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June 9, 2008

Queso Con Fresas

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 years ago, I went to Mexico with a bunch of other teenagers. It was my first big trip and it was OK, though I have to admit that Mexico is not one of the regions of the world that speaks to me most profoundly--I'm not into all that Aztec stuff. (And I do realize that is not the sum of Mexican culture, but it's what we focused on that trip--actually part of what we were doing was looking at sites that might have had historical significance in the Book of Mormon.... Whatever.)

We spent several days in Mexico City, which is where I had what I guess I could call my first smoothie. Down the road from our hotel was a little stand that sold fruit whipped in a blender with milk. I thought it was really novel: a milkshake without ice cream! Fancy that! My favorite flavor was strawberry. It wasn't all that thick and it wasn't all that cold, but it tasted good. And I liked ordering it: fresas con leche, por favor! It was fun to say.

Recently I have been saying not "fresas con leche" but "queso con fresas," because of this:

It looks sorta like a piece of cheesecake, but it's not: It's a hunk of cheese, more specifically, Yancey's Fancy Strawberry Chardonnay. That's right: it's cheese, flavored with wine, and studded with strawberries. It's really good.

Just for the hell of it, I tried making a grilled cheese sandwich with this. I don't recommend it. It wasn't bad; the flavor just wasn't as good as when the cheese was still chilled or at room temperature.

If you can find this, buy it, and eat it with fruit or a little chocolate. You'll be glad you did.

Posted by Holly at 9:26 AM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2008

Yogurt: What Else Could a Woman Possibly Need?

I found this on Salon's Broadsheet--it's too good not to share. It's "'substitute for human experience' good," at least for "the class that wears gray hoodies," sporting the "'I have a master's but then I got married' look."

Posted by Holly at 8:58 AM | Comments (8)

March 2, 2008

Technically, This Is a Grilled Cheese Sandwich Too

Currently Wegmans has this chocolate bread made with organic flour, cocoa and chocolate chips. It's more substantial than cake, not quite as sweet, and pretty damn good.

And I couldn't help it: I thought, what sort of grilled cheese sandwich can I make with that?

So I cut two slices--you have to slice it yourself; the chocolate chips means they can't run it through the automatic slicers, because they get all mucked up--spread cream cheese on one slice and raspberry jam on the other, then mushed it together, grilled it and ate it for breakfast.

God, it was delicious! The grilling meant the chocolate chips got warm and melty, as did the jam. It was decadent and not all that healthy, I realize, but still, it was a very nice way to start the day on a lazy weekend.

Posted by Holly at 11:31 AM | Comments (2)

March 1, 2008

More Grilled Cheesy Goodness

The other day I had to go grocery shopping, and I figured I might as well take the advice I was offered by Mr. Nighttime and see what sort of grilled cheese sandwich I could make with Wegmans rosemary and olive oil bread. I figured since I was using a previously untested bread I might as well experiment in the cheese department too, and asked the cheese lady to recommend something with a bite but no blueness--I hate blue cheese.

She suggested an imported Gouda that had been aged five years. I think Gouda is OK; it's not my favorite. Or at least that's how I felt before I tried this stuff. It was amazing, to die for, unbelievably delicious.... OK, none of these phrases capture how good this cheese really is. So let me try again.

I have this thing about spending money on food: I'll do it. You have to eat it, so why not enjoy it? Good food contributes to good health, so why be stingy about something so necessary to a healthy, pleasant life? However, even I have my limits, and paying eighteen bucks a pound for cheese--which is what this cheese cost--comes pretty close to being one of them. I mean, I feel extravagant when I pay twelve bucks a pound, which is what I paid for last week's Gruyere, and this cheese cost half again as much. But it was worth every penny, and I will even buy it again. That's how good it was: complex and tangy and sweet and slightly crunchy, which I learned is due to protein crystals that form in older cheeses.

It made a good sandwich, though I haven't decided whether I think melting the cheese improves or impairs its flavor. I took a picture, but it didn't look like anything special--it just looked like a grilled cheese sandwich--so I'm not posting it here.

However, I also took the hint dropped by A. and added some sweetness to my grilled cheese sandwich. I used the rosemary/olive oil bread and a nice but not too pricey Emmental, along with some raspberry jam. It looked like this:

As you can see there was a problem, in that the bread was too holey and the jam leaked out. The warm jam was REALLY yummy, but overwhelmed rather than complimented the mild cheese, and even the tang of the rosemary got lost in all that sugar. It wasn't a tragedy, but it sure as hell wasn't a success, either. Still, it was good enough that I'm going to have to keep working on this one.

Posted by Holly at 10:06 AM | Comments (5)

February 21, 2008

Grilled Cheesy Goodness

As a child, I was always disappointed when my mom said we were having grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. I wasn’t distraught and ready to cry, the way I was when she announced that we were having tuna sandwiches, or downright nauseated and hysterical the way I was when she served that HORRIBLE tuna casserole made with some creamed soup and potato chips. (I always knew canned tuna was unfit for human consumption, even before studies revealed that it contains all these horrible toxins like mercury, and it occurs to me every so often that whatever the difficulties of adulthood, one very nice benefit of being a grownup is that, barring some torture scenario, no one can ever again force me to consume a meal made with canned tuna.)

I didn’t think grilled cheese sandwiches tasted bad; I just didn’t think they tasted good. They were so bland, like a bowl of unsweetened corn flakes. Why ever eat them? OK, I know they were cheap and easy, but so were plenty of other things that tasted way better in my opinion, like Cap’n Crunch, or frozen green beans, or popcorn, or zucchini, or peanut butter and honey on saltines, or bacon and eggs, or a can of ravioli, or oatmeal with lots of brown sugar, or a big dish of ice cream. Fact of the matter is, I still feel that way about a few thin slabs of bright orange longhorn cheddar melted between two slices of white bread slathered with margarine. Why eat such a thing? I think I went four full decades without ever cooking myself a grilled cheese sandwich, though I ate a hell of a lot of cheese crisps, as we called quesadillas--something about substituting a flour tortilla for white bread and dumping plenty of salsa on top just made the cheese taste better.

A few years ago, after I started trying to eat like a vegetarian, I one day had a hankering for a cheeseburger, but as I was trying to live without meat and don’t much care for those veggie burger things, I tried to imagine how I could have a meat-free cheeseburger. “If I melt good cheese on good bread, that might satisfy this craving,” I thought, and realized that what I was imagining was simply a fancy-schmancy grilled cheese sandwich. And I began experimenting with different breads and different cheeses, and a old staple entered my diet in a new form.

As far as bread goes, I like a white sour dough with enough body that it crisps up nicely when grilled. I’m fond of a nice sharp cheddar, though I don’t like the way it looks as much if it’s really orange. I’ve tried various holey cheeses (like swiss) and even a few soft cheeses--a sweet bread with a nice spreadable goat cheese is pretty yummy.

Yesterday I had an exceptionally tasty grilled cheese sandwich. Lately Wegmans has had this really wonderful sourdough bread studded with walnuts and dried cranberries; I paired it with an imported genuine gruyere. When I grill a sandwich, I put butter in the pan rather than on the bread; it seems less greasy that way. And when it this particular sandwich was done cooking, it was so gorgeous I just had to take a photo.

Yumm! I’m hungry just looking at it.

Posted by Holly at 7:10 PM | Comments (7)

January 29, 2008

Some People Eat for a Week on Less than We Spend on a Single Cup of Coffee

Apparently links to this photo essay documenting "What the World Eats" have been circulating for a good long while.... A few weeks ago someone sent me an email message about it, with only SOME of the photos--one of the most important photos was missing, one depicting the Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp in Chad. The email message included no information about the photos' provenance, so I finally got around to tracking it down.... Turns out the photos are from a new book called Hungry Planet. Make sure you look at all the photos.... Originally I only saw six of the photos, which were interesting, but you need to see the whole series to realize how horribly unjust the distribution of wealth on this planet is. I mean, I knew this already; I've seen the Care ads and sent them money.... But every so often something helps you confront again those uncomfortable facts in your knowledge you've somehow learned to ignore, and these photos did that for me.

