Here’s Remy, who is a big weirdo. Look at those mutant feet of his.
Here’s Remy and Rosa, in the windows. This week is the first time we’ve been able to keep windows open consistently since last autumn.
This is Daisy, my mother’s cat. She lives a life of quiet feline dignity.
It’s not all cats! Here’s Carla, being dignified:
Here’s Carla not being dignified:
How about food?
This chocolate bar was awesome. If you love those Ferrero Rocher candies, this is for you–especially if you can’t have the Rochers anymore because they contain gluten. This includes The Wife! Ferrero Rochers were one of her favorite candies ever. This is that exact flavor, minus the crispy interior that’s likely from the gluten.
Last week, I broadened my horizons: for the first time, I made tempura:
This was my recipe. It turned out really good! Everything was wonderfully crispy and flavorful. If you haven’t had tempura, it’s a Japanese batter that is used for dipping and deep-frying vegetables and seafood. I did cubes of cod, shrimp, onions, asparagus (between this and grilling, I may well be a new asparagus fan!), and small peppers. The batter is made of rice flour and uses carbonated water for moisture, and the result is a very light and crispy batter that in some places is almost translucent…and yet, it’s there. This was a terrific meal. As they say on The Repair Shop, “Brilliant! I’m quite happy with that!”
And finally, drink. Specifically, rum punch!
As for tonight? The weather has been gorgeous–even a cold-lover like myself feels the wonder in the return of warm days when they finally arrive–and tonight I’m firing up the grill for the first time. Steak and shrimp, here we come!
If bay leaf didn’t exist, would anyone miss it? I’ve never tasted anything and thought, This stew is just crying out for bay leaf. But I keep buying and using it nonetheless.
So I shared the quote.
A few laughed, but I should have checked the comments to the post before commenting, because wow, are there ever a lot of people out there who are huge fans of bay leaf. I mean, there are people in the comments insisting that they put bay leaf in everything and that it’s the most wonderful spice and nobody who writes cookbooks should be allowed to speak the least bit ill of bay leaf.
…I am a long-time chef and love bay leaves, especially in long-simmered winter-type dishes, and honestly, I have never run into a bay leaf that was flavorless and non-performing. I think this humor was written for people who are aware of kitchen spice cabinets only superficially. Maybe they run into this problem bc they never use their spices!
…I use bay leaves every time I boil potatoes. Everytime I make stock, I add it every where I put herbs.
…I use bay leaf in almost all savory soups, stews and stocks. And I pick them from my bay trees….
…It’s not about the taste. It is a known anxiety and stress revealer. The essence of it in a dish, adds love to it and a feeling of well being.
Cultures all over the world have been using bay leaves for thousands of years so there’s got to be something to it.
I think it must be a “refined foodie” thing, because I like to think I have decent taste and I love good, well-prepared food, but in all honesty, I agree completely with the quote above. Never, not once, have I made a dish and thought later, “This would have been very much improved by the addition of a bay leaf or two while cooking.” People tell me I’m wrong, but I’ve reached the tender age of 51 without being able to tell the difference from a stew with bay leaf and one without, so I’m going to continue not using it. If that means I have an inferior palate, well, I suppose I’ll have to live with my other strengths. To me, being able to taste bay leaf is like being able to claim, when sipping wine, that one tastes the hint of elderberry on the nose, delicate chocolate notes, and the lingering scent of the August honeysuckle on the finish.
The comments do amuse me, though. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, since it is the Internet and all, but it honestly didn’t occur to me to think that there are people who really think that bay leaf is a kitchen necessity. I’m not even sure if I have any bay leaf on hand right now, but I sure did discover a community that apparently thinks that Samin Nosrat’s brilliant cookbook from a couple years ago should be amended and retitled: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Bay Leaf.
I posted a version of this on Facebook earlier and then deleted it when it annoyed someone over there, but it’s stuck in my head, so here it is.
