Fine, you can stop hounding me. I’ll tell you how I came to flip Rocco DiSpirito the bird. I gotta tell you though, it’s not really as exciting as you’d think, assuming you’re the kind of person who thinks flashing the one-fingered peace sign at pseudolebrities is exciting in the first place.

Which, hell, you probably are if you’re here.

By the way, we’re cooking from DiSpirito’s Flavor tonight. That’s right, I own and cook from a Rocco DiSpirito book because his food? Is good. I should qualify that: his non-Bertolli food used to be good. I recommend Flavor, which was also the source of the shabu-shabu Smackdown earlier this year. You can tell it’s from when he was still using his talent and his facial muscules because he has wrinkles on the cover.

Anyway: the finger. I was at the BlogHer food conference this September, and the conference organizers made the near-fatal (really, we were inches from a trampling) mistake of serving a ballroom full of food bloggers Bertolli frozen foods. Rocco DiSpirito’s line of frozen foods. I will tell you, as an aside to the story, that it was not good. I will also tell you that that was a massive understatement.

To compound horror upon horror, Rocco DiSpirito was actually there, wearing a wireless mike and working the room like the reanimated corpse of Billy Mays crossed with still-animate but no less jarring Susan Powter. Animated might not be the word, given the unnatural lack of play in his preternaturally smooth, perpetually slightly grinning face. Point is, he was there, he was yelling and he was bouncing around the room like someone going through the DTs who thinks giant squirrels with knives are after him.

I was sitting with Leena and Amanda of Leena Eats! and What We’re Eating, respectively; although I hadn’t known them long, I sensed that we shared the same feelings about Rocco because of all the under-the-breath cursing. Leena was trying to take a picture of Rocco, possibly to see if he still shows up on film, and all I wanted was (1) to never be that close to Bertolli frozen ravioli in four-cheese sauce again and (2) a picture of me giving Rocco the finger. I didn’t want to do it right to his face because I’m actually kind of a nice person – and, come on, TOO EASY – so the plan was to wait until he materialized somewhere behind me and shoot me flipping the bird over my shoulder.

He never did show up right behind me, so I had to flip the sideways bird; it strains the finger, but sometimes there’s nothing else you can do. I’m not sure if it was captured on film since there was never a totally clear sight-line and I don’t allow photos of myself to appear on the internet.

Still, it was a special moment for me.

At some point, Rocco left, we all filled up on bread and the conference went on. My finger tingled all day, though.

As I’ve said before, my harsh feelings toward Rocco spring from my disappointment that a once-great chef would turn to reality TV, botox and frozen foods. Union Pacific was a legend and Flavor is a great fricking cookbook. The man knows from interesting pairings and perfect balance. If I were that talented and ended up shilling for Prego, I’d hope a loved one would have the good sense to hand me the gun.* Or the Prozac.**

It is because I know the depth of his original talent that I trust these recipes. Tonight’s dinner was black cod with corn and spinach. Which maybe sounds not too exciting, but it was more that just a piece of fish with some frozen corn and an obligatory green. It was a deeply flavorful meshing of fresh corn with a tangy-sweet saffron gastrique and caramel and soy-glazed pan-seared fish matched perfectly with the gritty minerality (not really a word, but I don’t give a fuck) of spinach. Yes, please.

*HYPERBOLE. I DO NOT want Rocco DiSpirito to kill himself. He could always come around. Plus, I presume he has family, and I’d lose half my material. And I’m not sure he can actually die any more. IT MAY NOT BE TOO LATE, ROCCO. COME BACK.

**Or, if it were me, the Abilify, Neurontin, Valium and Lamictal.***

***I’m REALLY nuts.

The gastrique was easy enough to throw together; some white wine vinegar, honey and saffron, simmer simmer, and let steep for 30 minutes. Or until you need it, whichever comes first, although I might have made that rule up. The fish glaze is also relatively easy as long as you’re not scared of caramelizing sugar and you remember not to put the pan of sugar on the “power” burner of your stove, where that sugar will power right on through the caramel stage to the burnt, smoke-pouring-out-of-the-pan, foul smelling stage. Of course, if you do do that, you’ll catch it in time.

Some fresh ginger spends time cooking in your merrily non-burnt caramel before another hit of vinegar and some soy sauce go in and it’s set aside to thicken.

