Hopeless Housefrau

Housefrau’s Packing Tips: I Have None

2006-08-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

Moving day is a week from tomorrow. The nice thing about packing is that I don’t have to clean anything. The bad thing about packing is that I have to pack.

Some ruminations on the nature of owning things seem in order, but my heart’s not in it. Perhaps the unpacking process will produce an insightful musing on the complex relationship we have to our things, how owning something is also a way of being owned, how the domestic realm both shackles us to our couch cushions and at the same time offers the freedom of eating off frisbees.

But for now, packing is just packing. The only way I’ll ever get all this stuff in boxes is if I simply accept the inevitability of owning five different types of spoons and choose not to worry too much about whether it’s appropriate to label a box “kitchen stuff” if it also contains shoes.

Maybe next time I do this I’ll be organized. This time around, I’m just glad I saved the boxes for the marionettes.

Housefrau's Pretention Party: Poetry!

2006-08-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

After Bernadette Mayer

After the Price Chopper
Intervals of tomatoes
Pink the knife.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx “Don’t cut yourself!”
He cries. Fer chrissake.
Nobody sez that
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To the Price Chopper.

Hotelfrau

2006-08-06T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've been out of town for the last ten days, visiting Portland, Oregon (with five days of driving through other states of the union about which the less is said, the better [I'm talking to you, Wyoming]). I had thought I might blog from the hotel, but when it said "free wifi," it failed to include the phrase "that is so slow and unreliable that you may consider jumping out the window; oh, wait, we forgot to mention that the windows of the rooms don't open." In fact, the wifi at the hotel was so erratic that it made me concerned about the effectiveness of the free condoms they so thoughtfully provided with the toiletries.

At any rate, I'm glad to be back in my own poorly-kept house, surrouned by my own personal filth. It's nice to think that I can at least trace the origins of the stains around here.

The exciting news is that I'll soon be frauing a different house--we rented a place in Portland.

I'll keep you posted as the packing nightmare commences.

Housefrau’s Recipe Box: Some Sort of Sandwich!

2006-07-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

Time for recipe-swapping! After all my moaning about the concept of dinner, I went and cooked one after all, and it was tasty.

This recipe starts last night. The LP was having trouble sleeping, and I was none too drowsy myself, so I decided to list all the possible things that would be good on a sandwich. I got quite a long way into my Dagwoodian dream when I had a sudden inspiration for a simple yet delicious dish.

Housefrau’s Made-Up While Drifting Off to Sleep
Sandwich

Ingredients:
Whole wheat buns
Some chicken breasts
Some almond butter
1 apple
1 onion
Some ghee or olive oil

Directions:
First, broil some chicken breast. I’d tell you how to do that, but I am frightened of raw meat, so the LP handles that part. So, I dunno, look in a cookbook, probably.

While that happens, caramelize the onion. I’ll tell you how I did it, but you might want to get a second opinion, as, although caramelization did seem to happen, burning happened more, so maybe my method is flawed. At any rate: put about 3 Tbsp. ghee or olive oil in a pan and make it hot. I turned the number-dealie to 4, if that helps. Slice up the onion and put it in there. Then leave it there and stir sometimes. Try to turn off the heat before the mess is utterly charred—20 minutes or so, but probably less.

After all that’s done, slice the apple into thin-ish slices and toast the buns in that greatest of devices, the toaster oven. Spread a bunch of almond butter on the buns, slice the chicken, and layer chicken, apples, and caramelized onions on the buns.

Eat.

I was pretty sure this would turn out to be one of those things that I think is going to be some sort of wild taste adventure, and then it is, but less of a watching-Indiana-Jones experience and more of an actually-going-throug-the-awful-things-that-happen-in-an-Indiana-Jones-movie experience. But, lo and behold, they were gooooood. I imagine endless variations could be created.

Had I known they would be worth sharing, I’d have taken photos of the whole thing. Instead, all I have to show you is proof positive that these things were fucking tasty:

By the way, the plate is a Sherry Olsen, who is both a terrific ceramics artist and a very nice lady. Go. Buy. Now.

Aborted Dinner

2006-07-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I made dinner. The menu:

1. Rice soup (which is rice that for some reason didn’t absorb, like, any of the water it was cooked in, even though the rice itself was plenty soft and cooked)

2. Suspicious salmon (which is salmon I was supposed to broil, but that I was scared of because it had been in the fridge for three days and smelled like fish, which, okay, I know that it is fish, but it smelled really, well, fishy)

The LP came home and I gave him a choice: eat this dinner I had made (and yes, I was going to actually cook the suspicious salmon; I wasn’t suggesting we eat it raw) or go get something a bit more fully-formed.

Tough choice.

This has been happening a lot these days: I begin a meal in good faith, but somehow I can’t seem to finish it. Not that I destroy it (though that is a regular feature of five o’clock at my house), but somewhere along the line I just sort of lose my belief that this endeavor I’ve undertaken has any sort of merit or authentic reality. I just can’t seem to see these substances in pots ever becoming what I might recognize as a meal.

Cleaning is another problem. I might get halfway across the living room with my dustcloth when I suddenly cease to believe that I’m actually doing anything. The act of dusting becomes like playing a video game—several hours spent saving the princess, and what have you got to put on your resume?

My life at times begins to seem a series of gestures made to mark time for a non-existent orchestra.

And at the end of the day, I’ve lost the tune that, properly hummed, might have resulted in dinner.

“Dinner.” It’s a funny concept. I am often drawn to the idea of “eating close to the earth,” as they say—of walking into my (non-existent) garden, yanking out a carrot, and stuffing it in my mouth. Eating food, not a meal. The realm of dinner has very little to do with food. Dinner, my darlings, is theater in which one eats the props.

I’m thinking I'd like to do dinner differently. Serve plates of beautifully-arranged plastic foods, take to rubber steaks with fork and knife, take sips of synthetic wine between breaths of describing my day.

Then chug a tasteless protein shake from a paper cup and toss everything back in the drawer.

Ritual accomplished, nutrients consumed, and I can turn my mind to the next philosophical housefrau paradox:

When I remove the wrinkles from this blouse, where do they go?

Bunnies

2006-07-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

I just added a NabMe button (on the right, below links) in case any of you want to make my bunny sing.

Note: I tend to drop everything I'm doing and rush instantly to the bunny when it makes a sound, so the more messages I get, the more likely I am to drop an entire carton of eggs into a hot, open oven. And you know what that equals?

Material for blogging and possible eviction.

Woo!

Housefrau Pretention Party: Poetry!

2006-07-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Life of Jorge Chavez

Are you going to write my life story
says Jorge Chavez.
He’s putting my raisins in a sack.
Is it an interesting story?
I’m buying two tubes of hair gel.
One will make my hair curly,
the other will make it straight.

Are you going to put it on the internet?
Jorge is holding my wallet, which I gave him
because my Sooper! card is attached to it
by a ring.
It entitles me to Sooper! savings.
He’s wearing a name tag but he tells me his name

anyway; he’s told me his name
before, as well as his address.
Jorge tells Manuel,

She’s going to write my life story.
We live in the same town but on opposite sides.
Manuel is putting my bread in the same sack as my lightbulbs.
Huh
he says.
I spent a full five minutes contemplating
the difference between rice milk and soy milk.
I’m not really a Sooper! shopper.

She’s a writer
says Jorge Chavez.
Now I see the blue carton go in the sack,
I regret it.

The Life of Jorge Chavez
says Jorge.
He looks me in the face and he’s
grinning.
My ice cream is melting.

It Is Made of Poop

2006-07-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

This company makes paper out of elephant dung. Also paper out of other things, all of which are at least as sustainable as excrement.