Food is a major topic in my reading and teevee watching. We watch a lot of cooking shows, and I read a lot of books about food, going beyond cookbooks. Reading about food is often a great backdoor way to learn about other cultures, about history, about people, and more. Everybody eats, right?
But I do have one big pet-peeve that annoys me every time I see it in food writing or in food commentary. That peeve is use of the word inedibleto mean “I don’t like this food.”
The most recent example of this, which I saw online earlier, is a chef/restaurateur named David Chang, who is apparently the guy behind the Momofuku chain of restaurants. I’ve heard of Momofuku, and I’ve likely seen Chef Chang at some point on teevee–he has to have shown up on the Food Network or as a guest judge on MasterChef, I would assume. Aside from that, I know nothing about the man, but I saw a link on Facebook to an article where he apparently voiced his negative opinion of the rotisserie chickens at Costco.
Now, I do not have a specific dog in that fight. As admitted, I know nothing about Chef Chang, and I have never tasted a Costco chicken. (As of this writing the Buffalo area still doesn’t even have a Costco, and while one is coming, it will be in the terrible stretch of Niagara Falls Blvd. in Amherst to which we never go.) I have no idea if the chickens are great or not. That’s not the point.
What bugged me is that apparently Chef Chang couldn’t just talk about them being not to his liking, or why he thinks their preparation is lacking, or what errors he thinks Costco makes with the seasoning. Apparently he had to refer to the chickens as inedible.
I have to be honest here: I find that use of inedible really lazy and annoying. There is nothing about those chickens that is “inedible”, unless Chef Chang has some allergy. Whenever a “foodie” uses the word inediblein this way, what I hear is, “My personal palate is so advanced that I cannot bring myself to even swallow this food, and if you can, there is something wrong with you.”
This use of inediblereminds me of an old schtick from the early seasons of Hell’s Kitchen. We still watch this show, even as it’s become really repetitive to the point of being paint-by-numbers. Each season begins with the contestants all being tasked with cooking their “signature dish” for Gordon Ramsay to taste, and he goes through the batch judging each dish and assigning points to the two teams. He’ll say something like “That filet is very well-done, good seasoning, nice job”, or, on the flip side, “The fish is well-cooked, but the puree is bland, too bad.”
Back when the show started, though, Ramsay would have, shall we say, much more dramatic reaction if he didn’t like the dish: He’d take a bite, chew it, then he’d fake gagging, grab a trash can, and do a dramatic rendition of someone vomiting. It was always pretty obvious that he wasn’t actually sickened by the food, and this act has vanished from the show.
That, to me, is the equivalent what calling food inediblejust because you don’t like it.
Pizza Hut Pan Pizza is inedible to The Wife, because she’s celiac and it would make her sick. Hemlock is inedible to me and chocolate is inedible to Carla, because those things are poisonous to humans and dogs, respectively. But as much as I hate the stuff, broccoli is not inedible to me.
So, foodies of the world, stop referring to food you dislike as inedible. There are lots of words you can use instead. Yes, maybe this annoys me more than it should, but that’s what a pet-peeve is, right?
For Christmas 1990, a friend of the family gave me…a toaster oven. I was in college, and this was a gift that had never once been on my radar as something I wanted or needed. But off to college it went, whereupon my room-mate at the time saw it. This exchange, or something like it, happened:
HE: A toaster oven? ME: Yup. HE: We have a toaster oven? ME: Yup. HE: Did we need a toaster oven? ME: Maybe? I mean, we can make toast now. HE: Is that something we’ve been missing until now? ME: Maybe it’s one of those things we didn’t know we were missing? HE: Huh….
Anyway, we set up the toaster oven. I don’t recall how much we used it at the time, in our dorm room (given we were college students, probably small cheap frozen pizzas), but it did become more useful the next year when we were living in a rented off-campus house.
That toaster oven lived through college, and then…it kept on going. And going. And going. It stopped serving that roommate and I, and eventually served The Girlfriend when she moved out to Western New York, and it served us both again when we got married and she became The Wife.
And this morning there it was, that old toaster oven, still in our kitchen. I made toast in it just this morning.
