Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - 22:16:27
The Lasagna Lesson
I made lasagna from scratch the other night. It was an arduous process. It took 3 ½ hours. By the end both my sinks were filled with dishes. The recipe made 12 servings, though my family only consists of three. And my five-year-old daughter refused to try it. So here I am, three days later, eating leftovers, wondering why I spent so much time making it, when I could have bought a frozen Stouffer’s lasagna and it would have been so much easier. I’m lying here, watching TV, and I discover a piece of fennel stuck in my teeth. It’s from the lasagna. I remember buying that jar of fennel at Kroger for $4. I grab it with my tongue to swallow it, but I stop. I decide to chew up the tiny fennel seed instead.
This is when I figured out why I made the lasagna from scratch. It taught me something. Events in life are like the ingredients in a recipe. You can experience a meal pre-packaged and it may taste great, but you don’t know what went into it. So the joy stops when the last bite is taken. However, when you cook a meal, every piece of it has meaning- down to the last fennel seed. When you sail through life searching for the finish line, it’s like scarfing down a meal at a restaurant. All you care about is the end result. You wanna feel full. You forget what you’re doing. Cooking food helps me remember what I’m doing.
I guess I’m trying to say that it’s good to cook a meal from scratch sometimes. It makes you slow down and appreciate what’s happening around you. I spend most of my life trying to do everything faster and more efficiently. Cooking a 3 ½ hour meal was like a punch in the face to my frantic lifestyle. It was very frustrating and by the time I finished the lasagna, I didn’t even want to eat it. But three days later I have some perspective on the event.
I believe that all of these little things in our lives, if examined, can provide clues to what troubles us. The lasagna lesson for me was to slow down and stop trying to rush through life. What’s your Lasagna Lesson?
Monday, November 24, 2008 - 00:49:31
The Best Food Scam In Town
First question- Have you been to Jason’s Deli lately? They have the best salad bar on Earth. Did you know that you can get the salad bar to go? For $6.99 they give you a huge plastic to-go box, a soup cup, and a 4 oz. dressing container. This has been my dirty little secret for a few years now, but when I go there, I cram as much food as I possibly can into these three containers. It feeds me for days! They have tuna pasta salad, potato salad, three bean salad, kalamata olives, roasted red pepper hummus, feta, organic flat-leaf spinach, and the thickest ranch dressing I’ve ever seen. The last time I brought a salad home I weighed it on our kitchen scale. It was over 5 freakin pounds of food.
Second question- Have you been to Kroger lately? 8 oz. of hummus is $4. A pound of potato salad is $5. Spinach is $4 a bag. And Feta is $3.50 for 4 oz. I can’t afford that stuff! BUT-I can fit all that stuff in my Jason’s Deli to-go box. You see what I’m getting at? Theoretically, if you were say, an olive junkie, as I am, you could go to Jason’s and fill the whole container with olives! Even the soup and dressing cups. There’s no rules, dude!
The to-go box holds 96 oz. if filled to capacity (to figure this out, I did an experiment where I filled the box with water, then carefully poured it out into measuring cups). And then you have a 12 oz. soup cup and a 4 oz. dressing cup, which adds up to a total of 112 oz. So how much does 112 oz. of kalamata olives cost? Well, a 10 oz. jar at Kroger is $4.39. So, if you did fill all your to-go containers with kalamatas, you’d end up with around $50 worth of olives. Or what if you filled it up with Feta? 112 oz. of Feta cheese is worth $98!
Of course, these are extreme scenarios. I don’t need seven pounds of cheese. But if I ever do, now I know where to get it. So let’s get creative. Say you’re going to a potluck and you are in charge of bringing the dip. Go to Jason’s and get 112 oz. of hummus! It’s there for the taking! And if there’s not enough hummus there to fill your box, go tell the manager the salad bar needs re-stocking.
