A long list of pleasant things

Look, everyone. I know which side my bread is buttered on. If I want a significant spike in positive feedback around here, all I have to do is toss up a picture of children with a pile of cats and write literally no words in the post. I can dig it! Fortunately for all of us, the marriage of camera to computer is once again a happy one and we have done a lot of pretty good stuff in the past couple of weeks. Please enjoy our many merry activities, with commentary as limited as I can physically make it.

We discovered the transcendent joy of meat on bread.

We stoically accepted that being at the beach would eventually mean walking into the water no matter how many times we had claimed we would not do so.

We got used to it.

We had a sweet ride.

We flew a kite with surprising competence.

We played in the mud.

A lot.

We had strong opinions about sand castle design.

Like, strong.

We played it cool.

We took some chances.

We posed.

We made friends of varying degrees of creepiness.

We did not require much in the way of parades.

We ate hot dogs because we were Americans.

We were rightly concerned about fireworks safety.

We hung out with lovely internet ladies Caitlin, Natalie, Jess, Donna, and brave fool of a hostess Regan and proselytized them on our meat and bread discovery.

We played with our friends.

We hung out with OTHER lovely internet lady Jen, who fed us lunch composed of pasta and fruit and cheese and crackers like toddler food but for grown-ups and it was perfect.

We also very much appreciated the gummy lobsters on the cheese plate.

We were temporarily adopted while our mother ate cheese.

We worked out the logistics of cake pops. Eventually.

We confronted the sun many times. We cooked little but ate well. We were extraordinarily social, by our standards. We are tired now.

That is pretty bad news, actually

The workingness of my computer is ebbing at the moment, taking 250 beach and July 4th and blogger-hangout pictures with it. I can see them, receding with the tide. Lost to the sea of a frequently abused four-and-a-half-year-old laptop. (It's actually fine, Dan has already mostly fixed it, but it's more difficult to make that situation sound nautical. Did I mention I recently visited the shore?) As such, I am here to enthrall you with my words alone, just like in the olden days. The Friendster blog days.

First, a Bon Appetit update: very exciting news! I finally had a mild catastrophe with Recipe #11. I will…have to show you a picture. Later. And let me just say that my second mild catastrophe is currently in the works and it involves fish and Scandinavian liquor. So even if you can't see it yet, rest assured that I am busily torturing my family generating content.


Next, a short story about being the parent of a two-and-two-thirds-year-old:

The screaming has reached an intensity, and more importantly, a duration at which I can no longer remember my life before the screaming began. I cling feebly to sanity by mentally projecting myself into the future, to a time far beyond the screaming, where I carry on an imaginary conversation with sympathetic friends and family about how difficult this period of my life was. "It was miserable," I tell them. "You have no idea." My hypothetical confidantes nod, duly impressed by how stricken my expression becomes even after all these years. How traumatizing can it be to usher one child through an uncrowded Target? they may think to themselves but they do not say aloud.


Last, a play in one act about being the parent of an almost-five-year-old:

"Mom, come here. I need to tell you something."

"Is it good or bad?"

"Kind of bad, but it's going to be okay."

"You're making me nervous."

I am led down the hallway, to a television playing a nature program. She holds my hand for reassurance.

"Mom, the dodo bird. Is. EXTINCT."

Happy Independence Day From Our Cat Team To Yours

Periodical combat

I'm now ten recipes in to the June issue of Bon Appetit, and it's really not looking good, guys. I mean, it's actually looking excellent in terms of taste and ease of preparation and reasonability/non-aliveness of ingredients and lack of aquavit, but pretty terrible in terms of torturing me amusingly or generating anything interesting to report.

BA#8: Carrot Pancakes with Salted Yogurt. I feel like "carrot pancakes with salted yogurt" is the kind of thing you either immediately want to eat or immediately want to avoid, and if your instinct is to eat, I very much encourage you to follow it. Soon.

BA#9: Roasted Red Pepper, Feta, and Chive Caprese. There's a whole page of variations on caprese salad and they all look good. I mean, where's the sport?