The corn does involve shucking, which may be one of my most hated vegetable-prep tasks. Did other people’s parents always give them the job of corn-shucker at family barbeques, somehow assuming (or hoping their stupid children would believe) that shucking corn is FUN? I don’t want to whitewash that fence, thank you very much. I am not fooled, shucking corn is NOT FUN and I will only do it because I fucking love sweet corn. Here, the kernels are cut off the cob and whizzed in the FoPro, cooked down for 20 or so minutes and given the special treatment with the saffron gastrique.

The spinach just gets wilted. There’s some cayenne in it, that’s about the only thing that makes it unique. I took a picture of it anyway, because the saturated orange of the cayenne against the green leaves was pretty. (YES, I like pretty things. I’m an asshole, not a philistine.)

When everything was ready I threw the fish into a hot pan, where it popped and sizzled and promptly stuck fast to the bottom despite the high heat and liberal coating of oil. Eventually it came mostly unstuck, by which I mean I forcibly flipped it causing only minor shredding that ripped away its crown and forced it into the Miss Congeniality role. I spooned some glaze over it, watched while the excess started to glue the fish back to the pan and got it the hell out before it bonded permanently with the aluminum.*

*In the recipe’s defense, I was supposed to brush on the glaze, which would have largely avoided this problem, but my pastry brush recently passed the acceptable limits of accumulated grossness and had to be sacrificed.

This dinner, she was not up the the level of the shabu-shabu, which was truly exemplary; it was merely “above average” and “way better than I would have done if given these ingredients and left to my own devices.” But the thing that makes his food so good – that perfect balance – was there. When each forkful had a little bit of everything, it approached shabu-shabu levels of delicious. The corn was sweet and sour. The fish was sweet, salty, a little spicy and a lot umami. The spinach was a little bitter and had a little heat from the cayenne. Put them all together, and you get the classic Thai every-flavor balance but with decidedly non-Thai components (excepting, perhaps, the caramel-glazed fish).

Which kinda mirrors my take on Rocco in general; my dissappointment, disgust, appreciation and joy all coexist in perfect balance. But cognotive dissonance be damned; that was some fricking good fish.

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Come to think of it, I think I just DID liveblog it:

10:01 – 11:00: Drunk chefs sneer at each other.

The end.

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So in case you hadn’t noticed, in the great game of “What do you do when you’re uninspired?” I’ve gone with option C, “POWER THROUGH.”

Sadly, I didn’t power through this meal the same way I plan to power through the post, but more on that in a minute.

Here’s my three step program for powering through:

1. Sit somewhere different. For example, normally I’m sitting on the downstairs sofa, so I’m either watching So You Think You Can Dance out of the corner of my eye or looking at a set of bi-fold closet doors. Currently, I’m actually sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, looking past the computer at the wooden shutters covering the front windows. My perspective has been RADICALLY SHIFTED. I have little doubt that this will have an IMMEDIATE AND DRAMATIC IMPACT.
2. USE MORE CAPITAL LETTERS. Just in the course of writing out point the first, I’m feeling reinvigorated. Did you see how dramatic it was? Let’s face it, if there are four things upon which this blog is built, they are (1) proper usage of prepositions; (2) food; (3) semicolons and (4) YELLING AT THE AUDIENCE. Some might add “cursing” as number 5, but I think of it as more of an unintended by-product. SUCK ON THAT.
3. Accidentally hit on the Fresh Direct deliveryman. Sometimes it just happens. You’re home alone making dinner, you’re listening to Feist, you’re wearing an ill-fitting tank top that makes you look BOOBTACULAR and you’re monitoring the front door for the Fresh Direct people because you have a non-working doorbell and you don’t want them to knock on the window because it makes the dogs bark. And then they show up, and you look like you’ve been waiting, with your sexy music and boob shirt, just for them. It doesn’t help that half the light bulbs in the kitchen and living room are burnt out, giving the whole top floor of the apartment a dim, boudoir feel, if your dim boudoir included a refrigerator, range and IKEA cabinetry. Before you know it, you’ve made the deliveryman vaguely uncomfortable and written the first half of the set-up to a bad porn.

So: I’m in my new position, ready to be EMPHATIC and have boobs akimbo in case more Fresh Direct deliverypersons show up at the door. I am ready to POWER THROUGH.