But…this is the last day for that old toaster oven. Thirty-two years of a toaster oven. I’d say I got our old family friend’s money’s worth out of that toaster oven.
Now, why is it the last day for that toaster oven? Well, we’re upgrading. What to? Well…that’ll be a post for later this week, I hope!
(oooh, wait! A random memory of my grandmother’s toaster. I don’t know if it was specifically a toaster oven, but it looked like one. When you went to open it to put bread in it, the wire rack would actually slide out at you, and when the toast was done the door would open and the wire rack would pop out to give you your toast. That, for six-year-old me, was magic. A lot cooler than those boring toasters where you drop your bread in through the top….)
As a former Pizza Hut employee who spent four consecutive Halloweens becoming a nervous wreck driving pizza deliveries around town, please allow me to appeal to your humanity on this matter:
DO NOT ORDER PIZZA DELIVERY TONIGHT!!!
Seriously. Just don’t.
Halloween is a terrible night for pizza drivers. It’s a nerve-wracking night to be driving, with many children and families walking around in low-visibility situations. If you want pizza for an easy dinner, please order takeout early and grab it on your way home.
If you just have to order delivery, please take the drivers’ safety concerns into account and lower your expectations as far as delivery times go. Don’t give them shit about how it took 45 minutes, and tip them well. (You should tip them well anyway, but tip them even more tonight.)
And if you’re ordering delivery but you’re not giving out candy so you’ve got your light turned off so that the driver has to try to figure out which house is yours while they’re trying to not hit small children…well, that’s just being a straight-up jerk. Don’t be this person.
Look, folks, Halloween is why God invented frozen pizza, and we’re doing amazing things in the frozen pizza department these days. (Seriously! Try one of these. Or one of these! You’ll be happy you did!) Just get one of those and leave the overworked delivery folks out of it.
With the arrival of cooler weather comes the appetite for hearty crock-pot dishes, and a favorite of ours is good old chili! As I write this, the chili is crockpotting away in the kitchen; as you read this, we’ve already eaten a bit of it. With some cornbread!
(I’ll have to supplement this with a white-chicken-chili recipe I’ve found, next time I make it. And I also want to do Cincinnati Chili sometime this year, which I love and haven’t made in years.)
And now, the post:
I saw this pic on someone’s Instagram story last week and it made me laugh, because when it comes to food, I think I may be part-Southerner, in a lot of ways.
I have no idea whose IG account this is from! If you recognize it, let me know and I’ll credit!
The first pot of chili of the season is a big deal for me! I love chili. I love making it. I love how easy it is to make. I love how versatile chili is in the way you serve it. You can do so much with the leftovers over and above eating re-heated bowls of chili for the next four days. So yes, as a Northerner*, I get it!
Now, I make no claim that my way of making chili is “authentic” or “definitive”. Chili is like pizza or sandwiches: subject to enormous variety in how it’s made, from ingredients to flavor profile to cooking techniques used. I don’t even make one kind of chili! I have a recipe that I recently found to my liking (after trying several over the last few years) for White Chicken Chili, and I also love Cincinnati Chili, which is its own thing entirely, being at its root more of a thick chili-like meat sauce with Middle Eastern flavors enhancing sweetness rather than spiciness.
By way of some food history, here’s an excerpt from what Jeff Smith**, the “Frugal Gourmet”, wrote about chili in his cookbook The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American:
Most Americans think that the wonderful rich, beefy, and beany dish that we call chili came from some other culture. Mexico, perhaps, or Spain. Not so. I am afraid that both Mexico and Spain refuse to have anything to do with what we call good old American chili. One Mexican cookbook even goes so far as to scornfully describe chili as “A detestable food with a false Mexican name sold in the United States from Texas to New York City.” Hey, watch that! The rest of the country loves chili, too!
