pre-thanksgiving

This is not a post about what I'm thankful for. Those are boring. It's more of the minor disappointment variety.

This year we are eating dinner with some friends, who are incidentally moving out of state just a few days later. They are preparing the turkey, so we just have to worry about sides. My requirements are easy enough: candied yams, black olives, and sweet dinner rolls. Yams require no effort at all because this is the South and they love their sweet potatoes. Olives, well, that's just opening a can (and putting the olives on my fingers). I thought sweet rolls (also called Hawai'an rolls) would be easy too, considering this area's love of sweet tea. But they also love homemade flaky biscuits, and I guess that wins out because I can not find sweet rolls anywhere in this town.

After failing at the regular grocery store, I checked the organic / specialty store. Nuthin. They did have honey butter though, so I bought that, even though it was $6 for a small tub. And because I didn't want to make another stop, I went ahead and bought the regular rolls, which were literally 4 times the price I should have paid. Since I was spending unnecessary money, I thought I would buy some Tofurkey jerky as well, but apparently it's been discontinued. And usually that store has a coupon for a certain item free (be it a bag of apples, pasta, or what have you) when you spend $5. But not this week.

So all in all, it was a disappointing trip. I know dinner will be tasty no matter what, but I wish things had gone my way.

des the carnivore

Since I started eating chicken again, I kinda feel like it's all I want to eat. Chicken chicken chicken. Most of that was because the first step back into meat-eatingness was such a tasty chicken salad. Since then, I've also had chicken BBQ'd by Jay, and also in mcnugget form, grilled by nobody. I've decided that mcnuggets are not satisfying at all (well maybe to throw). I do like homemade chicken, but I still have to be careful that it's all white meat and all of a homogenous texture. No surprises like fat or anything like that. Yes I'm now uber-picky. But when everything works out, I get to eat tasty food.

welcome (back) to the dark side

Last night, I ate chicken. I haven't eaten chicken (or any type of meat) for about 10 years. But there were a number of reasons I decided to cross that bridge last night.

1. For my & Jay's 1st anniversary, I took him to a steakhouse. Duh, there isn't much vegetarian fare at a steakhouse, and a girl can only eat so many cheese fries. A grilled chicken salad is much healthier than cheese fries any day.

2. Now that I'm not in weirdo places like CA and NYC, vegetarian fare is much more limited. Again, a girl can only eat so many cheese fries. And shopping at a normal grocery store is much preferred to those "specialty" ones that sell all the yummy veggie food because I don't have any money. The meijer is only a coupla blocks away, so besides the cheaper prices, I don't have to pay for gas to go to Trader Joe's a few towns over.

3. I gave up meat in the first place because I just didn't like the taste - nothing to do with morals or ethics or anything like that. However, I did like chicken. I don't think I'll ever eat a steak again, but certain bites of chicken don't make me want to vomit.

Now that I've gone back to (semi)carnivorism, it's not like I'm going to be eating chicken at every meal. But I will be less limited in my choices now. I won't be the one that inconveniences people that are trying to be nice and feed me. I won't be stuck eating cheese fries whenever I go out (btw, I hate cheese fries). My loving wonderful boyfriend won't have to give up eating at certain restaurants (i.e. the steakhouses) because there's nothing I can eat there. I'll still participate in the veggie bacon, sausage, lunchmeat, etc. but not the fake chicken.

So. Chicken. Yeah.

Thank you eh*rmony! (post #1000!)

Yesterday Jay & I went to eat tasty tasty Mexican food. We were having fun already, but we got to observe a couple sitting a few tables away. From a variety of components we easily discerned that this was a first date. Their table was angled so that the guy was facing us and the woman faced away.

The first thing we noticed was the man's stance in his chair: leaning intently towards the woman, with one fist under his chin, the other arm looking like the brace for arm wrestling. His legs were in a state of readiness: if terrorists attacked Azteca in Madison Heights, he could spring into action at any time.

This body language denoted not only his military background (which would become even more clear in the course of conversation), but also that he was the dominant player in the conversation. This would also become more evident as time progressed, especially as he used phrases like "that's when I made the decision...". He was ripe for amateur psycho-analysis, which I am awesome at.

