Professional Attire At All Times

The part I love most about wearing a skirt to the office is that I don't have to worry all day long about making sure my fly is zipped. This is more of a chronic problem for me than it really should be for anyone over the age of, oh, I dunno, three. Although fortunately, I have long since dispensed with another habit I had when I was three, which was taking off all my clothes every time I went to the bathroom. Socks included. Hairbow optional.

I'm sure my coworkers are more than thrilled by this development.

Casa Del Grace, For Your Enjoyment

Alright, so true to my usual form of making a promise and then beating around the bush fulfilling it for longer than it takes a first-grader to sound out "antidisestablishmentarianism," I am here two weeks after I originally promised pictures of my refinished bedroom furniture, to provide pictures of my refinished bedroom furniure. And to rant, natch. What, you were here for sunshine and kittens?

Okay, fine. Kittens!

Well, singular kitten. Singular kitten totally digging his Santa outfit, whereby "totally digging his Santa outfit," I mean, "shit dude, I'm stoked he didn't kill me!"

Lawyer Boy and I discovered recently that our upstairs bathroom is an unholy disaster of Biblical proportions, and that renovating a bathroom is, coincidentally, a financial disaster of Biblical proportions. We have spent the last year of our lives slaving away on this house that we bought for approximately four dollars and a salami sandwich, which was formerly a disgusting mildew-ridden cricket cave, and which now is...not. I recognize that I've set the bar fairly low here: All I've said is that our house is no longer disgusting, mildew-ridden, or infested with cave crickets, who look to the uninitiated like craggy prostitutes with their ankles behind their heads. * It has been more work than herding a litter of kittens to get this house into shape, but finally, it's really coming together, and our house is no longer a big bucket of suck. We think the progress on the house is moving along well enough, in fact, that in order to get the bathroom done, we applied for a refinance. Yesterday.

This morning, like before-most-college-students-had-gotten-to-bed early this morning, the bank called LB (apparently they know who speaks their language around here). In order to figure out how generously they would like to reward our blood, sweat, and unspeakable profanity of the last year, they want to do a walk-through appraisal of our house on Wednesday morning. Tomorrow. TO-EFFING-MORROW, AMIGOS!!!

Commence extreme panic, frenzied cleaning, and fervent lighting of prayers candles in the Thoreau household. We had been hoping to avoid a walk-through appraisal, the real-life version of "My House Is Worth What?" with less of the profoundly obnoxious Kendra Todd, and more of the tangible real-life consequences. A walk-through appraisal with less than twenty-four hours' notice was, to say the least, as unwelcome as a Jehovah's Witness knocking on the door of a Sig Ep Kamoniwannaleia** tropical mixer. In preparation for the real estate apocalypse that is upon us, one of us finally had to wrangle our wardrobe back into the closet, dresser, nightstand, bookshelf, and everywhere else we use to contain the fabric of our lives when it's not smeared across our entire second floor.

So, my panic-stricken cleaning fest is your gain, and thus I finally bring you, at long last and with much fanfare***, photos of our freshly refinished bedroom furniture. In case you had forgotten, which is possible since I began this topic when Tara Reid had never enjoyed surgical enhancement, LB and I had some truly hideous oak bedroom furniture that I decided we should sand, repaint, and refinish to look "weathered," to fit in with our bedroom theme of "French country romantic."

Now, bear in mind that we're not there yet. The furniture is done but we haven't hung pictures or accessorized or figured out the most flattering pose for the cat to strike while lying on the bed. But, in its infant stages, here is our bedroom:

The view from the doorway. Yes, my bedtime reading is "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Some of us just think about food all the time. Some of us are going to be a threat to the world food supply when we're pregnant.

From the same end of the room, but really just to emphasize the fact that I have two chandeliers in my bedroom. This room used to be two bedrooms, one of which was roughly the size of a Lean Cuisine, so we have two light fixtures. They are both chandeliers because my husband is awesomesticks.****

In case you're wondering which fabric we picked out at Fondiqua's, this is it. We had to cover the cardboard back of the no-longer-oak bookshelf. Stage left showcases a picture that I haven't found a home for yet. Don't worry, we tuck it in each night and assure it of its personal worth.

Girlfriend just likes to be in her own pictures. Also, Grace-Based Trivia: I'm wearing the same shirt in this picture, that I'm wearing in the picture on the dresser. Play within a play, what what!