It therefore would have been nice if dinner – falafel with yogurt-tahini cream – had been in any way cooperative. I suppose it didn’t actively thwart me; it didn’t burst into flames or steal all the money from our joint account to run away to Bermuda with a younger woman who doesn’t have it out for the Fresh Direct guy.*

Nope, instead it just…gave up. Folded. Threw in the towel. Stopped the threshing machine and sold off the wheat. By which I mean it disintegrated. I’m still not sure how; I made a pretty classic batter with chickpeas, onion, garlic, parsley, cilantro, cumin and a little hot pepper. I whizzed it in the FoPro, adding bulgar, until it just massed together into a dough. I refrigerated it to let everything come together. I scooped it into cute little balls just like they do at Ibby’s Falafel. Up until this point, there’s photographic evidence that everything occurred as described.

Then I heated some canola oil in a heavy pan, and everything went to hell. My cute little falafel spheres went in and started bubbling away furiously. I started salivating thinking about the amazing flavor of crunchy fried bulgar and my long-standing love of falafel. Well, that and my naturally-occurring hunger; it’s not like I’m the magical exception to Pavlov. I threw the yogurt cream together**, keeping an eye on the talkative, spattering pot all the while. When I judged that enough time had passed, I returned to the pot and gently probed the boiling oil with a slotted spoon.

And there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

*Note that falafel is not a signatory on any of my bank accounts. But that’s just because of financial restrictions, because I love and trust falafel implicitly. If anything went wrong with tonight’s attempt, I’m sure it was completely my fault.

**From this relatively unloved-by-the-maddening-crowd Smackdown; so easy, so, so good.

Okay, I take it back; there was something: the inchoate remnants of a falafel that never was. Bits of bulgar, chucks of chickpea, flecks of onion and herb,  fried to a golden brown and none attached to the other in any way that would create a recognizable falafel. It was as though, when dropped into the oil, all the falafel ingredients hurled themselves away from one another at high speed. Like the Big Bang, but with garbanzo beans.

Maybe that’s what all the bubbling in the pot really was.

Since there were recognizable albeit itty-bitty pieces of foodstuff in the bottom of the pot, I’m proud to say that this falafel was not as great a food failure as the time my father forgot lamb chops on the grill for such a long time that they were 100% burned away. We sniffed at the air for dinner that night, hoping to inhale a particle or two of lamb char.

I couldn’t drink the oil to get at the falafel components and my god that looks even more disgusting in writing than when I just thought it. Instead, I went to town on the yogurt-tahini cream – I went a little berzerk with the garlic, but Fresh Direct isn’t coming back for another week, so who cares how badly my breath stinks* – with some pita and called it a night. Truth be told, I wasn’t in the mood for a big supper anyway because SOMEONE whose name may or may not be PRIN convinced the office to get McDonald’s for lunch and going along with that was perhaps not one of my wiser decisions; it’s probably just as well I didn’t eat more fried things. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. I DO NOT BROOK FALAFEL BREAKDOWN.

Not that I have a choice, really; the pot of falafel corpse-strewn oil remains on the stove as a stark counter to my words. Next time, falafel. NEXT TIME.

*I know, Brian should care. But since he’s going to be eating it too, we’ll cancel each other out. Transitive property of garlic.

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Here’s the deal: starting next Monday, all of November’s (and some of December’s) Awesome Shit That I Wants will be an Awesome Shit That You Get: either a giveaway, or a discount code for some of the retailers whose awesome goods have been featured in this very space.

To help the minutes crawl by, how’s about a new kitchen timer? I need one anyway, because every time I try to set the digital timer on the oven I end up turning the whole oven off by accident and not realizing until 15 minutes later when I wonder why my cake isn’t rising.

You could go all roly-poly with the Orb Timer from Unica Home, makers of the always-beloved and office appropriate “fuck” labeling system. The chrome version is kinda whimsical and classy, if that’s possible.

Bonus question: Did Swedes have a hand in making this timer? I’ll give you two guesses, but I bet you only need one!

Personally, I think Ill go with this triple-threat stainless steel baby from Williams-Sonoma.

Of course, it would have to be the most expensive of all the times I investigated, but it’s made of STEEL. I’ll be able to time THREE THINGS AT ONCE. In a pinch, I’ll be able to rub my hands all over it (in a non-sensual manner) to get rid of garlic smell. I’m going mad with power just thinking about it.

In any case, get ready for the HOLIDAY EXTRAVAGANZA!!, starting next week with a whiz-bang giveaway.

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Actually, that’s a conceit: everyone knows what it’s like to be the sad man. If you’ve never known what it’s like, I think, clinically, you are manic and should seek help.