So, now I know you’re going to go and try this. And here’s where the life lesson comes in. Are you going to feel embarrassed standing there at the salad bar, hoarding olives and cheese into this flimsy transparent box? What will the other patrons think of you? What will the cashier think when you hand her this massive pilferage to be bagged up. They might think you’re a homeless person with a very refined palate. Is that a bad thing? This is the moment where you decide what you’re made of. I say- be a man. March up to that salad bar and make it your bitch. Take what you want and leave the rest. Cuz they’ve got plenty more in the kitchen. It’s the fastest-growing casual restaurant chain in
Monday, November 17, 2008 - 22:42:49
Vodka Snobbery
I was at Popatop the other day purchasing my weekly $5 fifth of Heaven Hill. The cashier made a snooty comment about how he only drinks Grey Goose. Now, I've tasted Grey Goose and Stoli and Ketel One and they're all great. That's what I order when I'm at a bar. But I'm a working man. When I come home from a hard day at the office I need a little mental massage in the form of a cheap well-made dirty Vodkatini. I’m going to let you in on a little secret about vodka. The less you taste, the better it is. Most high-end US and European vodka brands brag about their filtration processes and how many times it has been distilled. This must not be confused with Russian vodkas which adhere to different standards. They value the slight impurities as they give each vodka a distinctive flavor. But in
I learned this a few years ago from a show on G4 of all places. They were pouring vodka down a contraption made from stacking 5 Brita water filter pitchers one on top of the other. Each one had a hole cut in the bottom so the vodka could flow down into the next filter. The point of the experiment was that running vodka through a simple charcoal filter is the same thing that top shelf vodka makers do to make their brand taste better.
So here’s the drill- Go to your favorite local liquor store. Buy a bottle of the cheapest vodka they have (Heaven Hill, Quality House, Aristocrat, etc...). Take it home and run it through a Brita (or any other water filtering pitcher) water pitcher about 5 times. If you do this, the result will be an intoxicating odorless tasteless liquid that will lower your inhibitions, impair your ability to drive an automobile, and make you consider cheating on your wife.
Here’s a practical scenario- you’re hosting a Christmas party and you’re on a budget. You don’t want to spend $300 on alcohol, so you get a few half-gallons of Quality House vodka and you do the filter-thingy. Now you have a decent starter for your guests’ drinks. But you don’t want to bore them with the lame story about how you just bought cheap liquor and ran it through a filter. Presentation is key! Why not spice it up with some flavor? Save some old liquor bottles and peel the labels off and fill each of them with an equal amount of your “filtered” booze. Now, to each bottle, add a different fruit or spice. Here’s some suggestions: lemon, apple, strawberry, peach, mango, cucumber, chili, mint, ginger, garlic, and lavender (it is assumed that all of these ingredients will be fresh, and not dried or frozen). So, say you’ve got five bottles of your filtered vodka, and you add a different ingredient to each of them. Let them steep for a week before serving. And once you are ready to serve, strain out the solid fruits/spices, then pour the vodka back into the original bottles. If you really want to go all out, make original labels for each bottle. If you’ve got Photoshop and a bubblejet printer, go to Office Depot and get a box of label paper. Print your personalized vodka labels and stick them on the bottles for the party. I did this one year with Coffee Liqueur. I made a batch of homemade Kahlua with real vanilla beans, coffee and sugar in the raw…Mmmmm. I called it “Javaliq.” I bottled it in old Grolsch Amber Beer bottles with the “swing top cap.”
People. This is merely an anecdote. Not an antidote. You CAN turn Heaven Hill into Grey Goose. This is true. But what I want you to learn from this, is that every aspect of life has a “cheat code.” Everything you think you can’t afford IS available to you. All you have to do is a little bit of research and put in some elbow grease. No one is going to hand you the answers to all your problems. You gotta dig for it. I’ve been digging for a long time and I hope it inspires some of you to do the same.