Posted by Holly at 12:30 PM | Comments (8)

December 24, 2007

One More Way Our Current Approach to Living Is Killing Biodiversity

Ethanol sucks. I don't know who came up with this idea but it sucks. Something that is added to fossil fuel but doesn't really wean us from it sucks. It requires all this fuel in the first place to produce it, and it makes everything else more expensive, particularly feed for livestock, which is one more reason to be a vegetarian (which I'm still not) or at least eat less meat (which I do). The answer is not a replacement for fossil fuel in the things we already use, but completely different forms of energy. That's all old information.

But here's a bit real news: the rush to grow corn for ethanol is raising beer prices in the US, because farmers are no longer growing hops, an ingredient used in brewing beer, while our crappy dollar (one more reason the Bush administration is the WORST leadership this country has EVER seen) makes importing hops prohibitively expensive.

As it happens I don't like hops, which is quite bitter. I HATE hoppy beers. Took me a long time to figure out what it was in certain beers that made them unpalatable to me: turns out it's lots of hops. But it's used in most beers; in some, the taste isn't pronounced, and those are the beers I like. I really like dark beers and brewed beverages--I like something that tastes like you're drinking a glass of heavy bread, Guinness being my favorite, what I usually drink when someplace has it on tap. But I almost never buy it in bottles to put in my fridge--for that, I prefer to pick up a six pack of some specialty beer from a microbrewery.

I don't drink a lot of beer, so it's not like I'm worrying about the effect this development will have on my wallet. But I don't want microbreweries to go out of business. And this whole thing just sucks. There's no reason to grow so much corn, most of it roundup ready and genetically modified.

Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)

December 5, 2007

My Pomegranate-Eating Interlude

At the edge of the alley behind Sandra C’s house was a gnarled old pomegranate tree, just on the other side of a barbed wire fence around a big field of hard baked dirt and a few sorry straw-colored weeds that always withered entirely by July. No one ever watered the tree, which didn’t seem to matter much because pomegranate trees do well in the desert, and as no one ever harvested the fruit, we felt at liberty to take it--I suppose we could have been accused of stealing but we never thought of that, because the fruit was so clearly unwanted by anyone else. Sandra, Patrice and I used to ride our bikes into the alley and eat the pomegranates, less because we liked the way they tasted and more because we couldn’t help marveling at what a strange, curious fruit they are, the exterior skin like brittle red boot leather, the interior skin so bitter and parchment-y and dividing the actual flesh of the fruit into strange little compartments. Our mothers could usually tell--and were unhappy--when we’d been eating pomegranates, because the juice produces a bright red stain (more like a dye, actually) impossible to remove from clothing.

And then the tree died or Sandra moved or both, and I stopped eating pomegranates. I can’t say I particularly missed them. After I was grown and did my own shopping, I rarely noticed them in grocery stores, and when I did, I couldn’t imagine buying one: they were so expensive, and why would I pay all that money for fruit that no one used to want? I think a couple of decades passed in which I didn’t eat a single pomegranate.

Ten years or so ago my mother planted a pomegranate tree at the far edge of the back garden. It looks like this:

While I was home she asked me to pick a bunch so she could use them in a center piece for Thanksgiving dinner--she didn’t even plan to use them as food. But as I picked the few remaining intact pieces of fruit (they often split open while still on the tree, and birds and bugs LOVE pomegranates), I thought, why don’t I eat some of these?

So I did. I ate a pomegranate every day for the last few days of my visit.

And I still don’t know if I like the fruit. The flavor is tart and acidic, with a hint of soil--that’s right, I’m saying it tastes a little bit like dirt, though a couple of websites refer to the flavor as “nutty.” And they’re just so messy! There’s no easy way to eat a pomegranate. I found all these websites telling you to cut off the top of the fruit, then score the rind, then soak it in water for at least five minutes (though they don’t say why).... But that’s too much work. I prefer to tear a pomegranate apart with my hands and then bite the fruit like an apple or a pear, albeit it more carefully--you have to watch out for that bright red juice.

I guess I should say that I know I like pomegranates; I just don’t know if I like to eat them or enjoy the taste. But the fruit as an object of contemplation, that I like, along with the mere fact of pomegranates’ existence: they’re interesting and weird and they seem ancient to me in ways that, say, watermelon and strawberries don’t. And that’s not just because pomegranates show up in extremely old myths (six pomegranate seeds are what Persephone ate in the underworld, and the reason why she had to go back for six months out of every year) and strawberries don’t. It’s also the way the rind of the fruit always looked aged and weathered. And I guess if I believed that some being had deliberately created everything in the world (and I don’t believe that), I’d consider pomegranates the kind of fruit you’d invent early on in your fruit-creating career, before you got a lot of practice and learned to make things like strawberries, which are the only fruit that has its seeds on the outside of the flesh.

Anyway. I was glad to have another pomegranate-eating period and figure if I go another decade or two without eating any more, it’s no big deal.

Posted by Holly at 1:10 AM | Comments (2)

October 5, 2007

Our Bodies, Our Smells

I remember reading this very annoying essay by this woman about walking through a cheese shop and noticing “the pungent, strangely and almost bodily smells of the cheeses.” Come on: the smells of cheeses are neither strangely nor almost bodily: cheese after all is made from a bodily substance, so it’s perfectly appropriate that its smell be quite thoroughly bodily. Moreover, cheese is what happens when you take a substance and introduce agents--bacteria, yeast, mold--that transform its chemical composition, while you simultaneously try to extract a good deal of the moisture--which is also what happens to food in the intestines. I’m not saying the processes or outcomes are completely similar, or that cheese smells like shit, but I am saying there are several reasons not to be surprised by a lingering whiff of living, eating, breathing bodies and the substances they produce when you inhale in a cheese shop.

Which leads me to another point: it seems to me that although--or because--smell is one of the most primal of our senses, conveying as it does simple information necessary to survival (if something smells sick or dead, maybe you shouldn’t eat or drink it) and able to affect our basic physiology in ways the other senses can’t (an unidentifiable bad smell affects us viscerally in ways an unidentifiable unpleasant noise does not), we don’t like to acknowledge the work our noses do, automatically, whether we ask them to or not. We don’t like to acknowledge that we occasionally smell stuff that stinks. And we heap shame on people who admit that they use their noses intentionally, as a source of information, rather than as an occasional and accidental source of pleasure or disgust.

I have been thinking about this ever since Rebecca acknowledged noticing that her left thumb smelled like fish sticks. She took some heat for this--people asked her, “Why did you smell your left thumb?” But if she’d said, “I just noticed that my left thumb smelled like jasmine oil,” would anyone care? Would anyone ask, “Why on earth did you smell your left thumb?” But noticing--and admitting that you noticed--that your left thumb smelled like fish sticks--well, that’s just beyond the pale.

So Rebecca came back with a spot-on response:

Oh please, don't pretend you never smell your fingers. It's not like I was changing diapers or something. While typing a blog post I was touching my lips, as I am wont to do when sitting and thinking, and I smelled fish sticks. So I smelled my left thumb, the thumbnail of which was pinching my top lip, and therefore right under my nose. It no longer smells like fish sticks, FYI.

I admit I have smelled my fingers, sometimes incidentally, as when I lay my forefinger above my lip and under my nose, which sounds strange when you write it out, but you see people do it from time to time--it’s a thinking gesture. Or sometimes my nose itches, and I scratch it, and notice that some smell, pleasant or otherwise, lingers on my fingers. Or sometimes, after I’ve been chopping onions or mincing garlic, I’ll smell my hands quite intentionally after I wash them, to see if the odor has been removed.

