Category: Food

Easter Feaster

On April 5, 2010

Yes, I know, I know. I’m behind. I’ll get caught up in the next day or two because I’m almost at half a year of blog posts. Yippee!

Ready for my excuses for missing a couple of posts? Sure you are. We had a slew of people over for Easter. What a joy! I stayed up until 3 am Saturday night tying little plaid ribbons around napkins and putting together Easter baskets for my ungrateful, way too old children. What is the cutoff for this kind of stuff? Will I be making them baskets when I’m in the nursing home?

I made little clues for a scavenger hunt for my daughter (my son has lost interest). I usually make each clue a little narratives like, “look in a place where your dad snores.” That’s a good one, because she’d have to look in the bed, on the couch, on the other couch, in the La Z Boy, at the kitchen table, and in the bathtub.

At 3:00 I wasn’t in the mood for writing little novels, so here were my clues: “Brrrr.” “Kick it,” “Shelley’s perch,” “Dad’s perch.” I made 14 of them and taped them all over the place. She’d go to the one that said, “Shelley’s perch” and then she’d find another one hidden there that said, “Brrrr” and she’d go look in all the refrigerators and freezers and found the next one that said, “Kick it.”

“Is it on the dog?” she asked.

“Kick the poor little sweet dog?????” I asked. “And it’s Easter morning!”

This one she could not get. She looked all over the house for balls or kickable objects. Then she looked all around my son’s drum set. “I can’t find it,” she whimpered.

“What’s the clue?” her dad asked.

“Kick it.”

“Did you look on the dog?”

“Enough!!!” I said. “It’s a device that kicks things.”

She roamed through the house again. “Is it a hula hoop?” “Is it a book?” “Is it the sewing machine?”

“It’s a DEVICE in the BONUS ROOM that kicks things.”

“We’re going to be late for church.”

“It’s a GAME in the bonus room that kicks things.”

She went out there and looked around, completely stumped.

“A GAME! A DEVICE!”

“Oh, the foosball table,” she finally said when I clumped my coffee mug down on it.

There were a few other clues that had her scratching her head, but finally she found the basket, I took some pictures, and we both rushed to get ready. She was right, we were late for church and had to stand up through the whole service – me in my heels and her without a coat right by the door where assorted people kept taking fussy children out of or sneaking late into.

It was a great day though, thanks to the company and the feast my husband cooked. I wish you could have seen it! He made enough for a hundred people, and I did my very best to mow through my fair share, but we’ve still got a refrigerator full of leftovers even after giving a ton of it away.

At exactly midnight on Saturday, I grabbed every bag of Easter candy I could find and gorged myself on chocolate. If you’ve never given up sweets for 40 days, you don’t know what sheer joy there is in tasting your first chocolate at 12:01 am on Easter Sunday. What a veritable feast it was. I am so thankful to the Hershey’s company for making all that good stuff.

I was also thankful that the good Lord let me get through Easter Sunday without feeling tired. He even made me hyper! But that could have been the chocolate, no?

The Pork Chop Story

By Suzanne Olsen

On March 24, 2010

In Food

I’m not a bad cook, it’s just not my favorite thing to do. If I had my way, I’d open the refrigerator and find the perfect meal without having to do anything more than fire up the microwave.

When my husband and I had just started dating, I decided I’d go to his house and cook dinner. Don’t know what got into me, I guess I was trying to prove I was domestic. I bought these big thick pork chops because I’m from the south and I know how to cook a pork chop. You mix up some flour, salt and pepper, a little garlic powder, then wash the chops and dredge them in the flour, then sizzle them in some oil until they’re brown as a speckled heifer on the outside and white as a chicken breast on the inside. I may not know much, but I know chops.

So I went to his house and let myself in, found the frying pan, prepped the chops, but I couldn’t find the oil. I called him and asked, “Where’s the oil?”

“Under the sink.” He was bemused and impressed that I was cooking him dinner. I felt special.

I put about ¾ inch of oil in the pan – just the right amount to fry half a thick chop at a time. As I was waiting for the oil to heat up, II called my friend, Claudia. She was intrigued about this whole cooking adventure since she had never known me to voluntarily cook. She’s very funny. I was laughing as I added the pork chops to the oil, arranging them just so in the pan to keep them from touching for even browning.

Have you ever had one of those really happy moments in life? Like all the planets line up and everything goes exactly how it should. I was cooking my specialty for a guy who I was liking enough to go to the trouble, and a girlfriend on the phone who was entertaining me with her endless stories of people at work. Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. I couldn’t wait to serve this scrumptious meat and mashed potatoes and green beans meal that I knew would make a good impression.

