June 2006 Archives

Directions:

Start with two Fla-Vor-Ices (or any generic freezey pop). Go ahead, mix colors!

Empty into cup:

The deliciousness is already in bloom!

Oh, now we're getting going:

Add about two glug glugs.

Swirl and enjoy!

No seriously, I think it's melted away in the summer heat. I can't concentrate on anything other than baking or hot dog competitions right now. I am also working on a secret art project with Abby, J, and Krista related to said competitions. I'll reveal all that later on, but for now you can get excited. No really, go right ahead, I'll wait.

We should all stop a minute and give a moment's silence for the death of Not Too Shabby, one of my favorite blogs, blogged by one of my favorite people. Unfortunately, real life steps in the way of your creative endeavours sometimes and you are forced to give up, however reluctantly, things you love. It's a good thing for us that Abby also loves to cook and be a hot roller chick, so that we can still enjoy her online. I mean, Abby's pretty fabulous in person, but I love having a dose of my friends accessible to me during the day. It's like a mini-party whenever you want! Plus, who doesn't like herb biscuits and hot roller chicks and their carnage? No one. (Get better soon, Nora!)

I've been home a lot recently, due to all the office construction and summer hours and all. It hasn't really been like the vacation I would have imagined for myself. I've spent a lot of time with the cats. Who are way too busy with their own routines during the day to pay me much mind.

Max takes a meeting.

Pinky closes a lucrative deal.

I've also eaten approximately 7,052 popsicles. DON'T YOU WANT MY LIFE? If you didn't already, this last story will surely be the turning point. On my way home from work, as I was about a block away from home, I came upon a person lying on the sidewalk. This being New York, that isn't so unusual. But he was kinda young and it was in a residential neighborhood, right outside a house. I kept walking past, as people do in New York. But then I got that horrible "This is some sort of Dateline Special Report hidden camera thing" feeling (otherwise known as a "conscience" in non-television terms). I called J, explained the situation and had the following conversation as I reached home:

Liz: Should I call the police? Man, why am I always calling the police here!
J: Mmm, I don't know. It's hard to tell if it's an emergency or a 311 situation.
Liz: Yeah, I know.
J: Did you try poking him with a stick?
Liz: No, I thought I wouldn't try that so much.
J: Maybe you should just poke him with a stick.
Liz: Yeeeah, I don't think that's going to happen.
J: Are you sure? This might be your only chance to genuinely poke someone with a stick.
Liz: There were some guys standing down the street. Maybe I'll see if they know him.
J: Maybe he's just playing around.
Liz: Yeah, but he was all in the sun and there were flies around his head.
J: FLIES? You should call the police.

But I decided to go back and check before I did that, and he was no longer there. Oh well, I guess EVERY Friday night can't start with a dead body.

I know I just wrote that whole post about shoo fly pie, but it looks like a hitch has screwed up our plans to get to Lancaster. Or several hitches actually, involving my underestimation of how long the drive is and how early the car rental place opens, and how far away Krista's PA relatives live, in addition to several other factors. I feel really guilty about not going, since everyone else who is going seemed really excited and encouraging, but I'm not sure what else we can do. I can't believe I spent a month perfecting a pie recipe I'll never make again. Jennie felt bad and wrote to me that we'd have our own pie contest. "But with good pies," she added. So, I'm bummed. Luckily, Dave will be there to capture the pies in all their glory. All these events need a good blogger!

There's a brownstone in Park Slope that always decorates for the holidays with giant blow-up toys in the front lawn. The usual holidays are represented: Christmas, Easter, Halloween. But they also go all out for St. Patrick's Day, Valentine's Day, the 4th of July. Everything. They probably have a bare lawn less often than a decorated one. A bunch of us were walking by the brownstone a few days ago and from far away it looked like they had a bear or something dressed up in black. "Huh," I thought, "A graduation bear?" But as we got closer, it became very clear that it wasn't a cap and gown I was seeing, but a little leather jacket and hat. On a giant plush pig. With a pride necklace. Who would've guessed that the cheesy decoration house was also a gay pride house? I kinda love it.