The aforementioned dresser, without the aforementioned assbaggery, tomfoolery, and cockamamery. Still with pictures of me, though, so my ego is assuaged. And thank God!

For those of you who are unnecessarily interested in the artistic aspects of this project, this is what the crackle finish looks like up close. It's a chocolate brown base coat with cream crackled over top. Chocolate plus cream. Mmmmmmm. Mmmmmmm....

Speaking of chocolate, I will leave you tonight with a shot of my favorite chunk of chocolate love, Breeze, our 100-lb Labradozer who has recently taken to sleeping on the sofa:

Can you imagine trying to move that so you can sit down?
No, I just can't imagine trying to make that face move. Who is a muffin? Who is a sweet, sweet chocolate muffin?

*A worthy skill, of course.
**Wherever you are, and I include in that an open cubicle or church, please say that out loud.
***Cue the fanfare! I said cue the trumpet fanfare NOW!!
****Thanks to Mr. Apron, who called my sense of humor "awesomesticks," which I can only assume is a compliment.

A Brush With Celebrity

Okay, seriously, pictures of my extremely exciting new bedroom decor, complete with panty window valances and seersucker jacket draperies, are on their way. At least, that's what it's going to look like if I don't ever put on my big-girl pants and address the laundry mayhem that has blanketed the room like San Francisco fog.

I would put my big-girl pants on if I weren't currently using them as window treatments.

Instead of playing the responsible role of Holly Housewife at home tonight, I went to my first-ever book club meeting, starring as Holly Housewife At Large, wherein I showed up with hot spinach dip but neglected to read the assigned book. I'm guessing that the cheesetastic dip was more popular than my comments on the book likely would have been, since they would probably have been in the vein of "I would love this character, except she's a giant asshole."

The exciting part of the book club meeting was that after reading her blog for almost a year and feeling a tad bit e-stalkery, I finally got to meet OMG FAMOUS VALERIE. Val is a friend of my friend Hayley, and Hayley turned me on to Val's blog around the this time last year. Something I may have never mentioned here before, possibly because it makes almost no sense, is that in my head all bloggers are celebrities. Following this logic, I still find it surprising and borderline insulting that the paparazzi aren't stalking my every move, following me at the grocery store to report back to my adoring public which heirloom tomatoes I selected for dinner tonight.

All assbaggery aside, I certainly don't consider myself a celebrity, or even worth taking seriously 99% of the time, but I rather illogically do consider all other bloggers to be rockstars. So when I walked into Hayley's living room tonight and immediately recognized OMG FAMOUS VAL from her blog pictures, I became a bit starstruck. It took me a good forty-five minutes of sweaty palms and mentally rehearsed opening lines before I could figure out a way to talk to her. Am I a frat boy, and is this the Mardi Gras mixer, or what?

Proving that I am smooth like pistachio pudding, I eventually went and knelt down next to her chair, and waited for a pause in the conversation. This gave me a chance to refine my personal introduction from a high-pitched giggle to actual English words. Words like, "SQUEEEEEEEEE HIIIIIIIIIII!!!!! Iknowyoubutyoudon'tknowmedon'tbescaaaaaaaaared!"

I was totally delighted to discover that Val is a really lovely person to talk to, in addition to being a great writer and mother to a super-precious chubby bunny of a baby. I don't know what I would have done if she had been some sort of steely-eyed girl-hating bitch, but I think it would have involved making love to the bowl of hot spinach dip in the corner to comfort myself.

That said, check out her blog and her chubby bunny baby, while I play over here and stall for more time to post pictures of my new bedroom.

Promise + Compromise = Prompromise!

Now really, when I wrote the title for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism you're about to read, I was thinking that my dear seventeen readers would immediately see things as I do,* and would recognize the word as a a head-on collision of the business end of "promise" with the party end of "compromise."

What it actually appears to be is a mashup of the popular springtime high school ritual known as "Prom Promise." I actually prefer my take on it, injecting the spirit of compromise into the oath teenagers take not to Do It On Prom Night just because they suddenly can't resist each other's rented clothing and overzealously applied body glitter. The Prompromise is more in the spirit of, "Sure Mom, I promise not to Do It On Prom Night, so as a compromise, we'll only Sprint To Shortstop in the backseat of his dad's Taurus. But we definitely won't Do It. No worries."

