I am getting up tomorrow morning at 6am.
I wanted to leave that up there all by itself because it looks and sounds more official that way, like someone announced it over a P.A. system.
Here's the rub: getting up at 6am is like getting up at 3am for me because even though I live geographically on Eastern Standard Time I live my life on Pacific Standard Time. It has to do with Trey's work and my life choices and a the smallest bit to do with my laziness.
All that to say, I am going to the farmer's market tomorrow morning and I'm getting there when it opens at 7. I'm going to go to the farmer's market (I know I just repeated myself. I'm trying to convince my own self of my seriousness about going to the farmer's market. At 7am.) and I'm going to pretend I'm in Provence, France. I'm going to buy flowers, a plant, some produce and hopefully the honey lady will be there. A different honey lady than last time, because the honey I bought from the other honey lady tasted like crushed up vitamins. I know this is probably due to my severely under developed palate. To a more refined connoisseur, it probably tasted like... crushed up vitamins. Ok, I'm not gonna give on that one. The lady sold me some seriously funk honey.
Anyway, I'm doing this partly because I really do wish I was waking up in the morning and going to a beautiful open air market in France. I somehow think I'd be more inspired to cook amazing things and make my life beautiful. I'm also doing this because sometimes when you've lived somewhere for a long time, you grow immune to the beauty that is right in front of you. So my little way of trying to see my own little world with new wonder and appreciation is to pretend I'm waking up in Provence. I will amble non-chalantly and say ooh la la just for authenticity. I understand this is weird.
But I'm committed. Or maybe I should be.
P.S. I'm waffling. And its only been one sentence since I said I was committed. I wonder if someone can wonder at beauty at the ungodly hour of 7am? Ok, before it becomes painfully obvious that the whole laziness thing is more than a small part of the reason I live my life on PST, I'm going to bed. Its only 9pm PST. I can do this. Provence, France saturday market, here I come.
P.S.S. Yep, I definitely should be committed.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Cooking Shows Need Subtitles
The thought has crossed my mind: maybe I just need to watch more cooking shows. That's what my foodie friends like doing. They really do this. for pleasure. I think its comforting to them to watch one of their own kind talking in their native language. Its comforting for them, I imagine, I assume, I conjecture, hearing someone talk about how effortless it is to blanch this, then saute that, throw in whatever you have on hand, add this "to taste"....
I need to stop here and say:
"to taste" is just...just...stressful. what does that mean? to what taste? mine? I don't trust mine. What is it supposed to taste like? Foodies taste something and then say oh...it needs a little more xyz. How in the hell do you know that? Is it a 6th sense I'm missing? Oh my god. It is. Well, that's depressing. If you know where they're selling those, let me know. I'd like one for Christmas. I want the recipe to say: "blah, blah, blah to taste (it should taste kind of salty...not quite as salty as a french fry but saltier than 50% less sodium campbell's split pea soup." I need things to be specific, people. I'm not comfortable feeling my way. I need hand holding. I need help. I'm going to jump off this downward spiral now. Where was I before I was blinded by rage against the stress inducing phrase: "to taste"?
Ah yes, food shows. I believe they should acknowledge they are speaking a foreign language and should, therefore, include subtitles for those of us who do not speak Foodie. Aside from this oversight, the thing that kills me about those shows is the whole "effortless" tone that drips from every casual wave of their hand, stir of their spoon and lightening fast chop of their beautiful knives. The toss this in, chat, chop that, chat, stir together, smile, act like they're just going for a stroll through a beautiful meadow picking fragrant wildflowers enjoying the sun's warmth on their glowing skin, confidently knowing all along that they are making something beautiful that one and all will enjoy. It just slays me.
This is not my experience. Cooking is a crucible, in which, I face uncertainty, stomach tightness, headache, irritability (and many other things listed as side effects in drug commercials). I spend half my time reading and re-reading the recipe and then looking up half the words and processes. Then I realize I don't have a certain ingredient and instead of saying effortlessly, "oh well, I'll just use a bit of this", I stop dead in my tracks and feel like I'm staring up at the 10 foot wall that needs scaling. Drill sargent children and my hungry stomach are screaming, "Scale that wall, soldier. Now! Now! The dinner's burning!" Doubt floods in. If I leave that out, will it ruin everything? If I add something else will it ruin everything? Then I've wasted all this food that's already committed itself to this !@$* recipe. And then I've wasted my little bit of money. And worse than that, I've wasted my time on that !@#$ trip to the grocery store. You can see how this can get a little wearing on a person.