I happened to look up and noticed a black cloud hanging just above my head in the kitchen. “Claudia, there’s a black cloud in here. It’s like being in an airplane when you are in clear sky and suddenly it’s white. I can see where it starts.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. This is so weird.”

“Is it the pork chops?”

“No, they aren’t burning. They’re just sitting there frying away. There’s no smoke coming from anywhere.”

I’m paranoid about everything. The black cloud made me think immediately of some chemical contamination – some horror movie kind of fog that rolls into town and everyone drops twitching to the sidewalk. “I’m going to hang up. I think it’s a chemical fog. I’m running outside.”

I dashed out the back door to find a clear sky. Hmmm. I went back in. The cloud layer was only in the kitchen. It had to be the pork chops. And then I saw that they weren’t browning on the outside – they were flour-white just sitting in the bubbling oil. And the oil looked like water in a rolling boil – little circles of air breaking the surface everywhere. With dread, I looked under the sink. There were two identical big plastic jugs with handles. When I picked up one, it said oil. The other said dishwashing detergent.

I pulled one of the pork chops out of the oil and ran it under some water in the sink. It bubbled. I could have washed an entire car with the thing.

In the meantime, gravity was acting on the black smoke, and it was falling to earth in little black specks that landed all over the white countertops.

I spent the next hour trying to get the evidence out of the kitchen by wiping everything down and then wiping again and again as more particles fell. When the cloud was gone and the counters were finally clean, I had a great idea. What if I washed the soap out of the pork chops? They had been very expensive. Maybe I could salvage the dinner after all. I ran one under the water, and bubbles flowed out of it like a foamy waterfall.

When my boyfriend got home, I had to tell him that dinner was all washed up. We went out to eat, we ended up getting married, and he’s been doing most of the cooking ever since.

Beans and Laughs

By Suzanne Olsen

On March 9, 2010

In Food

I’ve had beans all three meals today. There were some leftover baked beans that were so good I had them for breakfast. I finished them off at lunch. Then tonight I went to an open mike comedy session and they had pinto beans on the menu so I ordered them. Needless to say, I’m a walking time bomb. I wonder how long I’ll be in bed tonight before my husband kicks me out.

The comediennes were very funny tonight. They bill themselves as the “Mother of All Comedies” because they are all moms telling about their lives with children. It was some pretty funny stuff. One woman got up to the mike and instead of holding it in her hand, she attached it to the mike stand, saying. “I don’t want to hold anything in my hand, especially something that looks like a penis. I might get pregnant again.” She said she didn’t know how she got pregnant. “I just tripped on a penis and it got in there and all of a sudden I’ve got three kids.”

Penis is a funny word spoken out loud in a room full of women. We all laughed every time she said it. She described her vagina after pregnancy as looking like “a dog got in my uterus and ate its way out of there.”

Another older mom with four kids said she gets mistaken for her 3 year old’s grandma at the playground, so she milks it. If her son misbehaves, she tells the young moms, “They just spoil that child, it’s really a shame, but what can a grandmother do?”

All the while I’m laughing, I’m shoveling in beans because I love them so. Refried, in soups, boiled, salted, stir-fried, baked – I’ve never met a bean I didn’t like. The feeling isn’t mutual, though. They go down the hatch and all hell breaks loose. They gurgle a warning like a rattlesnake signaling that an eruption will soon take place and everyone better run for cover. I know this is going to happen as sure as the 2010 census will arrive in my mail any day now, but I can’t help myself. My family gets upset. They buy me Beano. They threaten to move out. They make fun. It does no good. I’m addicted.

This was a fun evening tonight, laughing with friends about experiences close to home and heart, and eating beans that they say are good for my heart, at least that’s what the rhyme says. I’m as happy as a mule eating briars.

Food for Thought

By Suzanne Olsen

On March 9, 2010

In Food

I’m in the mood to talk about food. I made a batch of chili mac the other night that was so good. The half that didn’t have the burger in it was, anyway, since I’m vegetarian. I knew it was good, though, because my son ate it.

He’s been finicky about food ever since he was about one and a half. Before that I used to grind up squash in a blender and feed it to him and he gobbled it up. Disgusting looking stuff that I wouldn’t even test – just plain yellow squash that managed to take on a brownish tinge from the grinding process.

