"Food" Is Just "Doof" Spelled Backwards

The release of this summer's Streep-apalooza "Julie & Julia" has caused many of my friends to examine, with renewed interest and hopeful appetites, my maniacal cooking habits. Some of them have compared me to Julie Powell, although I personally see no similarities beyond the two of us possessing both a nosy cat and ovaries. Additionally, I like to believe that I'm at least marginally sane and/or emotionally stable; at the very least, I do not talk to an imaginary friend while I pound out pie crust. I am very clearly screaming at the rogue pie crust as I hurl creative obscenities into the kitchen.

My kinder, gentler friends have made the more flattering comparison of me to Julia Child, and while all of them are on a special list to receive extra-large, flashy-like-Vegas Christmas presents, I have to disagree with this one as well. I am not now, and could never hope to be, the prolific pioneer that Julia was in shaping American cuisine as we know and love it today, and I can only cook because I have outstanding chefs like Julia to Xerox.

Also, I read her memoir, My Life In France, and would you believe that there is not a single fart joke in that entire book?

I just really love to cook, and coincidentally enough, Lawyer Boy and I love to eat, so most of my experiments don't last too long around these parts--except when I get carried away by the tides of kitchen creativity. Case in point: This weekend I became a bit, shall we say, overzealous about perfecting my mixing, chilling, and rolling techniques for pie crust...so I made four. (No, Mom, I did not eat them, and yes, I know what my cholesterol is.) Two of them became peach turnovers and two of them went into the freezer for future delight. For the future, when my cholesterol comes down out of the quadruple digits, circa the year 2034.

As the above-referenced crust capade might lead you to believe, my culinary explosions are not always practical, but I try to plan our weeknight dinners to include more balanced meals than not. Sometimes it works and I can turn out fare that makes 30 Minute Meals cry into its cacciatore in the corner; sometimes, like tonight, I discover that I've got canned cranberry sauce, taco shells, and Triscuits to spin up into a meal. For some reason, I just don't think a sprig of parsley and some creative plating are going to disguise that kind of horror.

Staring into my cabinets and wondering who bought chili beans and instant mashed potatoes (me and me, respectively), I thought of an experiment that the Bon Appetit Foodist had written about a few months ago: To cook dinner for yourself and, if applicable, your long-suffering spouse, for a week, using only the current contents of your kitchen. I find the thought of giving myself a week to dispose of the ridiculously random ingredients that have been staring me down for months vastly appealing, in a cleansing sort of way, and I find the idea of living at the mercy of my more unfortunate grocery acquisitions appealing, in a punitive sort of way. Seriously, I need to be punished for buying instant mashed potatoes.

And thus tonight, for better or for worse, for fantastic or foul, LB and I decided that this will be the week of The Food Doof Challenge, wherein we will bumble our way through disposing of the contents of our kitchen in the next seven days, trying to find the most appetizing ways to prepare what we've got. The only rules of The Food Doof Challenge are:

1) We can only use what we already have, period;
2) We have to, throughout the course of the week, use as much of the food that we have as possible (so no living on brown rice); and
3) We have to actually cook dinner each night (so no living on Cheerios).

As we begin our quest for gastronomic glory, the more useful elements in our corner include one pound of chicken breast, plain nonfat yogurt, artichoke hearts, capers, and two boxes of pasta. The more challenging items, however, include cranberry sauce, lard-free refried beans, three kinds of vinegar, and four jars of jam. And who bought seven bottles of barbecue sauce? I'm not naming names...but his rhymes with Lawyer Boy.

Day 1: The Food Doof Challenge Kickoff Event

Tonight we didn't do too badly. I roasted a pound of broccoli, which is both delicious and an appropriate detox mechanism after a weekend of pastry and pizza, and LB made a burrito with our lone tortilla (of questionable provenance and age), a can of black beans, cheddar cheese, and the salsa I made last week. Calling the tortilla cardboard would be unfair to cardboard, but LB's stomach is apparently quite the Viking. And seeing as I just plowed through a pound of broccoli, I'd better be hoping for some Viking digestive powers of my own. Normally I'd go for a more balanced meal than just a fiber tsunami, but I wasn't particularly hungry tonight.

