This is so mind-bogglingly stupid that I can barely handle it. It was in an Au Bon Pain.
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I love how, sometimes, when you buy stuff on ebay drunkenly and then forget that you’ve done so, it arrives, and it’s like a surprise Christmas present to yourself!
Drunken ebay shopping me got me Rosie Grier’s “Needlepoint for Men!” Thanks, drunken me! Check out this awesome pattern for a “covered brick.” This is apparently what men do when they needlepoint.
Anyway, you’ll never guess who stopped by to spend the holidays with us, and borrow twenty dollars.
See, Steve’s cousin is going to start growing pot in his barn, and he’s gonna get Steve a real sweet job selling at the middle school, but Steve just needs a few bucks to get a new carburetor on his van so that he can get to Wichita by Thursday. Man, Steve’s old lady sure was upset about that whole thing with her brother’s doberman-pit mix, but that wasn’t Steve’s fault none. That dog wanted that bologna real bad! How was Steve supposed to know that that bologna had been laced with gunpowder as some sort of funny joke they were playing on the rats that had made a nest in their step-dad’s Impala? Anyway, Steve thinks you’re lookin’ real good there, you know? How old are you now, anyway? You’re almost all grown! Steve bets you have lots of boyfriends, huh? Hey, have you ever tried Smirnoff before? It’s pretty high-octane stuff. Listen, don’t tell your mom about this, now, huh?
Oh, Steve, you’re incorrigible. Please get off my couch.
ATTENTION all Kansans and surrounding Shenas! We will be infesting your living area from January 1st to January 5th! Much holiday-type fun will be attempted!
(Incredibly depressing celebration illustration via google’s Life photo searches – this is, literally, the single only photo they had for “Chanukah.”)
Many exciting things have happened so far today!
So, first, early this morning I went to the saddest/nicest event I’ve been to, perhaps ever. It was the Holiday Bazaar at the Hamilton House, which is some kind of old-folks’ community center-type place a few blocks from my house. And this bazaar was basically a giant old-person (mostly dead-person, I strongly suspect) garage sale.
You walk in and the place just SMELLS of old people, but not in a bad, pee-way. More like in a really sweet, nostalgic dust-and-linen-way. And there are all these old people smiling curiously at you. AND I MADE OUT LIKE A FREAKIN’ BANDIT. Omg, dudes, if I wasn’t too lazy to resell this stuff on ebay or in the used clothing stores in NYC, I would have made a fortune. Ancient shapeless uber-boho linen poppy-print muumuu with matching fringed (scarf? belt?) tie? $1 at the Hamilton house. $30 to sell it to the vintage store in the Village, where they will turn around and sell it to Chloe Sevigny for $140. Or these FUCKING AMAZING little clutch wallets, which, sorry ladies – were originally planned as Christmas gifts, but which are now officially mine forever. The blue one is plastic, but the red one declares itself, in gilt script printed on the inside, to be “genuine cowhide.”
I got both of these, plus a humorous hippie handbook from the late sixties about how to buy pot, all three together, for $1. I mean – fine, fine, maybe I’m a little delusional: maybe they’re not really worth anything. But they’re freaking gorgeous, and never-used. And there was all this spectacular costume jewelry – amazing giant vintage plastic beads that you could have cut apart and sold bead-by-bead on etsy at obscene mark-ups, giant Vintage Avon bracelets and cocktail rings that I suspect someone out there collects and would pay money for on ebay, cock-and-anchor state pride lapel pins…
Etc! Etc! And I got tons of other stuff that I can’t even mention because half of you will be getting it for Christmas. If I don’t decide to keep it instead, which is a distinct possibility.
But, oh, it was also so freakin’ sad. There were like four different black leather skirts (not biker-y, just 1980s-y), one of which was elaborately embroidered with huge ugly pink roses. Those belonged to some old dead lady. She was fucking decked out in these leather skirts back in the day. Or the giant rack of eyelash yarn scarves that I couldn’t even bear to glance at, because if one of the old people had caught me noticing them, I couldn’t have helped but to have to buy one. You can’t just look at a giant surplus of hideous arthritic-hand-knitted polyester eyelash yarn scarves and NOT buy one. Some old lady in Providence, Rhode Island LOVES knitting these things. And her children just keep buying her this fucking noxious neon and pastel fuzzy acrylic yarn so that she can make more. And more. And more.