We're back in the office, but the renovations aren't so much done. Which means I'm doing a lot of work over loud hammering and sawing. Tomorrow they are sanding drywall and I can't tell you how excited this makes me. We still have some medical masks leftover from the anthrax scare, and my boss only half jokingly offered them up for us to use. Anyway, the whole operation, with filing cabinets being out of place and weird things piled on my desk, has made me feel very disjointed and like I can't concentrate on things like, say, blog entries very well. I also can't watch hilarious videos like this one.

Okay, this shouldn't be as funny as it is. Someone actually gets hurt here. But, um, listen to the ow sounds. And notice that the reporter does a little cheat stomp right at the end, which contributes to her getting hurt. Now watch it one more time. Oh, it's so wrong but SO FUNNY.

So, I've always wanted to enter a baking competition. Watching the Food Network religiously and the contests they air like I do, there's always the feeling that if only I had known about a particular one, I could have entered and won. It's a delusional thought. I'm decent at cooking and I have a few things I do particularly well. But the way I feel about winning these competitions is the same way J feels about the fact that he believes he could do open heart surgery if someone coached him through it. Or the way curling or synchronized swimming look easy.

Anyway.

It just so happens that I'm going to be at an event that has a baking competition and I found out about this a couple of months in advance, giving me plenty of time to prepare. I registered for the contest and started my research right away. There were a couple challenges that presented themselves straight away. The baking contest was for shoo fly pie, a dessert I'd never a) made, b) tasted, or c) heard of. But how hard could heart surgery really be?

Shoo fly pie, for the un-Pennsylvania Dutch among us, is basically a molasses pie with a crumb topping. The crumbs fuse with the filling to make a sort of cakey layer in the middle. It got it's name because it was the type of sweet pie that, when cooled on a windowsill, attracted flies and prompted the shooing of said flies. On the surface, the recipes I found were very similar to one another. Some have more or less molasses or sugar, or may use Crisco instead of butter, or whatever, but generally they all looked similar. I decided to start by using the recipe of last year's winner.

In 7th grade home ec class, we did an exercise in reading directions, where the teacher gave us a several pages of directions and told us to read them all carefully, then follow all of them; the first one to complete them all won some sort of prize. Of course the list was full of things like, "Do jumping jacks" and "stand on your chair," the last of which was, "Ignore all previous directions and sit quietly with hands folded." And of course the room was full of eager, prize-hungry kids climbing all over each other and balancing pencils on their noses. The moral being: read to the end of the recipe. Here's the winner's recipe:

Line a 9-inch pan with pastry. Combine golden barrel molasses, water and baking soda. Set aside. Sift together flour and sugar. Add the shortening to the flour mixture, work with a pastry blender to form crumbs for the top of the pie. Combine the flour mixture to the molasses mix. Stir. Pour into the unbaked pie shell. Top with remaining crumbs and bake at 375 degrees for 40-45 minutes.

If you're new to this, as I was, and was trying to make two recipes at once for the first time, you might do something stupid like, oh say, follow the directions verbatim. In particular: "Combine the flour mixture to the molasses mix." So when you get to the "Top with remaining crumbs," you are likely to go, "WHAT remaining crumbs??"

There are supposed to be crumbs on top of this mess.

My second attempt was better, but far from perfect. It mostly tasted like, uh, molasses and flour.

Which...is kinda gross. I don't know what I was expecting, but, hmmm. Luckily, a pro at eating shoo fly pies offered up some invaluable advice, which included trying to cut the molasses taste a bit. Innneresting. I thought that since the competition is sponsored by a molasses company, they might not appreciate recipes that CUT the molasses, but I thought it was worth a shot, if to only make the pie palatable. For ME. I also had the problem that the filling seemed to be too much for the pie shells. I had a dream (yes, really) about using a springform pan and decided to try it out.