Anyway. I was trying to convey that in the spirit of last night, when I promised I'd be back tonight to share pictures of our bedroom furniture project, I am here to shed words upon you. However, I don't have pictures of the project yet, because I have yet to act anything like the grownup I play on TV and get my wardrobe out of the bedroom floor. So, as a compromise, I figured I'd just write about something else. See? It's a prompromise!

Apparently I'm also super + lame = superlame, but that's neither here nor there.

Lawyer Boy and I were all set to corral my calamitous clothing and get the rest of the furniture in place tonight, and the only piece of the puzzle we had yet to procure was a little fabric to cover the hideous faux-oak (fauk?) backing on the bookcase. In order to do so, unfortunately, we had to go to a fabric store of the generic variety. You've probably got anywhere between one and forty-two of these retail lint traps in your current locale, and out of a desire to not get sued for Christmas, I'll call it Fondiqua's. LB hates fabric stores because his mom dragged him through each and every one on the Eastern Seaboard frequently and at great length when he was a kid. I hate fabric stores because they involve paying attention to one thing and one thing only, most of which is ugly, and most of which is not shoes, wine, or food, the only topics to which I can devote my undivided attention for more than thirty-two seconds.

So we wandered into Fondiqua's all set to sprint through the store, pick out a piece of fabric in a Michael Phelps amount of time, and sprint back out before Fondiqua's could cover us in applique-ed ducks and corduroy covered in autumn leaves. Or giraffes. Or whatever the hell they were.

We found our fabric. We even figured out how much we needed, which was something of a magical occurrence, since one of us whose name rhymes with Sawyer Joy forgot to measure the fauk panel we were trying to mask. We even unhinged the roll (bolt? cape?) of fabric from the rack without destroying or wearing any of the other capes of fabric, which was really fortunate, since absolutely none of them were my color. Seriously, since when is everyone a Winter? We took our prize and paraded it to the front of the store, where we had to wait in line. Twice.

Have you ever met anyone who likes to wait in line? Have you ever seen an industry that isn't actively trying to get rid of waiting in line? Self check-out. Associate to Aisle 5. "I can take whoever's next!" No one likes waiting in lines, so every store with common sense and a desire to write some black ink this year tries to get you out of them quicker than Kanye West out of any public event whatsoever. Fabric stores, however, do a number two on your desire to cut and run: You have to wait for the gravy-ass Scissor Sister to cut your fabric for you, and thennnnn you have to get in line agaaaaaaaiiiiin to give them dollars in addition to the sanity you've already given them. Look how generous you are! Dollars AND sanity! Bless your heart.

Seriously, did they plant the purchaser of yards and yards of bargain-basement purple polyester in front of me on purpose? Did they steal her ability to speak English just to keep me teetering on my three-inch pointy-toed shiny red heels just as long as humanly possible? Did they miss the part where I almost threw my three-inch pointy-toed shiny red heels at the polyester procurer just to get her the eff out of Fondiqua's? Because all. of that. HAPPENED. PEOPLE.

By the time LB and I sprang free from the cottony clutches of Fondiqua's, we were both so exhausted, hungry, and in immense pain from a day in three-inch pointy-toed shiny red heels that we couldn't bear the thought of finishing the bedroom. I don't think I can touch that fabric for at least another twenty-for hours.

*Which is, frankly, a terrifying thought.

Wherefore Art Thou, Grace?

Well, faithful amigos, I've been around. Recently I've been a really useful combination of busy and lazy, wherein I run around doing all kinds of productive, meaningful things like painting furniture and making my own yogurt,* only to be so butt-ass worn out by the time I sit down in the evening, that finding two words to put together is even more difficult than finding a shadow of a brain cell anywhere between Megan Fox's elaborately pierced ears.

Stop Googling "Megan Fox piercings" right now. This is about me, people!

Anyway, I promise to return triumphant this week. Lawyer Boy and I have been busy trying to prepare our house and our persons for La Grande Douche, or as it would roughly translate from French, "the part where we have to tear apart our entire bathroom, our only full bathroom, to pull a complete do-over from the floor underneath the tile all the way up to the peeling plaster ceiling." We're not embarking on this test of our sanity and marital strength until November, so until then, we're finishing up all the other random projects we had swirling around the giant toilet bowl of our house, in hopes that while the bathroom is a giant pit of suck, the rest of the house can be somewhat less suckiful.

