That's Empress to You

My Day in the Kitchen

Made ramen for breakfast. Prepped ahead of time: cut open outer package and inner foil packet and arranged them neatly on counter while water was boiling. Put in egg (see swirling froth in center) to simulate actual nutrition.

 

Made chicken soup, but overcooked the egg noodles. Picked out chicken, carrots and celery, using a strainer, spoons, and several bowls. Finally resorted to using my fingers. Recooked egg noodles and put it all back together again.  

 

Cooked "beets" for 2 1/2 hours because they didn't seem to get done. Finally took them off stove. They taste like nail polish remover. I have no idea what this food is. The house smells so bad we may need to evacuate.

 

Determined by clever use of internet that Quince ($4.99/lb. at Bi-Rite) is inedible unless cooked. Too cheap to buy more to make poached Quince, or Quince jam or whatever. Also, still don't know how to pronounce Quince.

 

Created extremely effective fruit fly trap by placing tomato and plum scraps in container, sealing it with paper, poking small holes in the paper with a pencil and watching for hours as fruit flies crawl in and find themselves unable to escape, outsmarted, because they're fruit flies and I'm a human.

Mayor Bloomberg Issues Rules on Humor, Beauty, Sex, Other Noxious Fun; Penalties Severe

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is adding salt to his list of Things People Should Not Have Because They’re Not Good For Me.  A long-time smoker, he has banned smoking in bars, restaurants, workplaces and even public outdoor spaces.  He has been known to eat food that would gag the Guinness Book of World Records hot-dog-eating winner.

As Michael Barbaro wrote in the New York Times:  “As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.” 

Oh good.  So he’s trying to foist his manorexia on everyone else.  He can hide out in his 12,500 sq. ft. town house eating  Cheez-its, but no one else is allowed eat Popeyes in peace.  Or smoke a cigarette in the park. 

And his newly proposed salt regulations are for our own good.  “We are trying to extend lives and improve the lives of people who live in this city,” he says in yesterday’s Bloomberg.com story.

The Daily News quotes Bloomberg on his salt proposals: "After this, we can keep going… People don't like to have somebody come in and tell them what to do, but afterward, if it turns out to be something that's in their interest, they sure as heck say thank you."

Oh yeah, I’m saying thank you.  Everyone loves the self-righteousness of the quote unquote reformed.  It’s so charming, and helpful.  Anyway, if Bloomberg is so concerned with everyone’s health, how about addressing one of the major causes of our country’s health problems.  Everyone knows poverty and life expectancy rates are inextricably linked.  A Cornell study of American kids “confirmed that the longer 13-year olds lived in poverty the more health problems they developed in adulthood. Poverty takes a toll on their bodies that makes it more challenging for their bodies to handle the impacts of the environment as they grow older.”

The dessicated little cat turd in the expensive suit should stop telling us* how to blow our noses and put some real money where his (big) mouth is.  His and Bill Gates’ $500 million global anti-smoking initiative was a good start.  But the world would be much more appreciative, and much better served if he didn’t dole out his good intentions with a set of prissy rules and a lot of finger-wagging, like a missionary lady handing out sandwiches and ruler slaps to the unwashed heathen.  So just hand out the cash and leave us alone, Mr. I’m-Going-to-Make-the-World-a-Better-Place-Starting-with-You.  Thank you and have a nice day.

 *New Yorkers, ex-New Yorkers, dissolute wastrels world-wide

And for a moment I was so happy

On my way home from dropping the kids off at the Food Bank, I saw a van with these words emblazoned on the side, and I swear it said Trans Fat Joy. 

Not That Good

Very dry. Although Jack pretended to like it and even agreed to take a piece to school tomorrow. Children are awesome.

Home Cooking: Problem #1 Solved

I am frying chicken for the first time in my life.  It's always seemed that the scrawny little lard injected, mega-salt infused buggers you get from the meth addict at Safeway was plenty good enough.  But. Here's how it's going so far.  The candy thermometer keeps popping out of the pot.  This is the first complex culinary hurdle I face.

IT Buses Chapter 2

Now those IT buses are going by my house at the rate of 2 per hour.  Then they’re dropping off their Google-ites and Googlettes on 18th and Dolores, so they can pick up The Freshest Produce at Bi-Rite and the Best Pizza Outside of New York at Delfina Pizza, and the World’s Most Awesome Ice Cream at Bi-Rite Creamery.

These people are completely un-cooling my neighborhood.  Of course the gay guys thought the same thing when we breeders moved in.  (I think Steven and I were the first on the block and I’m here to tell you we didn’t exactly get coffee cake in a basket with a bow.)  And the Mexicans thought that about the gay guys.  And the Swedes about the Mexicans.  It’s all a slow evolutionary slide toward the waterproof laptop case.

... and I love parking my Suburban in a spot marked compact

I enjoy my muffins too, but I’m starting to suspect that the muffin is not really a healthy breakfast item. I think it’s a cupcake. A really really big cupcake. And the refreshing midday iced frappucino? Milkshake. Now that we’re on the subject I’m beginning to think all those Luna Bars/Power Bars/Balance Bars/Cliff Bars are not that much different from a Snicker’s Bar. Except they taste like crap.

Whatever. As long as we all still fit into our Size negative-0 jeans.

Water water everywhere

When did people get so thirsty? Everyone you see is carrying a bottle of water. And drinking out of it. Constantly. I remember when the idea of drinking 8 glasses of water a day was ludicrous. Only weirdos like Jack LaLanne did stuff like that. Now it’s practically against the law to be seen on the street without a bottle of water. It’s like a sudden collective fear of being waterless has descended on all of humanity. I’ve seen people toting around half-gallon jugs of water and drinking from them while waiting for the bus. They’re not even exercising, unless you count carrying around 700 lbs. of water.

Is this somehow related to greenhouse gases or ozone depletion? In addition to wearing sunscreen 24 hours a day do we now have to constantly flush our kidneys with bottled water that costs more than Chanel #5? Maybe people are trying to be at least minimally prepared for a major earthquake. Or hydrated for the rapture.

When I was a kid we could go a whole day with only one stop at the water fountain, and that was just to get enough water to squirt between your teeth at the teacher’s butt when she wasn't looking.

I don’t know, I just think this water stuff is overrated. Hydrate, schmydrate. Give me a Diet Coke or a Sapphire martini any day. Beverages with benefits.

Vegetarian Driving

I often shop at the local Worker-Owned Cooperative Grocery Store, which carries only vegetarian food. You can’t get chicken stock there, and all the produce is organic, even stuff like garlic, which consequently costs $4 a pound. Everyone who works or shops there looks like they cut their hair with a hedge trimmer. They also appear to spend more money on one bottle of vitamins than they do on an entire outfit. And they actually eat stuff like whole-wheat, sugar-free, vegan “chocolate-chip” cookies that look like prehistoric turds. All of that is fine by me. My hair’s not looking so hot these days either.

What I can’t stand is that they can’t flipping drive. The parking lot is filled with Toyota Priuses and Subaru station wagons with Arms are for Hugging bumper stickers. Each and every driver of these vehicles requires at least 3 tries to get into a parking spot. And they’re not parallel parking. On the other end there is an automatic 7-minute rest period between the time they get into their cars and when they actually begin backing out of their spots. I think they’re taking notes on the NPR broadcast. The worst thing is the purposeless pause. They seem to like to stop. And wait. They’ll lurch forward occasionally but you mustn’t get your hopes up because in 3 or 4 feet they’ll stop again.

I’m not sure if they’re lost in deep thought about Eve Ensler’s new book, or if maybe they’re having second thoughts about whether using the gas pedal is politically correct. Mostly, though, I think they just need some red meat. Some nice rare steak. Osso buco for that full-protein blast. When it gets really bad, when in each driver’s seat sits someone wearing ethnic jewelry and the glazed-over look of the severely anemic, I want to borrow Dan Aykroyd’s Bass-o-matic and whip up a nice liver shake, which I will say is made of kelp and dried plums.

