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Christmas Breakfast

I rocked Christmas Breakfast bachelorette style (my Dad was tasteful enough to call me up and point out that I'm the only one of three sisters who is not in a committed relationship- thanks for rubbing it in, Dad!!) But I wanted to do something special, so I surveyed the contents of the fridge and realized I had the makings of Latkes, since I'm SUCH A JEW.

My friend Esther (who is a Jew, and an exceedingly lovely one), gave me a recipe for rice cooker applesauce (she lives in Japan), so I got up, turned on the rice cooker and went back to bed for a couple hours. It's super easy- throw cored/peeled (I didnt peel mine because they're organic) apples into a rice cooker with some water/sugar/spices/whatever, turn the rice cooker on, and voila! (I've also heard that you can bake a cake in a rice cooker but I never had much luck in that regard).

I used the Epicurious Latke recipe (with garlic, because it didn't have onions, and I added a little flour to make it stick together), and also made some DIY turkey sausage (add spices to ground turkey and fry it up), and fresh spinach sauteed with garlic. My meal was the bomb diggity!

For dinner I went to my ex-husband's house, as is my holiday tradition. He's a pretty good cook, even if he sticks to a limited meat and potatoes repetoire. He made some damn good lasagne, which we had with cream soda and some kinda so-so garlic bread (I pride myself on making damn good garlic bread with rosemary and parmesan and loads of fresh garlic and butter). Then we watched Season 4 of Weeds and he gave me a 30 day bus pass for Christmas, which is seriously an amazing present!!! Also, I have a ton of leftover lasagne in the fridge. YUM!

Like Vally Val, I faced a non-Grandma Christmas this year. My Grandmother came down with pneumonia this week, so my aunt and I cooked our traditional Swedish dinner today. I don't know how my Grandmother has done it all these years. There were three of us working in the kitchen today (two restaurant pros), and we were still exhausted. And none of us are eighty years old.

I cooked my Grandmother's Swedish meatballs today, without the recipe, for a family of people who look forward to her meatballs all year. No pressure. Like any good cook, I drank a little. I also didn't measure anything. It took years to get the recipe out of my Grandmother, so I used to treat it like a sacrament. I'd measure everything carefully and they never turned out like hers. Well, how often do you see your Grandmother measure ingredients when she's making an old family recipe? I eyeballed everything today, and swore that anyone who complained about the cooking would get a carving fork in the eye. Fortunately, the meatballs were met with contented silence and chewing. My Grandmother even bragged to my Dad that I can make meatballs. I feel like I passed a secret adult test.

A few facts about Swedish meatballs:

* They should never have tomato in them. That's Italian.
* Some recipes call for just beef, but I like a 50/50 beef and pork combo.
* White sauce is the only acceptable gravy. Anything from a packet and you might as well just phone it in. They sell frozen meatballs at Ikea now.
* You must eat lingonberries with your Swedish meatballs. My younger cousins don't get this. They think it's weird to eat fruit and meat at the same time, but they eat Chinese food. Maybe it's just weird to have them separate on your plate. Several spoonfuls of lingonberries on the plate is ideal, so that you can drag the meatballs through them. A bit of twirling action with the fork is good, but you don't want to be accused of playing with your food. This is an especially useful way to avoid awkward eye contact and dodge unwanted personal questions.

pick up your beans and go

Due to her failing health Christmas will, for the first time ever, not be at Granny's :(

I called my aunt and uncle and asked them what I could bring (Granny and I had agreed on me supplying the salad but I make no assumptions and I am in charge of "green beans". I know they are expecting a bag of frozen beans. They will be getting fresh grean beans with onion and bacon. I know I will be asked what is in the green beans, I know it.

The New Middle American Diet

I live a pretty healthy, sheltered food life in the SF Bay Area. Discovering a "new food" usually means trying something from another culture like pupusasas (a tortilla stuffed with cheese from El Salvador) rather than a the latest exploding neon colored kids cereal. But I am mesmerized when I see the newest colorful inventions when I visit the big chain grocery stores, like the H.E.B. in the Huston suburb where I am now.
Every thing stops when I see the neon colored cakes. I can hear my nutrition professors sneer in the back of my mind, but my inner six year old wants to stare up close. A cake with a dinosaur bursting out of a volcano! A pink castle cake with princesses doll on each plastic tower! Cakes shaped like pirate ships! Oh my God! You want to play with them, not eat them! The frosting is so bright it looks like play dough. I am in an alternate universe, where image is everything, and the question of what it's made out of is unimportant. Even the pictures on the boxed cake mixes are more vivid than any cake I've made. Andy Worhol would be proud.
I can see how people who think this is food would be afraid to cook. This stuff is to the whole grain chocolate and cherry scones I enjoyed for my birthday what porn stars are to the average, attractive woman. Real food doesn't look like that, and you can get a real complex if you confuse image with reality. It's fun to pretend, just remember that it's not real.

Intimacy

1) I had a professor once who said, "Eating is the most intimate thing you can do with your clothes on." You're taking something into a bodily orifice and accepting it, trusting it. Supposedly it brings people together. Like sex.

2) Hate-fucking. Common occurrence. People that hate each other bump uglies.

3) If two people hate each other, and they eat a meal together, what happens? Is it the same as hate-fucking? Like, some physical satisfaction, but also something frustrating?

not my kinda pie

Someone brought this into work:

It was brought in half gone, it has remained untouched. This picture doesn't do it justice, its kind of greyish in color and looks like it contains styrofoam. It looks like its starting to disintegrate. I bet it will burst into flames if air hits it.

I, on the other hand, made this because I'm a bad ass: