Ok, I might have to expand my "cannot live without" list to Pork, Cheese, and hot wings...can hot wings be their own category?
When I was attending Middlebury College, I worked at a place called Mr. Ups. I got the job senior year and in addition to my other job on campus, my classes, and my thesis it topped off what was already a very packed schedule. I like being busy and frazzled, I find I work best that way. Because of this, I tried to work as much as I could and eventually landed the coveted Wednesday night shift, also known as "Dollar Draughts" - an evening of $1 beer and 25 cent hot wings. I invariably ended the evening reeking of wing sauce and light beer, but very, very happy. If slinging wings and beer to a bar full of my peers for 9 hours didn't turn me off wings, I don't think anything can. (Sometimes I really miss waitressing and bartending. There is something so satisfying about working your ass off and then pulling all those tips out of your apron and tallying them up while eating your shift meal and drinking a big cold beer...*sigh*...good times.)
(As another aside: The wings were offered in Mild, Medium, Hot and "Hurt Me" and invariably some jackass table of guys would order "Hurt Me" wings and eat maybe three before giving up. Once? On a particularly sadistic Valentine's Day? The chef made the Hurt Me's with fresh habanero and I accidentally splashed some of the sauce on my stockings and it ATE THROUGH THEM. True story.)
Sometimes I get a craving for hot wings so intense that when it comes on I must have hot wings within 24 hours. Must. Otherwise the craving gets stronger and stronger until I enter a Jekyl and Hyde type state - something to be avoided at all costs. It's pretty scary. You could lose a finger. Luckily we have a local place that does pretty good wings for us when we are feeling lazy, but mostly we will make them ourselves. Sure it requires a lot of oil, and makes the apartment smell like a fry-house for days, but it is well worth it to be able to add just the right amount of heat and cook them exactly as we like them. Yummy.
Last night, because he rocks, The Boss freed me up to work on my project (Big reveal so soon! So soon now!) and made a big pile of delicious wings. When we were discussing dinner during the day, I directed him over to Evil Chef Mom for the recipe (because I KNOW I can count on Krysta for wings). (Interestingly, though he googled "wings, evil chef mom" ended up at Chaos in the Kitchen, not Evil Chef Mom, so....Krysta...when I said I loved your wings I lied...though I'm sure your wings are delicious and I look forward to making and eating them sometime soon. Ahem.) I AM ORGANIZED AND WELL INFORMED!
Hot Wings From Chaos in the Kitchen makes 16 wings, prep 5 min, cook 50 min 2 lbs wings, separated at the joints, tips removed 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter 1 cup Frank’s Hot Sauce 1-2 tsp Tabasco sauce, to taste 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce Cook wings. Fry or bake at 425°F to 450°F for 30-50 minutes. You can also broil wings (although I would remove sticky wings from the oven if cooking both). While wings are cooking, melt butter in a small sauce pan. Add Hot sauce, Tabasco and Worcestershire. Whisk to combine well then add cooked wings and toss to coat. Serve with Blue Cheese Dressing.
A pile of wings and some Battlestar Gallactica. Now, that is the recipe for a perfect evening.
GRODY UPDATE: I just realized my hands still smell like hot sauce. OMG so sexy!
I'm sorry if I ever gave you the impression that my home smells perpetually of delicious food, The Boss wafting from place to place like a cartoon character led by the nose towards tempting smells. This is not accurate.
Yes, I cook every night. Yes, most of my meals, though not always beautiful (as a friend pointed out in a recent email (though he went on to assure me that he knew everything must be yummy): "Your blog has been showing some pretty gross looking food lately. Are you trying to see if you can maximize the spread between appearance and taste?", (Duuuuuuuuuuuuude!), are usually pretty delicious.
When I do fail, however, I fail spectacularly. While in graduate school, in an attempt to impress a new friend, I made a lasagna with noodles I thought were no-cook, the result being an all but inedible brick of scalded sauce and cheese. It was like lasagna jerky. Not ok. When The Boss and I first met, I made him linguine with white clam sauce but, as can happen when I'm grumpy (I was angry over something that night and I am very literal), I put waaaaay too much cracked red pepper in the sauce and it was so hot as to render it nearly impossible to eat. And then last night...yeesh. It was bad.
I'll say right at the outset that I have no pictures. There was no point taking pictures of this mess. It was too embarrassing. Too infuriating. And, as some of you may remember, my New Year's resolution was to waste less food, so it was also an affront to New Year's resolutions everywhere, but, then, so are most smokers. (ZING! HA!)
I was attempting to make a chicken korma. If, like me, you read recipe sites from all over, you might know that most recipes for chicken korma (good ones, anyway) are on British food sites. (Stupid Great Britain with its stupid (ex-)empire that made it the stupid WORLD LEADER in awesome Indian food outside of India. WHATEVER.) You might also know that most British recipes for Indian food really bring home the shittiness of our supermarkets, even here in NYC where there are specialty supermarkets for everything. People, I can't even get my supermarket to consistently carry basil, they think shallots are "small white onions" and label their sausage "sagey rings", I'm pretty sure if I asked for garam masala or ghee they would burn me as a witch.
I quickly decided that even though I couldn't find that really good recipe for korma I had made sometime in the past six months (I know it is around somewhere. On the blog. In my recipe binder. I just put it somewhere REALLY smart. So smart that even I can't find it. "This recipe was really good...I'll want to find it again...I know! I'll fold it up very small and put it on page 100 of my Brothers Karamazov because it is 100% the most Bitchin' Korma I've ever had! Brilliant! Am Working Genius of Staggering Heartbreak! I will totally remember that! *pats self on back*, *smacks head*)
THEN I decided to wing it! Because winging Indian food is totally an awesome idea!!! I've been going home lately and changing into super comfy clothes and slippers, lighting apple scented candles and putting on my alone-at-home Pandora station of choice: The Weepies, all of which I now believe gives me delusions of grandeur, in addition to making me feel like a class-A dork.
Anyway, I saute off some seasoned chicken chunks, and, once the chicken is browned and set aside, add in a heap of chopped onions, shallots, garlic and ginger. Then I add cumin, chili powder, cinnamon, cardamom, coriander and...stuff. I don't know. I just started throwing things in there. I was drunk with power and candle scent!
In went lovely homemade stock and some defrosted tomato sauce that I remember being really good on the first go around. Finally, some yogurt and back in with the chicken at which point I settled in to work on this other project of which you will be apprised shortly but which for now remains confidential. (Big reveal early next week! NO I AM NOT PREGNANT!)
I realized, very soon thereafter, that a serious error in judgement had occurred. That delicious tomato sauce? The one I added right after my personal spice market and before the yogurt and chicken? It WAS really good the first time around. I made it several weeks ago to top off some excellent homemade pasta.
Unfortunately, I made it with thyme, very strong nicoise olives, and a good amount of goat cheese - none of which I remembered and all of which was now contending for Top Spice in my supposed "dinner". The dish officially had too much flavor and, try as I might to tweak and adjust it, was downright disgusting. We had to throw it out and eat side dishes (some wonderful roasted cauliflower and a whole grain/Israeli couscous mix from TJ's, so not the end of the world, but still.)
There is a moral to this story I suppose: experimentation is all well and good, but don't get cocky. Also: Oh my god, please start labeling things lest you end up with pork stock ice cubes in your bloody mary. (Actually...) And, probably: Apple scented candles will drive you mad with power, use sparingly.
Most importantly, I think, is that screwing up is a vital part of learning and growing - and can sometimes (though not in this case) lead to unexpectedly lovely results. If he hadn't bumbled through season five of Top Chef, all the while showing off his adorable accent, charming love for his mamma and grandma, and strangely hot man-love with Stefan, Fabio may not have been hosting the Top Chef reunion dinner last night, and, therefore would not have been able to chastise past finalists off-camera (on-camera) for making him look like a "dick-a" - an event that made my cooking faux pas of earlier in the evening tremble in the awe-inspiring shadow of Hot Italian Taking Liberties With The Beautiful Maiden That Is The English Language. Now that is fusion I can get behind.
Although my love of the almighty pork product is far and away the better documented of the two, my love of cheese trails only slightly behind it. I can remember, very clearly, the first time I ever had a cheese plate. It was at a restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, and, (my recent half-hearted google search notwithstanding) I can't remember the name, but I do remember that it was an absolute novelty to my then boyfriend and I, and that the cheese plate itself came with a whole bulb of roasted garlic and that we were both utterly charmed by the whole experience. I hope my husband isn't jealous of my saying so, but the thing I can recall most clearly is the romantic way the candlelight played off the sides of the portions of cheese. It was so hot.
Now it isn't at all unusual for a fine restaurant to have a double-fine cheese-plate - and the world is a grateful place. Though I still bend towards the dessert AND cheese rather than cheese OR dessert camp, I like to have the option and I love the little cart of cheese which can range from tragically anachronistic (albeit with an "A" for effort) as it was aboard our recent cruise vacation to a thing of true beauty, notably, the excellently well-appointed cheese FLATBED offered at The London.
