Alizarine

Misc. Winter Things

The photo above is a shot of our side-yard one afternoon last week, back when we had a dusting and a half of snow. The light seems to be changing just a bit now that December is over, and spring is obviously just around the corner.

Not really.

I'm going to spend the next ten weeks enveloped in various fleeces and plan to amuse myself with new recipes, including two you'll see below. But first, I wanted to show you a couple of photos of Poof from Christmas at our parents' house.

She was sitting there looking so blissfully content that I had to ask her to freeze while I took a photo.

I like how her senior photo seems to be peeking at her happy future self. What a beauty. I love her so much.

And now, the recipes!

This is a Pinterest recipe I found and made almost immediately. It's from something called "jujugoodnews" and is a black bean salad with corn, red peppers, and avocado-lime vinaigrette, minus the avocado for now. It's shockingly tasty and healthy to boot! I've tweaked it a bit (see italics).

INGREDIENTS

• 2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed and drained
• 3 ears fresh cooked corn, kernels cut off the cob <-- I used a bag of thawed frozen white and yellow corn, something like 12-16 ounces, so yeah, I went *heavy on the corn.* I've adjusted the lime juice, onion, salt and olive oil amounts below to accommodate the extra corn.
• 2 red bell peppers, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• generous 2 teaspoons salt
• generous 2 tablespoons minced red onion
• generous 2 tablespoons sugar
• 10 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon lime zest (be sure to zest limes before juicing them) <-- I zested 2 small limes
• 7 or 8 tablespoons fresh lime juice
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro, plus more for garnish <-- I used Italian parsley because I have a problem with cilantro
• 2 Hass avocados, chopped

DIRECTIONS

Combine the corn, beans, and peppers in a large bowl and mix well.

Mince the garlic and mash it into the salt until it becomes a paste. Put it in a small bowl along with the lime juice, lime zest, olive oil, and onion. Whisk and pour over the corn mixture. Mix well.

Cover and chill for a few hours or overnight. Right before serving, add avocados and mix gently, being careful not to mash avocados.

Serve at room temperature.

Jeff and I decided to turn this salad into some tacos. He has a quick guacamole recipe that he likes to throw together (avocado, traces of lime juice--he had a bad experience with too much last month--a grated clove of garlic, a tablespoon of jarred salsa, and salt to taste). So: it's a smear of guac and a little pepper jack cheese on a blistered corn tortilla topped with the above salad.

This made a fun 1:30-ish kinda-lunch! Also there's no meat here, although this made us want to add some carnitas into the mix, but not enough to actually get in the car and drive 10 miles into town to our favorite carnitas provider.

Next up: spicy brittled peanuts from that Smitten Kitchen cookbook I've been talking about lately. Oh man, these are incredible. That amount of cayenne down there is perfect, and it quietly buzzes around in the sweet-salty background. If you're not allergic to peanuts, you will find yourself saying lots of double-negative things like, "Life would not be worth living if I couldn't eat peanuts."

You're going to have to work for these way-better-than-CrackerJack peanuts, but not too much. It's mostly just a lot of stirring over a medium-hot pot, and some of that stirring is very interesting because science.

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon flaky sea salt
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 cups shelled raw or roasted unsalted peanuts, papery skins removed <-- I used blanched peanuts

DIRECTIONS

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicon mat. If you don't have either, coat your baking shee with a thinslick of vegetable oil.

In a small bowl, whisk together the baking soda, sea sat, and cayenne, and set aside.

In a large saucepan, the heaviest one you've got, heat the sugar, butter, and water over medium-high heat until it just begins to turn golden, about 7 to 10 minutes. Add the peanuts and start stirring, coating them with the sugar mixture.

After a minute or two, the sugar will sieze up a bit, making the peanuts look grainy and crusty, and it will be harder to stir them--you'll be convinced that it's gone irreversibly south, cursing me under your breath [This cookbook is so conversationally awesome and you need to go buy it--K], but fear not, keep stirring, and in about 3 minutes it will melt back into a golden caramel.

That part actually took more like 5 minutes. I'm sure this was because my idea of medium-high heat is a little low, as I am afraid of heat.

Keep stirring, breaking up any clumps with your spoon, until the nuts are evenly coated, then remove the pot from the heat. Stir in the baking-soda-spice mixture as fast and evenly as you can, then spill the caramelized nuts out onto your prepared sheet, spreading them in a single layer and breaking up any clumps that you can before they set. Cool completely.

Once they're cool, break the nut clusters into smaller pieces and put them in a serving dish. The nuts will keep in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks, but rarely do because they are habit-forming.

