Menu of the Day
iPodding to: Brandi Carlile
Drinking: Toasted Head Chardonnay (a staple chardonnay i love.)
The Best thing that Happened: I am nearly ready to launch our website that i've been working on for the past weeks for the union office. And i have to say I'm pretty proud of myself because it's looking good and i mostly had to figure this out myself with only 3 hours of training. (It's Joomla.)
What i am procrastinating about: (I like to include this because i have found that it gets me off my ass when i do.) I need to write my friend in Seattle a note because i've been out of touch.
What i'm looking forward to: I have the first DVD of Grey's Anatomy's last season.
About the photo: I put this up on Facebook and Flickr. I think this photo is so funny. That's my brother Scott. That cake was baked by my mother using the recipe in the magazine that my cousin Todd (originally from California and son to my yaya Aunt Connie) is holding up. (I took this photo over a year ago and when i put it up on Facebook just last night it got some immediate hits from my Louisiana cousins who know my mom's cooking skills, or lack thereof.)
About my mom's cooking: This photo explains why no one, not even my dad as he got older, has ever had a weight issue. My mom, even though she is from Louisiana, is a terrible cook. We never wanted seconds, hell, we never wanted firsts!
That's also funny is my mom loves to cook. She will call me at work and tell me about some recipe she made and the recipe is something that has potato chips on the top or is made with a Campbell's soup (you get the idea).
i remember when i was 11 years old before i took a trip on my first airplane ride from Louisiana to California and then to Japan. I remember LOVING the airplane food. That's how bad my mom's cooking was.
I thought i hated cooking until i branched out on my own in my mid-20's.
I joined Flickr - I need some way to organize my photos other than Facebook. You can see some of my photos at My flickr account . Some y'all have seen here or on Facebook, but i hope to keep updating as i take new ones. I needed a way to put the photos i take in a place where i can look at them or share them right away. Otherwise i load them all up on my external passport and never look at them again.
23 comments:
So come here and tell us about your Friday. And also : what kind of cook was your mom?
Momentous Decision from September 17, 2010:
It's time to change my emergency contact at work from my 85 year old mother to my 22 year old daughter
Momentous Revelation from September 18, 2010:
Making cookies is a pain in the ass. Setting the timer over and over; up and down and up and down. Are they done yet? Soft enough in the middle? Too done?
Plus because I'm making them for someone else I have to keep washing my hands all the time and I can't use the pancake tuner once it's fallen on the floor
And all the dishes you have to wash by hand, measuring cups and spoons, spatula, mixer bowls, cookie sheets, pancake turner, cooling racks
I don't even like cookies
Mom was an excellent cook. She baked all the time. I thought everyone had pie, cake or cookies every day. No wonder I have issues with my weight.
But not Mom. She smoked and drank coffee all day. I never saw her eat much. She was always a size six. Which would make her a two these days.
I worked all day on Friday. Then I went to Barb's and helped her make a photo album on kodak for her brother's 50th birthday. Then we went out for martinis and wine. I also had oysters and we shared a pizza. I was pretty hammered. I only had one martini and we split the wine between 3 of us. I think mixing is really the problem, which is sad because who wants to only have one martini. So does that mean I'm forever limited to only drinking wine?
Today was a great day! I spent it in New York City with my yaya friends Chelle and Karen, aka WingNut. It was my first time meeting Karen in person and she is just as cool as she seems online. We walked up 7th Avenue through a street festival. Then we asked a local woman on the street to to recommend a restaurant to us, and she sent us to a "blue ribbon" sushi place in an obscure hotel off the Columbus Circle. Then we walked around and shopped and people watched. Then we ended up having a bottle of wine and dessert at an outdoor cafe on Columbus Avenue called Isabellas.
My friend Carol is at a wedding reception she didn't want to go to tonight and she has been sending me text messages all night as she gets drunker and drunker. She is totally cracking me up. After I texted her saying she should try to catch the bouquet, she replied: "I don't do marriage anymore. We are eating now. Food and wine good. I'm not really expected to talk so am ok for now."
Tomorrow night we are taking Pat to a tapas restaurant to celebrate her birthday. Today we stopped in a wine store on Columbus Avenue and I asked for a spanish wine recommendation to take to the restaurant, and came away with a bottle of Robalina Albarino rias baixas - whatever that means. I'll let y'all know how it was after tomorrow.
Oh, and my mom's not a great cook either. But that didn't stop me from having weight issues.
I just love this pic!! What did your mom think of her cake? It still looks like it would taste good though.
louie, are you making ME cookies?????
P.S. did something happen recently with your mom that made you think you needed to change your emergency number?
eque how was that wine? I realize i don't often buy wine that i can't pronounce!LOL. I remember how proud i was when i got viognier down. Last night at Brian's family house i was showing his nephew Adam (who is another husband i have picked out for Kylee) how to use the fancy wine opener and most importantly, the foil cutter. I told him, i know you're just 22 years old but someday you'll find a woman you want to date who doesn't drink out of the big giant red plastic beer keg cups and you need to know how to open a bottle with east and how to pronounce the wines you buy.
He was pulling my leg when he prounounced 'pinot gris' and 'peanut grease'.
I want him to marry Kylee for the selfish reason that if they did have kids it would be a possible glimpse of what Brian's and my kid would look like if WE had one! LOL. Adam told me that was creepy.
Grits, my mom thinks she is a good cook. That's the problem. Actually i don't eat cake but i remember someone said it tasted good even if it looked like a drunk baked it.
haha!
the wine was fine. i was the last to arrive, so they had already opened Eileen's white, then moved on to mine. Then we had the two reds. And 10 tapas plates, in addition to each having our own dessert. I had the turkish coffee creme brulee - YUM!
i love the foil cutters on the wine openers. i got one when i was in france and i still use it.