The next series of recipes used the springform pan and were a little sweeter, with a little corn syrup cutting the molasses. I added such unheard of things like vanilla and cinnamon. The results were very pretty:

If a bit undercooked inside. I also made these little pie crust flies that I will decorate the pie with:

These are just rough prototypes, but: cute! I wish this was a shoo FLY competition. Anyway, while pretty, I don't think the shape of the springform pan was allowing the right kind of cooking. So I went back to the pie dish. Today I made a lovely tasting one. One that J actually ate a whole slice of in under 30 seconds! I figure this is a good thing, even if the "wet bottom" on the pie somehow slipped under the crust and made the pie sorta upside down.

Bah. I'll take any expert advice that might be floating around in cyberspace. Otherwise, just cross your fingers for me next Saturday.

Whew, watching that Britney Spears interview was EXHAUSTING! First I had to email/call all my good celebrity gossip peeps and make sure they were fully tuned in to give Matt Lauer and Brit their undivided attention for an hour. Then, my brain practically lit itself on fire trying to parse all the awkward phrasing and exclamations like, "How far along am I? I really don't know...six, seven months?" and "Funny people are hilarious!" Not to mention the sheer effort it took for me to wrap my head around the fact that this woman, this very rich woman who has access to all the stylists and make up artists and press coaches a person could ever want, was wearing Courtney Love's hair, Bonnie Bell blush, a clump of mascara on her fake eyelashes, and boobs. You want the paparazzi to leave you alone? Stop being a living, stumbling, gum chewing, slack-jawed train wreck.

Y'all.

But anyway, I was tired before the interview. It just kinda sealed the deal. Our office is closed for a couple days while we do some renovations, so I had the day off. I thought I would try to go to the gym, but it turns out I had a much better workout routine built right into my day. I call it the "Going shopping, cooking, cleaning, no car workout." If you, too, want a fabulous all day workout, you can follow what I did today:

Start the day off by cleaning the living room.
This won't take too long, so you can stop for some breakfast and tea afterwards.
You have a long day ahead of you, so it's good to get in the right frame of mind.
Watch the end of "Saved by the Bell," the one where Jessie gives Zach dancing lessons and Screech and Lisa win the dance competition by doing "The Sprain."
Watch series finale of "Dawson's Creek," the one where Jen dies.
Cry a little, because she leaves behind her BABY! And her last glance is at her grandma sleeping in the sun dusted hospital room.
Enough of that.
Clean out cupboards. Throw away all that old dried pasta, because you can buy more if you really want, for like a dollar.
Ooo, except for maybe those tiny pasta bow ties you bought for soup two years ago! Cute!
Clean out fridge, do dishes, take out trash.
Walk to subway and head to Herald Square.
H&M!
It will be a good shopping day so walk around the store slowly for about an hour holding a million pieces of clothing.
Wait in line holding clothing for many minutes.
Wait.
Try on clothes.
Cute!
It's a workout for your wallet, too. Heeey!
Just kidding, H&M is cheap.
Walk to your office, which is somewhat out of your way, carrying bag of clothes.
Check in with construction people. Cool.
Walk to Union Square.
Try to buy some hair stuff at Sephora but get overwhelmed, because: too much stuff! And also: none of these salespeople have good hair!
Try unsuccessfully to find shoes and DSW. Why no gold flats? Whyyyy?
Enter Whole Foods and wind your way through your grocery list, buying all things unavailable at shitty ghetto supermarket near home.
Board subway with 3 huge, heavy bags. Run a little to catch it. Walk (uphill) home.
Break! Watch "Ellen" for 10 minutes. Eat crackers. Get really embarrassed for the world watching her dance.
Realize you need other stuff for BBQ tomorrow.
Walk to shitty ghetto grocery store.
Buy whole store. Walk home with four heavy bags.
Make dinner. Eat.
Chop veggies, boil eggs, make kabobs, ream 15 lemons, make lavender simple syrup, parboil potatoes, mix marinade.
Watch Britney's clump of mascara flutter in the tear soaked wind.
Write obligatory blog entry about mascara clump.

