Weekend Gorging: When Petunia Wasn’t Looking

Posted on by thepoelog

In between attempts to feed much-needed medicine to wiggly fur face residents, we celebrated the gift of life that is our cat by eating lots of good things, including these guys.

When your personal chef for life wakes up on a Saturday morning and declares (while cleaning out the magazine holder stuffed with six months worth of cooking magazines) that he feels like making something, you don’t argue. And, for some reason, XFE felt like making lobster rolls.

But first, we had to drag out our large lobster pot. Because, yes, even though neither of us is from New England, and we’ve never made lobster rolls, we have a specially-designated lobster pot. (We have made lobsters before. And crab boil.)

We still have no gas in our house. I know, right? So our house is (was?) all electric, including the stove. This does not work for us, so we had a gas line run into the kitchen for a stove, and we swapped out the electric stove for a gas one. We got all our permits from the city, filled out all the paperwork with the gas company and now ….well, nothing.

Our gas line has protruded from the front of our house uselessly since we moved in late July. We need the gas company (or their subcontractors or whatever) to come and connect it to the main gas line under the street. In the meantime, large pots of water will be boiled outside. We’re seriously hoping we have a stove by winter.

Eventually they came in like this. Well, they had bodies, but this picture is post-body removal.

And the lobster gods got really angry and turned the sky into this (actually, there was a tornado warning for our area. I even got a phone text! Not from the lobsters, I don’t think. More probably from the weather service or the city or something. Lot’s of excitement).

We went a bit crazy on the ingredients front. We added green onions AND chives (living wild up in the OT). American chives are apparently not from America. They’re from Israel.

As I said, we went crazy with the ingredients. Besides Israeli-grown American chives, we added celery, mayo, and, of course, sriracha. Which is why it’s a weird peachy color. We cannot resist sriracha. We’re hardly lobster roll purists. We realize this was a pretty bastardized version.

Served on a crusty buttered french roll with a side of grilled corn and a nice white wine. The lobsters gave up their lives for a tasty cause. Actually, we both agreed we’d gotten too crazy with the mayo and sriracha and we’d probably leave those off next time (or at least use less).

Also on Saturday, before the lobster massacre and the tornado, I accompanied my friend Katie to some torture session called LA Kickboxing. It was one hour of pure hell. While it is very motivating to have an incredibly strong young man yell at you and threaten you with push ups, his penchant for burpees and squat jumps guarantee that our relationship will probably not go much further.

BUT, since I had almost died doing that, I figured I could do whatever the hell I wanted for the rest of the weekend. Including eating delicious chicken wings while watching the Red Zone.

XFE made two kinds of wings on the grill: Old Bay coated wings, and a new (and welcome) contender to the kickboxing ring: sriracha wings. They were amazing. Even more amazing than stumbling into a Starbucks after an hour of kickboxing and gulping down a mocha light frappaccino. Not that anyone did that. Or something.

So weekend lessons: cat medicine, always, always bad.

Poe and kickboxing: Mostly bad but a good excuse to eat too much.

Lobster and sriracha: good in moderation.

Chicken wings with sriracha: a match made in heaven.

I feel smarter already.

50 Shades of Crazy

Posted on by thepoelog

I have this weird book snobbery thing going on, which is totally at odds with my television viewing habits and my weekend consumption of every tabloid magazine I can get my hands on. I know, I know, I’m an enigma wrapped in a mystery and covered in hypocrisy.

So even though I read a lot, I refuse REFUSE to read anything that becomes popular amongst the general population. This includes all of the Harry Potter books. All of the Twilight books. Certainly the Hunger Games books. And most recently, the Fifty Shades trilogy.

I’d read this. By the way, there are tons of others here: http://fiftyshadesmeme.com/

The first three I can probably justify with the fact that I’m not a tween. I’ve tested very well on reading and I read above a fifth-grade level, so simple sentence structures fail to keep my interest.  I’m not some pre-pubescent enamored with magic or mythical creatures, or unconsummated lust, or lust mixed with violence. I’m an adult. I read adult books.

(Sidenote: I wasn’t always a book snob, nor even an age-appropriate book snob. In high school, I used to read those really torrid bodice-rippers, ie: historical fiction novels my mom was always buying at the used book stores. And anything by VC Andrews and Anne Rice. Ah, the 80s.)

But, I’ve seen lots of people reading Fifty Shades. In public. Which is so creepy since it’s basically porn. (By the way, I never read those bodice rippers out in public. Home reading only.)

Turns out, per usual, I’m right to eschew this book. Apparently, reading it is quite, quite dangerous.

Herein, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, is an enlightening parable about the dangers of reading Fifty Shades of Grey.

A man whose girlfriend refused his demand that she should stop reading the cult erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey subjected her to a spicy revenge – by squirting brown sauce all over her face.

OK, loving the “spicy revenge” detail. But my biggest question, quite obviously, is why brown sauce (which is what Brits call what is basically A1 steak sauce)? Were they fighting in a restaurant? Oh no. The boyfriend, Raymond Hodgson, 31, went to his girlfriend’s home with sauce in hand.

 “She answered the door and the argument continued. She went to close the door and he jammed his foot into the door, slapped her once in the face, and then squirted her with this bottle of sauce.”

When interviewed by the police, Hodgson said he felt Fifty Shades of Grey was a “distasteful” and “pornographic” book.

Welp, that’s one way to make the book more tasteful, I suppose

And this wasn’t some sudden little tiff. This is an argument that had started the preceding day and carried over into the day of the assault.

“They began arguing on June 25 after Miss [Emma] McCormick began reading extracts from the best-selling novel by E L James, which is now the fastest selling book of this year. Mr Hodgson thought that the book was pornographic, and that she should not read such literature. The argument continued into the following day, with the two exchanging text messages.”

But don’t worry. Our saucy lover (after being ordered to pay his girlfriend a $150 fine – it’s not like the judge threw the book at him. See what I did there? Book?) is really, really contrite.

“He said he had every intention of squirting sauce over Miss McCormick, but he now regrets having done this, realising how stupid it sounds. He didn’t realise that the sauce incident would be classed as an assault. He is sorry for his actions.”

And, all’s well that ends well.

 “He was angry that she suggested he slapped her because he hadn’t. But they are now friends and they have been in touch with each other.”

What a relief. I hate to see what other condiments might get thrown around (“Sir, please put the sriracha down.”)