There's not enough therapy in the world

We have a family tradition. Every year, my mother drops off grocery bags of "stocking stuffers" with one of us kids and after the actual children go to sleep (or are banished to their rooms now that they are older) we sit around and laugh as we stuff the random assortment of crap into each others' stockings.

Past years, we have had stockings whose contents were purchased at the auto parts store, including heel guards for my sister and I (we own about a 3/4" of heels combined) and the little hammers you can use to break your windows if you accidentally drive into a lake. I have enough Crabtree & Evelyn to open my own store.

But she is never going to be able to top this year. This fall, mom went to Tuscany with her church for the second time. Last time she went, she brought me a frilly apron with olives on it, I guess to wear when I am making martinis before I serve dinner to my husband's boss and his wife. She has always bought us bags of pasta, I guess because my husband is Italian-American. Many a food bank has received apple-shaped pasta, shoe-shaped pasta, and even cat-shaped pasta. None of that prepared me for what I found in his stocking bag this year.

Yes. Penis-shaped pasta. In all the years of stocking stuffers, this is the first time there has ever been one shaped like a reproductive organ. I'm trying hard not to assume that either my mother thinks my husband is gay or this is the single least subtle hint ever that she wants grandchildren. Either way, pass the prozac-shaped pasta.

Click the picture for more penis pasta photos.

Total Pot Roast Domination

I basically used the same recipe I use to make my beef stew adapted to pot roast. Here's what I did.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Take the meat out of the package and season it well with salt and pepper on both sides. Let rest while you prep everything else.
   
3. In a big dutch oven, cook up 3 slices of bacon, sliced into small pieces.
   
4. Once the bacon is crisped up, take it out and throw the meat in. leave it alone until it has developed a nice sear, then flip it and do the same on the other side.
   
5. Once it is good and browned all over, take the meat out and throw in some big chunks of onion (I actually used shallot b/c that's what I had), carrot, celery, a whole head of garlic (peeled in individual cloves), some more salt, a handful of whole black peppercorns, some dried thyme and some fresh sage leftover from Thanksgiving that really needed to be used up.
   
6. Give the veggies a few minutes to get going, then toss in whatever leftover red wine you happen to have. In this case, I had about a cup and a half of some nice Greek Demestica red.
   
7. Let the wine work on all the stuff on the bottom of the pan and scrape up what doesn't come up on its own.
   
8. Put the meat back in (with all the juices that have accumulated on the plate).
   
9. Pour on one carton of good, low sodium beef stock and enough water to cover the meat.
   
10. Bring it to a full boil on the stove then cover it and chuck it in the oven for 2.5 hours.
    
11. After 2.5 hours goes by, take the pot out and put the meat on a plate so you can decant the liquid to a bowl and strain out all the solids.
    
12. Put the strained liquid back on the stove and put the meat back in. I threw some sliced mushrooms in for flavor at that point.
    
13. Leave it on a low simmer while you make the potatoes/carrots/whatever you want to go with the meat.
    
14. I had some of those tiny Yukon golds, which I either cut in thirds or halves, and some sliced cremini mushrooms. I cranked the oven up to 350 degrees and threw them in a roasting pan with some olive oil and a few good spoonfuls of the strained jus. I guess it took about 15-20 minutes for them to brown.
    
15. Serve the meat and veg in bowls with plenty of the reduced jus to moisten it up.
    

That was it. It really couldn't have been simpler.

feels her annual Thanksgiving cold coming on. maybe bronchitis.

Husband declares, "Best peanut butter cookies ever!"

While cleaning out the fridge last week, I discovered that we had three almost full jars of peanut butter in the fridge. That fact combined with the arctic cold front hanging over the Mid-Atlantic made Peanut Butter Cookies pretty much inevitable today. I was bored with the same ones I have been making for 30 years so I scoured the web for a new recipe. I found a few that looked interesting so I combined them into this:

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

Yields: ~3 Dozen

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar, packed

3/4 cup white sugar

1 1/4 cup peanut butter, chunky

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

---

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour

1 cup quick cooking oatmeal

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350°.