She's not kidding. These were gone in two and a half days.

In other food news, yesterday I tried one of David Leibovitz's recipes for a flourless chocolate cake that was great but, disappointingly, not awesome. I already make a couple of F.C.C.s that beat it handily taste-wise and are a lot prettier to boot. So we're off to a disappointing start on that cookbook, but I'm nowhere near giving up. You should see some of the photos in that thing.

Finally, Jeff and I spent last week watching Mad Men's directors' commentaries for season five, and I was amused to discover this not-at-all-Photoshopped! insert in the packaging. I love how ticked off Betty looks.

PS Jeff thinks that Jon Hamm has an enormous head, especially in the image above, and he asked me to tack on this video.

 

Crab Apples

...At least I'm pretty sure they're crab apples.

This is a 10.5"x13.5" watercolor of whatever that tree is near our garage. The fruit is very small--smaller than cherries--and it sticks around long after the leaves have fallen and turns a lovely peachy color. I've found recipes for crab apple jam and the like, but I don't want to pick them because they're so cheerful on the tree and a much-loved pop of color during the winter months. I'm also pretty sure robins eat them when they return in the spring but the ground's still frozen and no worms are about.

The painting took about a week to complete.  I painted the crab apples first because let's face it, they're adorable.

The blurry areas in the background were created using the wet-into-wet technique: I wet down each blurry section with water and dropped paint onto the wet surface, letting the colors run together. The branches and fruit in the foreground are a little tighter. To make them I put down some wet-into-wet preliminary colors, and let those sections dry before glazing over the top with deeper colors and details and adding textures with a mostly dry brush.

Here's the painting nearly finished. I still had to work on some of the branches and pump up some of the background areas with a little more color.

I thought about selling this, but it looks so great in our kitchen.

Jeff and I painted it a couple of weekends ago and added some fabulous succulents. The paint color: "barrel," which is apparently a name somebody came up with by flipping and pointing randomly in a dictionary. I think of it as "M*A*S*H," a show I can't watch because I find it visually depressing and ugly. But the paint totally works in our kitchen and dining room, and I am crazy about it. It's only when I look at "barrel" as a color swatch that I start hearing this:

 

(I couldn't find anything better than a "guy taping his television while somebody says 'Roberta' in the background" version, sorry.)

Things I like about the opening credits:

• the truck with the red cross on it moving from right to left
• the babes running toward the camera seem pretty badass
• that camo-net stuff at around 0:25

Things I don't like about the opening credits:

• depressing overhead shot of the tents or whatever they are at 0:12
• the ugly M*A*S*H font
• the guys running upstairs that just make me tired
• TOTAL POOR POSTURE between 0:30 and 0:34--I realize it's necessary but it is unappealing to watch, and Alan Alda seems especially ape-ish
• Alan Alda's shirt and hat
• the close-up of Alan Alda as seen from the patient's point of view
• super ugly Jeep ending
• the rest of it

In animal news, our backyard foxes have been especially active last week. Two of them, possibly a male and female, whom we normally see at dusk or before dawn, were playing on the deck and lounging in the leaves in broad daylight. Whenever Jeff and I spot one, we call out "FOX" to alert each other--all work stops--and we start taking pictures. These three are from Jeff.

If they've taken over last year's woodchuck den, as foxes are wont to do, an entrance is under our back porch.

Sorry about the blurriness, but they were chasing each other and they're really fast.

I hope they stay! We've noticed a decrease in the number of mice we see in the house, and it's got to be because of the foxes.

In indoor animal news, I took photos of our cats posing with Julie Klausner's book, I Don't Care About Your Band, which is hilarious. I love Julie's podcast, and last week she asked her listeners to send in photos of their cats with her book. She ended up making a slide show of listener cats, which she played during her recent live show in New York on Thursday. Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin was the soundtrack for the slide show. So please play this while you peruse the following cat photos.

 

It's been sure nice talkin' to you, Bun.

Popular Searches

Today I've decided to give the people what they want: search results. Listed below are items that people have tried to find on this blog recently but failed. Some of them make me feel guilty: I should have a carbonara recipe on here by now, damn it! Some of them are nobody's business. And some are just strange and random. Hopefully this post will answer some of your nagging questions about me.

1. Tampax. Somebody keeps searching--many, many times!--for information about Tampax on this blog. I have no idea why. To the best of my knowledge, I have never mentioned tampons at all on Alizarine...wait. One time Jeff and I did blogs about packing for a trip to Italy, and I complained about sacrificing valuable carry-on real estate for a week's-worth of tampons. What a pain in the ass, am I right, ladies? But I'm not some kind of spokeswoman for Tampax. If you want to know about Tampax, please go here.

