Monkee

Culinary Mastery... You're Doing it Wrong 3

Eventually, The Husband (who was at the time, The Fiance) moved in and threw a major wrench in my little plans.  Suddenly there was this person hanging around all the time expecting things like meals and, lord help me, snacks.  Worse than that, even when he was offered lovely, nourishing things like natural applesauce, tiny dill pickles, and even my prized mustard and tomato sandwiches, he’d scoff.  Instead he’d demand more and better food and when I’d sweetly produce from it’s hiding place behind the ice cube trays a cherished and rare discontinued 190 calorie Lean Cuisine, he’d inhale it in a single gasping breath before determining it an inadequate appetizer and continuing his demands.  Then he would stab a jagged, rusty knife into my chest and spit on my still twitching corpse.  Or, at least, that’s how it felt.

Faced with the unyielding presence of this strangest of strange roommates, this person who seemed to think it perfectly normal to want food on a regular basis, I found myself at a bit of a loss.  What exactly is it that people who eat…eat?  As unbelievable as it seems now, I honestly did start out trying to feed him the same things I was eating.  I gave him a potato boiled with a bouillon cube and showed him how to mush the thin slices up to make something that was almost, but not quite, exactly unlike mashed potatoes; I made him a mustard and tomato sandwich with a fat free Kraft single to boot; and I introduced him to the subtle and luxurious decadence of huge, colorful bowls of sugar free Jell-O…for dinner.  I’d like to think my delusions were at least as charming as they were pathetic; yet he remained unconvinced.

Several months and multiple unsuccessful compromises later, I found myself in uncharted waters.  For a large part having kissed and made up, food and I were on good terms again, but where I had once subsided on mostly healthy foods and natural vegetation, I now found myself falling victim to The Husbands horrific shopping habits; floundering adrift in a sea of processed salty snack foods and sugary baked goods.  My childhood spent with an incessantly dieting mother and a foreign old-world grandmother (Who once, accidentally and unknowingly slaughtered and served my mother her own pet ducks.)(Oh, yeah.) had done very little to prepare me to deal with someone who routinely ate Spaghetti-O’s and Little Debbie snack cakes.  Even my steamed broccoli with it’s conspicuously absent sodium content and its lack of anthropomorphized mascotry was ultimately no match for the likes of the Hamburger Helper oven mitt.  (That bastard.)  I caved like the fat-free, low-cal, low-carb, white bread that I had been eating for the previous ten years or so of my life.  An item so lacking in substance and riddled with holes that I had once affectionately nicknamed it Air-Bread.

We Interrupt This Story For...

Well, for no particular reason.  I was just thinking…and wondering to myself…  Why is it called a doctor’s practice?  Is there any practical or specific reason for it, or is it just because they think they’re so special that they get to be different?  Maybe it’s like those stinking lawyers and their Freudian “Firms.”  On the other hand, a lot of things like this turn out to have stemmed from some reasonable, although long forgotten point of origin.  Maybe there was a time when practice – in it’s common definition – was the most appropriate descriptor of what a doctor was doing; some sort of preparation for the big show.  Of course, if that were the case, then what was the main event?  A childbirth?  A surgery?  War?  On the other hand, it could be a form of detachment.  It could be a way of distancing themselves from the ever-present possibility that they might fail.  As though, somehow, calling it practice would mitigate the effects of a less than desirable outcome.  Like a really tasteless joke:  What do you call it when a doctor accidentally kills his patient?  PRACTICE!  Ba dum DUM.

Culinary Mastery... You're Doing it Wrong 2

            It was very shortly after the grassy chicken incident that I began the rash of serious dieting that eventually turned into my little run-in with the world of eating disorders.  It wasn’t until just this very second as I was typing this that I recognized the humor in that situation, seeing it not as the coincidence that it likely was and instead as the catalyst.  As though my cooking was SO awful that faced with the choice between eating the food I was making and starving myself until my hair fell out, I found the path to be suddenly clear.  At any rate, since eating had suddenly lost a great deal of its appeal, I completely abandoned any interest I once had in cooking good food and began a crusade to seek out that ever-elusive dieter’s dream: calorie-free food.  I tend to liken this time to the dark ages, where people turned away from science and reason to really earnestly pursue magic and religion and effectively set back the course of human knowledge and understanding by a few hundred years.  Such was my single-minded determination to find food that could be eaten without crippling guilt and shame that I not only decimated whatever meager culinary information I had managed to glean up to this point, but also caused the death of the American diner, the reality TV takeover, El Niño, and Paris Hilton’s rise to fame.  All a result of my eating disorder.  Bet you didn’t know that.