Cream the butter, sugars, and peanut butter together until smooth. Add the vanilla and then the eggs, one at a time until well incorporated. Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, oats, and cinnamon together. Add dry ingredients to wet slowly, until mixed well.

Spoon by rounded teaspoons onto ungreased baking sheet. Mark tops of cookies with standard peanut butter cookie fork cross.

Bake for 12-17 minutes until bottoms just start to turn golden brown.

is enjoying watching the pretty snow.

is lost in a maze of resolutions and statuses. Workflows, it burns us!

is trying to avoid the plague going around the office.

had a 4 cat morning. brrrrrrr.

is sprint planning.

is going to get some apple cider and dumplings http://ping.fm/AtWiY

is going to get some apple cider and dumplings.

finally in lounge pants and the big yellow sweatshirt. ahhhhhhh.

got the good doughnut.

is glad it's Friday.

is full of Charm City Cake and Dangerously Delicious Pie!

is pinging!

Embracing Chickentarianism

Since Mark got laid off our insane habit of eating 2 or 3 meals out a day, every day, has come to an end but I am still completely unmotivated to actually "cook" anything during the week. What's a girl to do? Buy a rotisserie chicken, of course! It is amazing what you can do with a whole chicken. I thought about buying one of those "101 things to do with a rotisserie chicken" cookbooks but I still haven't run out of ideas. Here are just a few of the things I have made lately:

1. Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwiches
   
   1. Strip all the meat off the chicken and throw it in a pan with some BBQ sauce. Heat it up and slap it on hamburger buns. Or hot dog buns. Or leftover naan…
      
   2. This is an excellent way to disguise dark meat from people who claim they don't like it.
      
2. Chicken Tetrazzini
   
   1. Sauté some mushrooms, make a béchamel, boil whatever pasta you have, mix it all together in a baking dish with whatever chicken you picked off the carcass, slap some breadcrumbs on the top and you've got casserole heaven.
      
3. Chicken Chana Masala
   
   1. An international "can of this, can of that" recipe. Rinse a can of chickpeas and chuck it in a pan. Throw in a can of diced or stewed tomatoes. Add a bunch of your favorite Indian spices (I love Penzey's Rogan Josh Seasoning) and a bunch of cut up chicken. Let it sauté until the tomatoes break down a little.
      
   2. I once found myself completely out of chickpeas and made this with a can of black-eyed peas instead. Still terrific.
      
4. Greek Cous Cous Pilaf
   
   1. This one is based on having some leftover grilled veggies in the fridge also. It originated with some excellent grilled zucchini I made when it was at its peak one summer. Make a pot of cous cous (I like whole wheat cous cous because I can pretend it is healthy) with chicken stock and a little lemon juice. Let the cous cous cool a little and throw in the grilled veggies, cut up chicken, and some chunks of feta cheese.
      
   2. I make boatloads of this in the summer and eat it right out of the Gladware every night until it is gone.
      
5. Quinoa Pilaf
   
   1. This is a variation on the cous cous recipe I had to invent because my husband hates cous cous. Last time I made it, I had half a bag of spinach that was on its last legs so I chopped that up and threw it in the hot quinoa as soon as I pulled it off the stove, along with the feta cheese and chicken. Quinoa's good but nothing beats cous cous for its 5-minute prep time.
      
6. Chicken Pot Pies
   
   1. My tiny kit house has no central AC. The oven goes off as of Mother's Day and does not come back on until Halloween. The official Halloween meal is idiot chicken pot pies.
      
   2. Unroll a sheet of pie crust and cut it in quarters. Fit each quarter into a muffin tin, leaving the excess hanging out. Add some cut up chicken and some frozen veggies. Pour in chicken gravy (the kind in a jar will work) and then fold over the excess. It so doesn't have to be anything close to perfect. Bake then until they are done.
      