Oreo Crusts

Oh my God. I have raised a kid who thinks both Oreos and bagels have crusts. Crusts that he claims are inedible. There are children starving in refugee camps and my child won’t eat the final 45 degree edge of his bagel, which tastes exactly like the rest of his bagel (except for maybe the hole), or parts of the Oreo that exhibit a crusty quality only he can discern.

It’s disgusting. I am clearly giving him too much food. If he had one bagel to eat, all morning – and he can forget about the low-fat chive cream cheese – he would eat the damn thing, each and every crumb. But no. I give him a bagel, and fruit, and yogurt if he feels like it. Then when he doesn’t eat the “crusts”, I absent-mindedly eat them myself while not speaking until the A section of the Times is read.

Last night he ate maybe 1/3 of his delicious (okay, bland and strangely slippery) halibut filet. I put the leftovers into one of my hundreds of pieces of precious Tupperware, which are my lifeline out of an utterly destitute future, and told myself I could eat it for lunch. Then, after a rousing game of Quiddler he started in on the Oreos. Looking back as I scrubbed basil vinaigrette out of a baking pan, I saw that he’d piled up a stack of half-eaten cookies. “The ratio,” he explains, “of black stuff to white stuff isn’t, you know… right. You can’t eat this part. It’s the crust. Know what I mean?”

No, not exactly. I do know that Oreos are not food. Not eating Oreos is probably better for him than eating them. I also know, however, that the price of one package of this crap could feed a Sudanese family for a week.

It’s my fault. While no one believes this is a zero-sum game – the Oreos a kid leaves on the table in California don’t immediately translate into the rice a child in Darfur can’t get – there is a correlation of wasteful behavior to global misery. How did I raise a child who, while kind and appreciative and not otherwise particularly profligate, cannot seem to understand this?

I know what it is, I think: we shouldn’t even have Oreos in the house; they’re little round pieces of shrapnel in the arsenal of the mega-conglomerate. I forget exactly how this works but it has something to do with too much corn syrup, too many farm subsidies, and cheap Chilean blueberries.

Or maybe I’m letting him get away with this because I grew up being forced to eat food that no sentient person could eat. There were salads that included about four too many food groups, none of which were vegetables, and canned asparagus, and something lower-middle-class Minnesotans call “hot dishes”. I still don’t really know how you define a hot dish. The name itself doesn’t demand much. All I know is that you have no idea what the brown chunks are, or the creamy white stuff, or, god forbid, the green things. And you have to eat it or you sit there until midnight, gagging every time you bring your fork to your mouth.

The last thing I want to do is visit upon Jack the torture I endured at the mercy of someone else’s idea of what is delicious or nutritious or “good enough for everyone else at this table, young lady.” I lump in with the memories of those delectable meals all the other miseries of childhood – the countless things God gave us for which we should be plenty grateful, like a fine foster home and Bible Camp every summer – and get… Oreo crusts.

So I see how we got here, but I see even more clearly that it’s got to stop. I’ll probably never have the stomach to make my son eat the whole slimy halibut. I, like so many other lucky late-model baby-boomers, find myself at the miraculous juncture of (relative) prosperity and self-absorption that allows us to make good on our vows never to make our kids as miserable as we were.

Sometimes I think all the sanctimonious self-sacrifice of our childhood has made us less appreciative, not more. The religion of misery and endurance has turned us into gluttonous wasteful atheists. So what do we do? How do we – the new and awkwardly comfortable – keep our children from being obscenely wasteful with things they don’t know are precious, while at the same time refusing to make life into a forced march of gratitude? I’m sure some yoga teacher has the answer. It will have something to do with balance, and she will demonstrate by standing on her head. I welcome all answers, yogic or non, and as always, all and any suggestions.