Oh boy! You can make things out of poo! Guess what our next Craft Corner's gonna be?!

Hey, have you heard about this amazing new product?!

2006-07-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

Baking soda. WOW.

My pan is clean! What is this astonishing substance? Wikipedia informs us that it is sodium bicarbonate, and that it has over 100 uses. It then goes on to list those uses, which grows rather tiresome, but leaves us with fascinating information such as:

Baking soda can be used to make crack! Boy, making crack from everyday household products seems like a great way to pick up some spare mad money. Unfortunately, as Wikipedia also tells us, one also needs cocaine to make crack, and I don’t have any of that. Sigh. Guess I’d better stick to making meth out of children’s cough syrup.

One of the uses in Wikipedia’s list simply reads, “facial scrub.” Huh. That seems like a terrible idea.

We also learn that “a small amount (1tsp) can be added to a beef stew to make tough meat tenderize faster. (however, this is no substitute for just stewing the meat for more time)” [sic all over the place on that quote.]

That’s right, y’all. Don’t you try to pull the wool over my eyes. If you don’t have what it takes to just stew that meat until it is done gone and stewed, you may as well give it up. A good housefrau avoids superficial shortcuts.

Well, this particular disaster has had a happy ending. Baking soda fixed my pan (along with, like, two hours of scrubbing), dinner was had, all is well.

Now I’m off to ponder today’s housefrau problem: Dinner should be ready in half an hour, but I haven’t started it because I’m not hungry, having eaten lunch twenty minutes ago. And lunch was a jar of hot fudge.

Maybe I’ll luck out and discover that the LP also ate a jar of fudge at quarter to five, and will be delighted that I didn’t grill the salmon.

That seems plausible.

Housefrau Basics: Boiling Water

2006-07-12T17:45:00.000-07:00

Today’s kitchen mishap illustrates the importance of knowing your basics when attempting to frau the house. For instance, one should have a working knowledge of fundamental physics. Things like, “two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time” and “gravity makes things crash into the floor if you don’t pay attention” and “wandering off while something is on the stove is likely to incur the wrath of the housefrau gods.”

Let’s talk about the latter. I haven’t cooked anything in about two weeks, and lord knows I haven’t picked up a dustcloth. In fact, I believe potato-chip-crumbs were starting to rival dust for the title of Substance Covering Most of the Surfaces in My House. But because I had plans for an outside individual to enter my home this afternoon, my latent sense of shame outpaced my innate laziness, and I got off my ass. Went to the grocery (I’ll spare you the details), cleaned up the house.

(A digression: I love the phrase “clean up.” It implies a bit more than tidying, but doesn’t actually obligate one to clean anything. So shoving all the debris into a drawer and wiping down the counters can do the job, and you get to cross “clean up” off the list without having had to do anything resembling a respectable amount of work.)

So this evening I was all set to start dinner, just like a good housefrau should. Thought maybe I would get going on a pot of rice, since it is insanely easy to make and, because it takes forever to cook, I can claim to be busy cooking while I am actually staring at sharpeworld.

Getting all fancy, I decided to make the rice not with water but with vegetable stock! Poured in the two cups and turned on the burner. Then I zipped downstairs to check the laundry. While I was there, I noticed that there were several items in the pantry that I had purchased duplicates of at the grocery store, because I forgot we had a pantry. Better organize that pantry, and fast! Then I realized that we had been wiping our mouths all week first with dishtowels, then with our sleeves, because I hadn’t gotten around to ironing the pile of napkins on the ironing board (also hadn’t gotten around to washing all the dirty dishtowels). Well, feeling all super-housefrau-ey, no more slacking for me! Ironed those suckers, got the towels into the wash, read a little bit (a bad idea to keep books in the laundry room, but the damn things are running me out of house and home; the books just seem to keep reproducing). Finally trekked up the stairs with a pile of freshly-ironed napkins and a renewed sense of domestic pride.

Boy, something sure smelled good up there! I guessed it must be about time to pour the rice into the boiling broth.

Sadly, no. I no longer had any broth. What I had was this:

My lovely, fancy, probably-really-expensive Le Cruset pan coated in what seemed to be irrevocable burnt. (Let’s all just agree to use burnt as a noun, shall we?) NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

I called my mommy. I was frightened I had killed the pan. She reassured me that the pan would survive and told me marvelous secrets about baking soda. Her comment on the ordeal: “If you can hurt a pan like that, it’s not worthy of you.”

IMed the LP. His remark: “Wow, you’re just like a sim.” Then he offered to bring dinner home with him from work, and I declared him official Hero of the Blog!

My mom called back two minutes later—“Hey, at least you have a great blog topic!”

And she’s right. Let my experience be an important lesson for aspiring housefraus everywhere: when you feel yourself getting overconfident and believing that you can both boil something and iron something in the same day, slow down and remind yourself of the cardinal rule of housefrauing:

DO AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.

Shameless

2006-07-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

My friend Rich made a lovely little magazine and put two of my poems in it! You should go here and read more about it. One of the poems is about--you guessed it--groceries!

Also in this issue are several fantastic other poets, who you should read pronto before they become big super-star poets, so that you can tell everyone at parties that you were way into them before they were cool.

Assuming you hang out at parties where everyone talks about the latest super-star poets they are so way into.

Shout Outs

2006-07-10T15:30:00.000-07:00

The other day I had a phone conversation with my mother that went something like this:

Me: “So what are you up to today?”
Mom: “Oh, I’m so excited!”
Me: “What’s going on?”
Mom: “I just found out that I have a google page rank of four!”
Me: “Please step away from the telephone and give me back my real mother.”

Not only does my mom know what a google page rank even is, but she is kicking my ass in the rankings.

On the plus side, this nice lady linked to me! Hello, nice lady!

I would also like to note that two different people have visited my blog after googling “pooses.”

Pooses.

I suspect that word might refer to a fetishistic sex act that I’m not aware of, because why else would someone google it?

At any rate, hello, people searching for pooses!

Also, for the handful of people who have landed here after searching “how to mince a shallot,” I’m sorry. Very, very sorry. I hope your dinners turned out okay.

In other news, did you know that obsessively reading your website’s stats is much easier than producing content?

Housefrau’s Pretension Party: Poetry!

2006-07-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

You knew it had to happen eventually.

It’s the dirty little secret of poetry that, while the dead white men were busy defining what would be the bane of ninth-grade English students of future ages, their wives and maids were emptying their wastebaskets of the verses unfit for the historical record (not to mention scrubbing their under-breeches free of the stains unfit for the gossip columns). And occasionally, after unlacing themselves from their corsets and emptying their chamber-pots into the street, those nameless ladies would find just enough energy to lay down a line or two of their own before dropping off to sleep. Nothing that anyone would ever read, of course; that was for the boys.

Technological advances have given housefraus a bit more time in the day. And those ladies of a quixotic bent have found that the advent of the spin cycle opens up myriad poetic possibilities.

Now, certainly, the world’s poetics is hardly bereft of significant female poets; and I certainly don’t mean to imply that verses penned by ladies who don’t work outside the home are somehow inferior. Quite the contrary on all counts.

I suppose what I mean to imply is that, because I put pen to paper long before I put pledge to table, it has taken me some time to realize that the domestic realm is rich in the material of the arts. And I suppose I also mean to imply that sometimes I don’t have any ideas for writing a post, but I happen to have an appropriately-themed poem at the ready for your blog-reading pleasure.

In fact, let me state it all quite plainly: I intend to inflict my poetry on you. Just thank your lucky stars that I’m not inflicting my chili on you.