There really wasn’t anything the child wouldn’t eat – if I could turn it into a watery mush, he’d scarf it down. I don’t know what happened to him that made him into a discriminating eater, but over time he gradually started cutting out all foods that were (1) healthy (2) possibly healthy or (3) not part of the hamburger and French fries food group.

He also had this thing about food touching when he was little, which is why I could never get him to eat combined foods like spaghetti or pot pies. He wanted a separate pile of peas, another pile of potatoes, and his meat in it’s own area. He took pains to catch peas that rolled away from the pile, chasing them with a fork and turning it sideways to form a fence. This is why it was remarkable that he ate the chili mac.

My daughter and I will eat just about anything, but she can’t stand the feel of squash in her mouth. We goaded her as a child to “just try it one time.” She finally did to make us hush and within seconds of putting a bite in her mouth she jumped up from the table and ran to the bathroom where she Ralphed it and everything else she’d eaten into the toilet. If she ever wanted to be bulimic, all she’d have to do is put a piece of squash in her mouth.

I guess everyone has one thing they can’t or won’t eat. I absolutely despise brie. This comes as a shock to everyone who knows me because I have a mammoth appetite and will literally eat anything, especially if it has Heinz 57 Sauce or blue cheese dressing on it. Everything about brie disgusts me. I can’t stand the taste, smell, or texture of it. I’m apparently the only human who feels this way because every gathering I go to always has a plug of brie with some jelly and crackers. Ewe!

There are foods I’d never want to try. Like those things that short stocky guy goes around eating on one of the cooking shows my husband insists on watching. He goes to Amazon jungles and the southern United States to sample odd foods. Possum, cockroaches, and still squirming worm-like creatures are some of the fair he eats – not to mention eyeballs and gonads. I can’t be in the room when that show is on.

My palette is simple – I like food that tastes good. I’m not into novelty dishes or ones that make some kind of statement. I don’t have to show off that I’m eating truffles because they’re expensive, or snails because they’re gross, or alligator because it’s unique. I ate a piece of alligator once. It was coated in a fiery sauce so I couldn’t taste anything because of the burn. I could have been eating the sole of a tennis shoe for all I knew. I ate gold leaf one time on the first date with my husband. It had no flavor at all, and who ever came up with the idea of shaving thin slices of gold and serving it with dinner? How can that be good for you? I thought they should jut shave off part of the price and skip the gold.

Perhaps you’d like to comment on foods you like or don’t like. Perhaps you’d like to comment on the eating habits of people you know. Food for thought – or thoughtful food. Either way, I’d eat it up!

Too Many Cooks in Ze Kitchen

By Suzanne Olsen

On February 16, 2010

In Food

My husband and I can’t be in the kitchen cooking at the same time. Our styles are totally different. He’s a cooking show watching, recipe experimenting, gourmet chef kind of guy, and I’m an open a can, bring it to a boil, and avoid burning it sort of gal.

My husband’s a cooking snob, plain and simple. He’s never said this out loud, but it’s easy to see that he’d prefer not to share his sacred kitchen with some short order cook who sees food primarily as a means to silence my children’s cries of “hungwee!” This may sound crazy, but I’m convinced he tries to keep me out of the kitchen by sabotage.

Here’s a recent example. Last week I told him I’d cook dinner, and that I was having cod filets, corn on the cob, sliced tomatos, and salad from a bag. Simple, wholesome, and tasty. He sneaked home at lunchtime and prepared a marinade for the cod filets. I found them swimming in olive oil and spices. The tomatoes were bathing in balsamic vinegar, and the de-cobbed corn was tossed with other vegetables to a make a chutney. To use one of his fancy cooking terms, I was fricaseed. I’d been soooo looking forward to the taste of fresh corn on the cob, lightly salted and dredged in butter.

Another thing he does is hide my utensils. I’m looking for the slotted spoon to stir my green beans, the one I’d been using only moments before, but it’s gone. “I don’t know what you did with it,” he says innocently. A few minutes later it’ll be right back by the green bean pot. I’m sure a detective would find his fingerprints all over it.

Since my husband loves combining millions of ingredients to form one new taste, he is always in front of the sink washing and chopping something. If I need to use the sink, I have to wait, because I guess it interferes with his artistry or something. I can almost hear his thoughts, “Should a Michealangelo have to step aside for a mere house painter? Or Frank Lloyd Wright have to wait for someone who merely builds castles in the sand? Certainly not!”