Not that I didn’t still manage the occasional decent thing, but for the most part the food I ate at that time was a bizarre combination of bland or paste-like, water or greenery-based, and imaginary or non-existent.  There were things like thinly sliced potatoes boiled in water with a bouillon cube, mustard and tomato sandwiches, and cucumbers with vinegar.  Whole meals were eaten out of a measuring cup and ALL products containing fats or oils (stuff that has…you know…flavor) were excluded.  Upon further consideration though, while I couldn’t realistically call this stuff gourmet, I think I was still finding some decent combinations that simply would have benefitted from a little more content and a little less crazy.  So: good times.

After a while, I decided that I couldn’t be trusted with having food around the house lest I accidentally inhale some celery fumes and gain an ounce.  Thus, I started eating out all the time.  Now, I’m going to say something here that I know if my father ever read it, his head would literally explode.  With as tight as money is for everyone right now, I’m even having trouble thinking about this without having a few cardiac episodes myself, but at the time it made perfect sense.  (To be honest, at the time, I felt like a GENIUS!)  Not only did my strategy entail eating meals out, but I would also order full portions and multiple courses of really fatty and heavy foods.  I would get fried appetizers and pasta with cream sauce and finish it all off with chocolate cake and ice cream…but I would only have a bite.  Maybe two.  And then… THEN! The waiters!  The poor, confused waiters would offer to box it for me.  They would offer to wrap it up so I could take it home.  And I wouldn’t let them.  I would go out to dinner and buy the restaurant’s dumpster forty dollars worth of food and at the end of the night I would go home, weigh myself, longingly lick the frost from my empty freezer, and fall asleep to the comforting gnawing sound of a hunger-mad lunatic trying to eat her pillow.  And I did it for months.  Ahh…memories… Excuse me; I have to go talk my wallet down from the ledge.  (But you’ve got so much to live for!  Please, reconsider!  If not for me, think of the pennies!)

 

To Be Continued

Culinary Mastery... You're Doing it Wrong

            When I was younger, I was thoroughly enamored with cooking.  To a large part, I imagine, my curiosity must have stemmed from the sheer volume of food preparation I bore witness to in my short lifetime, but I also like to think that some of that interest must have come from the unique variety of flavors and methods that shaped my early childhood food experiences.  Between my mom’s fairly traditional fare like meatloaf and lasagna (usually made with help from store bought conveniences like shredded cheese and jarred sauce) to my oftentimes live-in Grandmother’s (made from scratch to the point of being one step away from slaughtering your own goat…and sometimes, not even that) Persian cooking - the latter of which usually began in the late morning or early afternoon in order for food to be ready at dinnertime – there was an astonishing amount of variety in both the foods themselves and the styles of preparation.

            Before reaching double digits, I had made my first solo ventures into cooking.  Nothing particularly taxing - mostly just cookies and cakes from box mixes - but that never stopped me from feeling particularly awesome and skilled while doing it.  Despite the fact that my personal attempts at cooking essentially amounted to a lot of egg cracking and stirring, I began to think of myself as the next Julia Child.  Standing in the kitchen whooping and hollering and generally exclaiming to my imaginary audience about the tremendous FUN I was having and how FRESH and NATURAL the unidentifiable pile of dust that I had just dumped out of a box of cake mix was; I was breathtaking.

            As I grew older, I began to regularly peruse my mother’s small shelf of cookbooks.  Immediately I ran headlong into my first set of culinary roadblocks:  a complete lack of interest in details (Was that one teaspoon or one tablespoon?  How about we just pour some in and call it a day?) and an unwillingness to listen to authority.  (Heat on medium for ten minutes.  Whatever.  Medium is for pansies.  Let’s crank this sucker up!)  The unfortunate result of this mental block was that, though I did pick through them for hours on end with a combination of deep fascination and overwhelming boredom, the task was never quite embarked upon with the mental discipline to be considered studying or learning.  Rather, I think I could best describe my intentions as a fervent attempt to soak up their knowledge through skin contact and desperate, clammy want.  I learned very little.

            With this tremendous vault of knowledge and experience tucked into my pocket like a treasured ball of gritty lint, I thus headed off to college to find my way in the great big culinary world.  A short time later, after a number of efforts that I’d like to think provided ample entertainment value to make up for what they lacked in edibility.  I decided that there were abundant opportunities to be had in life for amusement and that, while I was definitely enjoying the chuckles, what I really wanted was something to eat.  Carefully considering my options, I decided that the first thing to be done in this situation was to figure out what all the herbs and spices tasted like.  (It does occur to me now that this may not actually be most people’s logical first step in learning how to cook, but then again, I don’t recall ever claiming to be logical.)  And thus began the experiment that led to the first even remotely palatable recipe I ever pulled out of my ass (Please, don’t visualize this.).  I called it…grassy chicken.  Essentially it consisted entirely of chicken “sautéed” (on high) in a dry pan, then sprinkled with lemon juice and enough dry herbage to make a respectable salad.  Each piece was completely coated with a thick layer of coarse roughage.  It tasted…fibery.

