No, Chest Press Lady...YOU saved ME

Long ago, I used to work as an admin for a community newspaper mostly owned by a longtime alderman. This was pretty much my first job (not counting a two-week stint at a retirement home when I was 17 that mostly just served to instill a deep fear of aging in me.) When I started, there was a staff of three others: the managing editor, Jim; Karen, the office manager/bookkeeper; and Sharon, a salesperson.

At the risk of sounding mean, Sharon was not what one would call attractive in any respect. She was short, stubby, and reminded me a lot of those troll dolls, albeit an albino one. Her appearance was an unfortunate combination with her personality, which was sort of cheerfully aggressive, manifesting in non-recognition of personal space, painful side-hugging, literal cornering to talk, but she seemed to have no understanding that she was so grating. Basically she was a short female version of Mongo crossed with a used car salesman. Worst of all was her laugh. It was a lot like Beavis', but more of a rat-a-tat-tat, and I heard a lot of it because her long, boring stories were frequently punctuated with her laugh, and always began with "you won't believe this." As in: "You won't believe this. I went to go see Orv's Pizza. snort. heh heh. heh. And, get this, he pretended he didn't see me. heh. heh heh. snort. He locked the door while I was standing right there. heh." Anyway, one day her you-won't-believe-this story was eminently believeable. She regaled me with the tale of lonely weightlifting at the Y. "Erica. You won't believe this. I went to the gym at the Y over lunch. heh. And I went over to the free weights. heh heh. snort. But. snort. No one would spot me. heh heh. heh. snort. No one ever spots me. Not even if I ask. snort. They all spot each other. heh heh. But I try to talk to them. heh. And they just walk away." I was 18, 19. I didn't need to go to the gym then, so I didn't completely comprehend then how difficult it would be in a gym environment to not notice someone needing a spot, much less ignoring someone asking you to spot them. But I did get that the story, no matter how cheerfully-in-a-sad-clown-way it was told, was profoundly depressing.  Let's face it: if Sharon had had the same personality in a prettier package, the situation would have been very different.

Today, I saw an average-looking lady at the gym. Mid-30s, frumpy gym clothes, stringy ponytail. Me, more or less. And as I was on the back extension machine and watching the Cubs game, I saw her look forlornly at the free weights, touch them, walk around them. She sat down, leaned back, looked around, sat up, looked around, stood up. So I asked, "Need a spot?" She smiled and said, "Ohgodyes...thanks. I was afraid I would crush my own throat." She did a few chest presses, we shared a laugh and rolleyes at a meathead grunting/farting his way through a set of squats, and we went our separate sweaty ways.

I do not want any social interaction at the gym. Really, I don't. I'm just there to hate my way through a lunch hour, you know? All the fucking spiky-haired dbags who bob their empty heads like chickens at the oonst oonst oonst music that's playing, all the impossibly tiny post-teens in full makeup and coiffed hair daintily traipsing on the treadmill, all the hypertanned Lincolnwood moms aspiring to be Lake Forest moms who yak on their cells as they perch on whatever machine it is I would like to be using...my loathing for them fuels me through 40 minutes of hateful exercise. I hadn't even noticed all the normal, average people that are there hating them alongside me until today. It makes me feel good to know that I am not alone in my impotent dislike, and I have Chest Press Lady to thank for that. Thank you, Chest Press Lady.

Um.

Went past the Home Depot, and the kid selling candy was there again. It just now occurs to me that yesterday, around the same time, he probably should have been in school, if he is in fact a kid. I wonder if I am stupid.

It satisfies.

I kept an eye out yesterday, I really did. I was hoping, I suppose, that a little old lady would fall down and I could help her up, or maybe the woman at the gym who always seems drunk might choke on her own vomit in the locker room and I could swoop in with the Heimlich. I considered whether thinking charitable thoughts would qualify, but with all the road construction going on let's just say my thoughts weren't exactly of the Mother Theresa variety. I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere for the evening once I got home, so that left me with the relatively lame possibilities of donating money online to this or that charity or giving something away somehow. Actually, now that I think about it I did finally drop a big bag of clothes Hannah had outgrown into a donation bin. But really, I was doing myself a favor then, getting that damned bag out of my car -- it'd been in the backseat for about a month.

