Not only do I read magazines and books and blogs and reviews about food, watch the food network, spend large amounts of money of food, collect cook books, critique food, cook food, eat food, love food, but I also, if you cannot tell, obsess about food. It could be worse. I could be addicted to, say, meth. Instead of getting super crazy and skinny and meth-mouthy and violent and all that 'fun' stuff, I'll just get fat, if I don't watch it. I am a foodie. And I am proud, goddamn it.

I just realized how food-crazy I am. I'm like a prisoner of Aushwitz suddenly transported into a grand, turn-of-the-century Gilded Era no-holds-barred gala thrown by the Astors. FOOOOOOOOOD EVERYYYYYWHEREEEE. For real.

I can tell you the differences between tangelos, tangerines, oranges, seville oranges, and mandarins. The differences between the lemon and the meyer lemon. Between a key lime and a rangpur lime and a kaffir lime. Between apricots, apriums, pluots, plumcots, and plums. Between the 5 most common flatfish. Hell, what the 5 most common flatfish are! What a mangosteen is. What a brunoise is. How to concasse tomatos. Where limoncello originated. Why hollow-sounding bread is good bread and why it sounds hollow. The test to tell waxy potatoes from mealy potatoes and which texture you want for the dish you're going to make.

I don't have to google or wikipedia those things. It's all in my head.

I'm thinking about making Thanksgiving diner for my family. It's July. To say I'm early is selling it short. I already have a menu planned out, a prep schedule made, a shopping list compiled, and the misenplace all envisioned. I just need to pass the idea by my mom and grandma. And I would borrow one of their kitchens. The kitchen here in the apartment is tiny!

So, my menu is:

Appetizers:
Cinnamon and cranberry goat cheese on water crackers
Cream cheese with jalapeno jelly on water crackers
Shrimp cocktail
Crudites with ranch dressing
Marinated olives
Marinated mushrooms

Main:
Black pepper-pomegranate molasses glazed turkey
Spiral sliced ham with pineapple-apricot sauce

Sides:
Wild rice and goat cheese dressing
Sugar and spice acorn squash
Mashed potatoes
Mashed sweet potatoes
Honey glazed carrots
Creamed pearl onions
French cut green beans with almonds and fried onions
Green salad with citrus vinaigrette

Accompaniments:
Cranberry sauce
Hawaiian rolls

Dessert:
Pumpkin pie
Pecan pie
Angel food cake with espresso mascarpone cream

The only things that I'm planning on not making from scratch are the Hawaiian rolls, pie crusts, angel food cake, and the appetizers.

Dinner may be anywhere from 10-20 people, so I'm ballparking 15ish.

Hopefully, this will be the first big meal I make out of many, many more to come.

Allez cuisine!

Jennifer

So, last night I slept. And while I was sleeping, I eventually found myself in the hallucinatory abyss called REM. Not the band. Anyhow, my subconscious, which is notorious for providing me with crazy-ass food-related dreams, struck again!
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In Dreamland, I was walking around in a creepy forest.

Think creepy as in the evil tree in Fern Gully creepy. That tree scared the hell out of me when I was little. I still get kinda squirmy thinking about it.

Anyhow, me, in a creepy forest, walking. Jade Puget, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, and Brian Molko are there too. Accompanying them is Benjy the dog. Not the ugly guy in Good Charlotte. They are some fucked-up reproduction of Scooby Doo.

I meet up with them and we all do some more walking in the creepy forest. Eventually, we come to a beer factory.

"What the fuck is a Heineken factory doing in the middle of nowhere in the goddamn woods?" says I.

"Duh, that's obviously for us to find out, faggot," says Jerry Garcia.

I then make this face: .

So, like dumbasses, think Scooby Doo, we go to investigate.

We climb up inside the docking bay, where trucks back their trailers up to. It's dusty, it's quiet, it's dark, it's smells like fart. Other than that, nothing significant.

We walk through there into some offices. There is a woman lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

"Oh, FUCK!" says I.

"No shit," says Jade Puget.

Brian Molko just pukes.

"Arf!" says Benjy the dog.

We run. Fast. To the room with the production line and bottling machines.

In this room, which is crowded with machines, is a meatball with stick legs and arms. He holds in one hand a GIGANTIC penis. It's like 8 feet tall and I probably couldn't wrap my arms around it.

"Mah penis is too big," says the meatball.

"This isn't the acid, is it?" asks Jim Morrison.

"Nope," says Jade Puget.

We all look at each other with the aforementioned 'WTF expression' on our faces. Including the Benjy the dog.

"Mah penis is TOO BIG," repeats the meatball.

We back away from the schlong-wielding meatball.

"That is one HUGE cock!" says Brian Molko.

"What, you wanna piece?" Jerry Garcia asks sarcastically.

"MAH PENIS IS TOO BIG!" screams the meatball.

We run. Fast. Again.

We are chased by both the meatball AND the mega-dick, which has now sprouted stick legs and arms, similar to those of the meatball. Only on a larger scale.

"Beam us up, Scotty!" says Benjy the dog.

Beamed up we are.

We briefly arrive on the Starship Enterprise, long enough for Spock to do the whole 'chuck deuce' thing. We are then rebeamed to the creepy-ass forest.

The uber-wang and the meatball are nowhere in sight.

There is a great mutual sigh of relief.

We all walk off on our own to different destinations.

I go to Candy Land and walk the candy road toward the Lollipop Forest.

And then I sit up suddenly in bed, waking up as I do so.
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What. The. Fuck. My vivid dreams get weirder and weirder. Not to mention close to plagiarism. Stealing from Rejected and Scooby Doo is not cool, subconscious, not cool at all.

Signing off,
Jenny