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Mixin’ it up with the People of Wal-Mart

July 22, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

This morning’s trip to Wal-Mart to purchase hair dye and fake eyelashes turned into what my friend Paul would describe as “interbitch aggression”.

Not the actual person, just a representative image

I was innocently browsing dental floss when a 50-ish woman in stretch pants and an oversized T-shirt came around the corner. She was irritated with the smocked salesgirl trying to help her find the brand of electric toothbrush she was looking for. The salesgirl seemed unsure whether they still carried it, so she took her to where it used to be and started to look for it. Seemed like fine service to me. Better than I’d expect from Wal-Mart, honestly. When our new friend spotted her toothbrush before the salesgirl did, she pointed it out in a voice dripping with condescension and an eye roll before turning her back on her and ignoring her politely spoken, “Are you all set?….um, okay, well have a good day then…” I gave her a sympathetic smile as she walked away looking abashed. The instant she was gone, our friend looks at me and blurts, “She’s so STUPID Jesus Christ!”

Maybe this next detail is not relevant to this story, and maybe it is. You decide. The salesgirl was young and brown and had an accent. Our friend was an uneducated Tea Party sympathizer, I’d bet on it. (My ability to sense Tea Partiers is like a cursed kind of gaydar.) I work in town and I know her type.

I could have ignored this woman. If she hadn’t spoken to me first I’d have just walked away. But I needed her to know that I was not on her side.

“You were rude;” I said.

“What?” I’m not sure if she really hadn’t heard me, or if she thought she’d heard wrong, or if she was calling me out.

“YOU WERE RUDE,” I repeated, louder. She just walked away. There were more things I could have said. Shame on you, You’re the one who’s stupid, She was just trying to help you. But confrontation of any sort scares me. My legs go all shaky and my ability to communicate deserts me. I’m afraid of confrontation, but I’d rather deal with momentary fear than with pent-up anger afterward because I didn’t speak up.

A few years ago, I was waiting in line at the deli on Christmas Eve and witnessed a woman become enraged because the deli boy hadn’t sliced the cold cuts to her specifications. “I TOLD YOU TO SLICE IT REAL THIN,” she yelled as she chucked the bag at his chest. Deli Boy, of course, couldn’t react. She was a customer, although I believe violence toward an employee is grounds for ejection from a store. I caught the eye of a few people who witnessed the incident – Our faces all said Can you believe that? And on Christmas Eve, no less – but no one spoke a word to that wretched woman.

I have always regretted that I didn’t defend Deli Boy’s honor on Christmas Eve.

Slice my meat right or you'll be sorry, motherfucker.

There are few things that will cement my low opinion of your morality, intelligence, and decency the way mistreating a service person will. I’m not saying every waiter or checkout girl is above reproach (inferior customer service will be the subject of a blog post all its own someday, I’m sure), but there is a type of person who feels entitled to behave abominably toward service people. It’s because they know they can get away with it – they’re bullies who wouldn’t dare attack someone who could actually react.

You get a bit of this working in libraries, but since everything is free at the library it’s lessened. We are public servants, not public slaves; which I feel requires a certain amount of tongue-biting but never, ever ass-kissing. Generally, I reject the “Kill them with kindness” theory of dealing with rude people because that is enabling their behavior. Sometimes I use the *blink*blink*blink* tactic. You can, too! It’s easy: Grandma turns into a banshee because she didn’t pick her hold up in time and it got sent back? Screechscreechscreech. It’s impossible that perhaps she made a mistake, no, you are incompetent and she’s going to make you pay. First, you turn into an automaton and hurry to finish the interaction – you are neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but a cool, neutral professional. If Grandma recovers enough at the end of the transaction that the banshee recedes and she actually says, “Thank you”,  just *blink*blink*blink*. If you’re lucky, they might look a bit surprised. Good.  They are NOT welcome, why say what is not heartfelt? Get out of their orbit as quickly as you can – you have other things to attend to. This is why I could never work for tips.

The Checkout Girl has loads more tales from the retail trenches.

Posted in Employment, Library, People I Hate | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Anadama

July 7, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

Learning how to make a decent loaf of bread has been even higher on my to-do list than learning how to sew, but yeast breads intimidate me. There are so many steps and I invariably tire of kneading before the recommended amount of time has passed. Last week I attempted to make the simple pizza dough recipe from ‘The Joy of Cooking’, but the results were blah so I fed most of it to the baby. A wee bread repository!  I used a mix of whole wheat and white flour, maybe that’s where I went wrong? Bob ordered a craft Margherita pizza in a restaurant last week, and I was transfixed by the light and fluffy crust.”I can do that. I can. I can!” said I.