(Above is a picture of some flowering pineapple sage in my herb garden. It bears no relation to anything. Feel free to pay it no mind.)

In any case, I’m not really the sad (wo)man. Really: this is not a depressed or biopolar issue.  I’m just the tired, overwhelmed, lacking in inspiration right now woman.

So I’m asking you, blogger or not: what do you do to push through your periods of inertia? Take a break? Power through? Turn back to crystal meth? I love this blog but lately I feel like I’ve been forcing it, and that makes my voice inauthentic.  I don’t like that; presumably, you’ve come here in the first place because of my voice, so it’s less fun for you, and forcing it is less fun for me.

(Or you’re here because you Stumbled Upon me, and you don’t want to hear my whining. Sorry! You’ve got bad timing.)

But whatever. I know I’m not the only one who struggles with this sometimes; we all hit a wall and misplace our mojo, be for it blogging or knitting or breeding Siamese cats or drag racing. Maybe I just need a nap, but in case that doesn’t do the trick give me (and everyone else searching for their mojo) a good shove. What do you do?

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Stupid life.

(Don’t worry, everything’s fine. Just overwhelming.) (Also, Happy Halloween.)

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I passed out like a frat boy after his first keg stand when I got home from work today.

I’ve never been a frat boy, I’ve never done a keg stand, I’m not entirely sure what it entails and I’m sure it’s not something I want to experience, but it definitely sounds like something that would cause someone to pass the fuck out the way I did this afternoon. The only difference is that I didn’t alienate my entire subway car with the odor of my beer-soaked shirt or the fear that I’d vomit on them, and I woke up feeling better than when I first lay down.

Aside, based on television show currently playing in the background: The Stormchasers are a bunch of tools in clown-shoe looking wannabe tanks. What do those things get, 4 miles to the gallon? Tornadoes are god’s way of saying GO THE OTHER WAY. However, hearing someone yell, “It’s huge, we gotta get a probe it in!” is funny, so I suppose it’s not completely without redeeming qualities. Stormchasers seems to be rich in opportunities for “That’s what she said!”* Someone should make a drinking game.

Anyway, the passing-out means I did not hop off the train on the way home to pick up the ingredients for dinner, which was supposed to be some kind of North African chicken with chickpeas and winter squash thing from A Platter of Figs, an excellent cookbook for the awake. It did mean that when I stumbled into the kitchen at 8:15, not feeling particularly hungry, I decided it was time to bake something instead. Because just because you’re groggy and not particularly hungry does not mean it is not the time for chocolate cookies.

*”Look at that beautiful beast!”

I wanted something chewy and oaty, so I cracked Dorie Greenspan’s Baking to see what kind of oaty shit she had going on.

That did not come out the quite way I meant it.

She had several oat options. Option one was some kind of bar cookie with a layer of chocolate* that sounded great but involved a lot of chilling post-baking; a time suck not helpful for bakers who want to bake and eat a damn cookie and then go to bed. These cookies were option two, double chocolate (bittersweet chocolate and cocoa powder) oat spoon cookies (as opposed to the sliced log kind of cookie) that have some kind of cute name like choco-oatmeal chewies or oaty chocolate wonder drops or some shit like that. The book is upstairs, so we’ll never know. If you really care, buy it (it’s a good book) and look it up. All I know is, they’re full of oats and brown sugar and chocolate, and they come together right quick.

*I just typed “lawyer of chocolate” by accident, which: Best. Lawyer. Ever.

They actually start out a lot like brownies; that is, with a lot of butter and chocolate and in this case, brown sugar. While it melted together, I pulled flour, cocoa and cinnamon together. I didn’t actually sift them the way I was supposed to, because the sifter is in this low cabinet behind all this other crap and you have to move it all and then put it back and let’s be frank, the whisks are right there on the counter and they do virtually the same thing.

“The tornado is in the ground” is going to be my new code phrase for something, I just haven’t decided what yet. Suggestions welcome.

I folded the dry ingredients into the butter-chocolate-sugar-eggs mix. The instructions told me to mix just until the dry ingredients were no longer visible. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve run across an instruction like that, but I have trouble with them every time. Because I’m stirring, and the dry ingredients have just disappeared, but then I see something that may or may not be a lump and what if it’s a giant tumor of unmixed flour that will destroy whatever I’m baking? It could happen. So I stab at the the lumps, and eventually I just decide to mix, just for another minute, because can it really hurt?