The original dish is truly American, though I have found that a lot of Americans in different locales think that it was invented in their backyard. After much research (two days) I have come to the following unquestionable decision. Chili was invented in San Antonio, Texas, in 1840. It was a blend of dried beef, beef fat, chili powder and spices, and salt. It was pressed into a brick and it was so potent that it would not spoil quickly. It was then taken by the prospectors to the California gold fields. There it could be reconstituted with water and cooked with beans. It was very much like the pemmican that had been used in earlier times but with spices added….
San Antonio has the distinct privilege in history of laying claim to “Chili Queens”. These ladies had little carts and tables and would appear late in the evening and sell chili and whatnot…I expect more whatnot was sold than chili. They were forced to close down in 1943 due to city health regulations of some sort…mostly sort.
I would have thought that all of Texas would have been involved in wonderful chili. But in 1890, when chili arrived in McKinney, a town just north of Dallas, all blazes broke loose. It seems that some wayward ministers claimed that chili was “the soup of the devil–food as hot as hell’s brimstone.” I wonder if these clergy ever bothered to taste a good pot of chili.
Well, isn’t that to be expected. Show me something, anything, being enjoyed by someone, and I’ll show you some tight-assed cleric who thinks it’s evil or the Devil’s work or some bullshit.
Anyway, I fully expect that most of you have your own method for making chili. I don’t say “recipe”, because I honestly believe that one should have a basic chili method that is so ingrained that the idea of referring to a recipe is simply nonsensical. Here is mine. Now, while I note above that I do make other kinds of chili, this is what I make when I simply say that I’m going to make “a pot of chili”.
This is a dish for the crockpot. We own two; for this I use our smaller one. I have no idea what the size is in terms of quarts. Into the crockpot (spray it first with cooking spray!) go the following:
1 can crushed tomatoes (28oz)
1 can diced tomatoes (15oz)
1 can black beans (rinsed)
1 can dark red kidney beans (rinsed)
1 can “chili” beans in sauce (not rinsed; I like Bush’s)
Half (or so) of one bottle of commercial chili sauce (I buy my store brand)
Hot sauce. No idea the measurement. I pour a bunch in and taste it. This is how hot sauce should always be used in recipes. If a recipe specifies an amount of hot sauce, ignore it.
I try to buy the “No salt added” versions of those first four canned ingredients, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
Here’s what all this looks like, if you want to see a picture of a crockpot full of cans of stuff that’s red:
Chili stuff. In the crockpot.
Obviously you can use a can of whole tomatoes, if you like your tomatoes in bigger chunks, and obviously you can change up the beans. I like a blend of beans and I like a lot of beans in my chili.
Meanwhile, into the frying pan goes:
1 onion, diced
However much garlic seems reasonable, and then double that
1 lb ground meat
Several tablespoons chili powder
(Sometimes I add 1 bell pepper, diced, if I have it on hand. Today I do not.)
Well…hold on. That all doesn’t go in at once. Heat up the pan, then add a few tablespoons oil and then the aromatic veggies. (Add the oil to the hot pan. As long as we’re talking about the Frugal Gourmet, remember his rule: “Hot pan, cold oil, foods won’t stick.” This actually works.) I like to saute the onion, garlic, and optional bell pepper on a high heat for a minute, and then reduce the heat to medium to sweat the veggies for a few additional minutes before I add in the ground meat.
Now: what ground meat to use? Sure, you can use ground beef or pork or whatever, but I prefer hot (or spicy) pork breakfast sausage (Bob Evans is a fine brand, and I’m not just saying that because The Wife and I both worked for Bob Evans at points in our lives), because you get more flavor this way. Remember Alton Brown’s commandment for stews: Never miss an opportunity to add flavor! Get it in there and start breaking it up with your spatula, splitting the chunks up as you go. Oh, and a minute or so after the meat’s in there and has started browning? Dump in the chili powder. A lot of it. The color of the stuff in the pan should noticeably change.
I generally stop breaking up my meat chunks when they’re about the size of a marble, because I like the meat in my chili to be in large pieces. (I’ve even done chili with stew beef, which is quite tasty. If you do that, flour and brown the meat before anything else, then set aside and re-introduce to the pan after you’ve sweated the aromatics.)