(Which was also one of the prettier restaurants I have ever been in and had, far and away, the best chairs of any restaurant, ever. You have to go there to experience them. Divine.)
Anyway, I know a little bit about cheese and even took a turn at making it after a particularly reverential run-in with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle two summers ago, but I tend to gravitate to old favorites and flavors.
I love a triple creme anything (Fromage d'Affinois....aaaaand I just drooled on my desk thinking about it), and will also melt over a good goat cheese (come to me Coach Farm triple creme! O perfection!) especially if there is truffle honey involved in some way. (If you add fresh, hot bread to this combination I will begin to speak in tongues - an excellent party trick.)
I also used to like to melt Jarlsberg onto whole wheat pita with sun dried tomatoes and capers, I did this obsessively for months and then got so sick of it I couldn't even look at any of the ingredients for like two years.
The Boss leans more towards smoked cheeses (which I pretty much detest, with the notable exception of smoked mozzarella) and he loves smelly Italian cheese because he is required to by his DNA. I also love smelly Italian cheese but my love is more specialer because it is given freely. HA!
Several years ago, we both discovered a new cheese that meets both of our requirements: Parrano. I first heard about Parrano in October 2007 on the website D.C. Foodies. This was about a month before this blog was born so I don't think it ever made it on, but I couldn't let that stand.
It is vaguely creamy tasting, though swiss-like in texture, unless it is really cold and then it is more like a provalone. The taste is a cross between the preceding two and a parmigiano reggiano. It is technically a gouda and won some big cheese competition in a place called "Wisconsin" in 2006. (I would like to visit this magical place!)
Parrano isn't sold at Murray's, and probably doesn't meet the sharply honed requirements for being a cheese-snob's cheese, but I love it, and that is reason enough to feature it here. We have found it for sale in NYC at Food Emporium as well as Trader Joe's for around $11 a wedge and $7 a wedge respectively (though neither of these fine establishments are mentioned on their website).
I'm telling the truth when I say that I cannot resist buying it when I see it in the cheese section, despite the fact that it is always nestled in amongst more 'appropriate' cheeses. Yummy. Cheese.
Remember that time we tried to do a simultaneous cooking night and I was all "Hey INTERNET! Make this!" and you were all, *cricket sounds*, *empty howling of the wind* and *that big ball of twigs that rolls across the prairie in old westerns*?
Ahhhhh, good times.
Despite my bruised ego, I've decided to give this whole shared cooking experience another go. And, since I can't learn from the past, I am giving you exactly as much lead time as I did last time, ie: none! I AM SO SMRT!
You know how I flipped out over the fish tacos down in Playa del Carmen last year?
Super fresh and delicious fish with crunchy cabbage and cucumbers with red onions pickled in lime juice? How they were the only shining light in what was otherwise a very dark and dismal culinary trip? Well, since then I have been experimenting with fish tacos at home, with little (read: very little, read: no) success. The Boss would argue that we had a solid moment of food greatness with the fried tilapia tacos we tried this winter but I still think we could do so much better.
All of that said, during our extensive research, my team of (imaginary) helpers and I have found that one name keeps on popping up whenever "baja", "fish", "tacos" and "best of" are googled, and that name is Ralph Rubio. Ralph Rubio started his chain of restaurants named Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill(all far out of my reach as they are peppered around California, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Nevada) when he was just out of college after trying fish tacos at an informal stand. Sadly, fish tacos haven't really made it out east. I have certainly eaten fish tacos here, and there are quite a few places in midtown that make them (Pita Grill's are very good while Pampano Taqueria, much lauded on Yelp and Midtown lunch as the supreme fish taco of midtown, was exceptionally bad) but nothing that compares to the flavor and simplicity of the fish tacos we had in Mexico.
Here's the thing, after the 15th or 16th time I saw Rubio's mentioned in the course of my search I decided I would have to make his tacos, and, as our dinner plans for this evening have taken an unexpected turn for the canceled, tonight is going to be the night.
SO. Here's how, in theory, this will work. You can find the recipe that I am using here. I am going to try to make them with cod, and my only modification is that I am going to make an extra salsa of diced cucumbers and red onion pickled in lime juice because I still haven't been able to get enough of it and it is the only thing from our fabled time at Dr. Taco's down in Playa that I've been able to get quite right.