The Stormchasers: “We’re all gonna get screwed!”"We just gotta take it.” “I’m going to be thinking about the last 30 minutes for a long, long time.”

Surely, an extra 30 seconds of mixing to eradicate the possibility of flour tumor wins out in the cost-benefit analysis, yes? I say yes, and not just because that’s my MO.

After the flour came the oats. There were no instructions re: mixing specifics, so I mixed the holy hell out of those oats. And I’m proud, I tells ya. PROUD.

I lined some baking sheets with parchment, dropped spoonfuls of dough larger than I was supposed to because that’s also a problem I have – this did not quite make the 50 cookies Dorie told me it should – and got to baking.

My first batch came out a little under-baked; it’s a little tough to tell when the edges of the cookies are darkened when the cookies are, you know, already brown. Some of them fell apart when I tried to move them from the backing rack to the cooling rack, so I had to eat them. The under-baked cookies, they are good: all the yumminess of eating raw cookie dough, none of the voice in the back of your head telling you that the raw egg yolks are going to make you sick. The second batch came out just right. That is to say, fully cooked and structurally sound but not as good as the gooey ones.

I fed one piece of cookie detritus to Brian, who proclaims that they taste exactly like a good oatmeal stout is supposed to. So if that’s your thing, these are the cookies for you. I like to have them with milk, but if you want to have it with beer I’m not going to stop you. Or if you can’t get your hands on a good stout, you could always put these in a blender and thin ‘em out with a little club soda; I’m sure that would be just like beer.

My single cookie and small glass of milk hit the spot, the effort expended was minimal, and did I mention cookies? And any night that ends with fresh cookies is a night that’s okay in my book.

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Prepare to hear the same kind of complaining we heard when they did this EXACT SAME CHALLENGE on Top Chef Masters.

LAST WEEK: Restaurant Wars, the anticlimactic Super Bowl of the Top Chef season. The brothers will be sleeping with one eye open. Not Jonah Hill looks ridiculous in a suit, Mousy got the axe, and everyone still hates Robin.

10:01: Robin is “here for a reason” and is “holding her own.” All of which means “Robin is going home.”

10:02: Padma’s Italian “accent” makes the entire nation of Italy wince.

The TV Guide Fucking Quickfire Challenge. Seriously.

Seriously.

10:03: They have to make TV dinners inspired by a variety of shows they pull on knives. Several of them make a point of telling us they haven’t/don’t/would never/are horrified by TV dinners. Not Jonah Hill claims to be too young to be truly familiar with Gilligan’s Island.

They’re all like that one friend you have: “Oh, I don’t even own a television.” Shut up. You know what the fuck Gilligan’s Island is.

Shiv has The Flintstones and likens herself to Pebbles, suggesting that she might enjoy being clubbed and dragged around by the hair. I mean, really, she says this. Explicitly. I know, I know. And you know she’s totally imaging Eric Ripert doing it.

10:05: Beardie enjoys a “well prepared frozen meal.”

I enjoy Beardie.

10:07:  Who gets “Cheers” and does anything other than a burger? Also, if you get Seinfeld? Serve a bowl of cereal: the end.

Padma’s jumpsuit is making me cringe as much as all her TV puns. “Who’s going into syndication?” Not that jumpsuit, I’ll tell you that. Or the belt.

10:09: WINNER: Beardie! No immunity, but he gets his food made into a real frozen meal. Which I guess is exciting, but also seems like Gasteau’s line of corn dogs from Ratatouille.

10:10: ELIMINATION: Craftsteak takeover. WITH A TWEEST!

10:14: Commercials: In the Shaft-esque Gladware commercial, with which Brian usually sings along: “Viceroy!” in falsetto. He is brilliant.

Everyone is planning out their meat dishes and shooting their wads over Craftsteak because they don’t know about THE TWEEST. The walk-in fridge is packed with meat, gorgeous meat! It’s almost too good to be true!

10:16: THE TWEEST! Hello Natalie Portman, noted vegetarian.

Let the bitching begin.

Not Jonah Hill: “The only good thing she ever did was in Star Wars, which is the only good thing anyone can do.” Yes, and living with your mom? Still SO COOL, right?

There is a scramble for the mushrooms and eggplants, because those are not in any way cliched ingredients that meat-eaters use when they’re trying to cater to vegetarians.

10:19: Beardie gives up meat for Lent every year. Of course he does, bless his Jesus-loving heart.