I decided to dive in without a recipe and see what happened. After all, haven’t people been making bread for millennia? Surely the cavepeople didn’t own bread machines. Perhaps they didn’t eat bread, either. I think the Egyptians pioneered bread, as well as paper and pregnancy tests. I grabbed A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes and Remembrances from the library last week, and it has certainly put me in a more pioneer lady-ish frame of mind, even if it does read a bit like a textbook – as dry as Aunt Phyllis’s crumbcake. Food innovation rises from necessity, and it is certainly necessary to try and reduce our household food expenses as much as possible while not sacrificing nutrition. Also, I am sick of eating leftover cookout food from the Fourth of July.

Pizza is the original peasant food, after all. Well, maybe not THE original, but AN original, I’d bet a loaf of anadama on it. Mmmmm, anadama. I get it at Trader Joe’s whenever I’m there, but that’s not often. Whole Foods always seems to be out of it and my market of choice doesn’t sell it. Its origins are a tangled legend of marital strife, but they are decidedly New England. A hungry whaler was irate when his wife served him oatmeal and molasses for dinner, so he added yeast and other ingredients while he cursed her name. “Damn Anna”, and anadama bread was born. Gloucester bakeries sold it widely , until Pepperidge Farm bought the recipe and forbade the good townspeople from baking it. (Personally, I feel that part of the story is veering towaard the $250 Neiman-Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe conspiracy, but I appreciate a good story behind my food. Also, anadama is a satisfying word. It rattles around in my brain nicely.)

…but maybe I should stick to mastering pizza dough first. I dissolved a packet of yeast in warm water with a pinch of sugar and left it alone for five minutes. Then I added it to all of the white flour I had in the house. It still seemed like it needed more flour, so I added some corn flour (not corn meal, corn flour. I’m planning to make tortillas from scratch soon so I had some around.) I kneaded for a while, but did so gently. In the past my kneading vigor has made my hands hurt and I’d run out of steam too early. (Run smarter, not harder seems to apply to more than one area of my life.) I also added more water, a bit of salt, and some buttermilk because I had some leftover from making buttermilk biscuits last week. (Resounding success, even if I had to use a star-shaped cookie cutter because I don;t own a biscuit cutter. All the more festive I say.) I let it rise, then I punched it and let it rise some more. I used half as a pizza crust and half for a small loaf of bread.

The early results looked promising, but that means nothing. Nothing, I tell you! In the end, the pizza crust was perfectly delicious, but the loaf of bread tasted like a giant pizza crust. I may use it as a crust for a quiche. Nothing goes to waste if I can help it, except leftover potato salad from the Fourth of July.

Posted in Food | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Beware the Rad Fems

June 14, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

What’s the deal with blaming women for everything wrong with society? I have an angry acquaintance who blames the “rad fems” for his life’s disappointments and failings. Don’t you know they’re a bunch of man-hating lesbians who have concocted the myth of deadbeat dads and domestic abusers in order to achieve their goal of…(actually, I don’t even know what he thinks their goal is. Relations between us deteriorated years ago.)

I prefer the term “humanist” over “feminist”, although they mean essentially the same thing. You know, that all people are created equal and all that. I’m not afraid to call myself a feminist, though. Men are great! (Some of them, anyway). Women are great! (Some of them, anyway). I reserve the right to judge people as individuals instead of falling into an “us versus them” knee jerk way of existing. Gloria Steinem once recalled encountering picketers with signs that said “Gloria Steinem is a humanist” before one of her speaking engagements. “Oh, I’m among friends!” she remembered thinking. It wasn’t meant as a compliment, though. It’s like trying to insult someone by calling them a lesbian or a socialist. There’s so much hate and idiocy in the world. (I’m looking at you, Scott Baio.) Shouldn’t humanity be better by now? Middle schoolers seem to think calling someone “gay” is an insult, and some people never progress beyond that level of reason. Although if my kid grows up to be a preteen homophobe, I’ll wonder where I’ve failed.