Don't know about you, but I'm feeling toned.

My car was a little maroon ’91 Toyota Camry named Sally. My parents inherited it from my grandpa when he died, and it really was the car that had only been used for trips to the grocery store down the street; it only had 9,000 miles on it when it was given to me to use in 1995 or so. I put quite a few miles on it in high school, driving back and forth from Denver to Lakewood, but the real mileage came when I decided mid-Freshman-year that I really wanted the car in Tacoma, where I was going to college.

That first trip from Colorado to Washington I took with Kelly, who had come home with me for winter break. A guy who lived down the hall from us in the dorms was also going to be in Colorado over the break and offered to help us drive back. He was up in the mountains skiing and proposed a route where we’d pick him up and head off using the overpass. My parents were nervous and everyone had a long and loud freakout session the night before we were to leave, involving maps and yelling about dangerous terrain and annoyed phone calls back and forth. He ended up coming to town, where we picked him up and finally started the drive.

At gas stops, he would say, “I’m going for a little walk,” and come back all red-eyed and bleary. Kelly and I were doing most of the driving, and thought it was funny that he was trying to pull one over on us. We told him we didn’t care if he smoked and he nodded and seemed cool with it. But at the next stop, he’d make the same lame excuse about going for a walk. It got to be a joke between me and Kelly. We were supposed to stop for the night, but we ended up driving straight through, the first of many times I’d end up doing the whole 20-24 hours in one go.

One trip back to Denver was with a boyfriend who lived in Boulder. Usually this was the pattern with these trips: the driver picks the music, the passenger keeps the driver awake when needed or catches some sleep when needed. But the boyfriend couldn’t sleep with the music on and I couldn’t drive without the music on. He was a bit on an insomniac and refused to stop at a hotel, where he knew he’d be equally unable to sleep. When we’d switch, he was too tired to drive. He bought a bunch of caffeine pills at a rest stop and took them, but they ended up killing his stomach. He had to drink a ton of water, and we then had to stop every half hour for him to use the bathroom. As we drove through Boulder (finally, at last), Soul Coughing was on the stereo. I love Mike Doughty, but his voice at that moment was too much for my sleep-deprived, very cranky self. I always associate Soul Coughing with that trip. J thinks I don’t like Soul Coughing, but it’s not true. I just have a bad association.

When Willow started school in Oregon, I began taking trips with her. These were probably some of the best trips. She didn’t care about stopping and loved the open road; we once stretched the trip out over three days. Driving hurt her back, so she had a little pillow she always kept around for those trips. With Willow, we would stop for meals, and make games about getting to the next oddly-named town. We would get out for pictures next to the “Welcome to Bliss!” sign. She put my fish that died on the way home in a birdbath at a truck stop. We once took a detour through windy roads and a lava field in Oregon. She liked to queue up Built to Spill’s “Twin Falls, Idaho” as we crossed into the titular city. We liked to try to eat potatoes in Idaho, too.

One autumn, Heather, JD, and I all drove to the west coast together in two cars. Their’s didn’t have air conditioning, so their cat, Thumbles (extra thumbs), rode in my car. It seemed only fair to switch it up, so we rotated at pit stops and talked to each other with walkie talkies that only worked intermittently. Sometimes it was me and Heather and the cat driving in air conditioning. One rotation, it was me driving their car, watching them in front of me; a little family contained in my Camry, with me on the outside.

I didn’t usually drive home in the winter, but one year Kelly and I decided to do it. We took her Explorer named George. I drove a little, but when I skidded on some ice and freaked out, she took over and drove almost the whole trip. It was slow going with all the snow and ice and we wished we hadn’t drove, after all. We ate cream cheese, avocado, tomato sandwiches on bagels almost exclusively.