Dear Bernice,

I’m sorry
I purchased so much
produce
I know it
is a sacking nightmare

but understand my icebox
is a tomb of rotting
fruit I must replace
before it spreads to

these tomatoes at the sack bottom
I wish you hadn’t
done that

There, a poem. Next time I won't make such a fuss about it. Now go read some Alice Notley and see what truly great poets are doing with their dirty laundry.

Coffee and Cookies Can Kiss My Can

2006-07-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

I got my computer back! It actually arrived on Thursday, but I didn’t have time to blog until now, as I spent the last two days just sort of staring at Google’s homepage and drooling slightly.

Hoo, boy, I missed the internets. Maybe I don’t know anything about heroin addiction, but I am far more prepared to sympathize with addicts now that I know what it’s like to go for a week without mainlining electrons.

As luck would have it (for you, dear readers), today has been bookended with housefrau mishaps. This morning the LP and I went out to breakfast. Somewhere near the end of the meal, a wee little incident occurred. I was just about to take a sip of my coffee, had the cup up to my lips and was in the very process of tipping the beverage into my mouth, when out of nowhere, a fly landed on the rim of my cup! Now, certainly, with the clarity of hindsight and all, I can see how I should have reacted: in any way other than how I actually did react. Because what I did was scream and jerk away from the terrifying bug, splattering my entire full cup of hot coffee all over myself, the table, and my darling LP sitting opposite.

Now let’s re-enact that little blunder from my LP’s perspective. He’s sitting there talking quite eloquently about the futility of Goddard’s anti-bourgeoisie posturing compared with Buñuel’s sublime absurdity, when I quite suddenly scream and throw a cup of coffee at him.

I think he was a little pissed.

I stuck to less risky activities for the rest of the day, but late this evening it came that I found myself in the kitchen. And there I discovered that I possess an a rare culinary ability that I doubt even Julia Child could rival: I can fuck up food that someone else is making.

Around 2:00 a.m. last night, I realized that I had the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies in the house. Because such a confluence of ingredients comes around about as often as a non-pedophillic priest, I decided that I HAD TO BAKE COOKIES THAT VERY MOMENT. But my wise LP assured me that the time for baking cookies was not the middle of the night when he was trying to sleep for chrissake, and promised that he would bake the cookies for me in the morning.

Well, obviously, I didn’t have cookies for breakfast; instead I threw coffee. So the ever-patient LP decided this evening to make good on his promise.

It should be noted at this point that I was basing my conviction about having all the ingredients on a somewhat hazy memory of what might actually be in chocolate chip cookies. The fact was, all I knew was that we had eggs. I also knew that I still had chocolate left over from when I made those pots de crème. So LP pulled out a recipe and started baking away while I hacked at the much-smaller-than-I-remembered block of chocolate in an effort to make it into the requisite chips.

We didn’t have any brown sugar. Really, LP could have given up then and there, or told me that if I wanted cookies so badly, I could go to the store and actually buy all the ingredients. But, dear man, he started googling (gawd, how have I lived for the past week?!) and discovered that brown sugar is actually just plain white sugar with some molasses in it.

HOLY FUCK, I HAD SOME MOLASSES.

Onward! It occurred to me that I might want to tell LP that the molasses in the cabinet was purchased about six years ago (a gingerbread endeavor, which, well, let’s just say that I wound up having to go out and buy Christmas gifts after all that year), and I had only kept it around because the bottle had an adorable drawing of a bunny, and I had no idea if it was good. But I didn’t mention it. How could molasses go bad? It’s molasses.

Well, when the LP opened the bottle, it gave off an immense whoosh and proceeded to announce to the entire kitchen via olfactory messengers that six-year-old molasses tends to smell just like feces of the same age.

We checked the magical computing box again. Molasses is good for a year, tops, in the fridge. Whoops.

Well, too late. The batter had entered the early periods of gestation, and to abort at that point would have been to call down the wrath of Jerry Falwell, probably, since I assume he considers half-baked goods to be soul-endowed cookies in the eyes of completely fucking insane christians everywhere. So the cookies went in the oven sans-molasses, and also short quite a bit of chocolate and vanilla extract and possibly some other things that the LP was kind enough not to tell me we didn’t actually have.

Then I decided to make coffee! Because by gum, I was gonna get back up on that drinking-beverages-from-grown-up-cups horse.

Apparently, a compromised drinking-coffee skill translates into a compromised making-coffee skill. I brewed a fresh, somehow not-very-hot pot of brownish water with crunchy coffee grinds floating in it. I’d already slopped some irish cream liquor into the cups (in the hopes that being drunk would make the whole experience somehow jolly). So we sat in the kitchen eating exceedingly weird cookies and drinking irish cream slightly watered down and full of coffee grounds.

The cookies, actually, were pretty tasty, no thanks to me. And the more I drink of this mostly-just-alcohol concoction I call coffee, the more I think that maybe, just maybe, I should throw caution to the wind and hop right back up on the housefrau horse. It’s still pretty early, and I still have ten eggs in the fridge. And I think some sugar. And possibly even a bit of butter.

Say, isn’t that what goes in crème brulée?

Promises, Promises

2006-06-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

So guess what I don't have right now? A computer!

I'm borrowing the LP's at the moment, but it's not conducive to the constant exciting updating I so rashly promised. So I'll be sporadic once again until I get my computer back from the it-takes-two-weeks-to-fix-it people. And probably after that as well.

You'd think that being unplugged would give me ample opportunity to frau the house. It seems logical that not sitting in front of the computer for hours on end would free up some time to, say, cook or clean or mend my falling hems.

You'd think, wouldn't you? Well, you know what happens when you assume, don't you? You're an asshole.

Or something.

Housefrau’s Craft Corner: Let’s Ruin a Lampshade!

2006-06-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

Let’s face facts, people: I am not what one would call “competent.” Sure, I’d like to make gorgeous crafty/arty type objects with which to dazzle my friends and family. I’d love to be handy with a knitting needle like this lady or be brilliant with household waste like this lady or even just moderately inventive like these folks.

But the fact is, I’m a mess in the crafty department. Mostly I make stuff to give my mom and dad as presents, since they seem to interpret my lack of skill as “precious.” I did recently make a magnet out of a Barbie leg and a plastic horse, but the glue didn’t hold. Of course, the glue I got all over the kitchen table while making the magnet held just fine, and continues to do so.

Today, however, I was going to take a bold step into the artistic world and paint something for display in my own home. All and sundry who visit me can now be privy to my masterworks!

My dad found a gorgeous lamp in an abandoned building and gave it to me. It was in perfect shape except for one tiny thing: some kid had drawn and written his name all over one side of the shade (wherever you are, Kris, I am going to hunt you down and write my name all over one side of you, you little bugger [guess which side]).

My plan was to somehow cover up most of the damage without utterly destroying the lampshade. I considered a variety of tactics, but finally settled on stencils. How hard can it be to tape something down and slather paint all over it?

Oh, damn you, rhetorical questions.

I found some peel-and-stick stencils at the craft store, along with little tubs of what purported to be “stencil paint.” Once home, I set to work peeling and sticking, as well as investigating the substance in the tubs.

The paint wasn’t so much paint as completely solid spheres of color. I didn’t brush or dab it on so much as mash the sponge-brush-thing against the fabric as hard as I could, leaving little blotches of what looked like dried alien blood.

It wasn’t looking so good. I decided to let it “settle” and go read about video games for a while. You go too now; it will be fun, like you were right there with me.

Back from reading? Now go have some cake and maybe walk around the house aimlessly for a while, just to get the full crafting experience effect. Whoops, look out for that upturned laundry basket. Hm, should you maybe actually do some laundry? Nah. You’re busy waiting for paint to dry.