Robin, who’s into healthy cooking, is over the moon and freaking with joy over all the ingredients. Read: “Robin’s going home.”

10:20: Not Jonah Hill thinks vegetarians are a lesser life form. He tried to take it back, but we all heard it. NJH goes on: “I may be immature in terms of my career, but (something something something overcompensation about how he is awesome).”

Also immature in: sense of humor, tact, self-awareness and life, generally. I note that he does not point these out to us.

10:22: Shiv: “I’m not a vegetarian, and I never, ever will be.” I appreciate her brutal honesty.

Weed is doing this leek “scallop” thing, which: Haven’t we seen banana “scallops” like, a thousand times? Also, when you don’t separate the leeks, aren’t you just asking for them to be full of grit? And aren’t you a giant ass and I will gladly take another week of Robin if it means you’re going home?

10:27: Robin’s got a squash blossom, and a duo of GET THE HELL OVER THE DUOS. Meaning beets. If ever I’ve wanted more of something on my plate, it’s definitely beets.

10:28: NJH has eggplant and creamed lentils.

Brian: “It looks like there’s poo on his plate.”

10:30: Brother Michael is riskier than the other chefs, and better than them all around, and they better know it. Natalie Portman will walk away from this dish “scratching her head,” which is totally what you want.

She does, in fact scratch her head. Okay, not really, but she is confused. Unfortunately, it’s in a good way, cementing his hubris.

Shiv’s plate looks like the standard vegetarian mixed vegetable plate, and she’s so nervous that she nearly douses everyone in hot verjus.

10:32: Weed’s got his leek thing, which he explains as standing in for a protein…which no one buys. Even his use of the color purple – Natalie’s favorite, squee! – doesn’t save it.  Also, Gail Simmons’ giant ruffled sleeves are eating her neck in a most unflattering.

10:34: Brian’s got an asparagus thing with garlic blossoms. Padma is WASTED: “These garlic bites are like a little prick in my mouth.” And then everyone LOSES THEIR SHIT ENTIRELY and the dick jokes are flying left and right. I will not dignify them by repeating the rest of them; I may curse a blue streak, but I have my decorum.

Beardie’s got a mushroom-fest with kale, which Portman proclaims “manly.”

10:37: Next week: Top Chef reunion dinner instead of a regular Top Chef, and there appears to be a FABIO!! vs. Marcel showdown. I was one of the few who liked Marcel, but you DO NOT stir some shit with FABIO!! Because I? Will not brook that.

10:40: Pointless interlude: Beardie is not one to turn down food: being fat is a “personal choice.” Also, he once ate ten thousand chicken wings at a sitting. And he is adorable, even his bald spot.

I’m not just saying that because I’m married to a bald guy with a giant beard who loves pork and chicken wings. TOTAL COINCIDENCE.

10:44: Top 3: Brother Michael, NJH and Beardie. NJH is so excited to be here, he’s literally licking his lips.

10:45: Natalie Portman just called Michael a cokehead on national TV. Maybe she does have a personality.

Kevin’s kale was “special.” There was something very Drew Barrymore about that.

10:46: WINNER: BEARDIE! I’ll say it again, just give him the damn prize.

He wins a suite of GE appliances. His awesome reaction: “Oh…okay.”

10:47: Michael could have made Beardie’s dish the “second year of [his] apprenticeship.” It was just a “pile of mushrooms on some puree.” Because he is a graceful loser, and not a GIANT DOUCHE.

Bottom 3: Weed, Robin and Shiv.

10:48: Gail, incredulously, to Weed: “You know leeks aren’t protein, right?” He still seems not to be getting it. What’s so hard? Cutting a vegetable into the shape of a fish does not turn it into a fish.

Robin talks about what she did, and all the things she’d never done before, and it’s all a lot of talking and very very fast and also a LOT of talking.

10:50: Gail, you are not a long-necked woman. As a sister of yours, I must tell you with candor: you can not wear the giant poofy sleeves, you just can’t.

Shiv is crashing and burning and pretty much says “Thanks, bye,” before she actually loses. It’s unfortunate that it’s too late in the season for me to change anyone’s nicknames. Company policy. Also I’ll confuse myself.

10:52: Is “whatever whatever” an actual phrase, or just something idiotic that Weed says? I’m guessing the latter.

I gotta say, Natalie Portman seemed boring at dinner but is acquitting herself well as a judge.