Not too long ago I happened to notice that my fingers smelled like a mildewy dish rag. I found this strange because I had not recently handled a mildewy dish rag. But I dealt with the problem in what seemed the most appropriate way: I washed my hands at the nearest sink, which happened to be in my kitchen. Then I dried my hands thoroughly on the tea towel by the sink.... and noticed that my hands STILL smelled like a mildewy dish rag. So then I smelled the tea towel, and realized two things: 1) it was time to get a fresh tea towel and 2) I should probably use warm water and maybe even a little bleach the next time I washed a load of white things (having cut back dramatically on using both in my laundry because of their environmental impact).

I know that Rebecca and I are not the only two people in the world who occasionally smell their fingers, because in some article I even found a way to remove stubborn food smells from fingers. (That’s right: if your fingers never smell funky, you probably aren’t very involved in food preparation, because making food exposes your hands to all kinds of stinkiness.) Here it is: scoop some warm coffee grounds out of the filter and rub them all over your hands. Do this outside, because it’s very messy. It actually feels great: the graininess of the coffee grounds makes this a great exfoliant, and the oil in the beans makes your hands smooth and soft. As for whether doing this actually removes the smell of garlic or just covers it up with a faint coffee aroma, well, I don’t know that it matters, because at least after you do it, your hands smell good--provided you like the smell of coffee.

Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (7)

September 18, 2007

Peanut Butter Is OK, I Guess

Tomatoes, potatoes, cocoa beans and chilies are among the food plants indigenous to the Americas that have been thoroughly appropriated by other parts of the world, to the point where they seem integral to certain nations’ cuisine or history: think of Italian food with tomato sauce. Think of Belgium without chocolate. Think of Ireland with a potato blight and crushing famine. Think of Indian food without the searing hot bite of a really potent chili pepper or two.

Peanuts, not so much. Plenty of the world has never taken to peanuts or peanut butter or any number of peanut-flavored things. As Chanson notes, the French find peanut butter pretty damn vile, and as I remember from my time in the UK a couple of decades ago, the British didn’t much care for it either.

The Chinese and their neighbors, however, managed to dig peanuts and their by-products and do some pretty great things with them, as anyone who has enjoyed spring rolls or noodles with peanut sauce will know. I prefer peanuts in savory food to any sort of peanut-y dessert.

Frankly the thing I like best about peanut butter is its history. In elementary school I read this fabulous biography of George Washington Carver, explaining how he convinced all these farmers to plant soil-enriching peanuts instead of just soil-depleting cotton as part of his crop rotation program. Once the peanuts were harvested, the farmers came to George and said, “OK, what do we do with these peanuts? ‘Cause there’s no demand for them at all.”

And George looked at them for a moment, then said, “I’ll be right back,” went into his lab and invented about 50 million uses for peanuts, one of which was peanut butter. (Does anyone besides me still have very fond memories of hearing Eddie Murphy describe how “George Washington Carver died penniless and insane, still trying to play a phonograph record with a peanut” as part of a "Black History Minute" on Saturday Night Live?)

Anyway.... I’m not nuts about peanuts. They’re OK, but I prefer other nuts, real nuts. (Peanuts, after all, are actually legumes, as you probably learned in fifth grade.) Pecans are my favorite nuts for baking--I like them in cookies and pies and cakes and streusel or whatever. There are pecan trees all over my hometown of Thatcher, Arizona--the church I went to as a child was in the midst of a pecan grove--and I would regularly pick a pecan off the ground, crack it and eat the fresh nut meat.... No nut tastes as good to me as a fresh pecan I’ve just cracked. I like walnuts and macadamia nuts for cooking too. I also enjoy roasted and salted almonds, cashews and pistachios. (I especially like cracking pistachios and sucking all the salt off the shell.) If all the other, better nuts are gone from the nut mix, I’ll eat Brazil nuts. I don’t like hazelnuts for some reasons.

I didn’t really like peanut butter when I was little because it tasted too peanut-y and the texture was weird and it wasn’t sweet enough, so my mother’s solution was to mix it with honey, which made it pretty damn good. I really liked spreading that mixture on saltines. Yum! Honey’s much better with peanut butter than jam.

And in general I like it even less now that I’m grown. Nine times out of ten, I’ll pass up any sweet that is peanut or peanut-butter flavored, but there’s always that tenth time....

OK, this is still running long, and I have more to say before I get around to sharing the cookie recipe. But I promise, I’ll post it soon.

Posted by Holly at 11:20 AM | Comments (4)

September 16, 2007

This Wasn't Going to Be About Cheese

A sweet tooth is not the easiest thing to satisfy in China. I had to work very hard in both Taiwan and Shanghai to assuage my sugar cravings. I couldn’t find any decent Chinese sweets in Mainland China; I had to content myself with buying a bag or two of Skittles or M&Ms (both of which were imported and therefore very expensive) each week. Things had been markedly better in Taiwan, though I still had to make some accommodations. I ate a lot of chocolate O’Smiles, this sandwich cookie with a truly great name; there was also this flavored powdered milk drink I thought was OK. And then there were bings, these concoctions of fruit, shaved ice and sweetened condensed milk--they were pretty lovely, especially on a very hot day. And there was passion fruit juice--I’ve never tasted anything quite like fresh passion fruit juice, which was sold in baggies with a straw dropped into them, around which a string was tied so you could dangle the bag from the handlebars of your bicycle. There were also these sticky rice things that I found revolting if they had red bean in them--they were so very vile--but quite liked if they contained a paste of sweetened black sesame. But ain’t none of it the same as a really moist chocolate chip cookie or a nice big square of fudge so rich and sweet it makes your teeth hurt.

If you’ve ever looked at the “Desserts” section of a Chinese cookbook, you might have noticed that there’s usually not much there, and what is there doesn’t quite live up to our standards of an impressive finale to a good meal: you won’t find the Asian equivalent of a dense chocolate cake or a caramel souffle. That’s because something like chocolate cake--particularly if it’s frosted and accompanied by a dollop of ice cream--is cloyingly, unappetizingly sweet to the traditional Chinese palate. When I’d been on my mission about a year, a Dairy Queen opened in Taichung, the city I was stationed in. Of course I went to the grand opening.... and then I went back the next day. At one point I ended up talking to one of the western managers, who told me that all the recipes had to be revised to accommodate Chinese tastes. Otherwise, the local population might try a hot fudge sundae once, just for novelty’s sake, but it would be so unpleasantly sweet they’d never come back, and you couldn’t turn a profit someplace like Taichung catering only to expatriates.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything genetic going on, that the Chinese have different taste buds than people with ancestors from Europe. No. I mean, I guess there might be, but I think it more likely that it’s a matter of what tastes are reinforced by the culture, what people are trained from infancy to think is delicious. As someone pointed out to me, many tastes are acquired, and historically the Chinese found it silly that westerners spend so much time acquiring a taste for things that are really bad for them--diabetes isn’t nearly the problem in China that it is in the US--or else bad for them AND thoroughly gross if you stop to think about it, i.e., the fetishized, manipulated, clotted old baby food of other species, known to us as cheese.

It’s hard to realize just how revolting cheese is in the ideology of Chinese cuisine. (And yes, Chinese cuisine does have an ideology about the proper way to eat, just as we have a food pyramid and notions about what you need to eat each day to be healthy.) In that philosophy, only babies and barbarians consume dairy products, and at least babies consume it while it’s still fresh, instead of letting it get curdled, hard, and in some cases, moldy. Worst of all, this is done with something intended only for the young of other species--it’s not like we make cheese from human milk. (Think how you’d react if someone served you cottage cheese made from the milk of cocker spaniels. That’s getting to the visceral revulsion cheese in general often arouses.) The average Chinese person is as grossed out by the sight, smell and taste of blue cheese as the average American is by something called chou dofu, which literally means “stinky tofu,” and which you could buy in Taiwan as easily as you can buy a Starbucks mocha in the US. I never tried chou dofu myself; watching one of my friends take a bite and then retch violently into the sewer at the side of the road was enough to convince me I wouldn’t like the taste any better than the smell.