If you would like to cook along with me, take some pictures of your fish tacos or write a small blurb on your experience and send them over my way. I will then post the pics and blurbs and enjoyable reading will ensue.
If you don't participate, obviously, this can't happen. Should that be the case I will be the one weeping softly in the corner as The Boss feeds me from a bottle and tenderly strokes my unwashed hair. And it will be all your fault.
Taco flavored besos! STL
UPDATE: In the comments, Krysta made an excellent point. It is all very well to invite participation but I give no indication in my post of just how long YOU have to get your simulcooking done. Let's say by Friday, November 6!
So ok I had this whole post about cheese in my head and it was pretty good and highlighted this cheese I really love and there were going to be links and copious cheese-talk but I've got holiday-brain so none of that is happening now.
This is going to be a Serious Post instead. So, for those of you who voted for recipes, Face Vase and fuzzy animals in the recent poll, now closed, this might not be for you. Then again it might, who knows. I am not the boss of you.
Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is foodie Christmas (Christmas, oddly, is foodie Thanksgiving. True story.) and I've always been a big fan. I love the decorative opportunities; all kinds of woodland stuff and pumpkins and berries and maybe the odd turkey made out of construction paper and the outline of your hand. I love that it is a holiday based entirely around food. (What? Being thankful? Um...yeah, sure...that too.)
I love the turkey and the sides (SO MANY SIDES) and the glorious leftovers and sitcom treatments (I adore it when sitcoms reference holidays in their programming. Just take Friends alone: turkey on Monica's head with a fez! The Geller Cup! The Moist Maker! The one with Brad Pitt that is now kind of awkward!).
Despite all of this, like many other holidays there is one thing I hate: as a child of divorced parents I will once again be put into the position of having to eat two dinners or (hell no) choose between my parents and celebrate a holiday with one and not the other.
Around the time they stopped making this decision for me, I began to know the only true negative impact their divorce has had on my life. For several years I lived abroad, cooking my own first Thanksgiving dinner for troops of ex-pats, orphans and the curious - no pressure there as I was hardly expected to fly back to NY from Scotland so close to the Christmas holiday.
Since having moved to NYC, the question has been more or less moot as I have planned Thanksgiving at our apartment and/or my father has taken the onus off of me by taking his wife and their kids up to the country. I was always invited to these Vermont Thanksgivings (once I even went but was basically angry about it the whole time and ended up drinking too much and losing my favorite belt and blaming it on the kids and then finding it somewhere stupid and generally acting like an ass. Not pretty.) but I usually passed, making some excuse to keep myself in the New York area.
This year, however, the stars have done whatever they do when they don't align and The Boss, his mom, and my mom had all planned to celebrate at my maternal home on Long Island. I made the mistake of sharing this with my father, who informed me of his plan to stay home for Thanksgiving, entering me into what is certain to be a hell of crossed obligations and frustration that I am steadily building for myself.
Making this whole thing doubly difficult is the fact that they live in the same town, so, unlike a scenario where, say, one lived in California and the other in Texas or something, I can reasonably attend both Thanksgivings, kind of half-assing each one. This will be delightful because not only will I wreck my own Thanksgiving (as well as The Boss' and my MiL's) but I won't really be fully present at either of theirs.
My mother, to be totally honest, has put no pressure on me either way, insisting even that we should skip her house entirely and spend the whole holiday with him. I could do this, obviously, but then I would be eaten alive by guilt the entire time I'm there and feel like I abandoned my mom. Also, my dad's kids are...I'm not going to be mean here...A Lot To Handle and I "don't get along" with my stepmother so his house is going to be the far less pleasant of the two.
I'm tired of having to make these choices and sort of wondering when I will come into my own enough emotionally to be able to commit to the family I am building with my husband without plummeting into a ditch of guilt and self-loathing. But then I think what would the holidays even be without guilt and self-loathing? What a snore!
All of that said let me preempt anyone who might think that I think that this is actually a problem, like, a PROBLEM-problem. I understand about the starving children and war and disease and H1N1 and that there are people who would LOVE to have such dilemmas as having both parents alive and healthy and in one town so they could spend the holidays with them and there are people who are BEGGING FOR FOOD, like, AS I WRITE, who would think my equivocating over whether to have one Thanksgiving dinner or two is both wildly self-absorbed and yet another sign of my lack of real perspective. Let me say without hesitation that these people are correct.
You know how I got back from vacation last week so I only had three days at the office? Right? Well last week went by super fast, even though I came in early every day to get extra work done. This week? The first full week back after a vacation? This has been a long week. I am extra super happy and glad that it will breathe its dying breath soon. Also? Waking up in the morning after going to sleep at 9:30 PM beats the hell out of waking up after drinking until 3:00 AM. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.
(Seriously, do other people know about this?)
After dragging myself home by my own hair last evening I had a wonderful surprise. This is the SECOND time this week I have arrived home to something new and unexpected and this one was SO much better than the last one: wherein we had the nerve to close our bedroom door while we were at work, thereby locking Ozzie out, thereby making it impossible for him to sit in the windowsill and stare obsessively out at the birds on the deck while making weird noises in his throat, as is, pretty much, THE reason for his existence, therefore earning us one little nugget of cat poop, of all places, ON THE DINING ROOM TABLE. So, understand, he did not poop on the table, he took a section of his poop and carried it from the litterbox to the table, jumped up and dropped it. I know it was him because Sylvia lacks the innovation and acrobatic skill to pull something like this off.
This is basically Ozzie's version of a horse-head in your bed. It was just sitting there, one little piece of a poo, as if to say: "Lady, if you close that door again things will be much much worse. Don't make me go there." to which I say, heartily: "Well played stupid man-cat. Well played indeed." and The Boss says: "Oh my god, seriously. Your cats are disgusting." Then we all have a cuddle!
Ah, pets.
Anyway, what's so much better than cat poo you might ask, besides, like, most things? The e-mail from Evil Chef Mom, a.k.a. Krysta, that she had an extra copy of Ad Hoc at Home and wanted ME to have it, that's what. In case you are from Mars (where nothing ever happens) or an alternate universe where people clean cat little for fun instead of cooking, having someone I like, nay, love and respect as much as Krysta send me something I covet and will treasure as much as this book, is pretty much the recipe for a pure moment of happiness. As for the purchasing blackout, The Boss can hardly blame me, it is a GIFT after all. (THANK YOU KRYSTA!)
Later last evening, as I prepared dinner (Alosha's Kitchen's AMAZING pork chops) I thought about blogging, and blogger friends, and all the relationships I have been lucky enough to find and build simply because I decided to write down some recipes and publish them online. I found myself thinking about how I wish these folks were my friends in "real life"...
And then I stopped.
Because I realized that the voice inside my head saying "real life" was referring to the life I have outside of my home, like, the life I have at work, which, though I love my job and my boss, couldn't possibly be further from my real life and had somehow taken on the title "real life" when, in truth, it is the place where I am least like myself. In fact, Krysta and Melissa, Kim and Warner, Cali and Margie, Emma, Beth, Lisa and famdoz (among many others) all of whom I have never met (with one exception) actually know more about the real ME than most people I deal with in my so-called "real life". Which one, then, is more real? Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if our "real life" was our whole life? How DO you solve a problem like Maria?
Then I got tired of being all existential and made some pudding.
Remember that time when I wrote an overly effusive post about Thomas Keller, singing his praises to the interwebs with my hands clasped and on my knees in culinary reverence? Yeah. Me too. So, here we go again.
I'm not ashamed of my idolatry. I have stumbled and cursed through swaths of the French Laundry cookbook, ambled (cautiously) through Bouchon and staunchly refused to acknowledge the existence of Under Pressure because, oh my god guys, I am so not a professional chef (obviously) but even in my advanced stage of home cookery the very idea of sous vide gives me hives. I am like an evangelical at The Darwin Convention center; standing in a corner with my hands clamped over my ears saying "nanner nanner nanner" lest someone approach me with new information. Interestingly, this also sounds like some sort of culinary-religious-Blair Witch Project scenario, which I think we can all admit sounds terrific. In fact, let's go with that; I am the chick with the flashlight, and I'm a shitlessly scared of sous vide.
Moving on.
I know that Keller (had to try so hard to resist coming up with a funny celebrity name...like T.Kell, but I persevered) has a new book out, the aptly named Ad Hoc At Home, but I haven' yet procured one of my own. You see, The Boss and I have a sort of informal blackout period, beginning in the fall, reaching through December, wherein we have to avoid purchasing too much for ourselves. This has the double effect of saving money for Christmas and ensuring that one or the other of us doesn't inadvertently purchase for ourselves what might otherwise have been a dandy Christmas or birthday present (his is November 19th, mine is January 7th. Scorpio and Capricorn REPRESENT!)
Because of this, I will just have to drool over Ad Hoc until I either receive it or am able to run out on January 8th and buy it myself - clearly a very flawed situation, because if all the recipes rise to the audaciously yummy level of the two highlighted in The New York Times yesterday, The Boss is missing out on some seriously glorious food in the meantime. Does this sound smart to you?
Gillain was kind enough to forward me the article, which I immediately devoured and then hemmed and hawed about making the recipes. Though they don't have the 90 page legal document-like quality of the French Laundry or Bouchon cookbooks (I say this with love, and not because I find the recipes in those books boring or dry, rather because they are outrageously complicated and cause me, at times, to question my own literacy) the Ad Hoc recipes (these two, at least) do have a list of instructions and ingredients that land them on the crowded side of Recipes Everywhere. They also, and this in the grand tradition of Keller cookbookery, dirtied far more pots, pans, spoons, and bowls than your average recipe. I was, however, following the recipes expressly because they aren't average, so this is hardly a point against them...or at least not one that has any reasonable clout.
These recipes have the distinction that in addition to being oh so tasty, they can also be made (with slight modifications) with ingredients purchased at our local market in East Harlem, the fabulously noisy Fine Fare (I once left work early and went there to buy soup while on the phone with my mom and she thought I was at a club). This is no small feat, and considering the following substitutions and how good the dishes still turned out to be, I shiver with joy to think of what they would be like had I made them to the letter. It is entirely possible that they would have been so tasty that I would have died or exploded or turned spontaneously into a unicorn. Maybe all three which would have been a. kind of awesome and b. extremely messy. Did I mention I'm spectacularly hungover? Ok, good.
I know this is monstrously lazy (see: SO HUNGOVER) but I'm not going to paste the recipes here. If you want them, you can access them here (and believe me, you want them.) I will, however, list my substitutions, because I want you to know that unlike some of Keller's other recipes in other books, which more or less demand you get the finest ingredients and stick to the script, these recipes had atypical flexibility.
Even with all of that give and take, I still managed, in about 3 hours, to get what was certainly the best meal we have had since, well, the last best meal we had.
Not half bad.
The bread pudding...who knew a savory bread pudding would be so amazing? (Answer: anyone with half a brain could probably have put this one together, toasted bread + (3 cups of!!!!) cream + butter sauteed leeks + cheese + oven = party in your mouth, but, like, a party with a top shelf open bar and you are wearing a dress that was sent to your hotel room by a handsome stranger that fits PERFECTLY and also The Beatles are playing. Yes, all of them.) The bread pudding would be an AWESOME addition to any Thanksgiving celebrations or just, you know, to Tuesday...and any other day of the week for that matter.
The chicken, also, was sensational. The paprika and curry powder gave it the tiniest bit of spice...and almost a slight and very pleasant sour flavor mellowing into the herby, licorice-like tarragon laced white wine, shallot and butter sauce. *passes out*
Happily, we discovered that a morsel of bread pudding (3!! 3 CUPS OF CREAM!!!) on top of a slice of chicken was the perfect bite. We then proceeded to have many of them.
In other news, did you guys watch Top Chef? Did you see the mysterious lady sitting to Gail's right at the dinner table who we have dubbed "Sad Gail" because she looks EXACTLY like Gail but has sort of long bangs and not as much make-up and sort of a drab gray outfit on? Terribly sad eyes? It was almost as if Gail (in her boatful-of-crazy green dress finery. What was going on there??) were some sort of evil step-sister/twin person who makes her doppelganger come with her everywhere but not as dressed up? I like to think better of Gail, she seems the most genuine and kind of the judges, and I kind of feel like I would enjoy splitting a bottle of wine with her and that she would probably dish the dirt on Toby Young and whether or not Tom C really likes Diet Coke or is just on the shill, a quality often referenced by the fug girls as demonstrative of a cool person. Perhaps she and sad Gail and Padma are going to do a remake of The Prestige? But instead of dueling magicians they will be competitive eaters? I hope David Bowie still plays Tesla and for the record, my money will be firmly on Sad Gail.
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I am not now, nor do I ever hope to be a Saint. I live in New York City, where it is very hard to be saintly, anyway.
The name of the blog comes from a nickname I had many moons ago. It is meant in no way to offend, rile, or hurt those beings who have actually earned the title of "saint" about whom I know very little but know at least that they probably worked a lot harder at being saintly than I ever have.
I don't have a message or a cause, but if I did have to choose something to evangelize it would be this:
I believe that food, laughter and the internet will someday solve all the world's problems.
This blog is my supporting argument.
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