Imagine my recent chagrin when the usually-sensible Michael Pollan blamed feminism for America’s dysfunctional food culture. As if only women are capable of cooking. (Disclaimer: I am the one who does all the cooking in my house, but it’s what works for us. What can I say, I have a gift *wink*. Ain’t nothing wrong with a man who can cook.) How dare those tarts go out and get jobs! It’s not like the economy demands it or anything. It makes sense that the decline in family dinners has contributed to the increase in obesity – prepackaged convenience foods are generally higher in fat and sodium than food prepared at home. It makes sense that more women entering the work force has resulted in less time overall for food preparation – I know firsthand how hard it is to work all day, then come home and try to cook dinner, spend time with the kid, maybe exercise and pay attention to your spouse. There’s only so much time in the day! What doesn’t make sense is that this is viewed strictly as a woman’s fault and problem.  Seems to me men are just as capable of cooking as women. Conforming to traditional gender roles just because that’s how it’s always been done is for dullards.

I noticed the same ethos in the movie “It’s Complicated”, which I finally got around to watching last week. It wasn’t totally bad: I love that a woman in her 50′s was a romantic lead. Meryl Streep being courted by a sweet Steve Martin and a raffish Alec Baldwin? Awesome. Unfortunately,  it turned out to be formulaic and silly. When Baldwin’s character says he’s picking up olive oil for his much-younger second wife, one of his daughters snidely says, “At least she’s finally cooking.” It was shorthand to inform the audience that the second wife was a BAD WOMAN, whereas Streep’s character whipped up treats like Croque Monsieur sandwiches and lavender honey flavored ice cream. (Don’t get me started about how the second wife’s infertility was used for the same purpose, just don’t. I mean, OF COURSE her uterus didn’t work – she was an unnurturing, career-obsessed female. Who didn’t cook! That will shrivel your reproductive organs, you know. Because infertility isn’t terrible luck; it’s punishment for being a naughty feminist…I am thinking too much about this, I know. The characters were poorly developed caricatures and I took umbrage. I imagine infertility is difficult enough already without it being a punchline at the multiplex.)  Baldwin’s character was a buffoon and I didn’t buy it that Streep’s character would re-entangle herself with the man who left her a decade earlier for a younger woman. Even when that man is Alec Baldwin, whom I love despite his intermittent assholery. (I’ll bet that crazy Kim Basinger is no walk in the park as an ex, and I feel sorry for their daughter. It’s wrong to use children as pawns in a breakup – that must make for some hella screwed up adults. At least Ireland Baldwin will be able to afford all the therapy she’s going to need.)

I cook because I CHOOSE to cook, not because society tells me I should. Also because I possibly have some minor food issues and preparing healthy food is a good way for me to sublimate my urge to indulge in things like potato chips, french fries, and any other fat-laden potato dish you can dream up.  Now excuse me while I tend to my shriveled uterus and maybe make a Croque Monsieur.

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Man’s Best Friend, Etc.

May 21, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

Today’s ambitions have been waylaid by mutt gut. The last time Riley’s belly gave her this much trouble, she had eaten an entire loaf of rye bread. The vet ran a bunch of tests on her a few months ago and was unable to give a diagnosis, although Cushing’s disease was suspected. The next step was an ultrasound…then Minnie got sick, and before we knew it, we’d spent more money on a handful of vet visits than I earn in a month. Riley’s health is failing, but she’s 13 years old. We can throw all the money in the world at the vet, but there’s no cure for old age. She’s eating and her spirits seem good so we’re monitoring the situation. Bob thinks it’s her bowels…that’s TMI, isn’t it? No one needs to hear about a geriatric dog’s bowels. She also has a habit of gastric indiscretion, so maybe I am wrong and she’s not dying at all, the tough old piece o’ meat…

In any case: Riley’s my friend, my loyal and protective friend for the past seven years. It’s not fair to leave her sick and scared to be alone. She’s always had separation anxiety and today the stress might be enough to do her in. Playground and errands be damned! An oil change can wait another day but Riley’s are numbered and I’m running a hound hospice.

So Riley, Silas, and mommy had a backyard picnic instead, complete with Mozart and Goldfish crackers. Our backyard is actually a bit of a toddler Club Med. There’s a sandbox and a swing and lotsa sticks. Who needs battery-powered plastic gadgets when there are sticks to brandish about?

(Not that Silas doesn’t own his share of plastic crap. It’s unavoidable with grandparents like his. I don’t replace the batteries on most of his toys when they die. Let us not speak of the stuffed dog that so unnerved me with its unpredictable, maniacal giggle. I’d be walking down the stairs, and…it was watching, I swear.  That laugh taunted me from the bottom of the garbage can where I was forced to relocate it. I’m sure it’s still cackling away, somewhere in the Johnston Landfill. We’re talking Chucky-caliber scary.)

Riley is on the mend. Someday soon, my dog is going to die. But not today. Probably.