Today we finally finished refinishing all our bedroom furniture. Remember like, six lifetimes ago (okay, back in June) when I said I was going to do that? Yeah, we finally did that! I will have pictures for you tomorrow, once the ratio of my underwear collection to actual furniture in the room has been significantly diminished. Right now the room is much less "French country romantic" than it is "detonated laundry warhead." I've actually come to enjoy the way my tweed work pants double as window treatments.

That said, I'll regale you with all manner of ridiculosity tomorrow. Happy Monday!

I know, right? Ew.

*Total waste of time, this yogurt business. Well played, Yoplait. You win this time.

Little Yard of Horrors

I have a weird relationship with gardening: I really want to love it, but I also really want to smack it in the face and make it cry. I think our Chris Brown/Rihanna relationship stems from my rather overblown romantic notion of what gardening is. I prefer to think of gardening as a bright, fresh morning, the night's dew sparkling on my tomatoes and zucchini before it melts away under the hot summer sun. Before the sun is out in full force to wreak havoc upon the friendly dewdrops, I emerge from my house, my hair loosely braided, and clad in all-natural fibers--you know, something appropriately bohemian but also consciously fashionable, like a J. Crew sheer cotton button-down. I have some sort of fair-trade wicker basket in my hand (organically sourced and hand-woven, natch) and an exceptionally cute, sustainable straw hat on my head, maybe with a bow. I mean, hey! This gardening stuff? It's hard work, people! I need the right gear.

As I wander from my house, completely one with nature and in full communion with Mother Earth, who is coming over later for tea and gossip, I stop at the various plots of fertile soil in my garden, from which have emerged a veritable Thanksgiving cornucopia: shiny tomatoes about to burst, fat blackberries practically jumping off the vine, and cucumbers bigger than Jon Gosselin's ego (EGO. I said EGO, perverts!). I pick anything and everything I desire, filling my lovely, sustainable basket to the brim, and then meander back into the house, where I make blackberry teacakes for my date with Mother Earth.

Yeah.

You know what gardening is REALLY about? Gardening is DIRT. And BUGS. And digging up the long-dead housepets of the prior owner of your eighty-year-old house, and wondering if that discovery falls into the category of "grave robbery" or "clinical exhumation." Ultimately, I realized that, unfortunately, bugs are inherent to any outdoor adventure, and that any exploits that involve Lawyer Boy and I debating whether the subject was once named Fluffy or Pookiss is not in any way a "clinical" exercise.

We have spent the better part of the last six months trying to wrestle our front and back yards free from the terrifying grip of ivy, kudzu, and what I have been told is grass, but what I patently refuse to believe is grass. Frankly, it is too friendly and loving to be grass. It grows quickly, and so long and free that we sit in the sun together, the "grass" and I, braiding each others' locks and giggling about boys we want to talk to us. I've never met grass so eager to please, but LB burst my love bubble by telling me that it's not the grass, it's me. The love that it gives as freely as a middle-schooler with a crush is not because it really wants me; it's because I refuse to break up with it. Put simply, the grass wouldn't be all up in my biznass if I would remember to cut it more frequently than once a month.

So instead of a Garden of Eden of delectable, desirable vegetables, I am faced with acres of ivy and slutty grass that wants only to wind itself provocatively around my ankles. Anything that is supposed to grow, anything that is planted on purpose, dies as soon as I glance at it, killing my dreams of sustainable baskets and beribboned straw hats. I possess the mythical kiss of death. I only wish I'd known that when I was dating; I could really have used that power to weed out the losers earlier in the game.

However, Lawyer Boy is quite the Prince of the Pea Pod over here, raking and hoeing Fluffy's graveyard into producing some serious farmer's market goods. He has grown whole plants from seeds, which I find beyond impressive, since I cannot grow plants from plants. In just a few months, the kudzu has been bitchslapped, the ivy sent to boot camp, and the overgrown grass taught to shape up and keep its pants on. He is a true Green Giant to my Blackbeard.

Not that I, you know, have a beard. But if I did, I would totally braid a ribbon into it before wandering out into the garden, so that it coordinated with my sustainable straw hat.

I Know I'm A Twit...What Of It?

