to a the sudden development of a new counterweight situation in the frontal zone. I need to invest in some guywires.

Meanwhile I am completely falling down on the calorie intake front. I ran out of hershey's kisses yesterday and all I had today was a few cups of pasta with butter and a Snickers bar. I meant to hit Krispy Kreme for lunch, but I couldn't get it together; maybe I will do that for a pre-dinner snack. Dinner will be some tubs of movie popcorn. Of course. Like you needed me to spell that out.

Yesterday I had some Sonic meal items. The annoying thing about Sonic is, they play loud rock music so you can't listen to bonehead NPR unless you roll up the windows. Then it's really hot. Are they trying to get me to run the car so I can have the AC on while I await the rollernymph with my burger, fries and shake? Is corporate America not run by money-hongry Connecticut honkies as we've all always expected but in fact run by life forms of Pluto who wish to create an all CO2 atmosphere Earth so that they can raise their CO2-breathing, 50-foot space snails here? Think about it.

Furthermore, here's something: there is one thing these burger places do right and that's fries. Given that they do fries so right and everything else so very very wrong, is it too much to ask that the one fargin' time in like six years I go into one of these hellmouths and order fries they fry them in oil from, like, maybe this month? Instead of oil from before Christmas? Could that happen? No. No, Sonic cannot make that happen.

Coca-Cola: the final chapter

2008-06-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

I bought a 24-pack, which I thought I could dispatch no problem, but I'm seeing an issue, here. I have just today and tomorrow, and I have like ten or 12 left. I've already had two today. So far the maximum per day intake has been four. What am I supposed to do with the leftovers? I heard that you can clean the toilet with Coke, but I tried that after a bunch of people brought mixers to a party I had. It's not really very effective. I read somewhere that you can dissolve car paint with it, but then I read somewhere else that that's a myth. Anyway, I don't have any pressing need to dissolve any car paint right now. What do I do with all these frikking Cokes? I guess I could take a small plane up over the Kalahari and throw them out the window, thereby starting cargo cults among the bushmen. Except that all the bushmen have been shoved off the Kalahari. Dang. This is a 100% letdown spiritually. I can't believe I couldn't polish off 24 12-oz cokes in a whole week.

Coca-Cola, Chapter III

2008-06-23T12:09:00.001-07:00

Huge breakthrough!
Coca-goddamn-Cola is starting to taste good. After only five days of relentless, dedicated pounding, I have succeeded in destroying my taste buds. They have succumbed at last to the mighty, syrupy fist. Can colossal weight gain be far behind? Signs point to hell no! Hooraaaaaaay!

Lunch: an emotional roller coaster.
I consumed a "P'zone." I made the air quotes when ordering the P'zone, and the Pizza Hut lackey said, "Do you want it with quotation marks?" I was all, "Har!" Then he said it was going to take fifteen minutes and my balloon popped: booooo. Then when I was waiting in the car for it to be fifteen minutes, George Carlin came on Fresh Air: yaaaaaay. But it was an old one because George Carlin died yesterday: boooooo. Then, totally unexpectedly, the Pizza Hut lackey brought the P'zone out to the car, so I did not have to walk in and get it: yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Coca-Cola: Chapter II

2008-06-20T08:15:00.001-07:00

Esteemed reader who may one day be mine, do you drink flocola in the A.M.? Why do you do that thing? Can you help me to "grok," as the kids say?

My breath smells like caramel. Everything is sticky. There is a brown film over the world. And I have three more of these to take care of before 4 pm. H-hOW? HOW?

I probably sound as if I protest too much. Indeed not. I feel a strong inclination to barf. True, I did also finish a pint of creme brulee ice cream this morning, and maybe half a bag of potato chips. But these are minor actors. It's the refreshing cola beverage that's trying to kill me. Well, forget it, CocaGoddamnCola! As God is my witness, as God is my witness, I'm going to lick this. I'm going to live through this. And when it is over, I will never drink soda again. No, nor any of my folk.

Say it with me, folk!

As God is our witness, we'll never drink soda again!

Coca-Cola

2008-06-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

I am drinking a Coca-Cola from the Messican store. It is made with delicious sugar, rather than evil satanic subsidized sirop of maize. I am having it on top of some fresh, tasty ice. Despite the fact that it is made with pure, wholesome produit du cane, it is still making the inside of my mouth taste as if something complicated died there, a very long time in the past.