We’ve worked on this cooking situation over the years, and have come up with solutions like him cooking on weekends and me cooking during the week, but even this he sabotages. He knows I grew up being taught never to waste food, so he cooks enough on Sunday to generate leftovers through Thursday, and Friday night we always go out for pizza!

Then we tried having him do the entree’ and I’d do the side dishes, but entrees weren’t enough to challenge his creative genius; he’d wait until my back was turned and then “help” me. For instance, I once experimented with a gourmet salad. It called for purple cabbage finely chopped, with pears and walnuts, and a homemade dressing, garnished with tender strips of grated carrots. While I was mixing the dressing, my husband took one of his culinary gadgets and sliced my carrots into three inch long twigs, tossed everything else together and said, “Don’t you

like how your salad turned out?” It was totally not what I wanted to do with that salad. And he wonders why I get so stirred up.

Last night I was cooking rice and he sneaked in, looked at the gas flame under the pot, and must have said to himself, probably in some cheesy French chef’s accent he saw on a cooking show, “Ah, zee flame eez vay too hot for zee rlice, so I weel turn it not so hot.” I came back a few minutes later, knowing I’d timed that rice to cook to perfection, but when I lifted the lid to fluff it, I found the tiny grains staring up at me through a half inch of murky water. Puzzled, I looked under the pot. It took a magnifying glass to find the teensy little blue flickers. My husband breezed in, smiling, and said, “You had that up way too high, so I turned it down for you.” The rice didn’t boil, but I sure did. It’s sabotage, I tell you.

The only satisfaction I get out of cooking these days is when my children look at the gourmet fare their father has lovingly prepared for them and say, “Oh no, not again. Mom, would you please cook next time?” I just grin and chuckle to myself, “Wee, wee, my leetle buttercups, zee mom-ma will cook up somezing very magnifeek for zee leetle children tomorrow. Perhaps zee Spaghettio’s and zee meat-balls, no?”

The Long Awaited Dinner with Mr. Margolin

By Suzanne Olsen

On December 5, 2009

In Food

I’ve just returned from a dinner with Phillip Margolin, an international best-selling author of murder mysteries. A couple of the women in my writer’s group bid on him at an auction, and we all gathered to gorge ourselves and pick his brain about writing.

Before I get to him, I must talk about the food. And what a spread it was! I love a potluck better than almost anything because people bring their show-off foods. There were only 13 of us present, including the guest of honor, but there were at least 20 different dishes. At least. People brought two and three things, and huge quantities of everything – like a Thanksgiving platter full of lasagna and fruit salad. After I finished stuffing myself, I found a crock-pot full of chili that no one even knew was there. I love chili but one more smidgen of food and I would have exploded like I’d swallowed a grenade, which might have put a damper on the evening, but you never know.

If the food had been lousy, I would have probably overeaten anyway, but because it was so spectacular, I ATE TOO MUCH AND had three very lovely little red cocktails, which had no effect on me whatsoever except to make me extremely sleepy.

Okay, okay, I’m getting to Margolin. I ended up sitting close to him, so I’d ask him a question and he’d say, “I’ll answer that a little later when I give my spiel.” I don’t know about you, but when I’m sitting next to a perfect stranger, I either have to talk about my boring life or ask him questions. I wasn’t going to sit there like a chipmunk with my jaws puffed out from food and not talk, so I asked him something else and he smiled with infinite patience and said, “That’s one of the questions I’ll answer a little later.” Ooookay. Actually it made sense to wait because of the seating arrangement. We weren’t all gathered around the same table, so the people at the card table would have missed out, or we at the big table would have had to hear his answers again.

When dinner was over, Mr. Margolin settled back to tell us how he got his books published, and I started feeling my eyelids coming down like someone was tugging on a window shade. I jerked my lids back up and forced myself to look bug-eyed for a little bit, but then the old shades started sliding down again. I figured, what the heck, I’ll just have myself a short little nap and be good as new in a few. I’d wake up when the group would laugh. Finally I opened my eyes and saw the lady across from me dozing. It’s really hard to stay awake when you’ve eaten so much. Mr. Margolin’s stories were interesting as he took us down these winding paths, back alleys, and over hills and dells describing his experiences as a published writer. He’s also involved in a program that teaches grade school kids how to sit still for an hour and play chess that he’s very passionate about, and that has enjoyed many successes. I probably should have asked him if he could teach overeating grownups how to sit for an hour and stay awake. He’s an extremely nice guy who was a lawyer and must have worked very hard to do that and write at the same time, but he made it all sound like a piece of cake, which is what I got up to get because I could smell that chocolate from the kitchen and it was calling me like a siren song (whatever that is and I’m not looking it up right now).