It would make me feel better if there was a cooking show that ended with the host looking into the camera and saying (very slowly so that I can understand through the thick Foodie accent):
"you there, with the panic stricken face, the 3/4 empty bottle of wine, yes, you...the woman in the ill-equipped, teeny tiny, two feet of counter space kitchen who has just cooked while the phone was ringing, the texts were binging, the kids were waging civil war XXII, climbing over Mt. Laundry, to wade through the slog of the dirty dishwasher, all the while translating this foreign Foodie language....learning to cook when you're down the 6th sense and out of your element is work, but you can do it."
"Also, just for following along today, here's a little Foodie insider information: the Effortless Vibe is one aisle over from the 6th Sense, next to the Years of Experience and bottled Peace and Quiet. The Foodie Store takes payment in these forms: Relax Already!, Preparation and Practice. Warranties on our products are available for the low, low price of not taking yourself so seriously and seeing failing as creativity. See you back here tomorrow for some not so effortless cooking."
That would be my kind of cooking show.
I need to stop here and say:
"to taste" is just...just...stressful. what does that mean? to what taste? mine? I don't trust mine. What is it supposed to taste like? Foodies taste something and then say oh...it needs a little more xyz. How in the hell do you know that? Is it a 6th sense I'm missing? Oh my god. It is. Well, that's depressing. If you know where they're selling those, let me know. I'd like one for Christmas. I want the recipe to say: "blah, blah, blah to taste (it should taste kind of salty...not quite as salty as a french fry but saltier than 50% less sodium campbell's split pea soup." I need things to be specific, people. I'm not comfortable feeling my way. I need hand holding. I need help. I'm going to jump off this downward spiral now. Where was I before I was blinded by rage against the stress inducing phrase: "to taste"?
Ah yes, food shows. I believe they should acknowledge they are speaking a foreign language and should, therefore, include subtitles for those of us who do not speak Foodie. Aside from this oversight, the thing that kills me about those shows is the whole "effortless" tone that drips from every casual wave of their hand, stir of their spoon and lightening fast chop of their beautiful knives. The toss this in, chat, chop that, chat, stir together, smile, act like they're just going for a stroll through a beautiful meadow picking fragrant wildflowers enjoying the sun's warmth on their glowing skin, confidently knowing all along that they are making something beautiful that one and all will enjoy. It just slays me.
This is not my experience. Cooking is a crucible, in which, I face uncertainty, stomach tightness, headache, irritability (and many other things listed as side effects in drug commercials). I spend half my time reading and re-reading the recipe and then looking up half the words and processes. Then I realize I don't have a certain ingredient and instead of saying effortlessly, "oh well, I'll just use a bit of this", I stop dead in my tracks and feel like I'm staring up at the 10 foot wall that needs scaling. Drill sargent children and my hungry stomach are screaming, "Scale that wall, soldier. Now! Now! The dinner's burning!" Doubt floods in. If I leave that out, will it ruin everything? If I add something else will it ruin everything? Then I've wasted all this food that's already committed itself to this !@$* recipe. And then I've wasted my little bit of money. And worse than that, I've wasted my time on that !@#$ trip to the grocery store. You can see how this can get a little wearing on a person.
It would make me feel better if there was a cooking show that ended with the host looking into the camera and saying (very slowly so that I can understand through the thick Foodie accent):
"you there, with the panic stricken face, the 3/4 empty bottle of wine, yes, you...the woman in the ill-equipped, teeny tiny, two feet of counter space kitchen who has just cooked while the phone was ringing, the texts were binging, the kids were waging civil war XXII, climbing over Mt. Laundry, to wade through the slog of the dirty dishwasher, all the while translating this foreign Foodie language....learning to cook when you're down the 6th sense and out of your element is work, but you can do it."
"Also, just for following along today, here's a little Foodie insider information: the Effortless Vibe is one aisle over from the 6th Sense, next to the Years of Experience and bottled Peace and Quiet. The Foodie Store takes payment in these forms: Relax Already!, Preparation and Practice. Warranties on our products are available for the low, low price of not taking yourself so seriously and seeing failing as creativity. See you back here tomorrow for some not so effortless cooking."