This is the kind of day I am grateful for a well-stocked pantry.

“My Dog is Dying and I Can’t Leave the House to Go Food Shopping” Dinner a la Corrie:

Chop and saute a peaked looking zucchini and the remnants of a bulb of garlic in olive oil. Add jarred red peppers, canned black beans, and shredded leftover chicken breast. Heat until warm. Roll the mixture up in a tortilla and top with cheese and avocado slices. Serve with a side of barley. Or maybe grits. Garnish with a gentle belly rub.

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Eggs, It’s What’s for Dinner

May 15, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

Frugality isn’t very sexy, is it? Yet here I sit, preparing to type several paragraphs about HOW TO SAVE MONEY IN THE KITCHEN, like an industrious 1950′s housewife. With a blog.

We weren’t exactly flush with cash when I worked full-time, but cutting my work hours in half has done nothing to enhance the bottom line. (Come to think of it, having a kid hasn’t done anything to enhance the bottom line, either. For a couple of years, I delayed trying to get pregnant in the hope that our finances would improve. Then I realized I would be fifty and infertile before that happened. If then. Sometimes you just have to dive in and hope for the best.) Damn boy needs to start earning some dough. Dolla dolla dolla bill, y’all.

There’s a lot of extreme frugality on blogs out there, but I am just not the type of person to make my own baby wipes out of paper towels or boil beef bones to make gelatin. I won’t drive three towns over to buy carrots on sale. Isn’t that a bit disingenuous, anyway? You end up spending more for gas while you drive to four different stores, and you piss away the better part of the day chasing 23 cents in savings when you could have been writing the Great American Novel or playing in the sandbox. There is such a thing as frugality of time as well as money. I don’t clip coupons because they are mostly for products I wouldn’t buy, anyway. There are limits to how far I will go to save a buck. (Case in point: cloth diapers. They are certainly cuter than the disposable plastic kind, but I harbor doubts over claims they are cheaper and better for the environment. You have to launder them twice, every time. My laundry basket overfloweth already, so…no.)
We are hardly living high on the hog, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more steps we could take. In the past two months I went to the market 14 times. It’s good that we don’t eat out much, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take things down a notch. My goal is to cut our weekly grocery bill by around $35. That’s $140 a month – or two months until I’ve saved enough for another pair of Frye boots. (So, so beautiful. The dark chocolate of footwear.)

I like to cook, but I’m also pretty lazy. Recipes with too many ingredients are off-putting to me, and the truth is I rarely follow a recipe exactly, anyway. The results can be mixed, it’s true, but never boring. We’re carnivores again, but approach meat as more of a side dish or special treat rather than the focal point of every meal. Lately I’ve been experimenting with crustless baked quiche. Eggs are such a cheap source of protein, but it seems to me that anything cloaked in a pie crust might not be the best choice for health and svelteness. I very much enjoy wearing trousers in a historically small size and don’t want to mess that up.

A frittata is basically a crustless quiche, but it’s mostly sauteed and requires more attention than popping a quiche into the oven for 40 minutes. Then I remembered the springform pans I’d purchased months ago with the intention of making cheesecakes. I’ve yet to make a cheesecake, but they produce a gorgeous, cheesecake-shaped quiche.

Just look at it. You know you want to make one.

The beauty of a well-made quiche? Convenient, healthy finger food for a person on the go; appropriate for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Although I object to dinner-on-the-go on principle. It’s important to sit down together and appreciate real food at least once a day.

Crustless Baked Quiche a la Corrie:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees

In a bowl, combine:
1 cup chopped ham (you know I never measure anything, so my measurements aren’t gospel, folks)
1/2 cup chopped scallions
3/4 cup chopped, sauteed mushrooms
1 fresh tomato, chopped
salt and pepper to taste
In a separate bowl, beat 6 medium eggs with a splash of cream (or milk if you don’t have any cream)

Pour the egg mixture into an 8-inch springform pan (at least I think mine is 8 inches. A standard cheesecake-sized pan, in any case.)
Add the vegetable/ham mixture
Top with your favorite shredded cheese. (Or not – this savory quiche is good without cheese. I am not one to forgo my beloved fromage, but to each his own.)