I didn’t really like cheese when I was a little kid. I would eat it when it was served to me, provided it was melted (it had to be melted), but I didn’t really enjoy it and I couldn’t see why people always put it in things when most foods were just as good without it. But at some point I learned to love cheese, except for American cheese, which I won’t even go near. I also don’t care for blue cheese and the other really stinky, moldy ones. I’ve tried--I tried for the better part of two decades, in fact, to acquire a taste for those weird moldy cheeses grownups are supposed to enjoy. Starting in my teens, when I was served something with Gorgonzola or Roquefort, I’d tell myself that the reason it didn’t taste good was because I just wasn’t in the mood for a stinky moldy cheese on that particular day. But one day I realized that if I’d reached my mid thirties and didn’t really enjoy stinky, moldy cheeses, I probably wasn’t going to acquire a taste for them, ever. So now I just admit that I don’t like stinky, moldy cheese, the same way I don’t like raw tomatoes or organ meat, and I’m much happier.

I had this one boyfriend who once went off on this tirade about the inferiority of American culture. It’s not like that’s a topic I can’t get jazzed about discussing, but he had this particularly stupid way of demonstrating said inferiority. “It’s like this professor I had in college once told us,” the boyfriend said. “He said that a good gauge of a country’s maturity and its contributions to the rest of the world was the number of cheeses it had invented. And France has invented, like, five hundred or a thousand or something, and the United States has invented, like, three.”

“And then there’s China,” I replied. “It’s invented zero cheeses. The Chinese don’t even eat cheese. They just invented, oh, gun powder and paper money and toilet paper and porcelain and pasta and the printing press, like, a couple thousand years ago. But of course none of that stacks up to leaving sheep’s milk in a wooden bucket for long enough that it gets stinky, hard and moldy.”

Which pissed the boyfriend off. But he deserved it.

This wasn’t going to be about cheese, because after all, I posted something about cheese already this month. This was going to be a recipe for a peanut butter bar cookie. Oh well. This was another of those times when I got all caught up in my introduction. So I guess I’ll post the recipe tomorrow or the next day. Check back then if you want a really easy recipe for an ideal bar cookie to tote along to your next picnic.

Posted by Holly at 8:39 PM | Comments (3)

June 15, 2006

What I Ate Then, What I Can Eat Now

I'm sure everyone wants an update on the state of my stomach as well as a report of the gustatory pleasures I enjoyed on the cruise. So here they both are.

Probably the only good thing about forcibly ejecting the entire contents of your digestive tract from any available orifice over an eight-hour period is that afterwards, your stomach is as shriveled and sour as an unripened kumquat, which means you can't put a whole lot in it, which means you lose weight.

There are a limited number of activities you can pursue on a boat, but eating and drinking head the list. Cruise lines make it a point of pride to feed guests often and well. On this cruise, room service was available 24-hours a day, free of charge. The ninth floor of the boat featured a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet that didn't exactly stink, though it wasn't up to the quality of the formal dining room, which offered meals like roast pheasant, filet mignon, lobster or lamb chops. I ate more meat in that one week than I'll probably consume for the rest of the summer. I also ate more soup: I'm not usually a soup person, but when it's chilled blueberry soup with champagne, or chilled peach soup with a dollop of creme fraise, or chilled pear soup with ginger, well, then you're just eating a smoothie out of a bowl with a spoon, and who wouldn't go for that?

Supposedly the average weight gain for a cruise is a pound a day. I didn't gain that much, but I didn't diet, either, and I sure as hell always ordered dessert. One of the main reasons I didn't get spectacularly and instantly too big for my britches is the fact that I didn't drink much. I had an occasional fancy cocktail in some lounge while we watched the sun set, but that was it. No one else in my family drinks, and it's just no fun to be the only one at the table ordering wine. Plus it's expensive: you pay extra for fancy coffee (there was an espresso bar in the place), soda (no kidding: a Coke cost $2.89), and booze. The fact that no one drank at dinner quite flummoxed the various wine stewards, who would show up at the table to explain what wines we should be drinking with what course. They'd deliver a spiel and try to hand out a wine list, at which point everyone would turn to me, and I would say to the wine steward, "We don't drink." He would then say, "No one wants to risk drinking and driving tonight, aye?" and again try to give someone a wine list. "We don't drink," I'd say a second time, and he'd realize he wouldn't be earning any tips at our table (a 15% gratuity was added to all beverage orders) and begin dejectedly gathering up our wine glasses. But it was clear that for plenty of people, what really made the cruise a vacation was the fact that they could have not only meat but alcohol at every single meal: I can't stomach a nice plate of bacon and eggs and a bloody mary first thing each morning, but for those who can, well, a cruise is ideal.

It's nice to be able to think about food again without feeling instantly and thoroughly queasy, though I wouldn't say my appetite has completely returned. I went to see one of my local friends this evening, and we discussed the fact that as you age, it just takes longer to recover from any illness. It has been over 100 hours since I last vomited but my gut is still feeling a tad delicate and tender, and it's funny what seems appetizing and what doesn't.... I went grocery shopping yesterday, and I could think of exactly five things that appealed to me, the primary one being toast. I also had a hankering for two desserts I make a lot, the first being blueberry crumble and the second being fudge upside down cake with strawberries and yogurt. The only vegetables I could bear the thought of eating were boiled peas and palak paneer. I don't know why those things seemed palatable, but given the revulsion I felt at the idea of zucchini, or string beans, or hummus, or a cup of coffee, or just about anything else I could think of, I wasn't going to gainsay the fact that there were at least five solid foods I wanted to eat.

My friends H & K were so solicitous of my stomach that Monday night K made chicken soup and focaccia for dinner because she figured it would be easy for me to digest. It tasted good and stayed down, so she was right. Then we watched television for a while, and the show we settled on was Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. The particular episode involved him going to Canada and hunting seal with a bunch of Eskimos, then eating the entire animal--including the eyeballs--raw. I think if I'd had anything more ambitious for dinner it would have come back up at that point. I was also glad that my own arctic adventures involved foods like salmon and crab cakes rather than seal brains. Fish tacos are daring enough.

Anyway, I should be done writing about gut trouble for a while, in case you haven't enjoyed this topic. And I guess I was wrong when I said the only good thing about puking is that it shrinks your stomach: another benefit is that when you're done being sick, you remember that it's really quite lovely and wonderful to feel healthy. I feel pretty healthy--I think I could even enjoy popcorn right now, so I'm going to go do it.

Posted by Holly at 10:12 PM | Comments (5)

March 30, 2006

The Ultimate Gateway Drug

According to Chinese medicine, you shouldn't drink icy cold things pretty much ever, but they're especially bad for you in winter. I am enough of a Westerner that I quite enjoy a nice cola with lots of ice and a wedge of lime, and one reason I am anxious for it to warm up is because I am tired of not indulging in said beverage. I am a big ol' cheapskate and I can't stand paying a lot of money to burn up fossil fuels to heat my house to 70 F, so I keep the thermostat at around 65 F during the day and just wear lots of clothes. This saves on heating bills but means the only way I can drink an icy cola without darn near freezing to death is if I drink it in while I'm lying in a very warm bath, which I do from time to time, but only if I take a bath early in the day, because I don't like drinking caffeine after, say, 5 p.m.

Actually I try to avoid caffeine as much as possible. I only drink decaffeinated tea and coffee. Many people find this odd but I just don't like stimulants. Revving up is not what my personality generally needs.