BA#10: Orecchiette with Corn, Green, and Ricotta. There's bacon in this. Even the children ate it. I'm really at a loss, here.

At this point I'm thinking my only option is to pit the Real Simple "Best of Summer" issue AGAINST the Bon Appetit and just cross my fingers for some blood sport.

I realize the blood would be mine.

Oh, right, I have more time than usual to ponder such things because I am on a beach. Really! We took a ferry and everything!

We were appropriately wary of the proceedings.

Seriously, why I am still typing when the ocean is right next to me? What if I get distracted and fall into it? (I do not spend very much time by the ocean.) I hope the boringly competent recipes above can tide you over for a while because I'M ON VACATION NOW, BABY.

At one point a call is placed on a cellular phone

I was worried when I picked up the latest Book Lover's Cookbook entry, Patricia Cornwell's Unnatural Exposure, that I wasn't entirely up for a gruesome murder mystery. I read quite a bit of Cornwell in my late teens or so, but that was back when my tastes generally ran that direction and I knew a slightly concerning amount about serial killers. These days I find I don't really have the stomach for it, because having children has made me weeeeeeaaaaaaaaak (and/or more empathetic to human suuuuuuffering). For example, I stopped watching Boardwalk Empire when Anna was an infant because during a scene in which a random gangster (who was not nice and would definitely be dead by now anyway and also was fictional) was repeatedly punched in the face, I became overwhelmed with the thought that he was once someone's child. Parenthood is exhausting.

My point being, I didn't really know if I was in the mood for dismembered bodies and such, but what I was in the mood for without even realizing it was a story written in 1997 that centers on everyone being somewhat afraid of and confused by The Internet. It's SPECTACULAR. 

And there are CRAB CAKES in it.

How no-nonsense is everything surrounding our heroine, Dr. Kay Scarpetta? The excerpt in the cookbook is literally just one character saying a recipe for crab cakes, out loud. They are described as "no-fuss." They are from a lady named Bev. No time for frills, there are dismembered bodies everywhere!

Here are my favorite parts of Unnatural Exposure, in the order that they occur:

Page 18  Her beeper goes off.

28  The jerkface investigator's first name is Percy, which brings to mind Thomas & Friends. I hate him immediately and immoderately.

36  The killer sends Scarpetta an email with a picture attached. It takes roughly eighteen paragraphs for her to see it. "An image began to materialize on my screen, rolling down in color, one band of pixels at a time."

81  In case you have spent the past 45 pages wondering what "pixels" are, here is a definition. The definition involves a dot matrix.

109  Whoa did you guys know you could get a portable color scanner for "four, five hundred bucks"?

114 THE PLANE HAS A SMOKING SECTION WHAT IS THIS THE MIDDLE AGES

126 Their tour of Graceland is conducted via cassette tape, although to be fair, this might still be accurate to Graceland, I have no idea.

139 "The point is, scanning files into your computer and sending them through the Internet is very accessible to your average person, which is why telecommunications crimes are keeping us so busy these days." Dammit average people quit ruining everything good with your crimes.

142 The killer has sent electronic mail DIRECTLY TO THE WHITE HOUSE. The missive is all lowercase and lacking punctuation because the killer is actually pretty advanced as far as the internet goes.

191 The Martha Stewart "whipping up something with meringue" on the Today show has never been to jail, because these truly were simpler times.

199 The FBI's big sting operation involves Scarpetta hanging out in an AOL chat room waiting for the killer to happen upon it. This endeavor is successful. ("A/S/L?" she fails to ask, leading me to question her investigative skills.)

243 A character says "Don't you die on me." This is followed, appropriately and necessarily, by "Don't you dare!" This strategy is also successful.

250 A package arrives with a shipping label that appears to have been printed from a computer. Everyone is extremely unnerved by this.

258 This professional profiler is on to you, internet commenters: "His refusal to use punctuation indicates his belief that he is not like other people and the same rules do not apply to him."

General observation: Surnames in this book include Kitchen, Pleasants, Ring, and Wheat, yet the total pun count based on character names comes in at a tremendously disappointing one.