 

To Be Continued

Hypothetically

Hypothetically.  Let’s just say that you had this friend and you used to talk to this friend every day.  Then, over time, you maybe started to drift from them a little.  Perhaps you both got a bit busier, or maybe you procrastinated, or maybe you started feeling like you couldn’t think of anything to say to them or that whatever you could think of to say to them might be too boring or not funny enough to mention.  So let’s say that’s what happened and you started talking to them for shorter and shorter times and then maybe you would only call them once a week; just to say hi.  Now what if, one week, you forgot to call them.  Then the next week you didn’t have time.  Three weeks later you had a really funny story to share, but now you felt like if you called them, you’d have to explain where you’ve been and what if you had a great conversation but then you couldn’t talk to them again for a month?  Is that rude?  Would they be mad? 

Then suppose your life started to fall into a really, really grueling routine.  Suppose your industry failed and the market collapsed and you suddenly found yourself doing three people’s jobs and working sixty or seventy hours a week.  Maybe you didn’t have time to talk to your friend like EVER and even if you could find the time you wouldn’t know what to say.  “Hi, just stopping in to say that I REALLY think this whole thing is about to turn around.  I really genuinely feel like this summer/this fall/after this election/in the new year/when hell freezes over it’s all going to be all right.  By the way, could I interest you in a house?  No?  Some blood?  Plasma, then?  A vital organ?”  Let’s say that you did nothing but work and sleep.  Maybe your house became a disaster and you only ate fast food and your family started to worry about you and you essentially gave up every single thing in your life to cling to the completely unrealistic belief that there even was something you could do that would make any difference.

            Then, let’s say, that you got sick.  It was just a cold, but that it was the strangest cold you’d ever had.  Maybe it was a cold that seemed to be sentient.  Maybe it was cold that seemed to be able to tell when you took a day off and it would suddenly get worse.  And if you went back to work, it would get better.  What if you got an opportunistic cold that after having been around for a week already, suddenly spiked a fever within twelve hours of walking out of the office for the Thanksgiving weekend and completely took your voice.  What if you were able to “celebrate” the anniversary of that cold in weeks?  Months?  What if you had that cold for two months?  What if you still have that cold?

            Meanwhile you’re starting to wonder if your friend even still wants to hear from you.  After all, now you’re a boring, deluded workaholic with a chronic cough.  Who wants that around?  You’re trying to figure out if you should just act like you never went away in the first place and just strike up a conversation or if there wouldn’t been anyone there to have a conversation with anymore.

            Maybe that’s when you decided you should just stop worrying about it so much.  Maybe that’s when it occurred to you that you shouldn’t let whether or not someone was there to hear you talk stop you from talking.  Maybe you just missed the sound of your own voice.  Maybe you wanted to tell no one about your day or show no one your new light fixture.  Perhaps you had a really great recipe that no one might like or a very funny story that would make milk come out of no one’s nose.  Maybe that’s when you realized that you’d rather talk to no one than have no one to talk to.  Maybe that’s when you just decided to wing it.  Maybe that’s what you’re doing right now.

Presto Change-O!

You will probably want to revisit this post about the “before” of this kitchen for a refresher.

One of the first things I noticed when we moved into this house was that the refrigerator end panel was missing.  This is the cabinet panel that covers the side of the refrigerator if it’s not enclosed by cabinetry or walls.  Its purpose is to keep dust from wandering behind the refrigerator through the exposed side and also to keep you from having to look at the ugly couple inch gap behind the refrigerator that’s collecting dust.  To me (and my OCD) this was important.  Since this panel is also cheap to replace – being particle board and veneer – we decided to replace the missing one immediately.  This, however, proved to be complicated.  As I mentioned before, I didn’t actually like the cabinetry in the kitchen all that much and intended to reface it at some point in the future, so when it came time to order the new end panel, I couldn’t figure out if I should order it to match what was currently there or if I should go ahead and get a panel to match what I knew I was going to reface the kitchen with later.  I waffled on this matter for a couple of weeks before I finally decided that the only way to solve my problem was to just go ahead and redo the kitchen now.  After all, there’s no sense in letting a perfectly good builder’s discount go to waste.  You gotta spend money to save money, you know?