7. Quiche
   
   1. My quiche recipe is as follows:
      
      1. 4 eggs
         
      2. 1.5 cups of some combination of milk and half and half
         
      3. 1 cup or so of the cheese that needs to be eaten most urgently
         
      4. Whatever leftover vegetable matter is in the fridge and is about to go bad
         
      5. Whatever leftover protein is in the fridge and is about to go bad
         
   2. This week we are having Chicken and Mushroom quiche with a combination of smoked mozzarella, fontina, and something else I didn't remember buying but was pretty tasty
      
8. The most holy sacrament in chickentarianism is not to waste any part of the chicken. Every Sunday night, no matter what I make, The bones get broken up and thrown in a pot with whatever aromatics I happen to have and some salt and pepper to make a fresh batch of stock. Of all the great things you can make with a rotisserie chicken, great stock is one of the best. Don't forget to scrape in the chicken jelly from the bottom of the container!

I missed the memo

I said I wasn't going to do it anymore but I can't stop myself. I keep reading the comments at the end of articles in the paper. Maybe I should go back to only reading the print version again since that won't include yet another essay about the perils of Barak Hussein Obama by Ordinary Joe from Glen Burnie. But I read it and now I can't get it all out of my head again, the name calling, the accusations of socialism, the derision for his experience… it's all there as usual. But here's what I don't understand. When did the poles shift so selfishness became a virtue while altruism became a sin? I went to church as a little girl and studied the Ten Commandments and the Bible. We learned the Golden Rule, "Love they neighbor." I went to Girl Scouts where we collected canned goods to give to the poor.

But now, I feel like the cool kids are pointing and laughing at me all over again for carrying my Unicef boxes around with my Trick-or-Treat bag. Did they take out the commandment about coveting your neighbor's ass to make room for "Look out for #1"? Somehow I went from living a good, caring life to being a communist and I didn't even notice. Hell, I'm not even a good Christian anymore because I don't hate the right people.

Not as seen on TV

Facebook recently put me back in touch with a friend I haven't seen or heard from since high school. When I found out she now works at Liz Claiborne with Tim Gunn, I immediately assumed that her life is some kind of hybrid of The Devil Wears Prada and Project Runway and I was consumed with jealousy.

But then it occurred to me that people think my job is insanely cool, ("Wow! Do you get to sit around and play video games all day? That must be the best job ever!") but if people base their understanding of what I do on the portrayal of video game companies on TV, they may have a warped perception of what my life is really like. Consider these works:

Law & Order: Criminal Intent, F.P.S.
There's so much wrong with this episode it's hard to know where to start but the title is a good place. FPS stands for First Person Shooter but the game "Deathmatch" is clearly an MMO. The visuals you see are all dungeon-based PvP fighting. Then there's TR Knight wandering around, mumbling about the "lighting on the wall polygons" the entire episode. If he's the head of programming and that's all they let him do, he is a really sucky programmer. But the best part comes when the detectives figure out that the murdered woman was online playing when she was attacked and they go to the game company to find out who else was online at the same time. It's the hottest online game going according to the script and on a Friday night at 10pm, there were a whole 50 other people playing! With subscription numbers like that, you would think that killing players would be the last thing they would do.

Law & Order: SVU, Game
The obligatory "GTA makes you kill hookers" episode. Bad Rockstar! Bad! It does have one unintentionally hilarious moment when the killer is getting a PET scan and the tech uses a Game Cube controller. I did not realize until I saw it that Nintendo also makes medical equipment.

X Files, First Person Shooter
Again, someone needs to explain to TV what FPS means. A VR game becomes sentient and kills a tester "known only as Retro" (I wonder what they put on his paycheck) so Mulder has to go in and fight it while the employees of the game company cower helplessly behind their keyboards. OK, maybe that's not so unrealistic. Scully and Mulder bicker endlessly about the relative worth of video games (SPOILER! Scully thinks they are pointless, Mulder is a fanboy) and in the end Scully has to become the kick ass bitch to defeat the virtual kick ass bitch.