Hilariously terrible association with the recipe even though all the cookbook did this time was copy the recipe straight out of the novel: it is implied more than once that the crab may have been infected by a mutant strain of DEADLY MONKEYPOX.

This probably goes without saying, but I recommend this book very highly.

You'll have to excuse me now, however, as Anna is pitching me on a concept called "The Coffee Factory" that involves chocolate pixie dust and I need to liquidate some assets because I am definitely investing ASAP.

That is in fact why we laughed

Okay, I know I was supposed to be in a demon-cake-induced heat-coma for a few months, but for some reason the rest of my family is refusing to see the many benefits of sleeping until September, possibly because the weather is seriously confusing them right now.

This is uuuuuuhhhhhhhhnusual.

So I guess I won't be giving myself over to the lethargy, no matter how terrific of an idea that is, which is a shame, but hey! While I'm up anyway, look at this! It's a Bon Appetit with a list of summer recipes! Seems like I should probably make them all!

It's a normal thing that people do!

I have to tell you guys, I've probably flipped through this issue a dozen times now and I still can't find the part where I have to kill something, so I dunno, this summer project might be kind of a letdown. I guess that makes sense, given that it's obviously not actually summer because it was sixty-eight degrees yesterday, did you see that? WAIT, AM I HAVING LATE-ONSET HALLUCINATIONS FROM THE CAKE? IS IT A HUNDRED AND THREE DEGREES OUTSIDE AND I'M JUST TRAPPED IN A SEMI-LUCID ESTIVATION DREAM STATE? Of course I would dream that I was blogging about a cooking project I've already done before. Worthless brain.

Guess I'll press on either way, especially since I've already knocked out seven of the forty-eight recipes. Man, I was pretty impressed with my progress before I realized this was all happening in my head.

Possibly phantasmagoric BA#1: Minty Spinach Dip. This is good because it is 75% sour cream.

BA#2-4: Lemon-Ginger Brew, Strawberry-Ginger Lemonade, Extra Stormy Dark and Stormy. I already want to make the lemon-ginger brew again. So I WILL. It's not like I'm bound by the LAWS OF REALITY. And actually, the laws of reality completely allow for this, no problem. 

BA#5: Steak Tacos with Cilantro-Radish Salsa. The steak is chewy, the steak is always chewy, in this and all possible worlds there is chewy steak.

BA#6: Canal House Classic Vinaigrette. If you click on the link, please notice that Bon Appetit chose to showcase this salad dressing by placing a single leaf next to it because they have nothing to prove.

BA#7: German Potato Salad with Dill. I liked this. Were I the sentimental sort, I would point out that I also liked it the first time around, when it was the only enjoyable item on a certain magical
Scandinavian buffet.

In keeping with today's pleasant and slightly otherworldly tone, here is an image that made Anna laugh uproariously:

In keeping with the blog's regular tone, here is what she solemnly explained after a brief pause: "Its eyes are a different size than the glasses. That's why we laughed."

State of torpor: engage

Here is a nice pleasant plate of Martha-approved food items for you, some black pepper tofu with soba noodles, nutritious and not at all horrifying because I feel kind of bad about the other day.

Still a little shaken up? I understand. This homemade butter will help, I promise.

No more nightmares.

And, just so you know, the ghoulish pastry is no longer among us, not because I threw it in the trash and then set the trash bag on fire and then sprinkled the ashes with holy water, but because I wiped it off with about ten paper towels and I ate it. All of it. Because it was fine. And also, I am working on an extra layer of fat because I was just informed by TJ that estivation is a thing and GUESS WHAT TOMORROW IS THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER SUCKERRRRRRRS.

Before that though, I'm soaking up these last few moments of spring, trying to live in the moment and really say "YES" to life, you know? Even when life is four and wants to play Chutes and Ladders, which is just…unquestionably the most mind-numbing way for children to learn about the capriciousness of fate and futility of human effort, even then, still "YES."

It's possible that I'm too devoted of a parent.

She was seriously invested in this.

For a while.

It starts to wear you down.

About 15 minutes in she announced "This game is actually kind of boring" and asked to watch TV.

I have never loved her more.