My friend Chronic volunteered to help me once, when I didn’t have anyone else to drive with. He got free airline tickets, so would catch a plane back from Tacoma after helping with the drive. He didn’t talk much for the ride, but it was a very nice, comfortable quiet. He preferred to drive and didn’t seem to want to sleep or eat, or even stop very often. He was a driving machine. We got there in record time, in one of the easiest trips I ever made.

Another guy drove back with me later, and he was very talkative, which also made for a nice ride. It felt like we just stayed up late talking, rather than we were using the talking to pass the time. He was going to hitchhike elsewhere after reaching Denver, and he had provisions of Kool-Aid and candy, saying he didn’t like the taste of water.

And only once, I drove all alone into Denver from Boise, after dropping off a friend there. I was anxious about doing this, having only taken the trip with others. But once I got going, it was easy. The time slipped away; I didn’t get sleepy. I changed the CDs around, and sometimes I let the car be silent.

In all these trips, that route became very familiar to me, a place that wasn’t a place that I visited with all kinds of people. Is it funny to get nostalgic for a lone gas station in the middle of a dry expanse of Utah, or for Little America, or for the smell of the onion factory?

I work with lots of authors and know a lot of writers and sometimes those people end up being my friends, which is very cool for a bibliophile like myself. However, now? I know someone who was my friend before becoming a published author. And that is very cool. Because when she's all famous I can say, "Sigh. I knew her WHEN!" And if people don't believe me they can look in the acknowledgements and I'll point out my name. And then they'll say that lots of people end up in acknowledgement sections of books and la di da, I was probably someone important's assistant who photocopied a few pages of the manuscript for them at some point. Which is sorta true. For other books. But for this one! I actually know and love Zoe and am very proud to have had the chance to read the book in it's wee stages and am especially happy to announce that you can now go buy this book. In stores! Online! Everywhere!

It's a really fun story with great characters, and it's all set in the art world. What's not to love? It also happens to be hilarious and slightly addicting. Beware the missed subway stop.

And? If you live in New York you can participate in the double bonus of getting the book and actually meeting Zoe at the Park Slope Barnes and Nobel on June 14th (7:30 pm, 267 Seventh Avenue at the corner of 6th Street). I hope you'll check out the book and give it a read. You know I'll do the same for you when you finally get around to pounding out that novel.

J and I signed up for an airline credit card back when we were making wedding purchases a year ago, thinking we’d receive our exciting $99 companion fare ticket out of the deal and cancel the card when we needed to. All this worked out fine except we never actually received the companion fare ticket and this has me calling the credit card every few weeks to inquire as to where it is and listen to them tell me that it is on it’s way. We haven’t actually used the card in months, so the last time I called I decided to just cancel the card then and there. But I had some very unhelpful customer service rep on the phone who couldn’t assure me that cancelling the card wouldn’t interfere with getting the ticket and told me to call back in an hour because the people who could help me were “experiencing a high level of calls at the moment.” On the way to hanging up, he asked me, as they do, if I wanted to purchase their fraud protection program. “Considering I’m calling to cancel the card, I don’t think I’ll be needing that,” I said.

Cut to exactly one hour later. My phone rings and it’s an automated voice from the credit card people telling me there has been some suspicious spending on THE VERY CARD I CALLED TO CANCEL (the one I haven’t used in months). They connected me to a rep who told me someone tried to spend $1,500 in a specialty store in Tennessee, but that they had the expiration date wrong on the card, so the transaction didn’t go through.

I know that outside of a conspiracy within the credit card company, this has to be a coincidence. But I’m very suspicious anyway. I closed the account and am hoping for the best regarding the $99 ticket.