Here’s what the action in the frying pan looks like:
The frying pan part of making chili. And really, why don’t chefs wear overalls? I always wonder this. They’re perfect attire for cooking: protective, lots of pockets for stuff, and you can even hang a towel from the hammer loop.
Then what? Well, it’s obvious: Put the frying pan stuff in the crockpot with the rest of the stuff.
Into the pot!Stir! Stir! Stir! (Actually, you don’t have to get super-aggressive about mixing the stuff up. Just a few gentle folding stirs should do it.)
Stir it up, lid it up, set the pot on low for, I dunno, six or seven hours. I like to crank it to high in the last hour, but that’s just me. The Wife makes fun of me for this (“How can I tell you if I like it? You served me a bowl of molten lava!”), but I’ve seen her send back way too many bowls of soup in restaurants for not being hot enough, and I am not making that mistake. Top it with cheese, or not. Sour cream, or not. Guacamole, or not. Chili is the pizza of stuff-that-comes-in-bowls, when it comes to versatility. (Stay in your lane, pizza! I don’t care if Steve Martin’s first movie The Jerk has a joke about the local “Pizza In A Cup” place.)
I’m writing this post, by the way, while we’re still two hours out from eating, so I don’t have a picture of a bowl of chili yet. Stay tuned. My stuff works great for chili dogs, though! And poured atop a bed of Fritos! And though I’ve never tried it, I always think it would taste good as an omelet filling.
And that’s how I make chili. Believe me, folks: a crockpot filling the house with wonderful aromas, be it chili or something else (the natives are already starting to clamor for Mississippi Roast!), is one of the finer pleasures that the autumnal time of year can give.
* By “Northerner”, do we mean anyone north of the Mason-Dixon line, or more along the lines of the Northeast? Because Buffalo is more a Great Lakes area. That’s a thought for another time, I suppose.
** Yes, I know. But I still own his books, I learned a whole damned lot about cooking from his books and his shows, and he’s been dead for years. I grant that he was a problematic sumbitch and will not litigate it here.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this last year, a lot of the old Frugal Gourmet shows have turned up on YouTube. This is always an ephemeral thing, but I also can’t entirely fathom anyone making this big of a copyright stink over forty-year-old cooking shows featuring a guy whose career was ended by a ghastly scandal. Here’s the episode on chili. (And yes, I’ve watched a bunch of his old episodes. His episode on Philadelphia has me planning on making pepper pot soup sometime this winter, once I get myself to an actual butcher shop and buy some tripe.)
I don’t entirely understand what Coca-Cola is doing with these new “weird” Coke flavors, but I will admit that I genuinely like this one.
That’s the current version. I don’t know if it tasted like a “dreamworld” or not, and like the others it’s hard to actually describe the flavor. This one tastes, to me, like someone dissolved a pack of Smarties candy in the Coke. I know that is probably not a terribly enticing way to describe this stuff, but…yes, I like it. Quite a bit, actually. The last couple flavors I enjoyed through single bottles purchased here and there, but the Dreamworld stuff? I bought a ten-pack of the little cans. And I might get another!
Oh, and I’ve decided that the little cans, the 7.5oz ones, are my preference for this sort of thing. I don’t really need 20oz of cola, or even 12 anymore. Seven-point-five is the perfect amount for me to scratch this itch, when I feel like a cola. (I’m also firmly a fan of the “zero sugar” sodas that are coming along now. Many of them are almost indistinguishable from the full-sugar sodas, and that can only be a good thing. I’ve cut down my soda consumption anyway; the major portion of my carbonization intake now comes from sparkling water.)
It’s Monday! And as promised, The Wife and I are back from our too-brief (aren’t they all?) weekend getaway. After the general shit-show that was Summer 2022 for us, we really needed a nice getaway. And that’s exactly what we had. The focus was the Ithaca Apple Festival, with a few stops here and there along the way.