My cola is preference is Coke, the real thing, but I find Diet Coke with Splenda a thoroughly acceptable substitute for the real thing. I remember when Diet Coke was invented: it was 1982 and I was a sophomore in college, and I thought dc was the best thing EVER! I drank a lot of it, for years, and then I quit for even more years because I didn't want to drink artificial sweeteners anymore. I do that with beverages; I give them up for a while. I didn't drink hot Dr Pepper at all in the 1980s, and then I started again around 1993; I didn't drink tea for a while but now I drink it a lot; currently, I'm trying to drink less coffee. That would be easier to do if I could drink Diet Coke instead, which I started drinking again last fall after I heard about this Splenda stuff, which supposedly isn't so bad for you and tastes more like real sugar. I don't know about how healthy it is, but I do know it tastes better, and that somehow helps me believe it's not as deadly as that aspartame stuff.

Wayne disapproves of my fondness for Diet Coke. He claims that Diet Coke is the ultimate gateway drug, because it has so few consequences: you can drink it and feel almost virtuous because it won't make you fat or give you cancer as quickly as cigarettes, but make no mistake, he argues, it's a drug! And drinking Diet Coke will lead to much more severe substance abuse, just you wait! I point out that I started drinking Diet Coke almost 23 years ago and still have yet to develop a more serious substance abuse problem (unless you count chocolate, and I don't); alcohol is the only recreational drug I ever use, and I try not to indulge in that too often. He claims I'm just fooling myself and that someday it will wreak havoc on my life; look what it did to one of its most noted spokeswomen, Whitney Houston! And I think of the last photo I saw of poor Whitney and I sort of don't want to argue any more.

So if you ever hear that I've ended up in rehab after beating the shit out of my celebrity husband, you'll know that Diet Coke is the substance at the root of all my problems. But it won't happen for a few more weeks because it's still too cold to indulge in it regularly.

Posted by Holly at 8:56 AM | Comments (10)

March 27, 2006

What I Drink for Breakfast

My family drank boiling hot Dr Pepper every morning for breakfast the whole time I was growing up, and as a matter of fact, we drink it still.

The rest of this post has been deleted, because I revised it substantially and included it in an essay.

Posted by Holly at 10:10 AM | Comments (12)

March 18, 2006

Holly's Week in Review

I am pained to admit that despite my earlier expectation that I had an easy week before me because I was so productive over spring break, this week has been exceptionally busy. Thursday and Friday were REALLY hairy. The duties I had that day weren't especially onerous--I had to help entertain a visiting writer on Thursday, and on Friday I spent a couple of hours being interviewed for a documentary on memoirs that turn out to be fabricated, focusing on one specific memoir that is particularly suspect.... I won't share details, because it's not my project. Anyway, it was exhausting to sit there with a spotlight shining directly into my face for two hours (it reduces unflattering shadows, I'm told) but at least the guy making the documentary was really interesting and took me to dinner afterwards, so I felt well compensated for time. But the upshot of dealing with these claims on my time was that a lot of things I thought I'd accomplish handily didn't get done, and they have to get done by tomorrow night.

In other news, for lunch today I made the taco recipe I posted earlier, but used (as promised) some veggie protein weirdness in place of the premium ground Angus beef I typically use. The vegetarian version was OK, I guess, it just wasn't totally yummy, you know? It occurred to me that one problem might be the particular meat substitute I used (Smart Ground, I think it was called), that no doubt some are better than others.... Anyone have experience with vegetarian ground beef substitutes, and want to recommend one as superior to others?

Posted by Holly at 6:32 PM | Comments (4)

February 9, 2006

I Heart Wegmans

In an entry last week I mentioned something about checking the frozen foods section of my favorite grocery store. I wanted to write simply, "Every time I go to Wegmans I check to see if Ben and Jerry's has brought back my favorite flavors," but I couldn't, because not everyone knows what Wegmans is.

And I have decided to do something about that.

As I hope I've made abundantly clear, I prefer the southwest part of the US to the northeast part. But one thing that makes the northeast superior to the rest of the country is the presence of Wegmans, the best grocery store I've ever shopped at. It's even better than the New Pioneer Food Co-op in Iowa City, and that was a pretty damn good grocery store. (Though New Pi had better bread--they had this chocolate cherry bread that was AMAZING.)

I'd be proud to appear in a Wegmans ad, pushing my cart through the spacious aisles and merrily singing some jingle as I pull high-quality food items from the well-stocked shelves. But I'm not the only one willing to sing the company's praises: last year Wegmans ranked first in FORTUNE Magazine's list of the top 100 companies to work for; this year it ranks second. According to a company press release, "this marks the ninth consecutive year Wegmans has appeared on the annual list and its fourth year ranked among the top 10."

I realize I sound as enthusiastic as a paid spokesperson, but part of what I like best about shopping at Wegmans is the fact that the employees don't seem to resent doing the jobs they're paid to do. They're not surly--in fact, they're usually pretty cheery. They know where stuff is. When you ask them for help, they try to provide it.

My particular Wegmans, it should be noted, is not as vast and grand as some. A couple of my friends live in Ithaca, NY, and their Wegmans is truly impressive, boasting a better deli and restaurant section and a much better liquor selection than the branch I shop at. (That last bit isn't hard, since I live in Pennsylvania, and PA's laws governing the sale of alcohol are even stupider and more complicated than Utah's, with the upshot being that you can't buy booze at grocery stores in PA.)

But I still love my smaller Wegmans, even after being introduced to a truly magnificent version. Believe it or not, Wegmans is the only place in town to get decent sushi. The olive bar is nice too, and I'm fairly happy with the cheese selection. (It is the US, of course, so ain't no cheese section going to be as good as you'd find in, say, France.) They stock a lot of local produce; it's very fresh and reasonably priced, and the organic stuff is reasonable too. They have a really nice tableware and kitchenware section, with merchandise that changes frequently--cool seasonal place settings and ideas for entertaining. I admit I wish they had a better selection of Mexican food products, but no place is perfect.

Anyway, in the future, instead of writing "I went to the grocery store," I'll just write, "I went to Wegmans," and you'll all know what I mean.

Posted by Holly at 9:10 AM | Comments (5)

January 5, 2006

My New Favorite Cheese

Having written recently about my new favorite plastic bag, my new favorite French cover band, my new favorite fantasy boyfriend, I figure I might as well also write about my new favorite cheese. It's Purple Haze, a wonderful soft goat cheese flavored with lavender, from Cypress Grove Chevre. Go out and buy some! It's unbelievably yummy.

Posted by Holly at 12:36 PM

November 16, 2005

There Is No X in....

In 1994, the landscape of Iowa City was forever changed when the Java House opened at 211 ½ East Washington. Its appearance heralded the arrival of the coffee craze in the general Midwest--sure, there were probably Starbucks all over Chicago at that point, but there wasn't one in Iowa City. (In fact, there wasn't a single Starbucks in Iowa City when I left in 2001, but there's one now, I saw with disappointment, though at least it's off the main drag and not nearly as crowded as other, older, cooler places.)

Iowa City's downtown features an area known as the pedestrian mall, the ped mall for short. It runs through four blocks bounded by Washington on the north, Clinton on the west, Burlington on the south, and Linn on the east. Paved with brick, dotted with trees, well-stocked with benches both in the shade and in the sun, equipped with a fountain and a playground, it's a cool place to hang out if there's no one you want to avoid; if there's someone you don't particularly want to encounter--say, for instance, an evil ex named Adam--you are sure to find him there, sitting on a bench in the sun, hitting on some undergrad who can't understand why this 30-something guy with the crazy eyebrows (his eyebrows were his worst feature, looking as they did like small furry rodents nesting on an otherwise attractive face) is putting on this act of intense and obviously fake sincerity. The restaurants, shops and bars (mostly bars) around the ped mall occupy prime retail space, because it gets so much foot traffic.