Bake for 35-40 minutes or until a knife in the middle comes out clean.
Note: The springform pan leaks, just a little. I put a cookie sheet underneath it so my oven doesn’t catch on fire the next time I use it. It’s happened before…)

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No Neck Nellie

May 14, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

Do people still make zines, or did blogs do them in? I made a zine once but I never sent it to anyone. It was called the “No Neck Nellie” and it had a picture of a dismembered doll on the front. Inside the (provocative in an artistic way) cover, you could find a scintillating essay about the evils of customer loyalty cards and the appeal of men in Hawaiian shirts. I still find it annoying to have to use my Shaw’s card to get the lower price on scallions, but my ardor for Hawaiian shirts has cooled considerably. (I mean really…how many stores does the average person patronize? It is unrealistic to expect us to carry a special card for each store around on our keychains. Fight the power, consumers!)

I Googled "dismembered doll" and all I got was this lousy keychain

I should add that I didn’t personally dismember the doll on the cover. I found her on a postcard in the bargain bin at Job Lot. Nothing says “Wish you were here” like a photo of a dead doll in the mail. I even went so far as to get a PO Box – you know, so none of my zine readers would know my real address and stalk me and stuff. It accumulated junk mail for a year until it expired. I don’t wish I’d sent that particular writing effort out into the world, but I DO wish I’d kept writing instead of giving up after a brief spurt of enthusiasm. I’d be all kinds of a good writer if I’d actually practiced the craft once in a while. Maybe.

I write things in my head all the time – when I’m cooking, when I’m running, when I’m helping patrons find books in the library. Then I sit down with the intention to put it to paper/computer screen and that barrage of words streaming in my brain goes silent. It’s maddening. So, I vow to write regularly, quality be damned. An exercise in discipline! That’s how writing gets done. But the result is boring and embarrassing.

That’s why I’ve been away. But now I’m back.

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Old Mother Hubbard

April 28, 2010 by Penny Dreadful

The pantry is bare but I chose to visit my library friends this morning instead of food shopping. A little midweek foraging is never a bad thing from a frugality standpoint, anyway.

Here’s what I’ve got to work with: Assorted beans, stale tortillas, bits of various cheeses, a bag of salad and leftover fresh vegetables from Sunday’s chicken noodle soup. Also leftover rice noodles and assorted dried pastas. Assorted tinned and frozen vegetables. Oh, and an eggplant. That’s actually quite an assortment, in case I didn’t use that word enough already in this paragraph.

The first order of business is to check if Riley will eat a dried kidney bean. There is very little the old lady won’t choke down. She used to be more selective, but then Winston joined the family. Winston was an old black lab I found at the Warwick pound. His last known address was the Warwick Police Department, so we assume he was found wandering the street. His hips were funny, as if he’d been on the losing end of an encounter with a car years earlier and never healed up right. Winston was ornery and poor mannered and no matter how many baths I gave him, he always reverted back his signature scent of trash. He would eat anything. ANYTHING. Two of his favorite foods were raw pumpkin guts and shrimp tails. Riley’s jealous nature made it impossible for her to allow another dog to enjoy anything she refused, so she learned to broaden her palate. But by now, Riley has outlived not one but two dogs adopted to be her companion. Can the old girl still bring it, or will she reject the kidney bean?

She wasn’t too sure about it at first:

But eventually she decided to give it a whirl:

I mean, she did once steal and eat an entire raw beet off the counter. And a box of chocolate wedding favors right before my wedding, and a decorative gourd my mother gave me, and many an apple core/dirty diaper/used tissue smorgasbord. Mutt or goat? No one knows.

She sure has a nice snout, though. It’s the cutest part of her:

The Elder Statesman; or; Graybeard

I prefer my beans cooked, though, so they are simmering until they’re ready to go in quesadillas. I’ll just brush the tortillas with a little bit of olive oil and broil them until they’re toasty. I always try to scrimp on oil when I fry and the pan starts smoking and the fire alarm goes off and GAAAAHHH. I like broiling as an alternative to frying. Right now I’m debating between black bean soup or rice (actually barley) n’ beans. In any case, I’ll chop and saute the leftover veggies in the fridge and throw them in – zucchini, especially, is a versatile veg that can be added to just about everything. Added bonus: easy to grow.

Without beans, eggs, bread, and of course, cheese, I would be in real trouble. Since I’m working tomorrow I won’t cook. The eggplant in my kitchen is a fairly unusual purchase – see my aforementioned challenges with frying – but the plan is to saute it with the leftover half a potato in the fridge and make a frittata with it. I usually make quiche, but that rich crust is so good and yet so, so bad. It sounds like a frittata starts out like an omelet (or scrambled eggs if, like me, you lack the delicacy and precision omelets demand), then you put the entire pan under the broiler to finish the top. We’ll see how it goes. Eggplant is a surprisingly intimidating vegetable.

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