I'll report back each night for seven nights to let you know what we ate, how we cooked it, and who was the first to gag. As a caveat, we are going to a wedding Saturday night, so we'll have a night off from chick peas slow-simmered in peach-caper jam (and if not, I'm having a chat with the bride), but we'll make up for that by driving this train through this time next week.

Bon appetit! If you dare.

All Hail Suxor!

You know what is absolutely Suxor, King Of Suckonia And Surrounding Counties? When you go out for a run and for the first time in at least two molten months, it's not eleven thousand degrees, so you don't feel like every stride is taking you one step closer to a big, beefy hug from the Grim Reaper. You're so excited, you're even timing yourself intently (which you don't normally do because your molasses pace makes you cry) to see if this newfound freedom from running through a Swedish sauna is helping your splits at all...

...and you are suddenly hit with a horrible cramp in an abdominal organ you didn't even know you had, the intense pain of which convinces you that there must be a tiny, deranged elf up in there, performing an appendectomy with a plastic picnic spork, cackling maniacally. You slow your triumphant run to a walk, but the elf continues to hack away at your marginally vital organs until you slow...to...a...stop. Phooooooooooooo. You finally silence the elf within, but you're still half a mile from home. And you're pissed. Phoooooooooooo.

All hail Suxor, for he is mighty! And has a wicked herd of elves.

Ode To My Lost Love

Thursday nights are one of my all-time favorite channels on the TV Guide of my life. Thursday night is relaxing, because while I know I have to go to work the next day, it's Friday, so there are only eight hours left in which matters at the office can catch fire, blow up in my face, or commit other acts of workplace arson. Because Thursday night isn't Friday night, I don't have the inherent feeling of guilt that I get when I just laze around on the couch on a weekend night, feeling like I should be doing something more productively and outstandingly fun with my Get Out of Jail Free night.

Thursday nights in the summer are even more creamy delicious, because everything is just plain better in the summer (except pot roast, my brain function, and large, sweaty men). It's the closest I ever feel to the summer nights when I was a kid, when the only items on my agenda were to finish my dripping popsicle, and to kick my brother in the shins for smearing my dripping popsicle in my ponytail. Oh, summer lovin'.

Last summer I found myself falling into another delightful summer Thursday night ritual, courtesy of my amigos at CBS. I would describe it to you, but here, let me show you it!

(That little circle says "The Neighbors Are Closer Than You Think," because they can't say "The Neighbors Want Your Butt" during prime time.)

For those of you who remain dismally unaware of Swingtown, allow me to give you the executive summary, in which Swingtown will henceforth be known as Summer's Excellent Xtremelyrisque guiltYpleasure, or SEXY, for short. Set in 1976 in a suburb of Chicago, SEXY follows the adventures of the Miller family, parents Bruce and Susan and teenagers Laurie and BJ*, as they move up the social ladder and into a flashy new house, with flashy new neighbors who have a flashy basement orgy playroom. They find themselves torn between their new neighbors, Tom and Trina Decker, who are swingers with a voracious appetite for fresh meat, and their old BFFs, Janet and Roger, who wear a depressing amount of plaid. Bruce and Susan get involved with their new neighbors in more than just a potluck recipe swap, and the show explores the changing dynamic of their family as they struggle to adapt to their changing world, and to hide from their kids the fact that they're now smoking dope and spelunking their neighbors.

As you may have guessed from my deep love for this show, most of the episodes were not any more serious than a backyard wiener roast...or any other backyard wiener adventure. In the initial episodes, there was a lot of this face:

"You said to bring buns, so I brought buns...what? Show you those buns? But they're in the kitche...OH."