Saturday, November 15, 2008 - 23:35:49
Spiders
A friend called me up the other night to come and “take care” of some spiders at their new house. Her boyfriend is deathly afraid of the creatures and wouldn’t go near them. I am not afraid of spiders. I sort of like them. Not in a creepy way; I don’t collect them or anything. I’m just fascinated by their existence. They are in essence nature’s exterminators. Spiders have no reason to bite humans; they are not bloodsuckers, and are not aware of our existence in any case. I read that out of the 37,000 different species of spiders, only 25 are in any way harmful to humans. In any given locality you can expect to find from zero to (at most) three such species. If a person bitten by one of these guys obtains medical aid, death from a genuine spider bite is almost unknown in
Why am I talking about spiders, you ask? I’m a firm believer that animals and insects do not attack people at random. If you got bitten or stung by a bug or attacked by a pack of rabid wolves, there was a reason. I’m not referring Karma or the fact that you might of “had it coming.” We are all a part of nature, and it has a beautiful sense of balance. So, why is it that so many folks are still afraid of spiders? Do they not have access to the internet? Because all those facts I cited in the previous paragraph came from exactly two minutes of Googling. So, considering that this knowledge is readily available to anyone, I started wondering if maybe this blind fear of nature that so many of us seem to have, whether it be of spiders, dogs, jellyfish or whatever is not a result of ignorance. Perhaps we have some inner demons that we are projecting out into nature.
Bear in mind that while we are so scared of spiders that we use their webs as a decorative symbol of terror during the entire month of October, in Cambodia they’re considered a savory snack; along with crickets and beetles. I think the moral of this story is- if you see a spider in your house, you can step on it, because letting bugs run around inside is just uncivilized. But if it’s outside, tip your hat to the little bugger. And if you have some free time, grab a moth and throw it into his web for a snack…just to let him know that we're cool.
Friday, November 14, 2008 - 22:44:40
Art Imitates Life
I don’t like to complain. Cuz life is good. But every once in a while I see something that irritates me. I’m an AT&T customer, so my homepage is my.yahoo.com. and I just saw this headline today:
AP - Young adults who watch racy television shows have a higher chance of getting pregnant, says a new study.
WTF?! Are you kidding me? Did it occur to ANYONE, that MAYBE the young adults who are pregnant simply enjoy racy television?! I’m not going to bore you with the “chicken and the egg” argument, but let’s be honest with ourselves. People do what they want to do. They find TV programs that “work” for them. The old folks watch Walker: Texas Ranger, the middle-aged watch Rock of Love, and the kids watch American Idol. I thought that was understood. Why are people still trying to make the argument that life imitates art?
I play a video game called Hitman. I love this game. It lets me kill people, lots of people. I love it for the same reason I love the
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 - 01:20:45
Chiminea
So anyhoo, the weather’s getting cooler, the trees are changing colors and I’m in the market for a chiminea. If you’re not familiar with this contraption, it’s a freestanding front-loading fireplace with a bulbous body and usually a vertical smoke vent or chimney. You get them at Walmart or the McCain Mall parking lot for about $50-$100. 
I’ve wanted one for the back yard since we purchased our home in ’99. It was always one of those slight indulgences that I could just never bring myself to purchase. Now, for the past few weeks my wife had been telling me that the Harvest Foods on Old Cantrell was going out of business and that everything in the store was 50% off. Wait, I’ve seen chimineas at that particular Harvest Foods. OMG. I’m putting on some pants and driving myself to
Now, I am not a rich man. I buy my clothes at Saver’s, I still eat ramen noodles even though I’m in my 30’s, so I saw what the Lord was placing before me- my chance to finally own my own little piece of watered-down Mexican history in the form a brown bulbous clay firepit.
“Well,” I told my wife, “This is the year. This is the year that we’re going to get a chiminea. I’m going to clean up the back porch, put our daughter’s Barbie Mustang in the shed, throw a layer of Thompson’s Water Seal on the deck, and we’re finally going to have friends over for parties, dammit.”
So it’s a done deal, right? No. I drove to the Harvest Foods at
“Would it even fit in my car?” What was I thinking? I’d slipped into a chiminea-induced frenzy. I’d gotten so close. Then I regained my composure. It’s a freakin’ chiminea…
a dumb clay pot… a simple little…thing that I… MUST OWN!!!!
I came this close. You can’t quit when you’re this close, right?! Wrong.
The wife. The wife sets me straight every time.
“We’ll get one next year, honey.”
“’It’s just a big clay pot.”
“We can’t really afford it anyway.”
Don’t patronize me, woman. You know we can afford it. You just think it’s trite. You think I won’t use it. Like the exercise bike I bought two years ago that’s collecting dust. I know that was my idea, but I could still start exercising! We could start doing a lot of things…like entertaining outdoors. I don’t know. Was that a good first blog?
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