If you want the summary of what he said, read on. Basically, he started writing because he wondered what it would be like to write a whole book, and about that time an old college friend he hadn’t seen in years called him up wanting to come visit. This guy turned out to be a bigwig in the publishing world. One lucky break after another effortlessly fell into his lap, and lots of very nice people helped in many, many ways. He just writes and lets the rest take care of itself.

His is a great success story, and one that, I think it’s safe to say for the whole group, none of us wanted to hear. We wanted him to write for many years and suffer rejection after rejection but keep going and one day, finally, someone recognized his talent. This is what we’ve all been going through, except we haven’t reached the one day, finally, part yet.

But all in all it was a successful evening. He gave us insights into what it’s like to be a famous writer flying all over the world with escorts in all the cities who take him to all the bookstores and speaking engagements. It sounds like great fun. Hope to be there soon.

The other place I hope to be even sooner is in my snuggly warm bed. Yawn, stretch, snore, dreaming of Margolin and success, and stuffed mushroom caps and chocolate cake. See ya!

Happy Tofurkey Day!

By Suzanne Olsen

On November 27, 2009

In Food, Holidays

Well, I’m happy to say this was a fabulous Thanksgiving, and I am so stuffed that I will have to make my entry short because I need to be supine right now with my belly sticking up in the air like an island in the Pacific.

Our friends had us and a few others over for dinner, and Laurie was trying to be a great hostess. Her daughter and I are both vegetarian, and since we couldn’t eat the turkey, she graciously prepared us a turkey substitute called “Tofurkey.”

This thing was a roundish ball of, judging by the name, some kind of tofu that had been colored to simulate a turkey breast. It almost had me fooled except for the ends. The “breast” had been formed in some kind of plastic casing that had been twist-tied at both ends, creating a molded, puckered look. The human body has an orifice that has that same puckered look, and it was about the same color. I couldn’t look at it, honestly, it was grossing me out totally. My friend’s husband carefully sliced the Tofurkey like a real turkey, and left one of the puckered ends on top. What a hideous presentation.

It’s hard to eat fake meat anyway. It never has the taste or texture of real meat, though you know they’ve tried really really hard to make it a suitable substitute. You have to use a lot of sauce or something and your vivid imagination to think that something called Tofurkey is going to taste like turkey. But when it looks like an, well, puckering part, it’s not going to pull off the masquerade.

I ate it, just to be polite, drowned in it’s own Tofurkey gravy and eaten with a mouthful of mashed potatoes to further disguise the taste. Memo to Tofurkey producers: put the pucker on the bottom or somewhere I can’t see it if you EVER want me to celebrate with your product at Thanksgiving.

The rest of the meal was an absolute delight; we all stuffed ourselves and then listened to our children playing Van Halen songs on the electric guitar. Oh, and did I mention that my family went skiing this morning and the sun was out? Seventeen runs – not too bad for the first day out, and no bickering among us, mostly because the kids slept all the way to the mountain and back.

I really wish I could find something more to complain about, and something to make fun of, but the sofa is calling me so loudly I’m going deaf and can’t focus. Happy Thanksgiving – yes, it was!

Duck if You See This Turkey Coming

By Suzanne Olsen

On November 26, 2009

In Food, Holidays

On this, Thanksgiving Eve, I think it’s time to talk turkey, or if you come from Louisiana – Turducken. I typed that and my spell check lit up like a turkey grease fire. That’s because Turducken (there it goes again) is a completely unnatural species of animal that I first learned about from my sister-in-law’s husband’s in-laws in Baton Rouge.

Whether the Cajuns invented this atrocity, or just acquired it, I don’t know, but it definitely sounds like something that came from their neck of the woods. They eat crawdads and gators and blackened everything, plus it seems to me like something Emeril might come up with. I heard rumors that he wanted to solve the nutria problem in Louisiana by using creative recipes to cook up the water-dwelling, pre-historic rodent that looks like a gargantuan rat on steroids.

For those of you who have been fortunate enough to never hear of this creature (the Turducken, not the nutria, which is at least a somewhat attractive member of the rodent family, once you get over its mammoth size eight food whiskers), I suggest you quit reading right now, because you’re not going to want to know. Trust me. This is an abomination against nature.

You’re still with me? You know, you can lead a horse to water but if he refuses to drink, well, I rest my case.