Once the writers had us acquainted with the swingers of our summer seduction, most of the episodes centered around the Deckers throwing some sort of themed hot-weather get-together, where, by the end of the night, the company always got stickier than the barbecue. Every synopsis on the TV Guide channel seemed to begin with, "At the Decker's annual [insert ass-random party theme here] party,..." and at first I thought this was odd, that all these feather-haired folks did was throw parties. Then I realized that if you're only out to bean your neighbors, your best bet is to get them all likkered up and high on Quaaludes, just a hop, skip, and a bra away from your flashy basement orgy playroom.

Honestly, it wasn't the raunchy summer guilt that got me hooked on SEXY, it was the fact that SEXY took place in my most favorite decade, the seventies. Someone on the SEXY crew did their homework, and the set dressing and costuming, from the crocheted potholders to the slick polyester camisoles, was spot on, forming the perfect music video to accompany The Eagles, Jackson Browne, and the rest of the soundtrack--if their music videos back in the day had been, you know, porn.

Of all the disco-day touches that SEXY mastered, my favorite was the hair. The women's hair was free-range and fluffy, yet perfectly placed and purposeful:

Trina Decker (Lana Parilla).** Illegal in six states and fourteen countries. In any decade.

Women always aim to please, but when the men come through with the goods, it's always delightfully surprising, and the men really came through with delicious, lush hair in SEXY. That's what seventies hair was all about, as photos of my dad as a polo-shirted twentysomething have evidenced. Whatever happened to lush hair? I understand, and absolutely advocate, the death of polyester leisure suits (if only to avoid the fire hazard), but why did we pick gel over locks? Mohawks over feathers? Just look...look...

Ignore the fifteen-year-oldness. Love the lush.

Lush. Love it.

Lush. Lush! TOUCH IT!

And then we have, by uncomfortable comparison, what man-hair devolved into:

Not lush! NOT LUSH AT ALL!!! Go home.

SEXY became my Thursday night wine buddy, opening the gate into What The Frickday, starting my weekend off right with its disco vibe and sex for free--like a Britney video, but with a better dance beat. But I knew that the end was near when SEXY was deported to the Friday night lineup, a death sentence for prime-time programming, and sure enough, SEXY was cancelled after just one debaucherous season.I cried into my Chardonnay.

This summer I've tried to move on. I've tried Burn Notice. I've tried Royal Pains. And while I love them, in their own ways, they just can't bring back the swingerriffic thrills of SEXY. It's disappointing, like a hot summer night without a popsicle in your ponytail.

So I beseech you, CBS. Bring SEXY back. Why not? Come on. I'm bringing SEXY back.

You motherfuckers don't know how to act.

*There's your first clue.

**Maybe I have a girl crush.

Lawyer Boy Represent

As you may remember from my epic and indignant whining, on the way to the beach for Memorial Weekend, I got my first ever speeding ticket while most definitely NOT speeding through Prince "Deliverance" George County, Virginny. In lieu of showing up at the courthouse to shoot my mouth off inappropriately, I was given the option of pre-paying the fine and going on about my life, having coughed up one hundred and six of the most unjust blood dollars ever in the history of moving violations. This inherently involved an admission of guilt to a heinous crime that I knew that I hadn't committed, and I was not okay with being swept away in that grave miscarriage of justice.

I'm also married to a really belligerent attorney.

Before you picture me sailing into the courtroom surrounded by a million dollar club of slick defense sharks, throwing gems like, "if the speed trap was shit, you must acquit!" at the starstruck jury, I have to confess...Lawyer Boy is a real estate attorney. He's in front of a judge about as often as I'm on stage at the Kennedy Center shaking a tambourine behind Yo Yo Ma, so having him represent me in such a high-stakes legal matter was a slightly precarious gamble. However, he really wanted to get into open court again, and I really didn't want to stroke a fat check to my BFFs in Deliverance, so we opted to appear in court.

