Another Brilliant Newsflash

MSNBC has posted yet another piece of urgent medical news, entitled "Longer Needles Needed for Fatter Butts." It's starting to look like The Onion.

I'm Having a "Traditional" Thanksgiving.

That's right, it's noon and my turkey is still frozen.

Cooking Shows Should Carry Warnings

"DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME"

I just made some seriously weird shit for dinner. I'm trying to rescue it by baking it in the oven. It was supposed to be fried. Rachel Ray, you are seriously messed up. I know, some of you tried to warn me about her, but it looked so easy and homey. I got sucked in. I'm a total food slut. "Look, you can make it crispy and cheesy and..." YEAH! When will I learn? Julia, why did you ever leave us?

Dubloons Accepted

My kids like to play restaurant. Today it's Cafe Aaargh!!! They serve seafood, kelp cookies, sea horse milk, and citrus fruits (because, my daughter told me, friends don't let friends get scurvy!). They said that if you arrive at the cafe and there is nobody at the hostess station and nobody comes when you ring the bell, you should run because it means they're being raided by pirates and she's off trying to save their goods. Likewise, if you are dining and an alarm goes off, it is a pirate raid and you should draw your sword. If you don't have a sword, run for it. They have a special offer right now. For two dollars you can get a coupon for two full dinners. The money goes to a charity to prevent and cure scurvy.

I don't remember being this demented when I was that young. Mine developed over time.

This Needs a Caption...

I Anticipate the Next Big Announcement

There's an article on MSN entitled, (and like Dave Barry says, I'm not making this up) "Obesity Pills Work Best With Diet, Excercise". Yes, somebody, and I pray it was not we taxpayers, funded a STUDY to find this out! Thank goodness for people with medical degrees, huh? The rest of us would never know this stuff if not for their superior intelligence and education. I mean, who could have guessed such a thing? As for it qualifying as news, well, that's another topic.

Someone Needs to Be Beaten

As is often the case, it's someone in the world of advertising. The latest thorn in my side is the phrase "artisan bread". Oooh, I hate this. I guess "gourmet", which was meaningless in the first place but served its purpose well, has lost its impact. I would think that the phrase, used simply as it is and not as an advertising catch phrase, means bread that is not only hand-made by a person, but also has an individual characteristic that has been achieved by artful development and would not be duplicated by somone else. The combination of grains and the texture of crust perhaps. It is individual, and not just a skill, a job, a production, but an art. Not for mass production. Yet, I'm hearing it a lot more. The Panera chain uses the term. Their bread is very good, but simply by being a chain, they negate that characteristic. If they were a single bakery with one or two people making bread, each in his or her own way and you couldn't get it at any other bakery, that would be one thing. This? No. Yesterday I actually saw a coupon for Pepperidge Farm frozen "artisan bread" dough! WTF? And this year, our church's harvest festival put it on the flier. It was still the same bread they sell every year, but since they're calling it "artisan", they charged like two dollars more per loaf or something, which basically is what it comes down to. "Artisan" is the new "gourmet" and the only difference between it and regular bread will be a couple of bucks.

The worst part- yuppies will fall for it and spread it around like herpes. Good bakers will have to adopt the term to keep up with the market and then the price of a decent loaf of bread will be completely absurd. I can't stand what those frickin' yuppie dorks do to food. They elevate the trendy, whether it's crap or not. In a couple of years there will be a different trendy wine, vodka, chocolate, whatever, and guess what. The former trendy one will still taste the same, but the taste was never the point in the first place. Don't tell them that of course. Does not compute. Just hope that they don't discover YOUR favorite "whatever" because soon, you won't be able to afford it anymore and the only ones who can are the ones who won't know enough to appreciate it. But fear not, eventually it will fall from grace and though you may be considered fashionably ignorant, it's better than being fashionably idiotic. Artisan bread. They're fuckin' kidding me.

The Strange Legacies We Leave

My dad died on Sunday. Today when I was doing dishes, I noticed his coffee mug on the side of the dish rack. That's where it always stayed, waiting for him. For some reason, he didn't like to put it in the cabinet with the rest of the mugs. No, HIS had a unicorn on it and could not be subjected to the cooties of the more common inhabitants of my cupboard. This mug survived The Great Mug Disaster of Nineteen Eighty-somethingorother. He had a small galley kitchen. There was a narrow "wall" that was actually more like a pillar at one end of the kitchen on which he had a rack to hang the mugs on. Well, one day when he was making dinner and doing "ballet", he decided to combine some kind of pirouette with some kind of jete and kicked the whole rack off the wall. No, dad wasn't a dancer, he was a regular guy (mostly) which is what made it all the more embarrassing and caused him to blame it on the cats when his live-in girlfriend asked him what the hell happened to the mugs. A couple survived, one of which was his unicorn mug. His very favorite. That was a close one. Needless to say, he was more careful about combining ballet and cooking. So now I have this mug and I'm wondering what to do with it. Should I put it in the cabinet to catch cooties from my other mugs? Should I use it when I already have two other mugs that are my regular ones? Should I leave it on the rack where he put it? Hmmm...

We Made These

I'll write some thoughts about our halloween later. And I do have thoughts.