I really love Ithaca. It’s by far my favorite place in New York State thus far in my life.
I always plan on taking a lot more photos in Ithaca than I do! It’s weird, really. I just get caught up in people-watching and looking at all the wonderful stuff that I don’t get my phone or my camera out much.
Now, Taughannock Falls? That’s where I take a bunch of pictures. Here are a few from this year.
Lots of raptors on the wing at the falls. I assume these are turkey vultures, which are amazing to watch in themselves in places with high cliffs, like here and at Letchworth.A lovely couple! Hopefully next year we can walk the ravine trail below and finally see the falls from below. The Wife’s surgically-repaired ankle isn’t quite up to that yet, but we’ll get there!
We stop at Taughannock Falls every year. It just doesn’t seem right to visit Ithaca without stopping here. There’s something about all the streams and water and waterfalls and rocky gorges and deep verdant forests in this region that add up to it being my spiritual home.
Starting now, of course, there’s also a bittersweet quality to this place. We brought Cane here several times, while on our winter winery trip. I’d like to think that he had some hand in making this year’s visit almost perfect, with the beginnings of the autumnal crisp in the air and the perfect golden light.
We also stopped at a winery that had a great view! The wines weren’t to our taste, but the view sure was. (Nothing wrong with their wine; they specialize in dry wines, and we generally prefer the other end of that spectrum, being more into fruity and vibrant and sometimes outright sweet.)
Part of the magic of the Finger Lakes is that from atop the ridges you can see for miles and miles, and in many spots you can’t see the deep lake that lies between you and there.
On Sunday we set out for home, with a couple stops along the way, including the Barnes&Noble in Pittsford. This is the most beautiful B&N that I have ever seen:
What a store! An employee asked me at one point if I needed help finding anything, and I laughed and replied, “No, I need help NOT finding things!” Good thing I only go to this store once a year, really.
Of course, we ate very well on this little trip. We always plan our meals, partly because when we’re traveling we want to eat well, but also because The Wife is celiac which always requires some extra planning. Luckily we’ve found a bunch of places all throughout the region that have gluten-free offerings…though sadly, one of our favorites, is closing for good in a few weeks. Ithaca’s Waffle Frolic has been a beloved stop of ours for almost as long as we’ve been going to Ithaca at all, but the owners have decided to move on. We’ll find other options, but a special shout-out to all the times we stopped there for fried chicken and waffles! I remember when I first heard of that combo and thought it was the weirdest thing ever, until we tried it at Waffle Frolic and…suddenly, we got it.
I think this winter I’m going to have to figure out my own version of it.
I won’t subject you to pictures of all the food we had, but just a couple things:
That’s a Cuban sandwich from the Broadway Deli right here in Lancaster, NY. We love to start our road-trips east with a stop here for lunch, before we exit the 716. They have a wonderful sandwich menu, and yet somehow they’re never mentioned in local “Best Sandwich in Buffalo” rankings! They’ve got my vote, though.
We also love getting breakfast on Sunday morning at a place in Pittsford called Simply Crepes. (There are several locations around Greater Rochester, by the way.) They have a terrific menu, lots of GF options, and…well, if you’re looking for hearty-and-filling-and-not-exactly-healthy in your breakfast (and you absolutely should look for those things in a breakfast, maybe not all the time, but once in a while), you should look no farther. Here is my “Crepe Madame”, a crepe loaded with cheese and ham and smothered with white sauce and topped with a fried egg and served with two pools of bacon jam:
Ate this around 10am. I was not hungry again until dinner.
I really love places like Simply Crepes. There’s something about local breakfast joints (they’re not just a breakfast joint, to be fair), the kind of place where you go on a cold fall morning to cup your hands around the coffee mug before the food comes. It’s the kind of place that fills up first with kind-of bleary-eyed people mostly clad in soft flannels and their hair in messy buns, the kind of crowd that you can watch wake up as they drink their coffee and eat their breakfasts. The mood shifts later on, once the post-church “Sunday Best” people start showing up. The new mood then isn’t bad, per se, but it’s more formal and less patient.