Anyway, knowing that I wouldn't have much overt opportunity for charity once I got home, after lunch I drove past Home Depot where a kid was selling candy for his baseball team. I bought two Snickers bars from him and then bought him a Coke from the hot dog stand. He was a little confused by the whole thing, truth be told, but when it was clear I wasn't trying to rob or kidnap him he thanked me quite sweetly. If every time I try to open my heart to the world, a Snickers bar finds its way into my belly, I might be more encouraged to...well, what? Buy more candy, I suppose.

Week 17: It starts at home. And ends, sometimes, on the corner of Peterson and Kimball.

A little housecleaning before moving onto Week 17 -- there are two recipes unaccounted for from last week.


Friday night was pizza night, as is our family convention. My plan was to use a couple of bags of whole-wheat pizza dough from Trader Joe's that I had, but I guess I had them longer than I thought, because they were...kinda gross. Unless pizza dough is supposed to be speckled with what looks like barnacles. So I tossed them and sought out a quick recipe for pizza dough -- no time for a leisurely rise, know what I'm saying? Eating was necessary within the hour or heads were going to roll. I found this quick dough recipe on allrecipes.com, but was skeptical that you can just knock all that stuff together and come up with a nice crust. After reading some of the reviews -- occasionally, the people who review a recipe online actually make it the way the recipe prescribes, instead of completely changing/ignoring the recipe and reviewing it based on their totally different dish, and then suggest useful adjustments or improvements -- I let the yeast mixture proof for a bit while I prepped the toppings for the pizza. I wound up having time to let the bread go with the dough hook and then even rise a bit while I finished caramelizing some onions. So, it was more of a half-ass job with the dough than a no-ass job, but it felt good and smelled good, so I went with it.
 

I made four different types of pizza. There a whole pepperoni for AJ, who can be a real bite in the ass when it comes to pizza. There was a whole fig, caramelized onion, and goat cheese, which I'd had a version of at a girls' night not long ago and knew Peter would love. And, one more pizza that was half potatoes, leeks, bacon, and goat and mozzarella cheese -- the other half was artichoke, tomato, olive, roasted garlic, mozzarella and parmesan. The only one of the three "new" pizzas was anything I'd truly never tried was the potato-leek one, but I'd never made the other two types either. (Mark, I'd bought the ingredients for a queso fundido pizza, but then decided that I would rather just have queso fundido, because why mess with perfection?) Peter and I were the only ones who ate the non-pepperoni ones, but we both liked them quite a bit -- I was surprised at how tasty the potato leek number was. Pizza, to me, is tomato sauce and cheese, so it was difficult to think of it as a pizza, but whatever it is in my head it is also very tasty, and came together fast. I think it'd be a nice option for an evening when Peter and I are spending date night at home. All of them would be, in fact.
 

And then Saturday night. I decided to stay in with the kids since I had a full day of fundraising ahead of me on Sunday, while Peter headed out to a poker tournament and later a party. I'd kind of forgotten about my challenge -- I had initially planned on trying a new sandwich recipe for lunch, and then that got away from me. I started getting bellyrumbles late in the afternoon and, having no desire to go the grocery store, I rooted around in the fridge to find a small amount of ground beef, some egg buns, and the chorizo I had just bought the day before. So, I gave chorizo burgers a throw, topped caramelized onions and goat cheese. The beef and chorizo didn't really want to stick together (hmm, is that analagous to anything?) and kind of fell apart in chunks on the grill, so if I did it again I'd probably run the two meats through a food processor first before forming the patties. I wish I'd put more onions and cheese on mine, too. But they were good, if a little unexciting.
 
Sunday was a long, long day. Peter is the titular fundraising chair of the baseball league AJ used to play in (but hasn't for two years) with the understanding that he would go to the meetings and I would do most of the actual work. (He'd always wanted to be a figurehead.) This works fine for me, as the meetings were really the toughest part of the job for me when I was fundraising chair -- the actual work can be done more or less on my schedule, where the meetings can't. Anyway, yesterday was the second annual mixer/auction fundraiser -- we piloted the event last year to great success and thus decided to do it a second time. The event was just as successful this year as last, I'm happy to report, and as both a baseball nerd and a parent who strongly advocates for youth sports, I feel good that I can play a role in funding a worthwhile enterprise.
 