But that’s not even really the sad part – those are sweet stories. There were genuinely sad parts. Like the table full of fantastically ugly cross-stitching, and a giant ziplock bag of half-used embroidery floss, and the old vintage plastic needlework hoops, and the little paper envelopes, with the spidery, feminine script on the front that said, “rust” and “lt. pink” and “brown,” which each had one sad, lonely little piece of embroidery floss in them each. Ack. God, and one piece of cross-stitching fabric, blank except for a tiny, unfinished, maybe one-inch-wide block in the middle. You couldn’t tell what it was going to be.
And the woman who took my money! Oh my god. Had an adorable amount of trouble adding the prices together, and then didn’t realize I’d handed her money until I pointed it out to her, and then gave me totally incorrect change. I just wanted to pick her up and throw her over my shoulder and bring her home, she was so great. I wanted to wrap her up in a little blanket and feed her hot toddies and do jigsaw puzzles with her.
It was wonderful/awful. The church next door is having a holiday bazaar tomorrow. I cannot wait.
And then! We went out and I got some yummy sweet tea from this tea store we have here, but I kind of got a little crazy and decided to get bubbles (like bubble tea bubbles) in a hot drink, which is kind of stupid for all sorts of reasons, but the one that is pertinent to this story is that they kind of half-melted and got all gummy and gross to chew, so I didn’t eat them. Instead, I brought them home and tried to feed them to my cat. He liked the taste, but they kept getting stuck on the spikes on his tongue. You can sort of see it here:
AND!!!!!! There was a MYSTERY!! So we were in the kitchen, and Ian was making coffee or something, and he happened to notice this object in our clean-dishes drainer thing:
(You might also notice it in the background of the Erwin video, holding half-dissolved gummy bubbles.) This was notable because THIS OBJECT DOES NOT BELONG TO US. We do not know WHAT it is, or WHERE it came from. It’s kind of too short and the glass is too thick to be a drinking glass. It maybe looks like something that a store-bought jam or jelly or pudding-type-dessert or something might have come in? But there is not accompanying lid! And more importantly than what it is, is WHY THE FUCK IS IT CURRENTLY DRYING IN OUR CLEAN-DISHES DRAINER??? Who put it there? When? WHY?
Neither of us did this! We did not wash this! We did not place it there! Could the landlord have come into our apartment and put it there? Why? Perhaps he found it somewhere outside the house and assumed it was ours? Was it maybe an old tenant’s, and had been hidden on top of the fridge for this whole time, and one of the cats knocked it down and into the drainer? No one knows!!
MYSTERIOUS!!!
Feliz navidad, putos. Ian here. So, both Bon Apetit and Gourmet followed their Thanksgiving specials with Christmas specials. BORING. Why aren’t the food-centric holidays better dispersed throughout the year? I demand CHANGE!
<jessica> I just demand dinner, really. </jessica>
In the meantime, though, I’ll settle for making something from Bon Apetite’s Latino-based xmas spread. Tonight’s selection is the natural follow up to the single best meal I’ve ever made: cochinita pibil. I’ve sung its praises before, but for a recap, it was a pork shoulder, cubed and marinated in a citrus/tequila/spice mixture for a day before being slow roasted in banana leaves for four hours. Jeebly. Yucatan-tastic! For the record, though, there was way more to that dinner than the pibil. We made DIY salsa, guacamole, tortillas, sopapillas, sangria, pickled onions, and honey-cinnamon ice cream. DEAR GOD, DELICIOUS.
<jessica> You know what? I was all ready to be like, “Oooooh, this new thing was totally even better than the pibil,” but I only just now realized that there was no honey-cinnamon ice cream this time around, which – bullshit, yo. </jessica>
Anyway. This weekend I went for another slow-cooked pork dish. This dish was stew-based rather than roasted in banana leaves: pork posole. Saturday afternoon we headed to the local megamart to procure the ingredients. I couldn’t find a pork shoulder, so I asked the butcher if he had any in the back. The douchenozzle scoffed at me and snarled, “it’s too cheap a cut of meat for us to stock here, no one who shops here would buy it, and you’d really only want to use it for maybe a stew or something.” I replied, “that’s exactly what I want it for,” and potched him in the tuchas for his insolence as I bought a center cut pork roast instead, and slunk guiltily away.