A Turducken is a chicken stuffed inside the intestinal cavity of a duck, which is then stuffed inside the intestinal cavity of a turkey. This unwieldy beast is then stuffed inside your oven where it cooks unspeakably, unevenly, and unbecomingly. Understand why I despise it?

Who would have come up with such a thing? There is something about reaching up inside a bird that lowers the threshold of my appetite to begin with. I used to have to turn my head when my mother stuffed fistfuls of dressing into the anal cavity of our family turkey, and I sure wasn’t about to eat any of that stuffing. If I didn’t witness it coming straight out of a separate pan, I wouldn’t touch it.

So to put a whole bird, or de-boned bird, or whatever in the hell it is into another bird is just not right. But my sister-in-law’s in-laws swore it was the best thing on the planet besides marrying your first cousin, so we got one for Thanksgiving a few years back.

I don’t like eating duck for any reason – they are so cute when they come up to you quacking for breadcrumbs, and Daffy and Donald could be their relatives. Eating chickens doesn’t worry me so much after one time when I was little I picked up a chick at my grandfather’s house and a mother hen flew out of nowhere right on top of my head and flogged me with her wings for about two hours. I think chickens are treacherous. I’ve never been intimate with any turkeys so they don’t bother me one way or the other. But on general principle I prefer not to eat anything that’s been shoved into something else’s guts. Have I belabored this point too long? No, I haven’t.

I’ve been vegetarian for years, so I didn’t partake of the Turducken on those grounds, though I would have become vegetarian that very day if it was the only way to avoid the hideous thing. The others reported that it was okay, ranking between possum and road kill, though nothing special. I think even they were grossed out. All I know is this: If a food is called something with the word Turd in it, I’m staying away. I advise you to do the same.

Food for Thought

By Suzanne Olsen

On November 3, 2009

In Fears, Food

Where do you go for inspiration? I go to the refrigerator. If I’m feeling at a loss for anything, like I can’t find my black gloves, I’ll open the refer door and, no, I generally don’t find the missing gloves, they’re usually in the bread bin, but I will find something that makes me forget that I’m at a loss.

The something is comfort. I don’t know what it is, but staring into that bright box, one hand braced on the outside of the refrigerator and the other swinging the door back and forth, has a calming effect on me.

There’s rarely anything in there to eat in an emergency. Jars of assorted pickles only appeal on occasion, like when I’m pregnant, which hasn’t happened in awhile. Those pickles would be covered in mold except that even bacteria won’t go in those jars.

Bacteria are a funny thing. I feel like I’m catching a cold right now because I’ve got a scratchy, dry throat. I guess I’ve got the swine flu. That’s caused by a virus, you know, scientific name: the swine flu virus. Viruses seem to like to cause damage to your lungs and their associated apparatuses. Bacteria, on the other hand, seems intent on making you upchuck or get a festering, oozing, swollen, and I would say puss-ie but I’m not sure how to spell it, infection from an innocent cut.

I once tripped over a vine at Girl Scout camp, and it made a little cut on the front of my ankle. That thing swelled up and got so red and puss infested that I had to go to the doctor and get a tetanus shot in the bottom. Gosh that hurt. I limped around for two days because the nurse reared back and aimed that syringe at my cheek, and it went right through the muscle and lodged in the bone. The nurse and doctor were yanking and pulling, trying to get it out, sweat beading on their faces and dripping to the floor as they strained, me screaming like a banshee birthing a porcupine. Yes, I’m kidding. But it did hurt like a son of a gun.

Bacteria aren’t anything to mess with. That being said, yesterday I made a huge pot of fresh vegetable bean soup, and, what with the time change and everything, I left the pot on the stove all night. This morning I promptly put it in the refrigerator, but I knew those bacteria had been partying in there all night. I saw some swimming in the broth this morning when I opened the lid. They dove for cover behind green beans and carrots, but they were in there — I could see the splashes.

The all-knowing Google said I should pour the whole pot down the drain, ladle and all, and I started to, but I couldn’t bring myself to waste all the food and time and energy, and besides it was a rare batch of soup for me—it was fit to eat. I had a giant bowl for lunch, figuring I might as well make it worth my while if I was going to be heaving all evening.

Knock on wood, so far so good. But I do have this puss-ie thing on my leg I’m going to keep a very close watch on. No sense in having those bacteria in my belly joining forces with the ones on my leg, with the swine flu virus playing tag team. BACK OFF, BACTERIA! VAMOOSE VIRUS! I showed them who’s boss. I’ll be fine now.