10:57: The final knifing: No one understanding why Weed couldn’t cook a leek in 2 hours, Robin served a hot mess and Shiv served a garnish.

LOSER: WEED!

JESUS LOVES ME AFTER ALL!

10:58: You know he HATES that he went before Robin, and I LOVE it. The schadenfreude, she is strong in me tonight. It’s pulsating, like a living thing.

NJH is so pissed that Robin is still there that he kicks something weakly. What a statement!

NEXT WEEK: Toby Young is back, and he’s still not funny.

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Once up a time, I was a vegetarian. For almost four years, actually.

Yes, I know. Yes, I KNOW. Shut up. I was, and I didn’t break, not even for bacon. NOT EVEN FOR BACON. That’s how you know I was serious, because I take bacon very, very seriously, even more seriously than chocolate.

It’s corollary to the story that I first cracked on my first re-date with Brian. I patched the chinks up, turned Brian into a vegetarian as well, and then cracked completely later that year when summer rolled around. (Brian’s family grills a lot of sausage.) But we tried, we really did.*

Anyway.

*Good for you if you can hack if. I’ll join you again…one day.

During the time we first started living together but prior to the Sausage Summer of 2002, we ate a lot of pasta. We ate a lot of falafel sandwiches from the awesome joint down the street where we now get platters of lamb shawarma. We ate a lot of vegetarian stuffed peppers, veggie burgers, chicken nuggets made of something called “quorn” and many, many piles of black beans and rice. I believe that on Thanksgiving, we forced Brian’s father to smoke a loaf of Quorn alongside the turkey. We made of a lot of hummus, and a lot of meatless chili with, yes, extra beans.

(”Smoke a loaf of Quorn” = a sentence that means one thing but sounds like it should mean another.)

Yes, there was a lot of farting. But when you fart together, it’s not so bad. You know, because the stench is so all-pervasive that you get used to it faster. Just remember to open the windows at least 6 hours before having any house guests, even in the middle of winter, if you ever want to have house guests again. We went a long while without having any downstairs neighbors, although I’m sure that was just a coincidence.

We also ate a lot of veggie burritos: homemade refried beans with roasted potatoes, peppers and onions and the usual suspects of cheese, cilantro, and sometimes sour cream and salsa if they were around. (We were a lot broker then, which is saying something, so salsa was a luxury item.)

We got our bean-related supplies across the street from a very sketchy grocery store which probably should have been condemned because some of the meat in that case was about to crawl away of its own accord. But among their aged groceries there were always aged plantains, looking like they should be tossed because their skins were almost completely black. DO NOT FEAR THE BLACKENED PLANTAIN.

Some people like their plantains fresh and firm, but I love mine overripe and fried until wonderfully caramelized on the outside and sweetly giving on the inside. Plus, the unripe green ones are really fricking hard to peel, and the overripe ones were always on sale for like, ten for a dollar, making them perfect for cheaper eating. While I was in the bodega after work picking up beans and onions for dinner I saw a pile of plantains, half of them yellow, half black. I figured as long as dinner was a throwback we might as well go all the way and fry some up.

I threw together the beans, chucked some veggies into the oven and somehow managed to have all the components of dinner ready AT THE SAME TIME which NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS. So I’m, like, the damn queen of the hill tonight.

I heated up a tortilla, slathered it with beans and piled on vegetables, cheese and cilantro. In commemoration of the Days of Cheapness and because I forgot to get some, there was no sour cream, and there was no salsa because I forgot to dig the bottle of green salsa out of the pantry. (I made up for it with extra cheese, which covers a multitude of forgetfulness sins.) Then I sat down to relive the halcyon days of 2001-2002, when we were poor as shit and I had to drag myself out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn every morning to get to Torts class on time because I went to law school like some kind of student loan debt-loving person who wants to be a lawyer. Neither of which describe me.

Good times.

At least the veggie burrito was as good as I remembered it. I know it might seem strange, but potatoes and tacos – or burritos – really play well together. Spicy, chunky beans plus sweet roasted peppers and onions plus flavorful yukon golds = a delicious burrito.

And farting. But there’s no apartment underneath us in this building, so LET ‘ER RIP.

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But I bet you would be too, if you had one of these teapots. (Click through and look at the spoons. LOVE.)

And especially if you had one of these.

“New Old” and “Original Recycled” tea-ware from Christine Misiak in the UK. They’re hott with two Ts. ‘Nuf said.

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