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I am not actually (entirely) insane, so we didn’t just go all out and gut the place.  The cabinets themselves were in perfectly fine shape so all we had to do to update them was replace the doors and hardware.  Because I’m very finicky about furniture and cabinetry having really clean lines, I chose a shaker style door and found sleek, long stainless pulls to go with them.  As for the finish, I knew I wanted the color to be more traditional plus I’m pretty into the dark wood finishes these days, so we went with cherry (because it has a really subtle grain) with a dark walnut stain. 

            There were preexisting fluorescent task lights under the upper cabinets, which was nice, but they were completely exposed which wasn’t.  We finished the job by putting up a light valance, which covered it all up nicely.

            Both the new and the old house had the same etched glass pantry door so we brought the matching laundry door we had bought for the old house with us so they could still match.  There’s something very pleasantly old timey about the look that I quite like.

            Also like the old house, this one’s kitchen faucet was designed so you could pull it out and switch it to spray.  Because I have pretty bad carpal tunnel that made that maneuver tricky for me and, more importantly, because an untreated small leak had caused the existing faucet to corrode in unpleasantly water supply contaminating ways, we replaced it with something that was both functional and wouldn’t give us scabbies.  So, you know, BONUS!

            Because I knew we would definitely be revamping the kitchen someday (HA!), I didn’t bother matching our refrigerator to the white appliances that were here when we arrived and did stainless instead.  When we then discovered that the microwave in the game room kitchenette was actually broken, we replaced it with the one from the kitchen and bought a stainless microwave as well.  Our appliances are now split fifty/fifty between white and stainless.  I’d like to think that I can pass it off as a look.

            For extra storage and counter space, my mother gave us a housewarming gift of a VERY large, free-standing kitchen island.  Once again combining modern and traditional it’s painted black with turned legs and cup pulls, but is topped with a stainless steel counter.  It is…yummy.

All in all, the kitchen update has been nothing short of liberating.  Even though I’ve always been pretty good about trying to make myself feel comfortable wherever I’m living, I have never lived anywhere where I have allowed myself so much license to tailor things to my liking.  I mean, I always new that it was helpful.  I always knew that settling in and customizing your digs was the key to really feeling relaxed and at home somewhere, but even I hadn’t realized how big a difference it can make.  Honestly, it’s literally the difference between a house and a home and is totally worth the effort.  I highly recommend it. 

Sumi Gallery

So, um, you know that post that I said I had written about the house?  The one I left at work and said that I would retrieve today?  Well, I forgot it again.  So, um, how ‘bout a little more baby of Zen?  You’d like that wouldn’t you?  Sure you would!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changing Gear

So I had written another post about the house and put it on a thumb drive to bring home from work, but when I tried to open it, I discovered that through some error it had failed to copy.  Unfortunately, I don’t go back to work until Thursday and there’s no way in hell I’m writing it over again, so the house posting is just going to have to go on the back burner for now.  It did occur to me, however, that it’s been a pretty long time since I posted anything about the Baby of Zen and since that’s pretty bad in and of itself, it must be downright criminal that she also turned one a couple months ago and I didn’t even mention it.  Thus I’ve decided to dedicate the next couple of posts to catching up with the Baby of Zen.  Will be about her birthday party where gambling, gluttony, and greed reigned supreme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blame It On The Frames

I hung some pictures.  In frames.  Feel free to take a minute to let the gravity of that sink in.

You see, every now and then I blow things out of proportion.  I look at something that really isn’t that hard, that really isn’t that big of a deal and I make it so big, so insurmountably horrible, that I would do just about anything to avoid it.  Sometimes that thing is the only errand on a long weekend.  Sometimes it’s getting up to use the bathroom when I’m about to fall asleep.  Sometimes it’s changing the channel without the remote.  Whatever it is, given enough time and a strong enough lazy streak, I can make anything feel like the equivalent of being asked to dig my way to China.  (Can’t it wait a little bit?  China will still be there tomorrow.  Plus, I bruised my shoveling arm and for God’s sake, think of the children!)  Now, most of the things I tend to get overly sloth-like about are fairly common.  I mean, who hasn’t lain in the dark and weighed the very real possibility of wetting the bed against the crushing weight of gravity and decided to take their chances instead of getting up?  But some of these things are so tiny, so insignificantly small that avoiding them not only takes more effort than doing them, but even attempting to avoid them should be considered a serious sign of mental illness. 

            This is where the picture frames come in.