* * *

Dear people who keep calling even though I definitely haven’t called you,

Look, if you see that you’ve missed a call from a number you don’t recognize and there is no message left for you? Guess what? That person dialed a wrong number or their phone number has somehow randomly found its way to your phone; they don’t want to talk to you. If they wanted to talk to you, they would leave a message. That’s the ENTIRE purpose of voicemail. That’s why it exists. So that people who want to talk to you can leave a message and you can know that they called and call them back. I know you think it is the job recruiter calling to offer you an opportunity of a lifetime, or the producer, or the agent, or the person met last week you keep hoping will call and say they love you. But it is never going to be any of those people, because those people would leave a message. So if you call the number back, hoping it will be the answer to the desperate question in the back of your head, you will be wrong. And really annoying. Stop it.

xo, Liz

You know how much I trust you? I'm going to show you something which MAY BE the worst picture ever taken of me for an official purpose. Our office building recently implemented security measures which requires us to have an ID card to enter and leave after hours. So, the dreaded office ID photo loomed. Now, it may be that no one ever takes good work photo ID pictures, but there is certainly a scale ranging from "Yikes, you sure are redder and more blotchy than usual" all the way to "Caught mid-sneeze in florescent lighting." And things weren't looking good from the beginning: both my boss and coworker came back with dreadful pictures and warned me about it. So I took precautions, by fixing my hair on the elevator down, making sure I didn't have anything astray, etc. I knew going in I was going to give my passport/drivers license smile. Sorta demure, completely unscrewupable.

I was greeted by a nice enough woman (beware the devil in a cute skirt) and she set me up against the white wall. I prepared my safety smile while she set up the camera. Then she hit me with her secret evil weapon. "Say cheese!" she sang out. Which completely caught me off guard, because when someone says "Say cheese!" you have to say cheese. It's some sort of picture etiquette, especially if you're alone and not saying cheese would be weird and awkward. So, I said, "Cheese" (no exclamation point) and she goddamn took my picture in the middle of the word. I said, "Oh, I think you took the picture in the middle of me saying that..." and she glanced at the preview and said, "Oh no, it's fine."

Two days later, I received my card and fully appreciated how truly spiteful the picture taker really was. People, this is not fine:

Those splotches and discoloration were like EXTRA BONUS features.

A few weeks ago, some of us were sitting around talking about movies and somehow “Slackers” came up. J mentioned he’d never seen it and I said, “Oh my god! I can’t believe you’ve never seen ‘Slackers!’ Are you serious?” Then Krista said she’d never seen it either and I ran to put it on our Netflix list, astounded that they had somehow missed this landmark movie.

“Is it the one with computers?” J asked.
“No! That’s ‘Hackers.’”

They asked me what it was about and I was at a loss for a second, because it had been such a long time since I’d last seen it. Right? We got the movie right away, but it sat around for several weeks before we got around to watching it last night. And I have to say, I have no idea what this movie is. I had definitely never seen it before, and the premise wasn’t even vaguely familiar. Jason Schwartzman? So what the hell movie was I thinking of? In my head, I’d placed it squarely between “Clerks” and “Reality Bites,” some angsty 90s flick possibly starring Ethan Hawke. I know people sometimes incorporate movie and television moments into their own memories, but what about just inventing memories of movies?

* * *

I got a call at work the other day from a woman who worked for a genealogical society, wanting some information about one of our clients. The person she really needed to talk to is in a bigger office in California, and I gave her the information about contacting him. But she was worried her call would be lost at the bigger office and asked if there was something particular she should say to catch their attention. “No,” I said, “There shouldn’t be any problems. Just tell them where you’re from and that the client sent you.” She agreed to this, but I could tell she was still anxious about having to call.

“It’s just that, on top of everything else, I’m always afraid I’m going to say ‘gynecological’ instead of ‘genealogical!’”

Which made me really glad I don’t have to say “genealogical” on any sort of regular basis, because that is exactly something I would do. And that’s an odd flub to back out of gracefully.

* * *

On a shared computer in Ohio, in the search history, I came across what might be the most misguided search term ever: “pictures of me.” It was put in several times with different phrasing, and I can’t tell you how much it tickles me to think of someone desperately trying do a vanity Google and not understanding why these random people keep showing up. Then again, there were also searches for “Rachael Ray n*ked” and “s*xy Rachael Ray,” so this may have been part of a bigger, dirtier search.