After a while I spread a few more coats of paint-the-consistency-of-cold-butter on the lampshade and, since my efforts seemed to have no effect whatsoever, decided the project was completed! (It is possible that the success of my projects is somewhat affected by the fact that I decide they are finished when I get bored, and they are usually very wet and sticky at that point.)

I peeled off the stencils and, well, it didn’t look all that bad.

You can still se the writing a bit in some places, but luckily those spots correspond to the places where I got paint all over the place, so it goes together.

I popped the shade onto the lamp and discovered that when the lamp is actually in operation, the light shows through the splotchy paint in a decidedly unflattering way.

Whoops. I suppose it’s better to have a lampshade with bad-adult-craft-work than with evil-child-pen-work.

Oh, boy! A completed craft project! As an added bonus, I “stenciled” my kitchen counters and walls by not washing my hands very well after painting, then touching things before noticing the paint all over my fingertips. Two projects for the price of one!

I’d say don’t try this at home, but honestly, you’re likely to have much better results than I, so go ahead.

In the Garden: The Black Thumb Bandit Strikes

2006-06-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the hardware store carries plants? Seem like strange bedfellows, drywall and daisies, but that’s the marketplace for you.

So when I went to the hardware store to get a belt for my vacuuming machine, I also picked up a couple of plants. I was feeling cocky, because my sprouts, in addition to actually sprouting, had developed leaves and seemed to be not dead.

I got a basil plant and a purple flower thing labeled “verbena.” I also bought a bag of dirt, which seems kind of stupid to pay for, but I guess ten-dollar dirt must be better than the free dirt in my front yard.

I wonder where they get bags of dirt. Is there a dirt farm someplace? How do you replant the dirt after you harvest it? Clearly there must be some agricultural science at work, because I have a strong suspicion that if I stuffed some random dirt in a bag and tried to sell it, I’d be lucky to get an arcade token.

Anyway, the plants didn’t come with instructions, so I used Housefrau Logic: put dirt in pots, stick plants in dirt, water. I did this on the kitchen table.

Housefrau Hint: Don’t pot plants on the kitchen table, unless you are doing an experiment to see what random things might sprout in the dirt that continues to be all over the floor for like a month no matter how much you sweep.

So I stuck the plants in the sun and “nurtured” them. Gave them water sometimes, admired them, kind of turned them around now and then in case that somehow helps them grow.

Could someone tell me when my capacity for nurturing packed up, bought a Europass, and started a backpacking trip from which it never returned? Was it when I broke up with that guy because his shoes had velcro? Was it when I managed to kill a stem of artificial roses? Was it when I had my uterus replaced with an extremely detailed model train set? Because jeezus do I ever kill stuff.

The verbena is all yellow and pouty, and the basil—well, I don’t know what’s happening there. The leaves are droopy and holey, one of the stems has gone completely dead, and somehow the thing has flowers on the top.

Now, generally I think of flowers as signs of successful gardening, but I was unaware that basil was a flower. I thought it was leaves that are good for eating. Just goes to show something or another, but I’m not sure what.

The good news is that the sprouts and the original Plant are doing splendidly, mostly because I have done absolutely nothing to them. Sometimes I get halfway through a glass of water and decide to pour the remains on them.

Plant does seem to have a worrisome dead branch that my mother has suggested trimming off, but nothing doing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from observing the wonderful mystery of the plant world, it’s that if I love something, I should leave it the hell alone.

Which must mean that my friendships with people I never bother to call or write to are doing splendidly!

Housefrau Hints: Picking Out Produce

2006-06-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

I went to the grocery store today! Whoopee!

Now, I realize that, from your point of view, I just did that two posts ago. But on my end, I haven’t done it in nearly a month, so it’s worth noting.

It seems that between the last time I went to the store and now, summertime has occurred, because guess what was way on sale?

Produce! So I bought pretty much nothing but veggies and fruit.

(Side note: I also bought a jar labeled “Vanilla Bean.” It cost ten dollars. Guess how many vanilla beans were in the jar?

HA! TRICK QUESTION, MOTHERFUCKERS! If you paid attention to the lack of pluralization earlier, you’ll see that the answer is clearly one. One ten-dollar vanilla bean. Whatever I cook with it had better taste like a swinging vanilla orgy exploding on my tongue and then getting kind of out of control and maybe some feelings getting hurt, and then the neighbors calling the cops because of the noise and everyone putting on their clothes and the couples getting in their cars and driving home in uncomfortable silence.)

So I thought it was time to share with you, dear readers:

The Hopeless Housefrau’s Tips and Tricks for Picking Out Produce

Even the most seasoned housefrau can feel flummoxed in the produce aisle. All those mounds of melons, piles of peppers, cornucopias of cucumbers! How’s a girl to bring home the freshest, plumpest produce to feed her family? Fret no more, shoppers! Follow these simple tips and you’ll pick out the best specimen every time.

Tip #1: Selecting the best piece of fruit from the pile is simpler than you think. First, pick up a piece of the fruit. Frown a little. Now, PUT IT DOWN! It doesn’t matter what it looks like—the sensible shopper lets everyone know she’s choosy. Now pick up another piece. Kind of heft it in your hand while thinking about the scene in Dirty Dancing where Jerry Orbach is being nice to the knocked-up dancer. That’s the piece to put in your bag.

Tip #2: Don’t be afraid to be adventurous! Even the most meager produce section has a vast array of exotic fruits and vegetables, and with today’s global marketplace, abysmal treatment of migrant workers, and vast stores of chemical preservatives, you can sample a veritable global feast right there in your supermarket any time of year! Consider trying such mysterious items as broccoli, oranges, or some sort of cheese. I think you’ll be surprised at how exciting they can be!

Tip #3: It’s an age-old debate—is it acceptable to graze among the grapes? The fact is, it is absolutely rude to nibble on the produce as you shop. If you are just too tempted to pop a cherry into your mouth, visit the cookie aisle before you get near the fruit. Open up a bag of Oreos and snack on those as you select your veggies to stop the temptation. (Note: be sure to finish the cookies before you reach the check-stand.)

Tip #4: If you can’t find what you’re looking for, chances are, it doesn’t exist. It’s probably something a cookbook author made up as a trick. DO NOT accost the man unloading bananas and ask him if they carry it. Remember, his life is horrible and he doesn’t need you making it worse by taunting him with tall tales of “arugula.”

Tip #5: As Cosmo continually reminds us, the produce aisle is a great place to for sexy young singles to “hook up,” “make a connection,” and “julienne some potatoes.” So if you’re looking for that special someone, let your melons do the talking. When you spy a likely candidate mulling over the mulberries, push your cart up to his, hold up a cucumber, and murmur, “you must be at least this long to board this ride.” In no time, you’ll be dicing up peppers for two! And then doing the dishes for two! And crying alone at midnight into your Ben & Jerry’s for two!

So there you have it, darlings—a sure-fire way to navigate the produce aisle with ease. Happy shopping!

The Once and Future Blog of Me

2006-06-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

Hi. You might remember me as the person who used to update this blog occasionally. You also might remember me as The Noxzema Girl from the early-90s commercials, but if you do, you’re wrong.

I’ve been sans-blogosphere for a few weeks, and I just bet you’re dying to hear my excuses:

1) I’ve been in production on my magazine. “Oh, well, of course,” you’re thinking. “A woman with no job and no particular commitments naturally needs four full weeks to produce her quarterly magazine. I just bet it makes lots of money and that this time around she got it to the printer on time!” No and no. But still. On June 15th it will be released and you should buy it, smart-aleck.