In general, I will help out when asked. I figure I'm pretty shitty at managing my time anyway, so why not add more to the mix? We were sort of recruited for this board, in fact, by someone who will remain nameless but whose name may or may not be used as a curse word in our home as a result. But working for fundraising at work, although tangentially, and at home, has gotten me thinking about how many small charitable entreaties I pass up in my day-to-day life. I ignore most panhandlers -- including those horrible eco-panhandlers, as a friend smartly put it, that used to stalk in front of my building when I worked downtown. (The Save the Children guy shouted after me one day, "A child is dying right now of hunger, and you won't help because you have to talk to your husband?!" Fuck off, dreadlocks, and shove your sanctimony up your scrawny vegan ass.) I don't generally buy candy or Streetwise or whatever from guys on the street, not out of any enmity but because I'm just not interested in what they're selling. Like the guys who sell water bottles on street corners -- they might be enterprising but they're not getting my cash because I try not to drink bottled water.

 

I admit that there's also an element of discomfort when it comes to panhandlers in particular. They're, well, disturbing and sad. I don't know what's worse -- when panhandler scoffs at the offer of the 75 cents I have in my pocket (I really don't carry much cash at all), or when they ogle my boobs, or rant and froth about crazy shit, or when they're terrifyingly grateful for my pocket change. It's all very sad, and it's mentally much easier to walk on by.

 

Fortunately, panhandlers are not the only people you can do charitable things for, and charity isn't only about money. (Discussing this with Peter last night, he suggested what I had already been considering -- doing a charitable thing every day. I asked if he meant, like, fucking an ugly guy. He didn't. THANK GOD. I don't have that kind of time.) And it takes a certain open frame of mind, I'm finding, to look around for opportunities to help people, even in small ways. I know that the times strangers have helped me out, even when it's just holding a door when I'm loaded down with bags and babies, have honestly and instantly made me feel better about life. I think I'm a pretty nice person, all things considered, and am as kind and polite to strangers as I can be most days. But I don't go around actively seeking ways to help strangers. So, what happens if I do?

 

Well, I don't know yet, but Sunday, I goaded upper-middle-class families into buying gift cards and signed baseballs. I felt pretty accomplished, I'll be honest, at the end of the event. Today, I bought five lollipops from a guy who sells them on a street corner near work and he was absurdly grateful. And, I helped an elderly lady load her grocery bags full of bran cereal and prunes into her into her ancient Chevy today at Dominick's. Small things to be sure. But, I felt good about it. I even feel good thinking about it now. Is that selfish?

Stuff it...with sausage

I might be a little hosed for tomorrow, it just now occurs to me. Friday is traditionally pizza (or takeout) night in our household, and AJ would certainly protest if we didn't have pizza. Sometimes I make pan pizza at home on Fridays, though; maybe I'll make one experimental pan to fulfill the challenge and one of pepperoni to fulfill the AJ.

Anyway. Like I said, last night I noted that for the second day in a row that AJ didn't seem to eat much, so I wanted to make sure that today's dinner was something he would eat. Not that he's at risk of wasting away or anything, but I just hate seeing food thrown away. I really didn't want to go to the grocery store today, so I did a little scavenging in my freezer. Turns out I had two links of Italian sausage, so I searched on allrecipes.com for something that used chicken breasts and Italian sausage, and came up with this fancily-named sausage-and-cheese stuffed chicken, Poulet a la Saucisse. I mean, it's not like, revolutionary or anything, but it was something I hadn't tried before.

And it was pretty good. AJ ate it all, as did Peter and my mom. It was awfully rich -- two kinds of cheese will do that, I guess -- so I feel like it could have used a little acid, maybe a little lemon zest or something. The side of whole-wheat rotini with roasted tomatoes helped offset the richness some -- the tomatoes might have worked better as a topping for the chicken, actually. A little tweaking and it'll make it onto my permanent roster, I think, which is all a chicken breast could hope for, really.

So now back to the issue of pizza. I have tried pretty much every kind of pizza topping combination there is, I would think, at this point. I have eaten a lot of pizza. The only thing I haven't tried is anchovies, and as a person who doesn't really care for fishy fish (I've tried gefilte fish, so I know) that's not a path I'm interested in treading. Any thoughts for imaginative toppings I can try?

But of course

I had this flank steak burning a hole in my fridge today, and beef sounded like a good bet, so I decided to give steak au poivre a shot. I know that it's traditionally made with beef tenderloin, but I'll be damned if I'm going to ruin $10/lb meat with a first pass at a recipe. Besides, I like flank steak, and I didn't want Asian or Mexican, which is the direction I usually go with a flank steak.