EDIT: One of my friends has suggested that the post this Tampax person is looking for is I Was Girl X, where I discussed sex education and periods. I don't think I mentioned Tampax, though. It was now-extinct Modess pads.

2. Panda Cupcakes. People come here 30 times a week to read about panda cupcakes, which we made a year and a half ago. I assume they find my recipe and go away happy and/or disturbed, so this is not a failed-search item. I included it here because it's my #1 traffic source from search engines, and it blows my mind that people care so much about making panda cupcakes.

3. Expectation. I don't know what this search means. Expectation about what? If you are the one who keeps typing "expectation" in my search box over there -->, please leave a comment and tell me what you want! In the meantime, please enjoy this Gustave Klimt painting called The Tree of Life. The very cool triangle woman on the left is called Expectation, so hopefully this will help you in your search.

4. Carbonara. I made it for lunch a couple of months ago following this recipe from Giada di Laurentiis, except I substituted chorizo for the usual bacon/pancetta (was desperate). It was pretty good but not blog-worthy. I do want to make a proper spaghetti carbonara for Jeff in the future, though, in order to re-create the classic scene from the movie Heartburn where Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep eat spaghetti carbonara in bed (at around :44 below).

 

5. Wife. Um, yeah, I'm a wife now.

6. What color are Bono's eyes? Blue. With tiny light blue flavor crystals.

And now, here's the one you've all been waiting for, if my search box is to be believed...

7. Infertile. Months ago, one of you searched for this. When you type something in my search box, the searched-for word becomes a semi-permanent part of the list of other words people typed in. The more a word is searched for, the larger it appears in relation to the other words. For example, "cake" is my most popular search right now, so it's a lot bigger than the rest of the words. Here's what I think happened with "infertile." It's a juicy, juicy word, isn't it, even juicier than "cake." Other readers saw "infertile" with the rest of the searched-for words, clicked on it, and made it bigger each time. That caused more people to notice it, and they clicked on it some more. It got to the point where over on the right side of my blog you'd see my face, a few links to recent posts, and followed by a huge, screaming

INFERTILE.

Which is depressing! I'm a lot of things, but is "infertile" really chief among them, you guys? I hope not! I was so annoyed by looking at this giant word every day that I blocked "infertile" from appearing in my list of popular searches. You could still search for it, but it wouldn't appear on the list anymore. But every week without fail since then, at least one of you searches for "infertile" and its good buddy "infertility." And the reason you couldn't find any stories about it was because I didn't want to write about it.

But your whining has been heard. HERE'S THE STORY.

[deep breath]

Almost 20 years ago, Jeff had a vasectomy. Amy, his first wife, had health complications following the birth of their daughter Melissa, and in order to protect Amy from a potentially dangerous second pregnancy, Jeff had a vasectomy. They divorced when Melissa was in her early teens, Jeff married Nicole (who had three children of her own), she sadly died from cancer, and eventually Jeff married me.

I was almost 39 when I met Jeff, and I wanted to have a baby. Tick tock tick tock, went my uterus. After our wonderful first date, I was floating on air and beginning to imagine our bookish, brown-eyed, lushy-eyebrowed future child. Twenty-four hours later, Jeff called me and told me the vasectomy news, which he said was difficult for him to deliver, but he was serious about me and wanted me to know before things went any further. I thanked him for telling me something that would've been a dealbreaker to so many women my age.

After I hung up the phone, I cried on the couch for about an hour. I called two ex-boyfriends, and they calmed me down, especially Jeff's predecessor (and unlikely Jeff enthusiast) James. He said this about a woman he knew in a similar situation: "She just went ahead and had a genius baby." That is, she browsed through anonymous genius sperm donors, picked one, and nine months later: genius baby. That became a sort of Plan B mantra for me over the following months: "I can always have a genius baby." It would be just that easy.

IF Jeff and I were even going to work out, that is! I had about a week (the days surrounding Christmas) to think about how I felt before our second date. I kept coming back to the fact that we seemed to click in a way that felt absolutely right to me. I had spent years searching for this man. Even then, I knew he was The One.