After many months and much confused cocking of my head, I finally gave in to peer pressure and the allure of broadcasting every bizarre idea that cruises through my cranium to the Whole Wide Intarwebz, and signed up on Twitter. Or, as Lawyer Boy calls it, Tweeter. You can find me on Tweeter as @gracethoreau, or $gracethoreau, or #$%!gracethoreau, or whatever you use to Tweeter on me. At me. Upon me. All up in my Tweetness.

Regardless of whatever verb you would like to use in the phrase "____ @gracethoreau" (kick, hug, flying elbow) you should follow me on Tweeter. I just (like, right this hot second) discovered that I have to know someone's Tweetername to Tweetertalk to them, which really throws a wrench in my plan to get on Tweeter just to e-yell "stop being a dumb ho!" to Lindsey Lohan, Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Heidi Montag-Breast, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and the chick at my office whose skirt was so tight today, I could see her soul through it.

There should be a button on the right-hand side of this illustrious bit of the Intarwebz directing you to my Tweeterage, but since I all but have a stroke and collapse anytime I have to do anything other than throw word bitlets at the Intarwebz, I make no promises.

That said, Tweet away!

Food Doof Challenge, Day 7: The Grand Finale!

Well, we made it. We went seven days and seven dinners without hitting the grocery store, and to give you the Cliff's Notes: No one starved, died, or vomited profusely while screaming my name and obscenities, alternately cursing my cooking and begging God for mercy.

In a way it got easier to cook later in the week, because I was no longer paranoid about using up the useful ingredients and not having them later in the week, because obvi, it was already later in the week. Tonight I had two packs of frozen chopped spinach and a package of fresh carrots that I needed to use before they went to the bad, as my dad says, and as usual, I had enough bakery supplies to force-feed both of us pound cake all the way to a diabeetus coma.

I decided to make a crustless spinach quiche, which is one of my favorite quick dinners, the recipe for which I can share with you in three easy-to-read sentences: Buy a box of Bisquik. Find the recipe on the side for "Impossible Cheeseburger Pie." Omit the ground beef, onion, and cheddar cheese, using in their place anything you want (meat and mushrooms have to be cooked first, but that's the only limitation I've found). I like to make this with frozen spinach, cooked and drained, and whatever cheese I have in the house, which is usually around a dozen different varieties. Tonight it was either Parmesan or Gruyere, since that was all we had left.

To go with the quiche, I sliced the carrots lengthwise, tossed them with a little butter, sugar, and spices, and roasted them. I threw together a batch of baking powder biscuits, adding Parmesan and black pepper, and voila! For the last night of the Food Doof Challenge, we had the most nutritionally-balanced meal yet. And it was actually good, which is always a bonus.

Last night I mentioned that I had one last project that I was holding out to try tonight, and it's in the oven right now. I made a cake with the cranberry sauce, and I think it might have actually baked into something other than a big pan of barf. I have a great recipe for pound cake that I make all the time, and I've added jam to it before for random flavor, so I thought, hey, cranberry sauce is like jam! I could add it to the pound cake, and maybe no one would die!

In case the cranberry pound cake turned into a kitchen disaster equal to Rachael Ray, I cut the recipe in half. As usual, halfway through putting the cake together, I forgot that I had halved the recipe, so I used the full amount of baking soda and salt. If I had any sense at all, I would take the advice that cookbooks always give, and I would write out the measurements for a reduced recipe separately, and follow THAT instead of the original recipe. But if I had any sense at all, we probably wouldn't be here.

Before I put the cake in the oven, I tasted the batter, and--yes, I tasted the raw batter. Yes, I know I could get salmonella. Yes, I know how gross raw egg is. But seriously? Cake batter, brownie batter, and cookie dough are too delicious for a little threat like a bacterial hurricane to stop me. Also, it's important to know if your baked good sucks rocks before you bake it, so that you have time to drown your sorrows and disappointment in a quart of ice cream before the terrible finished product comes out of the oven. Or, you can taste it so you can tinker with the seasonings one last time before it's too late. Whatever.

ANYWAY.

I tasted the batter, and the first thing I thought was, "*gasp*! This tastes like Christmas!" I had added the cranberry sauce (all professionally mooshed up), cinnamon, vanilla, and Chinese five-spice to the batter, and in its raw, deliciously contaminated state, it tasted like Yule-y goodness and holiday cheer. Because it takes longer to bake a pound cake than it does to grow a real human baby, I'm still waiting for my pan of Christmas cheer to come out of the oven. Stay tuned!

