Pocketful of Meat

Here is a prime example of just how fucking demented I can be while out in public alone:

The other day I went to the deli to buy cold cuts.

You know how some deli workers will present you with a sample of your order and ask if it’s sliced to the thickness of your liking?

Turns out if you plan on ordering a variety of different items and the deli worker offers you a slice of each and you also end up asking him to slice a few items thinner than he first presented you with, and he hands over that sample to you as well, you will end up with a giant mound of meats and cheeses in your hand that you can either jam into your mouth despite having had your fill 2 slices ago and potentially choke on or you can literally sweat it out in your palm…

After gratefully devouring a slice of swiss cheese, roasted chicken, oven gold turkey and a too thick slice of provolone offered, I found myself accumulating more meat than I’ve ever wanted in my hand at one time.

It’s at this point that I began to panic.

I couldn’t find a napkin to stuff all the extraneous meat stuffs into and there wasn’t a trashcan in sight. There was no chance I was going to tell the kind and generous delicatessen worker to take back the slices he had previously offered and dispose of them for me.

And although I’m pretty sure he should have known to cut me off after the 4th or 5th slice, the ball was nonetheless in my court and I did nothing to dissuade him from keepin’ that ol’ meat train a-comin’…

So, I did what any truly brilliant/desperate/cold cut-crazy person in my position would do when faced with the dilemma of man-handling more than one can manage:

I folded up the second slice of provolone, a slice of honey maple ham and a slice of salami (why am i buying this much meat in the first place?) into a misshapen triangle of delicatessen freebies and jammed them into my jacket pocket.

When I got back home I removed the wad from my pocket and threw it to the woods in the hope that a baby deer or a scrawny fox might sniff them out for a late lunch but it failed to change the fact that I managed to walk out of a busy, local establishment with a quarter pound of balled up meat and cheese in my pocket instead of just telling the guy behind the counter: NO.

I believe the truth behind all this madness is simply that, if given the choice, I will almost exclusively choose the more embarrassing option.

*****

It has also come to my attention that I take 18,000 years to complete any one project. I’ve been “trying” to cook lately. It has (surprisingly) been mostly successful. That is to say that the tacos and tater-tot casseroles that I’ve spent far too much time on made have been downright masterful…or something.

I baked cupcakes tonight. From scratch. This was, by and large, a daunting task and one I’ve never even come close to attempting on my own before. Before tonight I wasn’t even sure I knew how to whisk things correctly. After tonight, I’m confident that I don’t.

I only managed to lose control of the whisk and fling melted butter and egg on myself and the side of the mixer once but it also took me almost 15 minutes to set up the mixer in the first place so maybe I shouldn’t be so proud so soon…

Also…

It took me, from first mix to final icing, over 4 hours to complete 12 cupcakes. I think the people on Cupcake Wars have 2 hours to make a thousand so I guess that kills any thought of my going into the competitive baking arena anytime soon.

The point is: cupcakes were made and it was an adventure.

A long, exhausting adventure full of expletives muttered at myself and a plethora of inanimate objects mostly labeled “Kitchen Aid”. An adventure that has now led me towards the greater pursuit and fervent study of whether or not Shiraz is considered a “dessert wine” and if I eat all 12 cupcakes is it OK to wash them down with an entire bottle?

Tomato Soup Spatter is Forever a Part of our Kitchen Décor a.k.a. So What? Who Cares?! (to be said in the voice of Joy Behar as played by SNL’s Fred Armisen)

I refuse to give up on my quest for obtaining domesticity points in the kitchen however much the odds are stacked against me. Over the weekend I did the unthinkable. I made my first ever attempt at going solo in dinner preparation and it was only semi-disastrous!

Ok, maybe it was 1/3 disastrous, 1/3 successful and 1/3 entirely too simple to completely fuck up even for me so can I really consider this a Grande feat at all?

The answer is yes, people. The answer is YES.

In a strange twist of events I took to food prep this evening while the bee did something. It’s been like 4 days, do really expect me to remember what? GAWD.

The recipe was easy enough:

4 Tomatoes (I would advise picking something extra red & juicy like a Roma tomato because it’ll make a big difference in the final product. I would know, I’m cheap and used shitty tomatoes so mine could have been way better.)

4 Cups Tomato Juice (Any brand. Doesn’t matter.)

1 Cup Heavy Cream (You could probably get away with using less.)

1/4 Cup Butter

Pinches of Salt, Pepper & Parsley

Simmer, puree, re-heat add some more stuff and serve!

Easy enough, right?

HA!!!!

The directions first called for dicing, peeling and seeding the tomatoes, then adding those and the tomato juice to a large pot to simmer for 30 minutes.

That part = so wildly successful that I felt like calling the bee into the kitchen just to show him how good I did much like a little kid might call their mom into the bathroom after making their first big kid poo in the grown-up potty.

Monumental, to say the least.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand here’s the part called DISASTER…

The directions next called for the concoction on the stovetop to be transferred into a blender to be pureed until there was nothing left but liquid-y goodness.

This should have been a simple CLEAN transition but nothing, I mean NO-THING, in my life is simple or clean.

I managed to pour a decent amount of the pre-puree onto the counter and all around the base of the blender during the first transfer.

Not a huge deal. Just wiped it up.

Now that I’d transferred the tomato slop from one vessel to another you would think the worst was behind me but oh how very very WRONG you would be.

Apparently I don’t know how to use a blender because after actively procrastinating and tentatively pressing buttons to ensure I was doing things the “right” way everything that could have possibly gone wrong basically did.