            I started college in the summer of 2000, just a scant few weeks after graduating from high school.  In order to prepare for my grand foray into the unknown, I bought a few things with which I might decorate my new digs.  Among those things was a large print of some Monet or other that I quite liked at the time.  About six months ago, seven years after I purchased said print, I decided I’d had enough of its accusatory presence lurking about in the closet and I finally pulled it out and donated it to the Salvation Army.  I am nothing if not a problem solver.

            In reality, of course, the problem lies much deeper than that.  I have a framing phobia.  Well, maybe not a full on phobia, but definitely some sort of framing aversion that prevents me from putting art and frame together without tears and bloodshed coming into play.  Not that I haven’t tried, because good GOD have I tried, but no matter how many frames are procured, no matter how much art is purchased with good intentions, I know that when my time is done and I show up at the pearly gates for an evaluation of my good deeds, there will be some serious questions to be answered about why I thought the needy needed so much art and exactly how benevolent unloading my psychological baggage on the underprivileged could be.

            Anyway (WOW, that was a long detour!), the point is that my mother got me some frames…there’s no need to get into when theses frames were given to me, we’ll just say it wasn’t this year, but she got me these frames you see and I FILLED THEM.  And!  AND hung them on the wall!!!

 

 

FRAMES!!

 

 

With PICTURES!!!

 

 

On the WALL!!!!

 

We’re not just talking about a couple of picture frames here people.  We are talking about twenty-four(!) pictures in fourteen frames.  Are you shocked?  Because I’m not going to lie to you – I know it’s hard to tell from my subtle and understated ways – but I’m a tiny bit surprised myself.  

The Redecorating Gene

One of the best and worst things about moving to this new house is getting another opportunity to decorate.  While I liked a lot of the things we did in the other house, I’m also one of those people who likes change and thinks it’s perfectly normal to spontaneously polka dot her walls or build elaborate play spaces for her cats.  I’m pretty sure I get this trait from both of my parents who have each been known to succumb to sudden redecorating urges that often end in near fatal structural anomalies or unfortunate knick knack situations.  Once, when I was seven or eight years old, I was having trouble sleeping and I got out of bed in the middle of the night to go peel back my mother’s eye lids and see if she was awake.  On my way to my parents’ bedroom, however, I passed through the family room where I found my mom had taken apart the whole room and was rearranging everything.  I snuggled on the slightly askew couch with my blanket and watched Mel Gibson in Hamlet till three o’clock in the morning while my mother scooted me around the room and debated the benefits of throw pillows.  Of course this all took place a few months after my dad had decided to replace the carpet in the same room and had instead redone all the carpet in the whole house, taken a sledgehammer to a wall and some columns that he deemed superfluous, and completely gutted and remodeled the kitchen.  Isn’t that how everybody redecorates?

Anyway, while I did like the things we did in the last house, I was definitely looking forward to the opportunity to try some new things and refine some of the old.  Many of the choices that I made during the decorating there were made so gradually that they fell short of achieving an intentional and cohesive look and I often allowed myself to simply wander off entirely and pursue a design based solely on my own curiosity or personal agenda rather than any particularly well thought out plan.  Take, for example the orange dining room, who’s sole purpose in the house was to remind me that somewhere there was such a season as fall. (Sigh.)  But which didn’t really match the rest of the house in any way.  Similarly off was the wall color in our bedroom.  While I loved the blue grey color we chose, it had an unfortunate habit of turning slightly tealish in the evenings and reminded me in a very unpleasant way of a New Jersey grandmother’s formal living room.  While I did eventually notice it and was willing to admit that I didn’t care for its evening shenanigans, I wasn’t so much willing to put the effort in to repainting it.  After all, the color was right on for the hour or two a week that I managed to be in that room during the daylight. 

This time around, we refined the color a little and managed to steer well clear of the lace doily set.  Not that I don’t like my fair share of the traditional, I just like it in small doses.  Which, as it turns out, is sort of becoming the theme of the new house.  I often like combining modern with traditional, using modern lines with traditional finishes, traditional colors in modern tones, or just simply putting a modern thing next to a traditional one.  See exhibit A: My nightstand.

 

 

This little grouping has become a beacon of hope for me.  A tiny glimpse of what I have planned for this whole place and a justification for our constant designing, building, refinishing, refacing, and decorating, which I have to believe is all for a good cause and not just an inherited home improvement hyperactivity disorder.  I’ll admit, there are times when I look at that pompous nightstand and think to myself, what this nightstand needs is a framed picture of itself because I’m childish and I need to take the edge off, but so far I’m resisting and, in my book, that spells progress.