***ONE HOUR LATER***

CAKEWIN!!! The cranberry sauce cake is delicious. It's a Christmas miracle! It has a nice tart undertone, like Granny Smith apples, which plays nicely against the warm, holiday spiciness of the seasonings. Additionally, it does not suck. I would totally make this cake, blanket it with cream cheese frosting (which, honestly, I would put on anything, including cheesecake, cheese crackers, and actual cream cheese), and take it to a holiday meal. If anyone would like the recipe, just shoot me an email and I'll send it over.

Well, on that happy Christmas note, I declare this week of the Food Doof Challenge closed. I also declare it a success, and I invite you all to try it out, naturally requiring you to email me photos of any particularly disastrous culinary catastrophes immediately. Captions involving four-letter charmers are also welcome.

And if I've learned anything from this week, looking at the goblins that continue to haunt my pantry despite my best efforts, it is that diamonds are not forever. Excess barbecue sauce and brown rice are forever.

Food Doof Challenge, Day 6: Pasta alla Partial Puttanesca

Last night's wedding was absolutely beautiful, and the food delicious, even beyond the fact that it was not frozen spinach sauteed in Memphis barbecue sauce that I rustled up from the back of the fridge. I'll write about the wedding more tomorrow, after the final episode of the Food Doof, but for now, I will let you know that the part where Lawyer Boy dropped me in the middle of the dance floor was less delicious than the almond wedding cake with Irish Cream filling.

Tonight I had planned to make pasta (fettucine, from a box in the cabinet) with puttanesca sauce, which is one of our perennial favorites. For the uninitiated, puttanesca roughly translates from Italian as "whore," so obviously, we at The Fumbling could not care less what it tastes like, but we are all about making Whore Sauce. Puttanesca is named after Ye Olde Italiane Whores because it's quick and easy (I am not making this up), but beyond that, it's a tomato-based sauce containing garlic, onions, artichokes, anchovies, green olives, and my lovechild, capers. Our favorite restaurant, Avenue 805, does a fantastic puttanesca, and even though LB spares no love for anchovies or green olives, he sucks that stuff down like, well, an Italian whore.

After my little affairette with the tomato saucentrate the other night, I had lots of tomato sauce left over, since one pizza doesn't take a whole lot. I decided to marry that "sauce" with the artichoke hearts and capers in the cabinet, along with a chopped onion and the end of the fresh garlic, for a partial puttanesca. We didn't have anchovies or green olives, but you can't taste them and LB picks them out, respectively, so I didn't feel like we were creating "Jeopardy!" without Alex Trebek over here. I sauteed the onion and minced garlic in olive oil and went to add the tomato sauce, turning the Tupperware upside down to pour the sauce in...and the sauce did not move.

Personal note to tomato sauce: Hi, my name's Grace. We played this game Friday night. Remember? I almost threw you away because you were a dry, pasty whore, but then I added to you the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean and we were good to go for saucy delight. And now? When did you get so thirsty? Now, when I want you to be a whore of a sauce, when I am begging you to be a whore of a sauce, you have transformed back into a mealy brick of seasoned tomato glue? Please. A little justice for the Food Doof, you...whore.

Once I had pried the tomato block out of the Tupperware and nestled it into the sizzling onions, garlic, capers, and artichokes, I poured in some chicken broth, and added in a liberal glug of white wine. I added kosher salt and cayenne pepper, and a dash of white wine vinegar, and covered the sauce to simmer and think about what it did. About forty-five minutes later, when we were ready for dinner, I boiled the fettucine. Upon stirring the thick, tangy sauce into the finished pasta, I threw in a bunch of basil from our garden, because what is life without a chiffonade of basil? And because LB grows mad crazy plants.

Seriously. No holds barred. This was THE BEST DISH so far in Food Doof Challenge Week; so delicious, in fact, that I wrote the recipe down to recreate it at a time when I'm not culinarily unstable. Everything really came together perfectly. The sauce thickened up just right, and when I tossed it with the starch-laden freshly-cooked pasta, it clung to the noodles in just the right way to prevent the noodles from floating in a watery mess of sodden sauce and vegetable bitlets. Put simply, it was absolutely delicious, which leaves me concerned that tomorrow's dinner, the final hurrah in Food Doof Week, will just not be able to measure up.

