GGCEx: The Beautiful People Basic

My dad likes what he likes.  If he isn’t familiar with it, he doesn’t want to become familiar with it.  This rule stretches across several arenas of his life, from vacations to movie genres to music, but where it’s most apparent is his relationship with food. If you can’t order it at Applebee’s, he calls it “beautiful people food.”  Most of what I cook, these days, falls into that category; he once asked me not to eat my bowl of chickpeas at the table with him, because it “looks, haha, kind of gross.”

Putting stuff into a grilled cheese, if it’s not tomato or bacon, moves it from the Normal People Food side of the chart into Beautiful People Food.  As I hate tomatoes with a fiery passion and love spinach, this grilled cheese is only for beautiful weirdos.  You’re a beautiful weirdo, right?  (Yeah, you are!)

The Beautiful People Basic

• multigrain bread
• havarti
• bab(a)y spinach
• crushed red pepper (I will probably put crushed red pepper in every GGCEx sandwich, get excited)
• some chopped shallot

Thoughts:

Pretty good!  It’s quicker and easier to make than the Avocado Goat Supreme, largely because it’s got less ingredients and is therefore more amiable to squashing down with the spatula.  That also makes it easier to burn, too, which I discovered when I stepped away from the stove to split havarti cubes with my roommate instead of –– you know –– watching the pan.  Oops.  So one side was blackened.  (Like fancy fish plates!  I should start a fancy burned food restaurant!)

Even with the burned side, though, I enjoyed it.  Instead of the explosive illegal-warehouse-party-in-your-mouth that was the Avocado Goat Supreme, this was like a backyard wedding with mason jar candleholders and lots of outdoorsy hipsters in floaty clothing being photographed in soft yellow light.  If you’re looking for something to eat with soup that’s a tiny bit more colorful and sharp than American cheese on white, this is it.

The Great Grilled Cheese Experiment: Avocado Goat Supreme

I love gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches (or, fine, paninis if that’s what you insist on calling them).  And one of my New Year’s resolutions is to cook more.

Hence, I have decided to embark upon the Great Grilled Cheese Experiment of 2012.  Every so often, I’ll make a fancy motherlovin’ grilled cheese with a new/different combination of ingredients and record the results (a brief taste summary, a star rating) on this here blog.

Tonight was the Avocado Goat Supreme (!).

• goat cheese
• havarti
• baby spinach
• tempeh bacon/fakon (which I made! I am so handy)
• avocado
• crushed red pepper
• paprika
• yellow lentil hummus with sunflower seeds and apricot
• store-brand multigrain bread

Thoughts:

Avocado draws out the agave nectar in the fakon, so it tasted a bit sweeter and more barbecue-y than I necessarily intended.  However, I also overshook the crushed red pepper and, between that and the hummus (delicious but weirdly peppery!), my nose started running partway through the sandwich.  I had to get up for a napkin and pour myself a glass of milk to combat the spiciness.  The goat cheese provided a cooling effect, but not enough of one.

To be honest, this sandwich — though tasty — may be too intense for me.  I had to keep taking breaks.  Next time I’ll make something more simple.  Oh, and add pictures, because that’s a thing I could do.

oh no we didn’t

BROAD! IS NOW LIVE!

That means you can DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE off the Broad! website!

 

 

DO IT NOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

(Oh, and also, submissions reopen for the next issue on February 1, 2012!)

greetings from the island of misfit toys, where no one ever blogs anymore

So it finally feels like December.  My apartment is cold but festive, the air’s dry enough that I anticipate snow at any given moment, and the soup broth I’m heating on the stove to make risotto is treacherously close to spilling over the lip of its saucepan.  Pardon me.

 

Back.

As I said, it finally feels like December in this part of the world; the alarmingly mild days have given way to thirty-degree winds and grey Magic gloves.  I feel drunk with love for everyone in the world today.  The sparkling lights outside are a drug.  The Christmas tree in our living room fills my heart with the sort of glee one used to obtain solely through eating an entire Pixie Stick.  This tree is the first one I bought on my own, it is rotund, and it is baller.

And God said, "Let there be baller Christmas trees." And it was so.

Also, there’s this tree, which my roommate made out of fishing line, ornaments and magic.

I realize that for some, the forced pep of the commercial Christmas season only serves to make them more annoyed.  I know; it’s the worst. We’ve all been there.  I worked two retail jobs last year at Christmas and basically wanted to drive my car into a lake the entire time.  But this year, I am happy!  Christmas is a week from today!  And I love all you cats and kittens.  Let’s be friends forever, even after our brains and hearts are cryogenically defrosted and placed in new cybernetic vessels, as they undoubtedly will be in The Future.

May you and yours have a happy, safe, lovely holiday season regardless what holiday you celebrate (or don’t), where you are warm and loved and needed (ideally, while underneath a Snuggie on a sofa).

Best wishes,
Heather

Stuff Heather Thinks is Super Great

Hey, look what I’m doing, isn’t this nostalgic and comforting?  Look what I’m doing when I should be practicing for my burlesque show on Monday.  Ah well, will practice immediately afterward.  I already listened to the song like eight times today.

Onward, to things I like!

The “Victorian Cream Corset” from Voluptupuss.  This is the third corset I’ve ordered from them and it arrived in the mail today.  It is softer and more comfortable and even beautiful-er than I anticipated, and I am wearing it right now.  I may take to wearing it under all my clothing.  Like a real Victorian.