Simply Crepes, Pittsford, NY.
Simply Crepes is located in Schoen Place in Pittsford, which is an old industry and trade center right on the Erie Canal. I imagine barges laden with goods used to arrive here, or empty barges arrived to be laden with goods; there’s a grain elevator down the street that has been converted to office space. The area has a terrific vibe that I think Buffalo is trying to capture with its inner harbor area.
Coffee in glass mugs.
I think that my favorite New York region, after the Finger Lakes and Buffalo Niagara, is the Erie Canal corridor and the old rail corridor that runs sometimes alongside the Canal and at other times ten to twenty miles south of it. All those old towns along the Canal and the once great railroads have such wonderful age and character to them, with a sense of weathered history connecting all of it. You can see plainly that in a lot of these towns the boom-times are long over, but you can also see that the people still there are working hard to keep their towns stubbornly alive. Yes, there are a lot of empty buildings in states of decay, but there are also lots of said old buildings with obvious work going on and “Coming Soon!” signs in the windows, announcing new businesses. There are a lot of people who are unwilling to give up on New York, and I salute them, each and every one.
Let’s see, what else? I got a little writing done this weekend, in the hotel room. Not much, but a little. As long as the words keep trickling, it’s fine.
Also, it was a great weekend for my new fashion concept of the last year or two, the “Renfest Cottagecore” thing I’ve been working on.
There were a lot of people in Ithaca wearing overalls, so I can honestly say that they’re finally back! Their banishment during the 2000s and quite a bit of the 10s made for a “lonely soldier assigned to a solitary remote outpost” feel for me during a lot of that period. I hope they stick around now that they’ve recovered from their banishment during that mostly-ugly era of form-fitting, show-every-curve period of fashion that was really pretty unpleasant.
At the bookstore. Maybe a future author pic!
The Universe actually gave me some direct confirmation of my fashion concept yesterday: an employee at Trader Joe’s complimented my shirt, and then, half an hour later, an employee at Barnes&Noble said, “I love your overalls!”
It’s the little things, isn’t it?
Anyway, we’re home now. I’m not back to work for a few days–I always make my autumn vacation a good long one–but we’re home. Back to a bit of normal life, some of which we actually missed. Which things would those be? Well….
Anybody know where this shit came from? Because it’s dumb.
Back in my college days, our musical groups all had their own odd quirks and traditions. One of the Wartburg Choir’s stranger ones (I do not know if they still do this) was that when they were traveling as a group someplace and they were eating or having some kind of fellowship time, usually in a church’s fellowship hall, if any choir member spotted another with one or both elbows on the table, they’d shout something like “Hey [Name], get your elbows off the table!” and then the offending party would have to get up and walk around the entire perimeter of the room while the choir sang some goofy song about elbows on the table. (I’m not getting the particulars exactly, but it’s been 30 years and I was only present for this weird practice two or three times. And no, it was never me being called out.)
I was thinking about this yesterday while we were eating at 110 Grill in Henrietta, NY. (Yes, we road-tripped 80 miles to Henrietta just to eat at that restaurant, because their food is good and they have a big assortment of gluten-free options for The Wife. You do what you have to do when you have certain appetites and a food allergy that makes them difficult to indulge.) I ordered the fish tacos, which were (a) really delicious, and (b) really messy. The best way to manage this was to either eat them with the knife and fork (which looks absurd–I mean, really, who the hell uses knife and fork for tacos?!), or to eat them by hand and lean way over the plate while doing so. Obviously, I took option B, but I found that to comfortably assume that stance, it was frankly easiest to plant my elbows right on the table.
And this whole “No elbows on the table!” thing is so ingrained that I was feeling self-conscious about it the whole time I was eating. Yes, I was sitting in a public restaurant wearing a poofy Renaissance-faire shirt under a pair of vintage Hickory-striped overalls, and the thing that I was self-conscious about was my elbows on the table. What a dumb rule.