This got braised for a couple hours in an onion/ancho-chili-powder and Mexican oregano/chicken stock braising liquid.
The pork was cooled slightly and then shredded. Jessica wanted to eat it so badly at this point that I basically had to fight her off with a wooden spoon.
<jessica> No, I totally snuck some, anyway. </jessica>
Now, for reasons I don’t quite understand, the recipe called for separating the pork from the braising liquid and cooling both in the fridge overnight. I guess maybe this lets the flavors settle in the meat? I think a better guess is that the first step for the next day is to remove the fat from the braising liquid, so it’s really meant to separate the fat released by the pork shoulder. Since I didn’t have a shoulder, I didn’t have any fat deposits cooled on the top, and so this step seemed of questionable necessity. The shredded pork was mixed in with onions, garlic, more spices, a significant amount of diced green chilies, and a beer to replenish the fluid. Finally, we added a can of golden and a can of white hominy, brought to a boil, dropped it to low, and put it to a simmer for 45 minutes.
In the meantime we made tortillas and prepped the garnish: sliced radishes and cilantro. At the end of the stewing, it was pretty amazing looking.
Plating:
<jessica> This shit was SO GOOD. I know that these foodblog things tend to lean toward the wildly superlative, and I hate to have to say this for like the fourth time, but this really honestly truly this time really was pretty much the best thing Ian’s ever made. I LUVED it on the tortillas, but I also do totally understand eating it with a fork, like chili or something, the way the magazine recommended it – especially with the hominy, which it turns out I’m a fan of. Who knew? The hominy kind of provided a rice-y starch-y kind of textural difference that was just right, in addition to giving it a very earthy, almost root-vegetably flavor that kind of made me think more “Aztec” or “Native American” than “Mexican,” though Ian assures me that that’s incorrect. It was spicy without being hot at all (though turning the heat way, way up would have been pretty great, too). It had the almost gravy-y stewishness that the coq au vin (which was another thing which I believe I called “the best thing Ian ever made” at one time) had, but in a sort of chili-ish way. Blah blah blah. It was yummy. And it wasn’t anywhere near as hard or time-consuming as the pibil. You should make it, too. Trust me. </jessica>
Agreed. Though I’m not convinced it was better than the pibil, it was pretty freaking amazing. I don’t think the two-day cooking was necessary when not using a shoulder, so I’d bet that next time the whole thing can be done in a night. It was a pretty easy preparation, too. Ultimately, there wasn’t much more to the preparation than chopping some veg, etc. Holy posole!
I only wish I could say that this was my Christmas Eve dinner – Taco Bell and Chimay. But it was my Christmas Eve Eve Eve dinner. I’m just bragging is all. It was delicious.
I feel like I know better than to post things like this on my blog, where eventually, maybe, somehow, this will get back to the people that it shouldn’t be getting back to. But I’ve really got no choice in the matter. For you, my adoring reading public, I must make this sacrifice.
So here.
This is what I got for Christmas from my boss.
Oh, yay! The new Pier 1 Imports Christmas catalogue is out!
Let’s look inside!
Ooooh! Ornaments from only $1.50!
Ahh! Blue!
Pink! How saucy! But would Aunt Lucy approve? Ha-ha!
And oh right the traditional fucking Christmas monkey!
Oh, Christmas monkey! Will you never stop playing with little wooden tool sets???
I visited the most boring toy store EVER today.
“Luncheon meat?!?! YESSSS! This is the best Christmas EVER!”
Dear everyone I know,
Buy me these for Christmas.
http://www.kix-files.com/2007/08/nike-dunk-sb-horror-pack-freddy-kreuger/
Love,
Jessica
P.S. – Unless something cooler comes out in this tantalizing “Horror Pack” later on. Perhaps soggy-wet and hairy j-horror sneakers? Everyone knows they’re RIGHT THERE BEHIND YOU except the person who’s actually wearing them!! Or the Saw sneakers – the insides of which are lined with scores of tiny little razors? Oh, I’m hilarious. But no really. Buy me these fucking shoes.
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