The other day the State and I tried to gain entrance to a local massage parlor, but were turned away in a rather sketchy manner; we later discovered (thanks, Internet!) that it was only a “massage parlor” in the sense that they gave you a massage before boning you.  Yeah, we unwittingly tried to gain entrance to a brothel.  This story will live forever, cats and kittens.  I will live to tell my grandchildren this story.  My great-grandchildren!  I will come back as a ghost, just to tell future generations this story.  I will construct the tale from misplaced items (e.g. massage oil canisters, Asian good-luck cats, empty potato chip bags) about the house.

Hey, Kurt and Blaine did it.  Alas, not while they sweetly sang the refrain from “Teenage Dream” to each other — how nice that would have been, so self-referential — but still, two gay kids losing their virginities on television feels like a TV milestone.  Let’s get drunk to celebrate.  Let’s get drunk, period.  It’s almost the weekend!  There’s a great wine store by my apartment.

Riding the train.  Mundane and boring it may be, I enjoy that half hour commuting from home to work every morning.  It’s quiet and comforting and I get to read.  On the ride home in the evening, I get to be social with a bunch of people I work with.  It’s one of the few instances when I enjoy the actual process of traveling.

Something I wrote was included in the Rumpus Readers Report!  It’s the last one, way down at the bottom.  400 words of aw yeah.

The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach.  Full disclosure: I hate baseball novels.  I hate baseball.  There was a time — 1994 — when baseball was my life, but no longer.  That being said, I can’t put The Art of Fielding down.  I’m 300 pages in and I started it Monday.  I mean, jeez.  Chad Harbach, I doff my hat to you.  Not even Michael Chabon could get me to read his baseball novel, and then you came along.

the devolution of an evening

1. Party tonight!  Halloween Party the First!

2. I should get dressed in my costume for the party now, so I am ready.

3. I’ll watch the pilot of Walking Dead, since there’s time before I leave.  It will get me in the mood for a Halloween party.

4. This is probably not something I should watch before going out alone into the night.

5. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH ZOMBIE ENTRAILS

6. Google Maps says I have to walk through that area where a woman got attacked last weekend in order to get to the party.

7. I wish I had someone to go with me.

8. Why am I falling asleep? Stop falling asleep, it’s 10:30.  Fuck, I forgot to take a nap earlier.  That’s what this is about.

9. Maybe I should stay home.

10. I am going to a Halloween party tomorrow night, too. There will be other chances to get drunk with costumed acquaintances.

10. I will stay home and drink beer and watch zombies drag their entrails.

11. No, I’ll make a whiskey with hot cocoa.  Better idea.

12. After this episode I’ll make that hot cokie, I will.  Also I should probably change out of my costume.  But then I’d have to take the Snuggie off.

13. Okay, really?  Falling asleep at the very end of The Walking Dead?  You’ve made it through one episode.  Jeepers.

14. I can’t get up from this couch.  Ever.

dear diary: the past five days

1. heard a good joke (“So an untalented limbo competitor walks into a bar(re)”)

2. listened to Sage Francis

3. told a stranger in a bar about that time a poledancer, much to my surprise, flashed me

4. listened to Josh Lederman

5. told a hot dog vendor about the time I sold someone a Wiffle bat because, she said, her husband “liked to be beaten”

6. bought patterned tights

7. lost a swordfight

8. slowdanced with a stranger in a kitchen

9. won free three-month subscriptions to three ladymags, including the grandiose and absurd Cosmopolitan

10. built a heart from clockworks and glue

11. bought milk to replace my roommate’s, which I had used to make pasta sauce

12. launched a Kickstarter campaign for Broad!

saying yes to m!ch!gan

Today I ate cherry salsa on cherry tortilla chips (???) and saw a dude drive by with his hand out the window, covered in a white handkerchief, shouting BOO! at passersby. Also there are no less than three “Oriental Health Spa” billboard advertisements on the stretch on 94 between Kzoo and Ann Arbor, and apparently around 3:35 this afternoon 88.3 FM was playing “Sitar Funk.” Only in Michigan, amirite ladies?

an open letter to the concern troll behind me in line at the grocery store

Dear Sir:

The funny thing about my body –– y’know, the one with the big ass and big tits you were eyeballing and the big everything else –– is that it belongs to me.  (Who knew?)  Which means that whatever I choose to put in it is my decision and no one else’s.  If I decide I want to eat two Oreos a night for a few weeks because it’s the most cost-effective way to manage my chocolate intake, so be it.  Even if I decide to throw caution to the wind and disregard the exorbitant “healthcare costs you’ll be paying later,” as you so eloquently phrased it, in favor of eating the whole fucking box tonight, that is my decision to make and mine alone.  I could eat Oreos for breakfast if I wanted.  A whole sleeve for afternoon tea!  Because I’m a grown woman and what I put in my body is my own fucking business.

I went to the grocery store to get cereal, Oreos and a frozen pizza, not a lecture from you.  So you can take your expensive coconut water and your road bicycle and shove it.

Best,
Heather

this is just to say

I have found
a totally heretofore undiscovered health foods store
it was on
oakland drive
vegan cream cheese was forty cents less than at the co-op
plus a 10% student discount

money which
would otherwise probably
have gone to support
a local community-oriented store
with an active membership

Forgive me
it was perfect
so cheap
and such an impressive bulk foods section

 

with respect to william carlos williams and batia’s kitchen curtain.