Prior to the arrival of the Java House, the only coffee house in downtown Iowa City was a place called the Tobacco Bowl, the retail equivalent of an AA meeting or an indoor cigarette break: no need to shiver in a snowstorm between classes or put up with the boozy smell of stale beer while you get your nicotine fix--heavens no! Why not enjoy a nice espresso instead of a beer and stay warm while you're at it? You can either study the cigars in the humidor--such a variety--or sit in front of a big window facing the ped mall, watching everyone who walks by! I admit I see the appeal of all that, I just don't see the appeal of smoking. I would never hang out there, even with friends who smoked, because I hated how I smelled when I left.

But then the Java House opened and the city was transformed. The Java House was pretentious, expensive and perennially overcrowded, which didn't prevent anyone from loving it, me included. It was centrally located--just a dozen yards or so off the north entrance to the ped mall--and had a phone from which you could make free local calls (this in the days before everyone had cell phones). It had reasonably clean bathrooms clear at the back of the establishment, so you could stroll through the whole place, see if there was anyone around you wanted to talk to, use the bathroom, then go on your merry way. Everyone hung out there from time to time, sometimes for hours on end. When we had visitors from out of town, we'd drop them off at the Java House while we went to take or teach classes; we called it "adult daycare."

The Java House also served damn good coffee--still does. Every cup is individually brewed, before your very eyes, after you order it.

There was one thing I always HATED about the Java House: the t-shirts worn by its employees. These shirts had a little slogan written over the heart: "There is no X in espresso."

It drove me nuts because the kind of people who drink espresso are generally the kind of people who know how to spell it. I always felt like responding, "There is no X in ‘pretentious f*ckhead,' either," but I realized that the employees just WORE the t-shirts; they didn't create them.

On my recent visit to Iowa City, the first place I went after checking into my hotel was the Java House (the original Java House, to be specfic--there are now five in town). It had changed in that there was more seating--a good thing--and the graphics on the paper cups were busy and fussy instead of austere and elegant like they used to be, but those goddamn pretentious annoying t-shirts were just the same. Thank god the coffee was too.

Posted by Holly at 8:40 AM | Comments (2)

November 7, 2005

I Don't Take Candy from Children, But I Also Don't Hand it Out

I confess: I've never been visited by the spirit of the Great Pumpkin. I've written here and here about various Halloween costumes I've worn, but I admit that dressing up is the only part of the holiday I care for. The whole ghosts and goblins thing doesn't appeal to me: I have never enjoyed being frightened out of my wits, and I don't see the entertainment value of skeletons, corpses and ugly witches. Nor can I see the point in wasting a perfectly good pumpkin by carving a design in it, inserting a lit candle, and putting it outside where it will attract bugs and fractious adolescent boys.

Then there's the whole trick-or-treat business. I have a highly developed, demanding and discriminating sweet tooth, and most of the candy handed out on Halloween does not meet my standards. With the possible exception of the Easter candy Peeps, I don't think a more disgusting candy exists than that vile candy corn. I remember seeing someone once who had painted her nails to resemble that candy corn; that's what the candy reminds me of now--it tastes like I imagine sweetened nail clippings would. I do not particularly care for peanuts or peanut butter, so I am not fond of Snickers or Reese's Cups, and I HATE peanut M&M's. I like hard candy in small and occasional doses. I can be happy eating a KitKat or plain M&M's or any flavor of Skittles, but what I really like is gourmet dark chocolate. Unfortunately, not many people hand out Godiva Truffles on Halloween.

I am sure you are saying: Holly, you are TOO OLD to go trick-or-treating--this holiday is not about what YOU like! Well, OK, but I used to go trick-or-treating, and I was often disappointed by the candy I got as a child. And even now, I have to BUY the damn candy, and I'm not going to buy candy I don't like--what if I end up with leftovers? And it's freakin' expensive to buy all that candy! I rather like the idea of being generous to other people's children, but I'm not sure doling out lollipops to anonymous wee ones is the best way to do it. I'd rather sign up to buy Christmas gifts for an underprivileged child--now there's a holiday and a practice I understand.

All of which is to say, a mere day or two before Halloween I still had not found the time or wherewithall to buy any candy or drape any part of my home in cobwebs or orange and black streamers. I was thinking about turning off the lights in the front of my house and hiding out in the back bedroom all evening so that I would not have to open my door to a steady stream of diminutive Disney princesses and Harry Potter look-alikes, when a friend said to me, "Want to see a movie Monday night so we don't have to deal with trick-or-treaters?"

What a glorious idea! We went to the 5:30 showing of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (which I heartily recommend). The cineplex was nearly deserted, which is precisely how I like my cineplexes. Then we got dinner; then we went home. I was back in my house between 8:30 and 9 p.m. and at that point the kiddies were back home as well, sitting on their beds in their costumes, exulting over their hoards of candy plundered under threat of malfeasance from obliging adults, completely jacked up on sugar and crying because they didn't want to put on their pajamas and have their faces scrubbed free of makeup. But I didn't have to deal with any of that!

So now I know what I'm going to do every Halloween. I can't think of a better time to see a movie. As for staying home, opening my door to short strangers and handing out candy? I'd rather indulge in my own little trick, my own little treat.

Posted by Holly at 7:47 AM | Comments (0)

November 1, 2005

Phone Chips and Salsa

Several weeks ago, Wayne and I had phone chips and salsa, which is a lot like phone sex except with chips and salsa in place of the sex. (That's probably pretty self-evident, but I wanted to make sure everyone understood.)

That is only one of the many activities we have shared over the phone. We have also scrubbed our bathtubs together. We have gone for walks. We have plotted and taken fiendish but heartily deserved revenge against Adam, my evilest of exes. We have washed dishes. We have done laundry. We have googled our celebrity crushes and directed each other to websites featuring photos of obscure foreign actors without their shirts.

In fact, I got a cell phone a mere 14 months ago largely to facilitate talking to Wayne. He was very upset about a $400.00 phone bill he got, especially since most of the charges involved phone calls to or from me. So I got the same carrier he had and we both signed up for free mobile-to-mobile minutes, with the upshot that I began spending 25 to 30 hours a month talking to Wayne on the phone, and about two and a half hours put together talking to everyone else I knew.

That kept up for a good long while until we had a falling out over religion. I may discuss our six-month estrangement and reconciliation at some point in a future post, but let me say now that within days of reestablishing contact all the animosity disappeared and it was like we'd never quarreled, except that it took us a while to work back up to talking on the phone for so long that we'd grow peckish and have to rummage through our various cupboards for snacks.

After we both closed up the bag of chips and put the salsa back in the fridge on that Saturday several weeks back, we decided we needed some internet action, so we blog surfed by hitting the "next blog" button on blogger. We came across a site run by some guy in Vienna dedicated to enormous breasts. He provided plenty of photos of breasts, including a substantial pair on a naked blonde woman who sits on a fireplace mantle, drinking a beer and looking bored while some guy eats her out. I found that in rather bad taste, but what upset Wayne was a photo further down the page of Christian Bale from American Psycho, accompanied by a lavish and loving paean to the character CB portrays: the guy went on and on about how that was his favorite movie and how he really identified with that character--the one who tortures, rapes and murders women.

The thing is, earlier in the conversation, while he was cleaning his kitchen I was tromping through this small wooded area near my house, Wayne had said to me, "So, I read that article you linked on your blog, the one about ‘Die, Women, Die!' and it really kind of bugged me. I couldn't trust it."

"Why?" I asked.

"The tone bugged me. There was this cheap shot about Desperate Housewives, and it makes it sound like the show is just about 40-something T&A. But it's not--it's so much more than that. So the whole article just seemed to have--"

"A feminist agenda?" I interrupted.