We quickly fell in love. We quickly got engaged. We quickly got married. Marrying Jeff was the best decision I have ever made. It wasn't even much of a decision. It was utterly obvious, even with the vasectomy problem. Every once in a while during the first year that I knew Jeff, I would mourn the fact that I couldn't have his child. As our love grew, I decided that I didn't want to have a random genius child. I wanted Jeff's child, no exceptions. I dug deep and also realized that I didn't want to adopt, either. Right or wrong (and I know several adoptive mothers who disapprove of my decision, so join the club), I wanted Jeff's baby or no baby. I chose my husband over a child, basically after one date, and I have no regrets.

Sometimes I find myself reminising about The Woman I Could Have Been (watch this later; it's awesome).

 

That woman would not have been able to quit her job and devote all of her time to painting. That woman would not paint at all--at least not the kinds of pictures I feel the need to produce. That woman would spend her newlywed years stressing out over hormone injections, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, and obsessing over a theoretical being who is not Jeff. That woman's body would never be the same and her life would be turned upside down for good, and so would the life of the man she loves.

I didn't want to be that woman.

Also, what about the very real possibility that our dream baby might turn out to be an asshole? Or even worse, two assholes?

 

I love our life. Honestly, when we walk hand-in-hand beside the baseball diamond a block away, all I can think is, "I am so glad I don't have to sit with these parents watching those kids play ball." I love how quiet our house is. I love being able to read anytime I please. I love cooking whatever Jeff and I want and not having to cater to somebody's oddball allergy or childish preference. I love going to the movies and traveling with Jeff. I love painting all day and not having to teach everybody else's children how to do it anymore. If loving these things makes me a bad, selfish person, I guess I'm a bad, selfish person. But I am also a blissfully happy, bad, selfish person. And it's my choice.

So there's your information about infertility.

8. "my cookies crust is burnt but not baked entirely." [sic] Maybe you should turn your oven down to something more like 350 when you bake them next time. 

Hilfiger Family Dynamics

Of the hundreds of ads in this month's Harper's Bazaar, the Tommy Hilfiger campaign above held my attention for longer than the usual 2 nanoseconds. Introduced last fall, "The Hilfigers" are a country club-going megafamily styled in the tradition of the (much cooler) Royal Tenenbaums:

And, as I did last fall, I tried to discern the various relationships within the family. Who are the Hilfiger children, and who are their mates and/or hangers-on? I puzzled over this for an embarrassing amount of time until it occurred to me that maybe a commercial existed on YouTube that might help me sort things out.

In fact, there were (at least) three. The first was created for T.H.'s fall collection, and it did not provide any real clues. The second aired around Christmas, and I remember seeing it once or twice on TV. In it, the family is having a wacky holiday meal.

 

Still, which ones were the true Hilfigers? I believe the new spring ad finally sheds some light on this mystery.

 

It is my belief that the ones spelling out H-I-L-F-I-G-E-R at the beginning are Hilfigers and everyone else is not. So I created the following chart.

The faces circled in red are the parents, obviously, and the faces circled in yellow, as suggested by the commercial, are their children. The arrows indicate romantic relationships (click photo to expand).

The two young people seen directly above Pa Hilfiger are employees having affairs with the parents, who are trapped in a loveless marriage ("Hilfigers do NOT get divored!"). Two red arrows indicate heterosexual involvement among the quartet, but it could just as easily have gone the other way. Pa H. certainly likes to show a lot of leg, doesn't he?

I wanted to think that the blonde on the left was a daughter, but the commercial says no, so Sneering Khaki Jacket is a son. Mom is drinking.

I'm going to assume that the Hilfigers adopted (unless...). The young woman in the white hat whose expression says "bish please!" is a gold digger and nowhere near good enough for their classy son. Note how chilly Ma H. has turned her back on this girl.

Not much to say about this trio, other than the fact that Hilfiger men can wear their hair any old way they want, and the commercials are trying very hard to make the little girl seem like Margot Tenenbaum.

And speaking as a high school teacher whose classroom was cruelly located in a junior high building, I think the boy above looks like he'd be completely unbearable.

In the bottom half of the ad, everything begins to fall apart.

OK, we know that the girl on the right and the boy on the far left are Hilfigers. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the girl is single. That's right, she's pulling a Kelly! She's forced to attend these country club family outings all by herself, sans significant other, and she will continue to do so until she is thirty-freaking-eight-years-old.

Exploding Afro Souffle and Dickish Card Player are college friends of Long-haired Son, and this trio's relationship is fluid and ambiguous at best. Ma and Pa Hilfiger keep trying to get Exploding Afro Souffle and Dickish Card Player to pay attention to Kelly, but for some reason they just don't seem all that interested.

The dogs are, of course, awesome.

And that is my breakdown of the Hilfiger family dynamics.