The first thing LB did in representing me to the highest extent of his ability was, naturally, to call the Commonwealth Attorney's office and try to sweet talk our collective way out of it. The Commonwealth unfortunately felt that habeas corpus was all there and my mens rea was perfectly capable of standing trial for the e pluribus unum crime of speedius ticketorium, so there was no bribing the law with a box of cookies in this case. However, thanks to his winning combination of crazy-good legal skills and outrageous charm,* LB was able to get the Commonwealth to agree to a plea of "defective equipment," which as I understood it, meant that I would stand up and claim that my defective foot was responsible for how hard it was pushing down the gas pedal. Perhaps, in furtherance of my claim, I should limp into the courtroom, dragging my pointy-shoed defective foot behind me. With this deal secured, all my cracker-jack legal team and I would need to do would be to breeze into the court room and yell, "defective equipment, Your Honor!" as we continued on our way over to the cashier's window to pay the fine. Why even take a seat if it's that easy?

This seemed a bit too easy to me, frankly, but the entire goal of this legal operation was to keep my insurance rates from going up, and claiming a defective foot would swish the ball right into the goal, so I took the morning off and practiced my best contrite yet angelically unaware face.

In the few days leading up to my trial, another attorney I know did everything in his power to convince me that the end of my court appearance would find me dangling from the stocks in the town square, having been sentenced to three days of public humiliation for inadequate representation by a real estate attorney. The Commonwealth would have no record of my plea. LB would have no idea what he was doing. The judge would be cranky after his wife accidentally scrambled his over-easy eggs, and he would find no sympathy in his heart for my defective limb. I would have to hang like a wet sock from the stocks and, to fulfill the "public humiliation" portion of my sentence, I would be forced to do so wearing the same clothes I wore to frat parties freshman year of college.

ALL WOULD BE LOST, Y'ALL.

The morning of what could potentially be my last day of freedom from platform shoes and Pussycat Doll-worthy eyeliner, LB and I got up early and put on our most responsible-looking outfits--the ones with matching creases in the pants and big, innocent doe eyes. We got into the car, me at the helm, and it occurred to me that I should take extra precautions not to speed, since it would be the height of irony to get a speeding ticket on the way to try to get out of a speeding ticket. I crept down I-95, nervously watching the other cars fly angrily past me, trying to hide my face from the glares of the other drivers, and telling myself that the middle finger is the new thumbs-up. After heading farther off 95 than I knew was possible without dead-ending at the Clampett's cabin, we finally arrived at the Deliverance County Courthouse.

Would you believe they had electricity out there? The court complex, built with the money collected from other unjust speeding tickets, was actually quite lovely. I had pictured a wooden structure on par with the courthouse in The Crucible, the judge glowering at me through the smoke of sputtering candles and the screams of the demon-possessed teenage girls. As we were unable to find a hitching post, we parked our wagon in the lot and headed inside, where LB quickly found my name on the docket.

As we waited in the hallway outside the courtroom, I looked at my attorney, so handsome in his suit and--oh, what is that?! A hair had fallen out of place and across his forehead, giving him more the appearance of a rakish college boy than a responsible attorney. LB saw me looking at him and smiled at me. I reached up and gently brushed the hair back into place. Without breaking his smile or moving his lips, LB hissed at me, "Do not do that in here. I'm your attorney right now!"

Well, pfft, fine. I can't help how cute my counsel is, is all.

We were finally called into the courtroom to stand trial along with the rest of the accused. As we waited for the unwashed pandemonium to settle into order, I busied myself with my favorite activity: shameless and unabashed people watching. LB and I were truly an anomaly that morning, in that we were neatly groomed, clothed in business attire, and in comparison to some of the other guest stars, we were just plain fully clothed. As the carnie folk and Clown College waitlisted applicants milled around us, I noticed all of the attorneys filing into a room behind the judge's bench. I nudged LB. "Are you supposed to be in there with the other attorneys?" I asked, concerned.

"Nah," he replied. "I don't know why I'd need to be."