I loosely followed this Epicurious recipe except I grilled the steaks instead of pan-frying them. I had a ton of dishes from the night before to deal with, and I didn't want to dirty up another pan. Seriously -- I don't remember those dishes all being there last night, so I'm forced to believe that either the dishes are somehow reproducing or AJ is taking Ambien and engaging in very couth, flatware-intensive sleep-eating, and also maybe some sleep-souffle-making. Also, I wanted to try roasting some potato wedges in garlic and olive oil on the grill rather than in the oven -- I try to forget the oven exists in the spring and summer.

Anyway. I was mixing up the ingredients for the sauce when I realized we're out of dijon mustard, so I had to sub in spicy brown. (Ever try asking a dude in a limo for spicy brown? Very different from the commercials, let me just say that.) Then, Hannah asked me to help her read Are You My Mother? so I decided to dump the sauce on the steaks to let them soak a bit while we read. There's a word for that, isn't there? Soaking food in a flavored liquid? Whatever, I'm not a brainiac chef. I threw the prepped potatoes on the grill for a nice slow roast and we read about the adventures of a lost baby bird and his borderline negligent mother. We finished up (spoiler: he finds his mother) and I tossed the steaks on the grill and put the salads together.

A word about making salads in my household: it gets a little stupid. Peter doesn't like cucumbers or hardboiled eggs; AJ doesn't like tomatoes, olives, or mushrooms. Neither likes onions. I will eat whatever. Isn't that what salads are about? Throw all that shit in there, it's all good. There's no point to this; I just wanted to make a stand for the garbage salad lovers out there.

When Peter walked in the door, the steaks were resting comfortably and I was working on the sauce -- boiled up what became the marinade and added the cream. While it thickened I sliced up the steaks. Mine: nice and rare. Theirs: medium. The sauce was a little funky tasting in the pan, so I served it on the side rather than risk it on the meat. But when I tried it with the potatoes and the meat, it was much, much better -- especially on the potatoes. Peppery and beefy and yum. I imagine it'd be even better with, you know, good meat. And real dijon mustard.

A note: I have no idea why the photo keeps rotating 90 degrees, but you get the gist.

I don't know how Peter felt about it -- he ate it, so I guess he liked it -- but AJ wasn't a fan. I'm thinking he's not enjoying this week much because he was far from a member of the clean plate club with yesterday's chicken, too. I guess I'll try to find something he might like for tomorrow's dinner, lest he waste away. Or lest he sneak-eat a frozen pizza.

Baby, don't be sad

The human breast causes great joy for so many. Nursing infants, Girls Gone Wild viewers, bra manufacturers, plastic surgeons. So, too, is the chicken breast. A lean source of protein, yes, but also a nearly-blank canvas for your culinary desires. You can pound it into a paillette; you can cut a pocket it in it and stuff it with other meats and/or cheese (or vegetables, if you must); you can poach it, broil it, grill it, bread and fry it; you can use it as a handy stand-in for push-up pads as long as you're not going anywhere terribly warm or buggy. And most of all, you can marinate the shit out of it.

That was the advised method for making Grilled Fusion Chicken here. The ingredient list for the marinade/sauce base was intriguing -- what with the Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, chipotle, and ginger, it sounded vaguely Asian, vaguely Mexican. Asican, I guess. I figured it'd be great or it'd be a disaster, but the peppy reviews on the website made me think it'd be great. So, I whipped up the marinade, pounded the breasts (heh) and let them soak while...

Actually that sounded way simpler than it was. I am as distractable as a toddler on meth and once I got past the first three ingredients I was halfway to dumping it in the dish when I spotted the limes on the counter. Oh right, limes. Mixed it up, dumped it on the breasts, and then thought, oh right, ginger. Oh right, fucking CHIPOTLE. I must have drained the dish and refilled it four goddamned times. I guess I was in a hurry to get to putting climbing roses up on the trellis Peter just installed.

45 thorny minutes later I headed back in to cook. Chopped up the broccoli and got it started roasting in the oven, and started water boiling to cook the pasta. Once all that was going, I cranked up the grill, slapped on the chicken, cooked the sauce, and we were ready to go.

The result was decidedly meh. The ginger and lime didn't really come through; they were way overpowered by the chipotle. But roasted broccoli and Trader Joe's lemon-pepper pappardelle dressed in a little olive oil are always welcome in my belly, so they made up for the chicken's meh-ness. Oh well, two out of three ain't bad.