What's a good topic for conversation on a first date? Religion, of course. When we started paying attention to the couple, we heard this lovely snippet:

I once knew a guy from San Antonio, Texas who jumped onto a hand grenade to save 6 of his buddies. He made sure that he had "atheist" stamped on his dog tags. So even though he didn't think there was a Heaven, he was willing to die to save people's lives.

This of course led to more stories relating to war, another excellent 1st date topic. In his mind, it was a perfect time to bring up this hilarious anecdote:

...They have scars and cuts and stuff from when they fell down the hill, but they were holding their rifles, so it was kinda funny.

I for one find it uproariously funny when people holding guns fall down hills.

You know that the natural progression from stories involving guns is to talk about hunting. Yet another award-winning conversation starter on a 1st date. From this, we learned that the guy really likes eating duck, but isn't so fond of the 9 months it takes to prepare it. Luckily, though, "you can make chili out of anything." Even deer, apparently. Sorry, we were too busy laughing to catch all the details of that one.

Around this point, I noticed that the guy had a giant strawberry daiquiri, which was full when we walked in. Even though he was spending all this time talking (I don't think his date had gotten one word in), he had somehow found the time to guzzle his drink. We surmised from this, that he must have been an army ventriloquist. While we were wiping the tears of laughter out of our eyes, the waiter approached them to take their order. Wait a minute, they haven't ordered yet? They were here before us and we have our food already. No wonder the woman hadn't said anything - she was busy studying the menu. But we did get to hear her finally speak. It was totally worth the wait.

You guys aint got no more tomaters?

This gave the man more time to brag about himself. Did you know that he speaks Farso? That's right, not the Persian language Farsi, but Farso, which is apparently a very tricky language (since it doesn't exist). And that he spent 30 days - no wait, I mean 90 days - traveling in Europe? (That was his correction, not mine.) He even had a Native American friend that taught him to live off the land. One time, he met the Chief of Police of South Africa! Impressive, no? And his stories flowed together so seamlessly! It's a shame he "had to get back into shape and get his gun fixed after he got out of the army."

Finally the time came when it was time to talk about her. So he asked her: "I thought you got laid off?"

We were laughing so hard at this fiasco / date that we missed the woman's response. However, our attention was drawn once again when the waiter came over to their table and they asked to move "because the sun was in their eyes." Since I had been openly staring (Jay was a bit more discreet about observing our newfound blog fodder) and we were probably not as quiet as we could have been while repeating their phrases and mocking them, we knew that they were actually moving away from us. Yes, this made us laugh even harder. Oh sorry, were we ruining your date? Are you sure it wasn't you who was doing the ruining?

By this time, we were done with our meal and could hear naught but muffled bragging, so we decided to pack it up. I had been writing furiously in my handy dandy notebook so I didn't forget any of the excellent quotes and my hand was tired anyway. Plus, Jay had had a small "salsa mishap" so it was time to go.

But thank you, eh*rmony! Even if they didn't find true love, we found a whole afternoon of merriment. Hopefully some of that mirth can be now passed on to you, gentle readers.

the strange case of the asparagus in the nighttime

So on BFF's bday, which was Thursday. We I splurged a little at the Melting Pot, for yummy fondue dinner. For those MP virgins, here's the scoop: You get 3 courses plus a salad - a cheese fondue (yum!), a flavored broth fondue-marinade-cooking tastiness (yum), and a chocolate fondue (yum!). They give you lots of time between courses so that you may enjoy and digest without feeling rushed.

So, once we were sufficiently full of cheese and broth but not yet chocolate, we had some down time to get some good old fashioned hang time. We were having very happy animated conversation when apparently I picked up a spare asparagus spear (btw, have I mentioned lately that asparagus is my mortal enemy?) and began to stir the remaining broth with it. Then I put it back in the pile of other unused asparagus like nothing had happened. Unfortunately for me, both Jay and BFF stopped what they were doing and stared at me, mouths agape. I vaguely remember doing that, but it was clearly not a conscious decision. We all had a good laugh about how I could pick up something, stir something else with it, and put it back without realizing I was doing it. In fact, I still laugh at it. However, it does not bode well for my sanity.

I've always known I was a stirrer. I stir my drinks nonstop. I twirl forks in my food. And apparently my unconscious stirs flavored broth with asparagus.