The bailiff stepped out of the secret negotiation chamber and read from a piece of paper in his hand. "Attorney Thoreau?" he called out. LB and I perked up like cats in front of a fishtank. The bailiff motioned for LB to follow him, and my legal counsel, my representation, my only slight chance of not spending three days locked in the stocks wearing a tie-back shirt, disappeared into the negotiation chamber.

ALL WOULD BE LOST, Y'ALL.

I barely had time to think about the most effective way to panic mindlessly when LB and the bailiff emerged from the secret chamber. They walked straight across the court and out the door marked EXIT. Commence mindless panicking, STAT!

Half a second later, and just before I would have started unbuttoning my shirt to represent myself with the time-honored Massive Cleavage Defense,** LB popped back in from the exit and motioned for me to join him. Forgetting all about limping dramatically on my defective foot, I bolted for the exit faster than I had bolted through Deliverance County on that fateful trip and darted through the door.

"What's going on? Why aren't we in court?" I asked, half relieved and half concerned that I had already been found guilty behind my back, which would still be better than a variety of other things that have happened behind my back in the past.

"They're trying to clear out the docket to move the schedule along. They had the Commonwealth Attorney and I agree in front of the judge that we had reached a plea deal, and the judge gave his approval. We can just pay the defective equipment fine and go." He pulled out the checkbook.

"That's it?" I practically fell over from shock.

"That's it. We can go now."

I was so excited I was practically giddy. In no time at all, we were out of the courthouse and back to the car. No jail time! No stocks! No skin-tight black pants melting to my butt in the blazing summer sun! Justice had been served!

My only regret was that I didn't get to watch LB morph into Matthew McConnaughey in A Time To Kill, pacing about in front of a jury while sweat poured from his head as he furiously defended my honor, rolling up his sleeves and gesturing emphatically to my defective foot.

But seriously? No objection, Your Honor.

*I am in no way biased.
**Which I am, in reality, physically incapable of, um, mounting.

Summer Vacation: Lazy R Us

Well, it has been two weeks since I have flung my mental detritus at you, and truth be told, I miss it like the tabloids miss La Lohan when she decides not to wander the streets of L.A., panties begone and dignity thrown to the wind, for a full weekend at a time. What has happened is this: It is a two-fold problem.

1. It is hot. It is August, which is ancient Latin for "foul swamp fungus," which means that outside, it is hot, humid, and generally akin to walking into an eighty-year-old man's denture-riffic mouth after he plowed through a bowl of Brunswick stew. The heat is killing me and my precious brain cells. All I want to do is bathe in sweet tea, with ice cubes and mint leaves floating around my puffy, sticky self. Would you believe that Lawyer Boy refuses to cold-brew me seventeen gallons of sweet tea? Oh, the abuse.

2. I have an obsession problem with food. If you're really interested in what I'm up to in my copious free time, when I'm not working as a paralegal, restoring my old house, being a crazy social butterfly, or being generally inappropriate, you can read about it here. I know I have told you before that I am a nuttermeister foodie, but I don't think I was really explicit enough about it. In layman's terms, I make up my own recipes and cater small events. (Actually, that's pretty much it, in layman's, technical, and theological terms.) When I'm in food mode, which I have been recently, my attempts at writing fail like Victoria Beckham on this side of the Atlantic. I can do one or the other, but both food and funny can't play on the same court.

Between the heat and the personal failure, the fact that I haven't flung poo at the World Wide Interwebs recently is killing me. KILLING ME. I have so many things to tell you, but they just fly around my head, shapeless and without reason, because all my good brain cells (the seven I haven't killed from alcohol) have been devoted to recipe development. I am working on coming back to you, amigos. I will be back soon. I promise.

PROMISE. Or I'll send you cookies.

Just ask Ghost Baker. When I say I'll send cookies, I send cookies. Look at my beautiful cookies, so glamorous in their very first Hollywood(-ish) photo shoot! All they're missing is their stunning feather boas and shiny lipstick.