"Exactly," he said, "and I don't trust agendas."

"Everyone has an agenda," I said. "It's just that they can be more or less explicit, more or less offensive, more or less progressive."

"Well, I just don't see why someone needs to prove their agenda by knocking Desperate Housewives. It's a great show."

(Unfortunately I couldn't comment on that particular issue at that point, as I had never seen an episode of DH. I have now seen eight episodes, and have been surprised at how much I like it--but more on that later.)

"I think it's a good point and a good article," I said. "There are so many shows that feature violence against women. The article makes the point that not only are these shows most popular among males age 18-34, but these shows are about the only television programming that demographic group really likes to watch."

"But I'm a male between the ages of 18-34," he began.

"Yes, but you're not a straight one," I said.

"But I watch Desperate Housewives," he said.

"Do you watch CSI?" I asked.

"Of course not. I don't watch most of the crap on television. And if you started examining the crap on television, you'd see that almost all of it insults someone."

"But that's not necessarily the same thing as trying to titillate someone by depicting the violent rape, torture and murder of women," I said. "Why should that kind of suffering be entertainment? Why would anyone enjoy watching that?"

(I admit I honestly don't understand that, but then, I have never been able to see anything funny about someone slipping on a banana peel. Even as a small child, I never felt able to laugh because I was too busy thinking about how painful it would be to fall down like that.)

And then the conversation took a turn and we talked about other things for over an hour until we both read the entry about how great that American Psycho character is. "This is obscenely offensive," Wayne said, "because that character is sick!"

So I said, "Do you get it now? Do you see why it's repugnant and abhorrent to have someone identify positively with a character who gets off on brutalizing, degrading and killing women? Do you see why it's not cool to make women convenient objects to be destroyed and discarded as part of a man's exploration of good and evil? Do you see why this sickens and distresses women who come across it?"

And he did--thank goddess.

I haven't unleashed many feminist rants on my blog lately (OK, I haven't unleashed them on the blog, but there have been several in real life), but it seems about time for one. I was going to write something about this Amnesty International Report on Japan's refusal to apologize for enslaving thousand of women as sex slaves, claiming that rape wasn't a war crime until 1949; and about a museum in Japan documenting the lives and suffering of comfort women, but I found an entry on the topic already posted on a blog I really like, I Blame the Patriarchy. So I'll work on drafting some of the ideas I've been mulling over lately, and in the meantime, you can enjoy the insights of another spinster aunt.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)

October 17, 2005

Chocolat

This is a review of the movie Chocolat that I wrote in 2001 for a class on, well, on writing reviews. The teacher liked it but suggested that it was a bit too idiosyncratic to be appropriate for most publications, so I never bothered to do anything with it, but it seems it might find a home here, especially since I posted all this stuff about movies.

****

Once at a party a friend of mine who had been sitting near my television said to me, "I can't believe your movie collection. It's so...brazen."

"You mean ‘cause they're almost all chick movies?" I asked.

"It's not just that," she said. "It's that you have them out, where people can see them. I mean, some of my friends own a lot of these same movies, but they put them away before people come over. But you're not even embarrassed."

It's true: I like chick movies, I watch chick movies, I buy chick movies; I don't care who knows. I might add that my collection is alphabetized, ranging from Annie Hall, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chasing Amy, Clueless to Sense and Sensibility, Singin' in the Rain, Sixteen Candles, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Truth or Dare. I feel entitled to add that I like other kinds of movies as well--I love Lawrence of Arabia and The Pride of the Yankees, and I don't think those qualify as chick movies. But then, I haven't gotten around to buying those movies. Maybe I should. Nothing in my collection starts with L or P.

Chocolat, directed by Lasse Hallstrom and up for Best Picture in the 2001 Academy Awards, is the best chick movie I have seen in a good long time. First of all, the clothes are terrific. Juliette Binoche and Victoire Thivosol (who plays Binoche's daughter) arrive in a tiny French village at the end of the 1950s dressed in matching red cloaks that would make Little Red Riding Hood jealous. They carry two medium-sized suitcases, but you'd need at least two suitcases more to hold the entirety of Juliette Binoche's marvelous collection of straight skirts, full skirts, cute sweater sets and colorful high heels. I especially loved her bias-cut circle plaid skirts, one of which has really cool patch pockets. When Binoche sets about painting the dingy walls of the patisserie she intends to turn into a chocolaterie, she does so in a fabulous fitted off-the-shoulder purple blouse, and not one drop of paint is spattered on that blouse, which is good because it's really flattering and shows up again and again. I imagine she also has a decent collection of push-up bras in one of those suitcases--at least, I'm guessing she wears one under that purple blouse.

Carrie-Anne Moss, who was so drop-dead cool in black leather and vinyl as Trinity in The Matrix, is here a prim widow who wears elegant suits and pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy. Her mother is played by Judi Dench, and while not all of Dench's costumes are particularly remarkable, she is provided with a very flattering haircut and wide-brimmed hat just in time for her birthday party. Even the mayor's absent wife has a closet full of fabulous clothes--and when the mayor, played by Alfred Molina, takes garden shears to a flowered chiffon party dress because he's angry at his wife for running off and leaving him, I had to suppress a gasp of horror.

Nor are men's fashions ignored. The hair and make-up crew did a wonderful job of adding striking blond highlights to Johnny Depp's dark hair, which he wears pulled back in a severe, straight ponytail. Depp plays a vagabond whose presence threatens the towns tranquility, and he is suitably vagabondish in a ratty leather blazer, fraying sweaters and tattered pants. Alfred Molina looks quite dignified in a series of well-cut suits, and the priest, a curly-headed, doe-eyed, callow actor whose name I forgot to note, gets to wear exceptionally lovely and elaborately embroidered vestments.

The movie is set in France, and while no one actually speaks French in the movie, at least most of the actors--only three of whom are French--speak with French accents. An exception is Johnny Depp, who acquired a fairly awful and unconvincing Irish accent for this film. The French setting means that we get many nice shots of quaint homes and large trees along a slow green river.

I don't want to make it sound like clothes, hair, accents and a picturesque setting are all this movie has to offer. Keep in mind, it's about chocolate. I suggest you bring some with you while you watch this movie. There are lots of scenes of melted chocolate being stirred around in big bowls, and you can get pretty hungry. At one point Lena Olin licks the knife she is using to stir such a pot of chocolate, and while I winced at the unsanitariness of that act--after all, this chocolate is going to be for sale--I couldn't help wishing for a chocolate-covered knife to lick myself.

The movie also has a plot, which I found compelling and moving. It's a story about the cost of self-deprivation and petty intolerance, and the rewards of generosity. One of the things I liked best about this movie was its generous attitude towards its characters. None of them are whole-heartedly bad; all are offered redemption. The fact that redemption arrives in the form of chocolate might seem cloyingly sweet to some viewers, but there was enough darkness and bitterness in this chocolate for me. I'm going to buy it when it comes out on video, even though I already own a couple of movies starting with C.

****

Just for the record, I never got around to buying a copy of Chocolat. Several of the other movies I mentioned are no longer in my collection, because I sold most of my VHS cassettes after I got a dvd player. I now own Lawrence of Arabia on dvd, and watch it regularly.

Posted by Holly at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)

October 7, 2005

Wasabi Potato Cakes

There have been three or four times in my life when I've lost a significant amount of weight (fifteen pounds or so) without dieting. Instead, something awful has happened--a serious illness, clinical depression, a devastating breakup, or some combination thereof--that has made it hard to choke down food, and made the food hard to digest once it was down.

Recently I lost over ten pounds without trying. I wasn't depressed or ill, but I was extremely anxious. It had to do, first of all, with the standard post-traumatic Sunstone syndrome I go through every year. But what I didn't want to admit to many people (though I did tell Tom and his wife about it) was that what troubled me most was this visceral certainty that I lacked a fundamental piece of bad information about the romance I'd begun at Sunstone.