That would be my kind of cooking show.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
a necessary rant
ok, you know what? I'm just really tired of being seriously intimidated by cooking. I'm sitting here drinking too cold merlot because it was that bad. It IS that bad.
I have a bad relationship with food. Not in the binge sort of way. Or the starve myself sort of way. More like the its an inconvenient necessity sort of way. I'm annoyed by food, the preparation of it, the time it takes out of my day, the sitting there eating it while everyone complains. Oh that gets me....
Anyway, I've been saying for a long time that I need to work through my cooking issues.
Cooking for me = griping, complaining, a bunch of unappreciated work, not having one ingredient, anxiety, way too much time, stress, interruptions, f-word inducing frustration, a lot of clean up, exhaustion.
My friend Adriana (who likes to cook) told me the other day, "you know what? The conditions you were under when you learned to cook would make cooking terrible for anyone." What do you mean, I say? "Well, you didn't know a thing. You got married and had a baby right away. No money and a million other stresses. That takes all the fun out of it." She learned to cook while she lived on her own. by herself. What in the world is that like? deep breath...
Anyway, so I think she's on to something, because I had an epiphany right then and there. What if I were to figure out all the things that stress me out about cooking and try to either eliminate them, overcome them or otherwise work around them?
A couple days after I talked with A, I came across a blog: Tongue in Cheek. It is absolutely beautiful. The woman blogs about her experiences living in France for the past twenty years. I was so inspired. In France, eating is dining and its a thing of beauty. I understand that culturally, Americans eat for fuel not for the pleasure of it. But maybe, I can aspire to the French way?
So tonight...armed with my new inspiration I decided to try to whip something up using what I had on hand. Something I hear foodies say they do all the time. I only have a few things on hand because I also hate to go to the grocery store.
Going to the grocery store = making a list, which means I have to make a menu, which stresses me out because coming up with one meal is bad enough, much less multiple meals..., taking 2 wonderful, but rowdy boys to the store, not being able to think, getting home and realizing that I forgot x number of things, which means I need to go back, losing the list that I wrote my menu on, not being able to remember what I just bought all this fricking food for because I'm so stressed out by the whole cooking thing that I completely blocked out the whole menu writing process so I have no idea what I'm supposed to make for dinner tonight. fishsticks again?
So tonight, I decided to make a frittata with sundried tomatoes, black olives and parmesan. I also decided to make latkes because I had potatoes and onions and Adriana had just showed me how to make them for Hanukkah.
That's when the panic set in. The boys aren't going to eat this. Shit. I can't deal with complaining at 8:00pm. But then, I caught myself. Wait. I think that sounds great. So, heckfire, I'm making it. That's when my brilliant plan came into my not so brilliant brain. I'll make fishsticks for the kids. I'll make the frittata for me. I'll make fishsticks and other icky bland, gross food (+ a vegetable, of course) for them every night. And I'll explore cooking for myself every night if it kills me dammit.
So, I acted on this brilliant plan. I threw the fishsticks into the oven and proceeded to grate cheese, pit olives and dried the tomatoes in the sun. I grate potatoes and onions. I add flour and corn meal just because that sounds like something a real foodie would do. Then reality struck. The mousetrap game is missing a piece. (Who made that flipping game? I want to ring their neck). There was fighting. The birthday lego airplane has been mysteriously destroyed, wailing ensues. Too much humming, more fighting. I can't even beat some eggs. And I say to myself, "this is why I don't cook. Right here." Really. How am I supposed to pay attention to what's on the stove when there's a riot in my living room? My visions of happily (fishstick fed) children playing happily while I casually stand by the stove drinking my red wine went up in the smoke of my now too hot vegetable oil in my iron skillet. What was I thinking?
I casted my face toward heaven and shed a little tear, growled my frustrations and decided right then and there (in a very Scarlett O'Hara fist shaking sort of way), that I will do this. Even if I have to feed my kids fishsticks every night and scream fiddlesticks because I'm really trying to cut back on the other f word, I will learn how to enjoy cooking. I don't envision myself becoming a card carrying foodie, but I do want to see food as more than an annoyance to be endured. I'd like to enjoy the pleasure of all the things that make a meal beautiful: preparing, cooking, savoring even if it means I spend all of my time failing forward.