I THOUGHT I had my hand on the lid. I THOUGHT I had control over the electrical spinney device with razor sharp killing apparatus inside. Maybe I was a little TOO apprehensive which was what ultimately caused the lid to fly off and tomato puree to spew EV-ER-Y-WHERE.

On the floor. On the counter. On the stove. IN the crevice BETWEEN the counter and the stove (and that shit is there permanently, ya’ll). On the oven. In the sink. On the mini-blinds ABOVE the sink as well as ALL-OVER-MYSELF.

This is what our kitchen typically looks like:

And this is what our kitchen looked like after I was let loose in that bitch:

At this point, there was no other recourse but to have the bee step in. He assisted in some of the clean-up and manned the blender because I had proven that I was clearly less than able to complete this otherwise straight-forward task.

No use in crying over spilled tomato slop, right?

Well apparently nobody told me that because even after the blender disaster and the 30 minutes of clean-up it required and gaining assistance from the bee and finally having (what was supposed to be) the most difficult part of the process behind me I managed to YET AGAIN! spill that shit when pouring it from the blender back into the pot.

Once more, liquid tomato is all over the stove AND the counter top AND dribbling down the oven door into a pool of mess on the kitchen floor.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand this is when I start to cry.

Because I’m clearly a total head-case/loser-faced toolbox who can’t even manage to POUR.

It was then that I realized that this last mess might not have been completely my fault.

Here’s a picture of our blender:

That handy little pouring “lip” didn’t do diddley SQUAT for me. You would have thought that I had used a garden hose to get that stuff back into the pot with the amount of residual spray there was in the kitchen.

So I cleaned it up AGAIN, alone this time, mainly because I was too ashamed proud to ask for help.

And just so this seems like it’s a legit-type recipe post I’ll have you know that the rest of it went off without a hitch. I just brought that baby back to a simmer, added the butter and the cream and…

VOILA!!!

the black stuff is parsley (i think)

OH-MAGAHD.

I almost forgot to mention my s e c r e t ingredient…

SUGAR!!!

LOTS of sugar. Like 3 tablespoons of that stuff. Minimum.

Holy crap.

Did you just read a cooking post of mine?

I’ve got 2 words for you:

Death. Wish.

Don’t Put Marbles In Your Nose/Put Them In There/DO NOT PUT THEM IN THERE (or anything else for that matter)

I’ve always been a “different” kind of person. Words that have been used to describe me since as far back as I can remember include: weird, strange, eccentric, alternative, unique, quirky, DIFFERENT. And those are just the nicer ones.

I mention this because when I was much younger I decided that shoving fuzzy willows* up my nose would be a great idea because I liked how they felt.

There is no doubt that fuzzy willows are perhaps some of the most decadently soft and luxurious little suckers in all of existence. In fact, if someone was entrepreneurial enough, I’d bet that harvested willows could be turned into some seriously excellent fabric, potentially putting the fur industry out of business.

Think about it…

Now, picture this:

I am 3 years old.

At the time, we lived with my grandmother, and my Gramm, being my Gramm (and likely my direct link to eccentricities abound) had less of a house and more of a museum filled to the brim with various tchotchkes, antiques and oddities. One of those oddities was an old spittoon that held branches of fuzzy willows.

My mother is busy at the sink, finishing up the last few dishes before she has to jet off to work. I am all of 5 feet away curiously picking at the fuzzy roundness of the willow branch emerging from the brim of the spittoon when one after another after another AFTER ANOTHER find their way into my pint-sized self’s nostril. No sooner than the last of ’em have been shoved into my nose, my mom turns to find her 3-year-old looking something like this:

My mom has now entered into full panic-mode.

So here I am, 5 or more (nobody is really sure) fuzzy willows unceremoniously shoved into one nostril, my breathing is struggled and my complexion is spotty.

~momentary aside~

I was very inquisitive and somewhat independent as a child, frequently looking to push the boundaries of what was the norm or acceptable into something that what was straight up bizarre-nified. I went through a brief phase where I would only wear different shoes together. I can remember being in kindergarten and wearing 1 pink cowboy boot and 1 rubber soled canvas slip-on to school. Rubber soled so I could still participate in that day’s poor excuse for physical activity: jump roping. So while I perfected the one-legged double jump, I’m sure my biggest success was establishing myself forever more as a closeted extrovert.

I’m not entirely sure something like that even exists but I’m totally claiming its discovery as my own.

(except i can’t because i just googled “closeted extrovert” and found someone’s blog! check. it. out.)

So!

The closeted extrovert (according to my own definition) is someone who just lives to push the envelope but doesn’t want to be seen as overly “show-off-y” or “obnoxious”. Just sort of outer circle and mysterious/weird, strange, eccentric, alternative, unique, quirky, DIFFERENT. Apparently there is also something called a “clos-et extrovert” and that’s basically the exact opposite of what I’m talking about so let’s forget I even mentioned it…

~resuming~

My mom runs next door to get my uncle (because what the hell ELSE do you do in a situation like this?) and he looks at me and then looks at her and suggests I be seen by some medical professionals.

The next few hours are a blur of lab coats and arms holding down my tiny body to an exam table so I don’t squirm away while a GINORMOUS pair of tweezers infiltrates my nostril in the hopes of removing the fuzzy perpetrators before they lodge themselves too much farther inside my nasal cavity.

Thankfully, I was left physically unscathed by the whole incident and (probably) all willows were successfully removed from my head.

It was a highly traumatic event to say the least but I learned my lesson. If you’re going to put things up your nose make sure they are BIGGER than your nostril.

Like a tiny marshmallow.

Duh.

*i had to ammend the name of said item due to a large number of kiddie p()rn perverts finding my blog.