For tomorrow night, I do have one grand finale planned, not so much in the meal, but in the form of a dessert that I've been throwing around in my head all week. It will either be spectacularly delicious, or spectacularly, mind-blowingly horrendous. Either way, it will be the perfect finish to the Food Doof Challenge!

Food Doof Challenge, Day 5: Victory, Italian-Style

Well, here we are at Day 5, with only two more "meals" left to brew in this week's cauldron of calamity. I don't know who's more relieved that we're nearing the finish line: Me, for no longer having to stress over what to cook with a collection of ingredients more random than Lindsey Lohan's sexual partners, or Lawyer Boy, for no longer having to stress that I'm going to ask him, at long last, to unhinge his jaw and suck down the vacuum pack of teriyaki tuna in the cupboard.

Last night's lemon chess cheaterfest was definitely a success, as was Molly's arugula pesto dinner, which was far beyond anything my kitchen is capable of spawning at this point in the week. The Italian dinner, complete with prosciutto-wrapped melon and homemade limoncello, got my Giada juices flowing, and I decided to (try to) follow suit with my own Italian masterpiece: Pizza made with absolutely no mozzarella to be found.

In between rolling out pie crusts for everyone I have ever met, and rolling out pie crusts for everyone I might hope to ever meet, last Saturday I happened to finally find a great recipe for pizza crust, while at the same time discovering that my oven will heat to a summery five hundred and fifty degrees. I made two really fantastic pizzas in three days and fortunately, as a totally unhinged baker, I still had tons of flour and yeast in the house. What sealed the deal was the small jar of tomato paste that I found in the back of the dwindling cabinet last night. Raise your hand if you know what tomato paste is. Raise your hand if you know what tomato paste is for. I, frankly, question humanity's need for the existence of tomato paste, since it seems to be nothing more than what happens if I leave tomato sauce on the stove for too long. If I had known I could bottle that crap and that people would pay real dollars for it, full-time employment would no longer be de rigueur in these parts.

My mom, however, recently told me that tomato paste is just tomato sauce concentrate, to which you can add liquid to turn it back into tomato sauce. Okay, seriously, why. do. they. not. say. that. on. the. can??? Or call it tomato sauce concentrate? Or even better, tomato saucentrate? Or just share with the world at large that THIS PRODUCT HAS A PURPOSE???

I'll write my Congressman about that later. Tonight, while my dough rose, I added liquid to turn the erstwhile tomato sauce back into tomato sauce, throwing in salt, herbs, and spices so it didn't taste like licking a tomato on Ecstasy. With the dough rolled out and spread with my reconstituted saucentrate, the only hurdle left to overcome was the fact that we had zero mozzarella cheese in the house. I pillaged the fridge for melty dairy products, coming away with two slices of havarti, a half-cup of Pecorino-Romano, and eight ounces of Gruyere.

Every time I cook with an unusual combination of ingredients, I think to myself, "this is such a cool idea! Why hasn't this become really popular yet?" Most of the time, the reason is, "because it tastes like ass." So when I mixed my three cheeses and spread them over the pizza, it occurred to me that there is probably a reason no one uses those three in harmony. But since it was either the cheese stooges or apple butter, I decided to take my chances with the cheese.

All in all, the pizza was good. The crust was outstanding, but I hadn't been forced to compromise anything in making that. The sauce, on the other hand, was HOLY SHIT TOMATO. I added lots of liquid, but it was still extremely tomato-y, although the garlic and spices fought hard to assert themselves against the crimson tide. The cheeses were a mixed bag. The havarti completely disappeared, leaving the Pecorino and Gruyere to duke it out for the title of Dairy Queen. Ultimately, the Gruyere won, beating out the Pecorino in a most unexpected way.

Does anyone else think Gruyere tastes like pineapple? I always have, but I was hoping that once it was onstage performing with the rest of the cast, the pineapple would take a backseat to, oh, I dunno, the actual taste of cheese. In fact, not so much. Either that, or a gnome snuck into my oven and spritzed my pizza with a pina colada.

With all the weirdness I've seen come out of my oven this week, my money's on the gnome.

***

As a reminder, LB and I are off to a wedding tomorrow night, to nibble on delicious cuisine that wasn't fished out of the back of the bottom shelf of someone's fridge, sprinkled with coconut and brown rice, and deep-fried. See you on Sunday!