Questions in Order:
1. My mom is a good cook; and pretty adventurous. But that’s been pretty recent. When we were growing up, there were a lot of tuna and hamburger based dishes; nothing’ wrong with a little cream of mushroom soup. My mom worked so mostly supers were what-can-I make-after-work-that-is-cheap-and-will-feed-my-family-of-six. We always had vegetables but they were often creamed, creamed corn, creamed green beans, creamed carrots. . . Got to love that Wisconsin up brining.
Mom made a pot of homemade soup every Saturday, split pea and lentil, beef barley, potatoes, chili, that sort of thing. This amazed my friends. We did have dinner every Sunday at about 1:00 in the afternoon. It was always a big meat (ham, pot roast, chicken…), vegetables, usually potatoes and gravy. We also had dessert on Sunday too; she used to be a good pie maker.
2. Jo, nothing new with my mom really, she just seems more and more fragile. Repeating stuff and has less energy. I was trying to picture her hurrying to meet with at the ER with my broken arm or stroke or whatever; Em seemed like as better choice.
Mom did hit the garage with her car again though. Today after church my brother turned to me and said, “Oh Magoo, you’ve done it again”, to which my other brother replied “Road Hog!” Pretty sure you have to be a child of the 60s to get this.
3. Fantastic reality: I can’t see the eye of my sewing machine needle, but I can still thread it.
dang, wish I could remove that post and change super to supper; at least I didn't type desert instead of dessert.
im too tired to go through and read all the posts and the whole blog but i just HAVE to comment about grandma dee's cooking. LOL
the last time we went over, must have been someones birthday or maybe mothers day or something -- anyways, we got there early (i think it was just ash and I) ash was on the deck chatting with papa and I was in the living room chatting with grandma, i heard the buzzer go off on the stove and I looked at her and she was talking away but didnt hear it, but she was tellign this elaborate story and I couldnt just stop her, finally when she stopped i casually said "grandma is that buzzer?" and she said "no" LOL and i said "i think it is, maybe check it?" and she did and the corn that was sitting on the stove was BLACK...however whatever was in the oven, was fine. I dont know what she set the buzzer for. LOL
she does have a MILLION cooking magazines though but on this same night we were looking through them and she even said "mine never look like the pictures" I dont know how you make a layered salad look any different...we actually tried to stare at the two to figure out what exactly happened and we couldnt. haha
okay im off to bed.
OH, i actually remember the black corn. Didn't she even try to serve it?
My real mom is not a good cook. She was anorexic and bulimic when I was growing up, so I think her ability to assess what was edible (especially by children) was incredibly skewed. She lived on Red Hots and RC Cola.
She made a few strange things (the banana and margarine sandwiches on white bread, for example), but mostly she just made normal things in really abnormal ways. For example, she put Miracle Whip on everything and she'd layer it on so thick that our sandwiches would be see-through by the time we got to lunchtime at school. She also put deer heart in spaghetti and used squirrel and rabbit in recipes that called for chicken. This was so embarrassing in grade school when all the other kids had gorgeous sandwiches with real lunchmeat and non-game animals.
When we did get lunchmeat, it was liverwurst cut into half-inch rounds and slathered with about a quarter cup of Miracle Whip on really squishy white bread. The slices were so thick, they'd slide out the back of the sandwich, plopping on the table and splattering Miracle Whip on everything in a 2-foot radius.
She'd also put milk in canning jars and expect us to drink it with our lunch. It was always warm by lunchtime. Plus, all the other kids had fancy thermoses or those Capri Sun packs. Having room temperature milk was like wearing a badge of poverty.
I haven't seen her in almost a decade, but she now says she has celiac disease and a host of other potentially invented afflictions. I blame her casseroles and Miracle Whip fascination.
OH Amanda, you so often post the unbelievable! It's amazing you lived through school lunch time and weren't in the hospital with food poisoning at the least. I have wondered how we all lived through it too.
I remember my mom used to thaw out raw hamburger in the sun for HOURS. And she used to keep this little coffee container of bacon grease on her stovetop and would often use that very old grease to cook stuff!
She was never careful about raw chicken on the counter either.
Amanda, what is celiac disease?
jo
now you're just messing with me, with all those removed posts
amanda
I can't believe deer hearts
We had that liverwurst too; I actually like it
hehehe, louie, i am messing with you!
The Miracle Whip cracks me up too Amanda! In my obituary scrapbook somewhere is an obituary that i saved about a woman who loved Miracle Whip. I am not kidding. It really was in the obituary.
hmmmm.....I should publish that scrapbook. Or just start a blog on funny obituaries. I could see that being a real popular one. Thousands of people all over would be sending me funny obituaries.
and also poignant ones. One of my favorite obituaries that i cut out was for a homeless man. It included his photo too.
Celiac disease is a severe allergy to gluten (wheat). It causes a host of intestinal problems and creates an immune reaction that affects the whole body. I don't know if she really has celiac disease (she's claimed all kinds of cancers and various illnesses that turned out to be false), but that's the latest thing. I wonder if she's just feeling the long-term effects of a lifetime of serious eating disorders. She's such a mess!
It's so weird to talk about her, actually. I never talk about her. She found me on Facebook after we lost contact for nine years. Facebook!
Amanda, it sounds like we could both write a dysfunctional family book. :(
I would hate to have that disease. I think i would have a better chance of quitting heroin if i was an addict than if you told me i had to give up bread and pasta!
does your mom get her feelings hurt when you laugh about her cooking?
She does sometimes and she can be a big pouter. But sometimes it's just so bad you have to laugh.
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