CSI: Miami, Game Over
OK, what's with killing the poor testers? I mean come on! We get the lowest pay, the least respect, the crappiest computers and now you kill us off too?!?!? That said, this is my favorite of the Game Dev episodes. So many great suspects to choose from. Did Tony Hawk kill poor Jake because he was really doing all the work? was it the insane programmer who blamed the tester because of all the extra work he had fixing the bugs he found (hello! You coded the bugs asshole!)? was it the testers jealous wife (as IF!)? was it the other tester who was all hopped up on his cane sugar soda ordered special from Mexico? Can they figure it out from the mocap data of the actual murder? You are just going to have to watch this one to find out.

Murder She Wrote, A Virtual Murder
Again with the virtual reality game. And if one ever did get significant funding, I suspect the IP they would choose would not be written by a senior citizen from Cabot Cove, ME, no matter how good she is at solving murders. This episode involves Jessica having to do a last minute rewrite because of a glitch in one specific character and a lead programmer who is murdered while trying to steal source code. For a VR game. On a floppy disk. I'm sure you can fit a lot of VR code on a floppy. OK, I admit it. I am probably the only working game developer (well I will be working soon) who has actually seen an episode of Murder, She Wrote but I am sure my mother has and thinks we all walk around the office in power suits with huge shoulder pads, heels, and panty hose.

But if anyone really wants to know what it's like to work in a game company, all they really have to watch is Grandma's Boy. It's crude, disgusting, adolescent and totally accurate.

Shhhh... If you are quiet you can hear the fiddling

I drove by this McCain/Palin sign proudly displayed in the parking lot of a lumber yard that failed in the wake of our housing crisis and I couldn't help but stop and take a picture. So many thoughts sprang to my mind immediately. How can anyone be so clueless as to miss the incredible irony of an image like this one? Did someone actually have the thought, "I know, I have a vacant, run down property. It's the PERFECT place for a McCain sign!"

If I had more of a vandal’s heart, I would be tempted to add a sign overtop saying, “This failed business brought to you by:” but that would be unfair. They haven’t really had a chance to put businesses under yet. But that doesn’t stop their local campaign office from taking advantage of the opportunities a deserted commercial site has to offer.

Because nothing says “Reform*Prosperity*Peace” like a sign behind a locked chain link fence.

Old 84 Lumber

I am so tempted to post this to failblog...

Blog This!

I downloaded the new Picasa 3 Beta today and decided to check out the "Blog This" feature. Of course, my hard drive is full of nothing more exciting than endless pictures of my cats being exceptionally cute. This is Mingus, climbing the apple tree in the front yard.

The chili that gave me weird dreams

It occurs to me that just posting the weird dreams I had because of the chili without the recipe is cruel so here goes. It's inspired by Ellie Krieger's White Chili, as seen on Food TV by me yesterday before I went shopping. Actually, it was the fact that I stumbled on really nice poblano peppers at the Korean market that prompted me to make this.

Black and White Chili

olive oil

1 medium onion, diced

3 medium poblano peppers, finely diced (seeded and ribs removed)

1 Tbsp garlic (from the big jar I bought at the Korean market)

1 Tbsp ground cumin

1/2 Tsp kosher salt

1/4 Tsp chili powder (no salt kind)

3/4 teaspoon dried oregano

1/2 Tsp fresh ground pepper

1 pound ground white meat turkey

1 can black eyed peas

1 can black beans

3 cups low-sodium chicken broth

1 Tbsp lime juice

3-4 dashes hot sauce

1/4 cup gravy flour (like Wondra)

1 can hominy

Salt

Lime wedges

Heat the oil in large pot or Dutch oven over moderate heat. Add the onion and poblanos, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, chili powder, salt, fresh ground pepper, and oregano and cook, for about 30 seconds.