Every morning for a month I'd wake nauseated and grossed out. I'd raise a carton of orange juice to my mouth (I live alone, so I feel entitled to drink straight from the carton) and my throat would contract after a swallow or two. Along about noon, I'd find myself ravenous and toss a salad, but I could never finish it. At dinner I'd grill a cheese sandwich and end up throwing the last few bites away. As for dessert, I couldn't even go there! The way I felt reminded me of how my sisters described morning sickness, except that instead of random smells making me want to puke, it was random thoughts: I'd think suddenly of this guy I was utterly enamored of, and I'd feel dread, foreboding and a trace of sheer physical revulsion, which, to state the obvious, is not a good sign.

Eventually I discovered what it was I hadn't known. Soon thereafter, the relationship went away, and with it, much of my anxiety. But my appetite didn't return immediately, which was OK with me. I'm generally quite healthy, with an appetite to match; I'm a decent cook, and I enjoy food. But I discovered that fitting into clothes I haven't been able to wear for four years offers certain enjoyments too. Having begun losing weight, I rather wanted to continue.

And I managed to be good enough most of the time, losing a few ounces every couple of days. But I had to work at it, had to tell myself to order a small mocha, no whipped cream. Had to say to myself, "No, Holly, you DON'T need to make cookies." Had to make myself cover my plate and say, "I'm done here" before I finished all my french fries.

But this morning I awoke again with that violent internal retching that prevents me from even thinking about solid food. It's not anxiety today--well, maybe a little, because I do feel harried and harassed by the many, many things I have to do, like shower, get dressed and go to a 4 p.m. meeting on campus. But mostly, it's wasabi potato cakes.

One of the nicest duties of my job is meeting the visiting writers we bring to campus, attending their readings, then going out to dinner with them. It's always a fun evening: food, drink and conversations with some cool writer, six or seven members of the English and creative writing faculty, occasionally a partner or two. We have a standard reservation at one of the nicer restaurants in town, and the service is almost always provided by a genial, efficient waitress who knows us and our preferences quite well. When she's taking drink orders, before I even have to ask, she tells me what the martini special is. If it sounds good, I'll try it; if not, I go with a cosmo.

The flip side of going to a restaurant so often that the waitress knows what you'll ask before you ask it, is that you know what will be on the menu before you open it. I have a favorite standard item I can always fall back on: a nice steak covered in a delightful piquant pepper sauce. And sometimes they have cool and interesting specials. But sometimes they don't.

Earlier in the day, I'd taught a Stuart Dybek essay about a bunch of sixth-graders going on a field trip to a slaughter house, and the descriptions of cows being clubbed to death, of an assembly line of swine hanging by their hind feet to facilitate the slitting of their throats, after which they are allowed to watch each other bleed to death as they squeal in terror and pain.... well, discussing that with a group of undergrads left me with the sense that I didn't want to eat red meat again any time soon.

But this restaurant isn't known for its vegetarian items. Fish, I thought, I'll order fish. I almost went with the tuna.... but it was on the cheap menu and didn't come with any side dishes. One of the specials was crispy-skinned salmon, accompanied by a few spears of grilled asparagus--AND wasabi potato cakes.

I couldn't help it: I was skeptical. It was farmed salmon, for one thing, which just doesn't taste as good as wild salmon, and isn't as healthy, either. And then there were those wasabi potato cakes.... I hated to be accused of culinary cowardice: after all, this wasn't any random pairing of a strangely colored condiment with a familiar white starchy food, like ketchup-covered banana chunks; no, it was nouvelle cuisine, the blending of east and west! My colleagues on either side of me announced their intention to go with the salmon. I figured I might as well ask this trusted waitress for her honest advice.

"Oh, I serve so many of those wasabi potato cakes! We can barely keep ‘em in the kitchen!" she assured me. And I placed the fateful order.

As you should surmise from my subtle foreshadowing, the entire meal SUCKED--well, I guess the asparagus was OK. When our plates arrived, a colleague who had wisely ordered something else commented, "Oh look, it's the dish with hair," because each item in the meal was stacked on top of each other, the entire structure covered with finely shredded, deep-fried potatoes, mounded high on top and trailing down the sides in curls, so that the whole thing looked like a fuzzy brown muppet. The salmon was not only bland, but covered by an especially greasy tartar sauce I had to scrape off. There were a couple of breaded, deep-fried tomato slices buried in there (had that element been mentioned in the menu, I would never have ordered the dish, because I don't like tomatoes), and as for the wasabi potato cakes, they were just spicy patties of hashed browns, undercooked on the inside and burnt on the outside.

The meal was so bad, it even put me off dessert. I ordered a black forest trifle, but didn't have the appetite to finish it. I wasn't even as buzzed as I wanted to be because we have a two-drink limit, but I guess there's something to be said for being sober enough to drive home at the end of a two-and-a-half-hour long dinner, whether the food is good or bad.

I got home, got ready for bed, couldn't sleep, took a sleeping pill. I did manage to fall asleep soon thereafter and stay asleep for a long time, but I woke up feeling just like you'd expect. I've been up for seven hours and have yet to put anything of substance into my stomach. I think it might be seven hours more before I do. The only consolation for feeling so queasy is that the evening of excess won't show up on the scale or on my hips.

Posted by Holly at 3:27 PM

September 22, 2005

Bad Coffee in Bed

Monday afternoon I called Wayne, because a conversation with Wayne was what my Monday afternoon needed. At one point he said, without a segue, "So, I've decided I need to be more of a snob." I figured there was a good reason for this pronouncement, so I waited to hear it. "I started drinking tea a while ago," he said, "mostly chais, because they seemed healthier than coffee. Green chais, herbal chais--there was a vanilla chai I really loved and couldn't get enough of for a while. Lately I've been drinking black tea and I really like it, and I realized it's not really that different from coffee. But I just like it better than coffee. And then I realized that part of the problem was that I drank so much bad coffee."

He was on a roll and it was interesting, so I didn't interrupt him.

"You know how for a long time I was all about coffee?" I made some noise of acquiescence. "Well, good coffee is really good. But bad coffee is really bad. And I realized today that I needed to be more of a diva when it comes to coffee. Not once, when I was presented with a cup of really awful coffee, did I taste it, then spit it out and say, ‘How can you expect me to drink this shit?! This is vile! This is beyond vile! I will not pollute my mouth or any other part of me with a substance so thoroughly foul!"

"Does this mean you're going to start drinking coffee again?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "But only good coffee. If I do, I will be a complete coffee snob. I'm ashamed to tell you about all the bad coffee I've had, Holly. I mean, coffee from some awful container that's been on the back of a caterer's truck for hours and hours if not days and days.... We're talking some of the worst coffee in the world. Coffee that even before you sugar and cream it up, you can just tell is going to take the enamel right off your teeth--both the smell and the look of it just tell that it's not OK."

There was a pause, and I imagined him staring at the painting of Gabriel Garko he had just finished, and shaking his head. "But I would drink it, I would drink that bad coffee, because it was coffee and I believed I liked coffee. I would drink the whole cup, thinking at some point, it would get better, but a bad cup of coffee never gets better, though it often gets worse."

"That pretty much sums up my feelings about sex," I said. And then we both laughed--after all, as both Karen Walker and Homer Simpson said, it was funny because it was true.

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed I liked sex. I did say, on more than one occasion, "I'm not willing to have sex right now," but on those occasions when I said OK to sex and it turned out to be bad, I never said, "This sex is really bad! How dare you subject me to such bad sex! Get out of my bed!" That, after all, didn't seem polite. No, I just did what I could to make it end sooner, and hoped it would be better the next time.

Details tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 7:17 AM | Comments (2)