Honorable mention for making me pause while flipping through Bazaar goes to this Dolce & Gabbana ad:

...in which three classy brunettes gaze upon a yucky Ke$ha type with disdain.

Hot Fudge Sundae Eating Strategy

It's ice cream season again--like it ever stopped. Jeff and I live within walking distance of a Dairy Queen. It's also a restaurant that serves hamburgers, etc., as opposed to one of those seasonal, exclusively-ice cream shacks with an open window where you place your order. In case you're not familiar with the institution that is Dairy Queen, it's an American restaurant chain that offers soft-serve ice cream products, some of them involving high-maintenance mix-ins, waffle cones, or embarrassing names such as MooLatte.

My go-to order at Dairy Queen is very simple: small hot fudge sundae. I don't like the ice cream very much and often describe its flavor as WHITE, but I love the hot fudge. They never, ever seem to dole out enough fudge, wouldn't you agree? I've never eaten a small hot fudge sundae that made me say, "Ooh. WAY too much fudge on that one." In fact, I've been tempted to go up to the counter and demand a cup of just the fudge.

 

(Jeff is Milhouse.)

I mean, the ratio of ice cream to fudge is way off. Over the years I have developed a strategy to balance things out, at least during the last half of my eating time. I call it The Drill.

First, hold your spoon vertically, with the scoop end on the tip of the sundae. Slowly press down while rotating the spoon as if you were using a screwdriver. Your objective here is to hollow out the mountain of ice cream, eating it as you excavate. This is the dull part, as the ice cream tastes like WHITE, but you need to get it out of there, and you will be rewarded for your efforts.

Continue drilling your hole until you hit the bottom of the sundae cup. Bonus points if you have encountered no fudge cave-ins during this process.

Now you can eat the rest of the sundae. Notice how the ice cream-to-fudge ratio seems closer to correct than ever before!

I would also like to point out a big design flaw in the Dairy Queen sundae cup: those D-shaped indentations near the rim that do nothing more than trap fudge. For a restaurant whose fudge-dispensing practices are stingy at best, these indentations just seem cruel.

I had a dream...

Last night a cold-fearing Jeff took some cough syrup before bedtime, saying, "I'll probably have some fun dreams tonight."  Jeff's dreams are always so much better than mine.  Chock full of explosions, espionage, zombies, and actual plots, they put my usual unprepared-to-teach or I-can't-find-my-plane-ticket dreams to shame.  Jeff's medicinally-enhanced dreams are something special, and this morning's dream report included time travel, brachiosaurii and a T-rex that ate a guy and then the guy hacked his way out of its stomach.  See?  Better than mine.  Awesome, even.

Today is Martin Luther King day, a holiday I love, but unfortunately whenever I hear or even think about King's "I Have a Dream" speech**, the song "Say You, Say Me" by Lionel Richie inevitably comes to mind and stays locked in there all day.  And here's why.  As you may recall, early on in the song Lionel says:

I had a dream

I had an awesome dream

-- Interesting, Lionel!  Do tell us about this awesome, possibly King-like dream! --

People in the park

Playing games in the dark

And what they played

Was a masquerade

From behind the walls of doubt

A voice was crying out

If I may, Lionel?  THAT IS NOT AN AWESOME DREAM.*  That is an ordinary dream.  These "walls of doubt" are mildly interesting.  What did they look like?  Perhaps they resembled Rodin's Gates of Hell, but with less teeth-gnashing?  Lionel does not return to this dream during the remainder of the song, thus leading the listener to believe that the awesome dream ends with a crying-out voice as people continue their nighttime park games i.e. masquerade. 

See, that is the kind of dream I would have: pointless, confusing, mildly frustrating, and ending abruptly before it becomes interesting.  In other words, not awesome.

Martin Luther King's dream, on the other hand, was truly awesome, but one minor, overlooked reason why his speech was so masterful was the fact that he did not boast that his dream was awesome.  He let us, the listeners, come to that conclusion ourselves.  He did not oversell the dream the way Lionel did.

And that is why "Say You, Say Me" is in my head today.

 

Also?  "Say You, Say Me" was impossible at high school dances ca. 1985.  You'd start with that pathetic, weight-shifting-from-side-to-side thing that passes for slow dancing among teenagers.  Then, about two-thirds of the way into the song, the tempo shifts abruptly and kind of starts rocking for half a minute before returning to its original plodding groove.  No one ever knew what to do once the song started rocking, so we continued to slow dance as if the song had not done a complete 180. 

*And I say this as someone who has enjoyed your music since the late-70s, i.e. when I was eight.

 

** And, of course: