| Current mood: | subdued |
| Current music: | Johnny Cash--the "Sorry, June" collection |
Mm, homemade-ish...
How was your holiday? I liked my gifties, of course, and have been learning all about corpsy (or, if you prefer, cadavery) stuff. Not around mealtimes, though...
I had a lot of fun at Mom's house for the holidays. Pretty low-key, though we had another big wacky gathering, you know, Mom's gentleman friend, his daughter, her boyfriend, his brother, his girlfriend, his mom, her husband, etc. It's always kind of fun when we get to put all the leaves in the table.
And since you asked...
1. My favorite semi-homemade treat? We had a couple at Christmas dinner: the classic green bean casserole (with canned green beans, canned mushroom soup, canned fried onions, yum! The dish barely made it around the table once.) and ambrosia, this time made with coconut, canned pineapples, canned mandarin orange sections, sour cream and handmade marshmallows. Bear in mind that I didn't make the marshmallows, I bought them at Whole Foods, but they were super-absorbent, so they soaked up lots of fruit juicy goodness.
That brings up my biggest problem with Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade Crap: she seems to go out of her way to use not just canned food but plastic food, like white chocolate and cool-whip, both of which are icky. Plus they're poor imitations of the real thing, namely real chocolate and whipped cream, neither of which is all that hard to work with.
Fun Christmas moment: I described the Semi-Homemade Yule Log to Mom (you know, take a grocery store jelly roll, slather with Cool-Whip, use a fork to make wood-grain markings, dust with cocoa powder) and she said "Ew! That sounds like what they feed the prisoners. You know, like at Huntsville."
2. Labor-intensive food that's totally worth it but only rarely actually made? I'd say Mexican sauces--there's a tomatillo sauce for chicken enchiladas that's totally awesome (but is also kind of a pain). Another item is homemade bread, which I don't make much because I tend to eat way too much of it hot out of the oven.
3. Death is not an option? Well, Twila is my obvious choice, just because I know (and like) women like her already. I have to confess I've had friends like Ami but it never lasted because eventually I'd flip out because of the domineering, passive-aggressive, knife-twisting bullshit and we'd have a huge falling-out, usually where I behaved like a screeching harpy and she and her friends would shake their heads going, whoa, bitch crazy.
Not that I'm bitter. I just like the Twilas and Scouts of this world a lot better.
4. Favorite street vendor food? Hot pretzels with mustard. I salivate at the thought of them. Sadly, the street vendors on the UT campus mostly suck, and some were arrested for fencing stolen property.
I ask you...
1. How many variations of Monkey Bread do you figure we can come up with? For instance, they could be baked in those oversized muffin cups and served out individually. Or they could be made with biscuits dipped in butter and layered with a brown-sugar-cinnamon mixture. There was also a version that used undiluted orange-juice concentrate and something else... and then there's chopped apples, or rasins...
2. What's your favorite emergency snack? I'll eat a hardboiled egg when I'm starving, standing over the sink and salting and peppering as I go. Eliot will eat a piece of cheese. Or, when there's not much else around, I'll drink milk straight out of the carton. (You know you're still transitioning to adulthood when you have to wipe lipstick off the milk carton.)
3. What's your favorite Christmas gift this year? I'm enjoying everything (especially the books) but was especially touched by both grandmas' gifts for the new baby: an asian baby doll from Judy and a completely adorable (and girly) baby outfit, featuring Baby's First Bluejeans (which are embroidered with teensy flowers, as is the matching ruffled shirt and jacket).
4. What is it that disturbs you most about all the destruction from the tsunami? It's all disturbing, but something about the on-the-scene footage taken of the actual waves really got to me: in some locations, it looked as though the usual ocean waves just kept coming. As in, you're at the beach, you watch the waves go out and come in, and then--the ocean just rolls across the land, the water gets higher and higher, across the beach and the grass and the roads. It's something I never could have imagined and it's unsettling.
And since there's so little else I can do, I'm putting these links here. Not that I don't know that you're already aware of these organizations.
https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/
And here's a useful summary of the relief efforts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_response_to_the_2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
Take care, dood!
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dangerchicks) wrote,