Now that I've had my little rant, I'm going to enjoy the last bit of my wine that's finally at an acceptable temperature. Here's to my messy kitchen and the victory that tonight's failure is for me.
I have a bad relationship with food. Not in the binge sort of way. Or the starve myself sort of way. More like the its an inconvenient necessity sort of way. I'm annoyed by food, the preparation of it, the time it takes out of my day, the sitting there eating it while everyone complains. Oh that gets me....
Anyway, I've been saying for a long time that I need to work through my cooking issues.
Cooking for me = griping, complaining, a bunch of unappreciated work, not having one ingredient, anxiety, way too much time, stress, interruptions, f-word inducing frustration, a lot of clean up, exhaustion.
My friend Adriana (who likes to cook) told me the other day, "you know what? The conditions you were under when you learned to cook would make cooking terrible for anyone." What do you mean, I say? "Well, you didn't know a thing. You got married and had a baby right away. No money and a million other stresses. That takes all the fun out of it." She learned to cook while she lived on her own. by herself. What in the world is that like? deep breath...
Anyway, so I think she's on to something, because I had an epiphany right then and there. What if I were to figure out all the things that stress me out about cooking and try to either eliminate them, overcome them or otherwise work around them?
A couple days after I talked with A, I came across a blog: Tongue in Cheek. It is absolutely beautiful. The woman blogs about her experiences living in France for the past twenty years. I was so inspired. In France, eating is dining and its a thing of beauty. I understand that culturally, Americans eat for fuel not for the pleasure of it. But maybe, I can aspire to the French way?
So tonight...armed with my new inspiration I decided to try to whip something up using what I had on hand. Something I hear foodies say they do all the time. I only have a few things on hand because I also hate to go to the grocery store.
Going to the grocery store = making a list, which means I have to make a menu, which stresses me out because coming up with one meal is bad enough, much less multiple meals..., taking 2 wonderful, but rowdy boys to the store, not being able to think, getting home and realizing that I forgot x number of things, which means I need to go back, losing the list that I wrote my menu on, not being able to remember what I just bought all this fricking food for because I'm so stressed out by the whole cooking thing that I completely blocked out the whole menu writing process so I have no idea what I'm supposed to make for dinner tonight. fishsticks again?
So tonight, I decided to make a frittata with sundried tomatoes, black olives and parmesan. I also decided to make latkes because I had potatoes and onions and Adriana had just showed me how to make them for Hanukkah.
That's when the panic set in. The boys aren't going to eat this. Shit. I can't deal with complaining at 8:00pm. But then, I caught myself. Wait. I think that sounds great. So, heckfire, I'm making it. That's when my brilliant plan came into my not so brilliant brain. I'll make fishsticks for the kids. I'll make the frittata for me. I'll make fishsticks and other icky bland, gross food (+ a vegetable, of course) for them every night. And I'll explore cooking for myself every night if it kills me dammit.
So, I acted on this brilliant plan. I threw the fishsticks into the oven and proceeded to grate cheese, pit olives and dried the tomatoes in the sun. I grate potatoes and onions. I add flour and corn meal just because that sounds like something a real foodie would do. Then reality struck. The mousetrap game is missing a piece. (Who made that flipping game? I want to ring their neck). There was fighting. The birthday lego airplane has been mysteriously destroyed, wailing ensues. Too much humming, more fighting. I can't even beat some eggs. And I say to myself, "this is why I don't cook. Right here." Really. How am I supposed to pay attention to what's on the stove when there's a riot in my living room? My visions of happily (fishstick fed) children playing happily while I casually stand by the stove drinking my red wine went up in the smoke of my now too hot vegetable oil in my iron skillet. What was I thinking?
I casted my face toward heaven and shed a little tear, growled my frustrations and decided right then and there (in a very Scarlett O'Hara fist shaking sort of way), that I will do this. Even if I have to feed my kids fishsticks every night and scream fiddlesticks because I'm really trying to cut back on the other f word, I will learn how to enjoy cooking. I don't envision myself becoming a card carrying foodie, but I do want to see food as more than an annoyance to be endured. I'd like to enjoy the pleasure of all the things that make a meal beautiful: preparing, cooking, savoring even if it means I spend all of my time failing forward.
Now that I've had my little rant, I'm going to enjoy the last bit of my wine that's finally at an acceptable temperature. Here's to my messy kitchen and the victory that tonight's failure is for me.
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