2) My vacuuming machine broke. Well, it didn’t actually break. It began to be smelly and refused to perform its duties properly. I thought I should throw it away, but my dear friend Kelly was kind enough to perform a long-distance telephonic diagnosis on the loathsome beast, and concluded: it needed a new belt. It took me three weeks to purchase and install the new belt, during which time, obviously, it was pointless to cook or clean or wipe maple syrup off the counter, because what is the use of a home-cooked meal and a not-covered-in-dirty-socks coffee table if the floor is dirty? Right. So I did nothing around the house, giving me nothing to blog about.

3) I got a Nabaztag for my birthday. Confused as to how the acquisition of a wireless electronic bunny could possibly prevent an otherwise healthy woman from blogging, cooking, showering, or leaving the house whatsoever? Well, well, well, aren’t you a fancy-pants. Go buy one and just see if you don’t spend a full week laying on the couch staring at it, and if you don’t sob and claw at your face when the server goes down and your bunny can’t connect to the internet for an entire day. Go ahead. I dare you.

So, that’s that. I have done nothing worth blogging about for a month; hence, no blogs. But I got really awesome cookware for my birthday and an APRON, if you can believe it, so I am back in the housefrau saddle. Expect regular reports from the land of whoops-I-caught-the-oven-mit-on-fire-but-somehow-the-chicken-is-still-raw from now on. Unless, of course, something else breaks, or they come out with another electronic device shaped like something cute.

Uh-oh.

Housefrau Fieldtrip: The Grocery Store!

2006-05-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

Hateful, hateful places.

For a good long while, the LP had taken over grocery-shopping duties. I was prone to grocery-store mishaps: buying twenty pounds of potatoes, coming home with a cartful of hair products and no food, abandoning the half-filled cart in the middle of the store and crying as I drove home.

But now that I’m frauing the house, I figure it’s back on my list of duties.

Today was my third grocery-store outing since I started this whole not-being-a-productive-member-of-society thing. The first two went surprisingly well. I bought actual food, I managed not to yell at anyone, and I even remembered by Sooper! card. (When did all grocery stores start requiring a membership card to get ten cents off a head of lettuce? What are they doing with that information? There’s a sinister plot afoot, I tells ya.) In fact, the only problem I ran into was getting to the register and finding that my total bill for a week’s worth of groceries for two people was several times more than the monthly electric bill. I tend not to look at prices in the grocery store—they’re groceries, for chrissake; how much could they possibly cost? A fucking lot, apparently.

Today’s fieldtrip to the ingredient stores started at Vitamin Cottage—like Whole Foods except way smaller, way cheaper, and way crappier. It was fairly successful, although the people there are nutballs. One stocker yelled “Hi!” to me after I had passed him and was halfway down the aisle. Another worker was actually wearing a tie-dye t-shirt; didn’t anyone teach him not to embody stereotypes? And the other shoppers were exceedingly weird. Parking their carts in the middle of the aisles and then wandering off—not down the aisle, mind you, but to entirely different parts of the store. One woman followed behind me most of the time I was there. Each aisle I stopped in, poof, there she’d be, stopping her cart behind me and staring (really, really, staring) and the shelves. She never put anything in her cart.

Anyway, I got my cart to the check out, shamefacedly requested plastic bags instead of having canvas ones with me, and proceeded to dig through my purse for my car keys. Not there. More digging, more nothing. Uh-oh.

I got my groceries out to the car, and there I found my keys: dangling from the ignition. Lucky for me, I had also left all my windows down! The fact that no one hopped in and drove off while I was in the store for an hour is a testament either to the quality of my neighborhood or the crappiness of my car.

At any rate, it was now time to go to the regular grocery store to get all the things the health food store was either out of or doesn’t carry. Like apples.

Would you like to know what’s wrong with everything in the entire world, especially grocery stores in white-trash suburbs in the middle of the afternoon? Old people. And children. And old people who have children with them.

At least no one spoke to me or looked at me or followed me around the aisles, and after an agonizing search for oat groats and being laughed at by the produce guys for not knowing the difference between lime juice and key lime juice, I got out of there.

So that was my big housefrau day. I bought groceries. If you include the time I spent making a list, preparing my hair and face for public consumption, shopping, and putting things away, I think it took me right at about four hours. In fact, I got home just in time to start dinner.

I have no idea what to cook. Maybe we’ll order out tonight.

There is Currently a Spider

2006-05-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the vicinity of my desk.

I saw it crawling on the curtain and screamed at it. That made it fall down among my books. So I took a shoe and poked at the books until it ran out. Then I screamed at it again and it ran under the stapler. I thought that was weird, to run underneath a stapler. What a strange thing to even be able to run underneath. Anyway, you can probably guess the next sequence of events: poke with shoe, scream, run away. Repeat until spider goes behind desk and stays there.

I am not what you would call a tough broad. A partial list of the things I am afraid of might contain: bugs, the dark, strangers, mold, elevators, airplanes, being put in a loony bin, food poisoning, water, heights, small places, too-large places, being hot, throwing up, burglars, the idea that all the people I love will suddenly become different people who are strange to me, zombies, needles, dogs.

I think there is a common misconception that housefraus, ladies who bustle around the home doing ladyish things, are pansies. Faint-hearted. Wimps. Quite the contrary. Why, a good housefrau must possess a steely resolve and a stomach of iron. Must confront unidentifiable tupperware contents without a quiver. Must haul heavy laundry baskets up and down the stairs with nary a complaint. Must face down intruding spiders with a big black shoe and a soldier’s bloodlust.

A good housefrau doesn’t solve her housekeeping problems by screaming at them, then writing about it. A good housefrau straightens her apron and confronts whatever hideous thing it is until the blight is rubbed out and life once again gleams clean and odor-free.

I don’t have an apron, and my bloodlust is sadly dampened by my innate squeamishness. I’d like to be the sort of lady who, when the zombies start marching, calmly whacks their heads off with a machete, then goes about serving a four-course meal to her guests; while the world ends around her, she heroically saves at least her own dinner party.

But I’m not. When the zombies rise, you’ll find me at the mall, playing house in a department store. And when Tom Savini comes, boy, won’t I be a picture!

Jesus fucking christ I hope that spider doesn’t come back out.

Wet Paint

2006-05-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

My landlord painted my front door without telling me.

Again.

So this is the second time I have come into my house through the back door (where the carport is), opened the front door to get the mail, and stuck my hand on a very wet, sticky, freshly-badly-painted door.

And then I see a handy sign taped to the front step saying “Wet paint.”

This came after a long afternoon of minor but for some reason extremely irritating little mishaps: my car gave me trouble starting, the filling station didn’t have cold soda, my hands inexplicably smell like rubber and no amount of washing seems to help.

Is that a symptom of something? Rubber-smelling hands? It’s probably an early indicator of rubella or something.

The thing is, it’s frustrating to housefrau in a house that isn’t really mine. I can’t do anything about the ugly walls, the terrible window coverings, the fucking horrible neighbors. And all the myriad little broken things that the landlord is uninterested in fixing, well, I guess I could fix myself, but why should I?

It’s startling to discover, when I’ve gotten the bright idea to clean underneath the fridge, grime that predates my living here by decades. Those bobby pins, crayons, and BB gun pellets certainly aren’t mine. I’m just adding my dirt to the layers already set down by other tenants. I almost don’t want to clean too deeply—I’d rather be swimming in my own filth than in someone else’s.

And yet, much as I crave my own little piece of land with my very own plumbing problems to call home, it’s much easier to rent. It’s nice to feel that the crappiness of my home is someone else’s responsibility. It helps to think that my failed recipes are the fault of an oven that someone else picked out. It’s reassuring to know that I can pack up and leave with no strings attached, and I tell myself that, I'm not stuck in this life, I can leave, I can leave, I can leave, and that makes it better when I keep waking up in the same pokey little house, same pokey little life.

Still, I think it’s just common courtesy to give someone a bit of warning before slathering paint all over their front door. What if I had been planning to throw a come-over-and-touch-my-front-door party tonight?

“Wet paint,” indeed. I just hope the landlord doesn’t spoil the hey-check-out-my-broken-bathroom-faucet shindig I’m throwing next week.

It's a bird, it's a plant, it's...Grow-a-note!

2006-05-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

"Oh, bother. I need to send a greeting to a friend or family member. But I hate to send yet another bit of paper to be tossed into the rubbish. What's an environmentally-conscious housefrau to do?"

How about Shannon Lowry's Round Robin Press notecards. Each card's 100% recycled paper is embedded with wildflower seeds, so the recipient of your kindness can pop your greeting into the ground and get some blossoms.

And if they do throw it in the trash, at least the landfill will have some flowers sprouting amongst the diapers and spent print cartridges.

I Love Mooses to Pooses

2006-05-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

My friend Andrew sent me a recipe. Since it only called for two ingredients and I happened to have both, I gave it a try. Here’s the recipe he sent, verbatim:

Greek Chocolate Mousse (Moussaki!?)

This is more verbose than the actual making—because I am verbose, I guess:
***
Take equal amounts of Greek yogurt and white chocolate (to fill a trifle dish use about a pound of each). Melt the choc, then stir in the yog. Before it sets, you can add a zoom of extra flavour: e.g., one teaspoon of orange blossom water, but think of rosewater, and it's very good with the juice of a lime + lime zest. Or scoop out the flesh of a passion fruit and stir in.
Let set (fridge, probably an hour is enough).
Before serving, add a layer of fruit on top to offset the richness-richness.
Raspberries are good. Peaches would be good, I bet, or apricots, or gooseberries.

Another variation: do the same with dark chocolate and double/heavy cream (I always translate types of cream wrongly—but I think you know what I mean). A bit of orange zest and a spoon of orange juice work well there.

Another variation (the greedy one): bake a thinnish layer of chocolate brownie, and let it set/cool. Then add a layer of the white choc, as above, then let that set/cool. Then add a layer of the dark choc, then let that set/cool. Of course this would be in a tin pan, but it can work well in one of those cake tins with springs, if carefully lined etc.

It also works to pour mix directly right into ramekins rather than a trifle dish.

I figure this is easier than making mousse, anyway! There are lots of ways to experiment.

Isn’t he adorable?

I tried the first variation, but with milk chocolate instead of white. And I didn’t add any flavors, as I didn’t have any. And I didn’t use a trifle dish because I don’t know what that is.

It turned out tasty.

Andrew, is this what it’s supposed to look like?

I served it with sliced bananas, as that was all the fruit we had in the house. And I made far too much for two people—Andrew’s right, it’s insanely rich. But it was a successful cooking excursion all around!

If you can’t find Greek yogurt at the supermarket, try the health food store. It’s good stuff—tangier and less sugary than regular yogurt, with a denser, grittier texture. I have been eating it with blackberries mixed in.

Andrew is from London. They have all kinds of food there that I’ve never heard of. He is the one who gave me the recipe for beet root spaghetti, which I have yet to attempt. I did make spaghetti last night, but I used an unorthodox cooking method. Here’s my recipe for spaghetti:

Ingredients
Telephone
Credit card

Method
Call local Italian place and order spaghetti delivered. Also some bread, maybe.
Place food into dishes and serve in front of television while watching the entire second season of The Office (British version) in one night.

Yep, I run a tight ship. Gourmet meals served in a well-kept house.

There are socks all over the place.

And Then a Miracle Occurred

2006-05-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been one of those weeks. You know, the ones where you sleep until noon, stay in your jammies, and don’t shower.

I am a smelly person.

One pitfall of housefrauing is that no one validates my existence. There’s no paycheck that proves I count in the world, no cubicle that people expect me to occupy as if it matters in the least. Everything I do with my time, I do because I want to, because it matters to me.

And that, my friends, is terrifying.

Maybe I’m starting to understand why those horrifying people agree to have their pathetic lives exposed to the world on shows like “Nanny 911” and “Wifeswap.” It’s all pretty silly, what we do with our days, slogging along to our bellies’ urges, draping decorations over the walls in which we enclose our very very small selves. It’s a big world full of tigers, and we are slow and tasty monkeys. Even those whose deeds sweep the world must at some point fold their underpants into a drawer, rinse their lunchplate, write “floss” on a grocery list.

They say that the more scientists look at the minute particles of the world, the more vast those microcosms become. Each atom is bursting with particles; each of those little fellows is swarming with more bits of life. It’s not that life is boring—it’s too fucking full. Every gesture is a mosaic of minute postures, and to scrub the sink becomes a tapestry too rich to contemplate. We build life thread by thread.

I suppose that what it all comes down to is this: I didn’t do laundry this week; instead, I bought new clothes. It’s been that kind of week.

And yet, somehow, something wonderful occurred; a feat of housefrauing beyond my wildest dreams:

Sprouts! In my pot of dirt! By the simple act of doing absolutely nothing, I have green growing things.

I’m thinking that next week I’ll just stay in bed every day and see if a solution to world hunger doesn’t turn up in my living room.

Lessons Learned: A mincer is not a mincer is not a mincer

2006-05-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

So I’m making a recipe that calls for two tablespoons of minced shallots. I have the shallots. I also have a mincer. It’s a garlic mincer, but it’s still a mincer. This book wants the shallots minced, fine, I’ll put them in this mincer and mince the motherfuckers.

But, lo, that is not what happened. I put the shallot in the mincer and squeezed and, instead of some nicely minced shallots squooshing kind-of grossly out the other end, all the juice in the shallot was forcefully expelled out of the shallot, some onto the kitchen counter, but most directly into my eye.

Then I cried like a baby. Not because my eyes were aflame with the juice of an onion (although that too), but because once again, I have been fucked over by cookbook authors.

See, a shallot is like a tiny little onion, all crisp and juicy. And garlic is like, well, garlic. Not at all the same thing, and they cannot be minced with the same tool, apparently. But did the cookbook say this? No. Did it say, “Mince the shallots by using a knife and cutting them so tiny that you also slice off some of your fingernails, not by using a garlic mincer, which will get you all onion-juicy”? No. The mincing of the shallots was not even a step in the recipe! It’s just there on the ingredient list: 2 minced shallots.

This is bullshit, people. The ingredient list is for ingredients. Ingredients come from the store. There are no “minced shallots” at the store. That’s preparation. Step one of your recipe should be “Mince the shallots. Oh, and by the way, here is how to mince a shallot.”

And while we’re at it, let’s quit with this coy game of “I-know-what-vegetables-look-like-and-you-don’t.” The other day I was going to make a recipe that called for leeks. So off I went to the grocery store to get some. Unfortunately, I don’t know what a leek is. I’ve never seen a leek or eaten a leek or taken a leek to a baseball game. Lucky for me, my grocery store has signs! But when I located the sign that said “leeks,” there were two vegetables underneath it. There were also other signs for things like “bok choy” and “edameme” (???), and all the vegetables underneath were sort of jumbled around. So I had to take my best guess, then walk around the store until I found someone who worked there and shake the vegetable at him and demand, “Is this a leek?”

It was. But when I got it home and chopped it up, I only had half a cup. I needed two cups. Did the recipe say “4 leeks” in the ingredients? No, silly, it didn’t. It said, “2 cups chopped leeks.”

Cookbook authors, listen up: I’m wise to your game, and I’m not going to take it anymore. Two can play at this.

So now I present my gourmet recipe for Herbed Cornish Game Hen:

Ingredients:
1 Herbed Cornish Game Hen,
prepared.

Procedure:
Eat.

Look! I’m a cookbook author! Give me money.

In the Garden: Black Thumb Thursday

2006-05-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

I have a plant.

My usual method of dealing with anything is to obsess over it while it’s new, then forget all about it for a while, and then suddenly remember and shower it with an uncomfortable amount of affection out of guilt for ignoring it. I call this erratic nurturing, and it works fine with most inanimate objects. Plants and friendships, however, tend to suffer from this approach.

Plant, though, has been alive for almost three years, which is stunning. I have killed a LOT of plants in my day. When I moved into my current house, my mom brought me this plant, and I fully expected to dispatch it with due haste. Somehow, plant has withstood my nurturing. It has been left outside overnight when the temperature dropped well below freezing. It has sat inside with the curtains closed for a week. It has gone for a month with no water. It has survived a month of being watered daily. It has somehow made it through my well-intentioned effort at pruning (unlike my LP’s hair).

Recently, I added an orchid to my things-I-might-kill family. My friend Rachael grows orchids as a hobby, and she assured me that most varieties of orchids are surprisingly easy to grow. She described orchids’ preferred means of care as “benign neglect.” Sounds easy, but I am more prone to malicious neglect. At any rate, the orchid is not dead yet.

At least, I don’t think it’s dead. It’s kind of hard to tell. When I was eight I had a tiny cactus plant that I never watered because I was afraid of drowning it, and then one day I picked it up and the plant just sort of fell over, because it no longer had any roots at all. It had been dead for months, and I hadn’t known.

I hope that doesn’t happen with people. I could leave my life partner alone in his office for weeks, thinking he’s playing a video game, and then one day walk in and find his eyeballs all dried up.

Well, today’s housefrau project (other than trying to iron, which didn’t go all that well [my mom gave me an ironing ham {it looks and tastes nothing like actual ham, believe me} and I tried to use it, but, come on, it’s, like, round]) was to plant some flowers! I found some ziploc bags of dirt in the basement (I dunno), put them in a pot, and put some seeds in it. Seems a little too easy.

I had a bunch more seeds left, so I scattered them in the dirt by my front door, sort of under a bush. Now we’ll see who’s got the greener thumb: me or nature! Oh, it is on, Mother Earth!

I’d have taken photos of the whole process to share, but 1) like anyone really needs to see photos of a container of dirt, and 2) I’d left the camera on for three days, so the battery was dead.

Sigh. Guess my erratic nurturing doesn’t work with digital cameras either.

Current Statistics: Wrapping a Present

2006-05-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

Things overturned on kitchen table:
Vase of flowers
Soda
Candle (burning)

Things that temporarily bound fingers together:
Tape
Glue
String

Things jabbed into various body parts:
Scissors
Awl
Teeth-things on tape dispenser
Flowers, somehow

Things currently on floor:
Flower petals
Tape
Glue
String
Paper
One present (wrapped [badly])

I am going to make some fucking SOUP!

2006-05-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

So I was lying on the unmade bed reading a magazine this afternoon (this is what kept women do with their time, right?) when it occurred to me that I should go make some badass soup. It’s 75 degrees out, which I gather is not good weather for soup, but that didn’t deter me. Neither did the fact that I have never really made soup before.

(I was reading an article about the Donner party when this particular bee entered my bonnet, but I discount the notion that that had any bearing on my desire to cook.)

My mom gave me a gorgeous soup cookbook, and I have leafed through it admiring the pictures many times. But most of the recipes start with something like, “boil a brown cow’s foot for twelve hours,” and I wanted to do something simple. Something that was mostly already done for me, but that I could claim to have cooked because I got out a cutting board.

You know what this means, don’t you? It means that I am going to have to MAKE UP MY OWN RECIPE.

I opened the cupboard and found a carton of organic creamy sweet potato soup and, get this, an actual sweet potato. Brilliant! I will cook the sweet potato, put it in the ready-made soup, and it will be tasty. It has to be. Sweet potatoes always go with sweet potatoes.

Except the vegetable I had might have actually been a yam. I don’t really know. And it had little purple fellows sprouting from it.

But onward! I started peeling it, and it seemed to be leeching some sort of weird milky-white liquid.

I was on the phone with my wonderful friend Kelly at the time, and she said that it was fine. She’s had a baby in her tummy, so I assume that all divine secrets of the domestic realm must have been imparted to her through some sort of uterine transmogrification. Also, she makes great salads.

So then I diced up the vegetable and the insides had all kinds of weird little holes inside. Kelly’s remark was, “I’ve never seen that when I make sweet potatoes.”

Oh well. I decided to boil the sweet potato, so I dumped it in a pan of boiling water and splattered insanely hot water all over myself.

Shirt changed and with a renewed sense of caution, I decided to fancy-up the soup. Who wants sweet potato soup with just sweet potatoes in it? The answer to all cooking questions is invariably corn and garlic, so I dumped in some of that, along with some black beans and garbanzo beans, because I had cans of them and they seem innocuous enough.

The soup looked really disgusting.

When my darling LP came home, I had him taste one of the sweet potatoes, as I am terrified of tasting food while it is still in the process of becoming edible. He deemed it “okay.”

I’m given to understand that flavors “mingle” in the pot if you leave them alone. Much like Christian singles at a picnic, I imagine. So I ignored the food for a while and added more things to my Williams Sonoma gift registry, things that will certainly guarantee that my next soup-making adventure is a success.

After a while I got bored waiting, so I decided it was time to eat my creation. I didn’t have any bread, so I served it with crackers made out of seeds. Also, I was out of napkins, so we used dishtowels. One of the dishtowels was kind of damp, as I’d just used it to dry some dishes, and there was only one clean one left.

The verdict: Here’s a rough transcript of our dinner conversation:

--Hm, it’s good.
--Yeah?
--This tastes like food your mom makes.
--Oh really?
--Yeah. It’s nourishing. I like it.
--You don’t think it’s a little bland?
--It only tastes bland because we’re accustomed to eating food that’s less bland.
--
--
--Mm, this really is good.
--Oh, good.
--I’m getting excited thinking about eating this food.
--You’re eating it right now.
--I’m excited about eating some more of it.
--
--
--Hey, this garbanzo bean looks like a butt.

And so on. So, I guess it came out all right. I still don’t know why the sweet potato was full of holes and white stuff, but if we die of some mysterious sweet potato disease, I’ll let you know.

Housefrau Field Trip: The Alpaca Show!

2006-05-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the Great Western Alpaca Show in Denver. Like a good housefrau, I traipsed down to pick up some lovely fiber arts and take in the unbelievable cuteness.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, this is an alpaca:

At the show, alpacas are placed in funny costumes and paraded around.

They are also taken through obstacle courses,

although they often don’t like it.

The show is also a chance for the alpacas’ fleeces to be judged and ranked, which helps their fleece fetch a handsome sum at market. Alpacas are shorn.

Then, clever housefraus or underpaid Peruvians can spin the fiber.

The resulting yarn can be woven into fabrics

or felted into hats and other products

or just sold as yarn

to be knitted into things like scarves

or adorable monkeys.

It was a good time. And, as you may have surmised, we got a digital camera. I have refrained from posting all 550 pictures we took with it at the Alpaca Show, but rest assured that, when I attempt to knit that alpaca yarn into a scarf and it somehow manages to turn out as a flesh-eating virus, you’ll see photos.

The Life Cycle of a Food: Death on the Plate

2006-05-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

The pots de crème came out wonderfully, despite the mishaps of making them. Which I suppose just goes to show that making food is like making children: completely horrible.

I think it’s time that we had “the talk.” Let me take you, dear readers, on the wonderful and mysterious journey of food’s life cycle.

Food begins as just a twinkle in the eye of the randy chef. It starts as raw ingredients. These come from a magical place called the grocery store. If you want to know where they come from before that, you’ll have to ask a scientist, or a farmer, or maybe a professional wrestler, I don’t know. Stop asking questions.

Raw ingredients sit around in the fridge or pantry until they are very close to spoiling. That’s when the chef begins to hear her culinary clock ticking, and she realizes that she has very little time remaining in which she can still cook something. (This might also be around the time she realizes that her acting career isn’t going to materialize after all.)

The chef gathers this fetal-food and begins the birthing process. Much screaming and gnashing of teeth ensues. There is grating, sautéing. Maybe something catches on fire. Possibly some hot and heavy zesting goes on—I don’t know, what you do in your bedroom is your own business.

At any rate, the fetal-food at some point enters the incubation process. This can be anywhere from a few minutes to days, depending on exactly how disappointed you are that your life is turning out to be much more meaningless than you’d planned.

(Side note: the prudent chef sticks to preparation processes that are left largely unsupervised. Sure, it’s fine to stir the food now and then, and maybe play it a bit of Mozart, but largely you should leave it the hell alone. You’ll see sickos on television sipping the broth and adding a pinch more oregano or whathaveyou. This is disgusting. If the recipe calls for me to sample the embryonic fluids of my gestating food, I know it’s the devil’s work.)

And then—voila!—the food is born. It takes up residence on a plate and begins its glorious existence. The food’s life span is inversely proportional to how long it took to produce. Therefore, tamales you spent three full days preparing should last approximately four minutes before they enter what’s politely called “ignoble death.”

Food that has not been conveyed into someone’s belly sits on the counter for a while, gradually cooling and coagulating. In a few hours, the food is dead and is ready for a proper tupperware burial. It’s sealed in plastic and embalmed in the refrigerator until such time as all mourners have had a chance to push past it for a soda. After a month or so, the food and its coffin are conveyed to the trash bin and a nice fellow comes around and carries it off to its final resting place.

Then the chef buys new tupperware.

Now, some crackpots will whisper to you tales of mystical creatures known as leftovers. These mad cooks like to dig up dead food from the depths of the fridge and reanimate it for later consumption. Don’t fall for it. Reanimated food is an abomination. And chances are it will eat your brain before you can swallow a morsel of its flesh. Don’t play god with your food—or we’ll all be running through the streets from giant zombie stroganoffs.

Once More Around the Block

2006-05-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

Today’s adventure in getting lost in a small town I have lived in for four years took me (eventually) to my chum Andrew’s house. We went to the printer and looked at proofs for his new chapbook, which will be lovely. Then over a delicious lunch he gave me the following recipe:

Dice beets. Sauté in olive oil for a while. Add dry spaghetti and sauté it for a while too. (Sauté dry spaghetti, he says. He says this like it’s something everyone does all the time, as if you call up your pals and they say, “Oh, yeah, just watching the ball game and sautéing dry spaghetti.”) Then add boiling water and some other things and cook it for a while. Then you have pink pasta.

I am clearly out of my league, here. I have done the following things with spaghetti: boil it, pour jar of sauce on it. Andrew is from England. He has notions of yogurt beyond my wildest dreams.

I have accomplished nothing remotely housefrauey today. But I am in awe of the fact that this nice lady made a sweater for a tree. Now I must learn to knit and make sweaters for something. I don’t have any trees. Maybe I can make a sweater for my neighbor’s dumpster.

Problems with Chocolate and Underpants

2006-05-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow my former co-workers and I are having a potluck. I am bringing dessert. My general method of bringing foodstuffs to other people’s homes is to buy something at the store, put it in my own tupperware, and say I made it. But since I have a newfound lease on life, I decided to take a stab at this thing called preparing my own food.

Inspired by this seemingly-regular person (who in retrospect is probably an alien blessed with unrealistic culinary skill), I decided to make chocolate pots de crème. Since they have to be refrigerated for a while, I planned to make them this afternoon.

Things went swimmingly at first. I boiled milk and separated eggs (!) and chopped up exceedingly fancy chocolate. Then I put the liquid in the ramekins and popped them in the oven for an hour and fifteen minutes.

While they baked, I shaved my legs and went looking for my massage underpants. I had a massage scheduled at the local massage school in the afternoon. An indulgence. Last time I went there it was awful, but I figured that the semester is further along, so maybe the students have improved their technique. At any rate, underpants that conceal my ass crack are essential for situations in which I am naked with a person but not in a sex-way. I have one appropriate pair.

I could not find the massage underpants. This boded ill. I was forced to gird my nether-regions in lace.

The oven timer dinged ten minutes before I had to leave. Perfect! I could just pop the custards into the fridge and be off. But lo! What’s this?! These are not custards! These are entirely-not-cooked-at-all containers of chocolate liquid!

I called my mommy. We speculated that the evil atmosphere of Colorado had cursed my custards. Her suggestion was to stick them back in the oven, turn it off, go to my massage, and turn the oven back on when I returned. She seemed to think that leaving uncooked eggs and cream sitting out for two hours was not at all problematic. Since I have a scar on my hand from the last time I ignored my mother’s advice, I did as I was told.

Off to a relaxing massage! In the pouring rain! Now, I’d only been to this place once before, and I was coming from a different direction, and I am prone to getting discombobulated in the relative confines of grocery stores, but I didn’t seem to think I needed to check the address before leaving. It’s a big brown oddly-shaped building right off a street near my lifepartner’s office. So off I sped!

I turned down what looked like the right street and proceeded to a big brown oddly-shaped building and pulled in. Parked. Looked at the sign. I was at Lockheed Martin. Yes, the defense-weapons contractor. I went to get a massage at a place that manufactures warheads. I turned around.

Fifteen minutes late for my appointment, I finally found the right place. Rushed in. They’d given my appointment away to a walk-in. No socially-awkward rubby-dub for me.

Back home. Custards back in the oven. Went to switch the laundry. And there I was confronted with a perfect housefrau cliché: I’d washed my lifepartner’s favorite white cotton shirt with a pair of red cotton underpants.

I called my mommy again. She instructed me in the magic of a potion called bleach.

Checked the custards. Checked them again. Again. After being in the oven for two and a half hours, they finally appeared cooked. I had made exactly enough to take to my potluck tomorrow; no extras for tasting or screw-ups. So I stuck them in the fridge and decided that if they appear too liquidey when we eat them tomorrow night, I’ll say it’s pudding. Or some sort of French chocolate dessert soup. Maybe crème de la I-can’t-fucking-cook.

I emailed the lifepartner. Asked him to bring home takeout. Called it a day on housefrauing.

Tune in tomorrow for “Watch Me Get Drunk and Say Uncomfortable Things to My Friends.”

PS—Advance apologies to anyone reading this who might be eating those pots de crème tomorrow night.

Welcome to My World

2006-05-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

I quit my job.

Now I’m at home.

aaaaaaaaaaaaall daaaaaaaaaaaaaay loooooooooooooooooong.

There are a variety of domestic activities at which I’ve never excelled. Cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, not cutting myself, killing spiders, and owning aluminum foil are some of these things. I have ended two different relationships when the man I was dating bought me foil.

But now that I have some time on my hands and I seem to have contented myself with only writing ten pages of My Brilliant Novel, I thought I might throw myself into all things housey. After all, I’m against marriage and against having children, so I might as well do something with my pent-up uterus juice.

And I thought I’d write a blog about it. Because life doesn’t exist if the world’s not watching.

So, hello, world. Welcome to my little life. I have a wonderful lifepartner and I run a magazine. I once caught a pair of socks on fire in the microwave.

Perhaps I’ll update this blog constantly. More likely, sporadically until I get bored with it in a week. Hooray for the internets!

PS—Hi Mom.