Add the ground turkey and cook, breaking up the meat with a spoon, until the meat is no longer pink about 2 minutes. Add the beans, broth, lime juice, and hot sauce. Sprinkle gravy flour over mixture and mix in well. Cook, partially covered, stirring occasionally, for 25 minutes.

Add the hominy and salt, to taste, and continue cooking, partially covered, 10 minutes longer. Garnish with a lime wedge.

NOTE: This chili was even better the next day.

Things that are better now than when we were kids

As I refilled the bottle of olive oil I keep next to the stove from the 3L bottle I buy at the warehouse club, I flashed on the tiny bottle of Pompeian Olive Oil we used to have in the pantry when I was a kid. Recipes that called for olive oil required precision measurements so as to not waste a precious drop. When the bottle ran out, we piled in the car for a trip down to Little Italy to a special Italian grocery store to buy another tiny bottle. Now, I use olive oil for all of my cooking. I can't think of a meal that doesn't start with a swirl of olive oil in a pan. Sure, I have smaller bottles of different grades and nationalities of olive oil, but the giant jug of extra virgin olive oil is my go to oil. Every time I go to make brownies, I have to run out and buy new vegetable oil because the tiny bottle in the pantry (that I bought last time I made brownies) has gone rancid on me.

But I still love a good trip to the Italian grocery store.

Ringtone dilemma

So I finally got around to replacing my old cell phone (you know the one with the 4 key that didn't work anymore, making it impossible to text gerunds) and upgraded to a fancy one with a full keyboard, the LG enV. Because I am inherently distrustful of anything different or new, I refuse to take the protective plastic scratch guard off the front of it. I figure once I do, I am fully committed. But then again, am I really committed to a phone while it still has only the default ringtones?

But that presents the dilemma at hand. Do I stick with the elaborate set of ringtones I already have that allow me to immediately identify who is calling me without having to dig my phone out of my purse? Or, do I seize the opportunity to change things up and get some new tunes? No, if I have to download them all over anyway, I might was well embrace the new.

Getting new ringtones always seems like it should be so much fun but then, when faced with the moment of download no return, I always find myself paralyzed with indecision. What if I choose the wrong song? I'm too cheap to waste a $2 download so once I get a song, I am damn well going to use it (thus the Rainbow Connection debacle of 2004). How does one express themselves and identify their friends and family with a 3-5 minute song? It's a veritable minefield of cute and uncool and annoying. And now there is the added wrinkle (poor choice of words) that I don't recognize half the songs on the "What's New" page. sigh.

Back to the Verizon Media Store.

Dreams inspired by white turkey chili

I'm in a night club and we're all sitting around, waiting for Deb's act to start. She explains to me that she is going to get me a pink sweater like hers with one big black dot, but first she has to get one with two black dots for my niece. Then she goes on to tell me the Pony Club store in Savannah closed and she just cleaned up on stuff to give my niece for Christmas.

First, there was some kind of ecological disaster and we all had to be airlifted out. I had to hang onto the ladder and hold my breath through the poison gas cloud.

Upon my arrival at the relocation desk, I waited while a group of travel agents finished the arrangements for a tour for a high school reunion. Finally, she hands me my relocation package, which includes a brochure about the nightlife in the area where I will be settled. It has a club that features "shovel dancing" and has a picture of a middle-aged man in full motorcycle leathers and assless chaps dancing with a woman in a mumu. I know I will be fine.

Finally, I am coming home from Thanksgiving Dinner and remark this was the worst one yet [this is sadly, not dream fiction, I have had some wretched Thanksgiving dinners]. I stumble onto Erica and a group of her friends just as they are setting the table for their own Thanksgiving. I ask if I can help and find myself sitting at the end between Erica and Christopher Walken. I go to check the messages on my phone and when I come back, there is a pot of vegetables in front of me. I ask Erica if there are fiddleheads in there and she says, yes and a lot more. I look in and there are indeed fiddleheads plus a bunch of small vegetables shaped like skulls and skeletons. Christopher Walken looks at me and asks, "are you acquainted with the Flintstones?"