To Thine Own Self, Be Food

Sundays are beautiful, glorious days of the week.  A time for leisure and work, the promise of success and fortune lie right at Sunday's feet.  Anyway, it's almost November.  And you know what that means! Or...maybe you don't? NaNoWriMo!!!  Wheeeee!  One month of craziness, scaryashell laughs and fist pounds as me and millions of other writers across the planet try to pound out 50,000 words of unadulterated crap in 30 days. As if I don't have enough to do.  I know.  But as Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) says in The Shawshank Redemption , Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'. That's about damn right. I'm on year five, and I've won all previous years (winning = hitting 50k+), so I expect this year to be the same, except... my genre of choice this year is "Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense", which sounds great, but a.) I've never written a mystery before, and b.) I don't read a lot of mysteries. But hey, I'm not...

Two weeks of unrelenting and uncompromising cake decorating ended today in the bakery. And while I'm rather relieved that the ordeal is over, I admit to being a little sad about its conclusion.  Here's what I've learned... 1. Cake decorating is art.  Anyone who tries to argue that it's not knows nothing about its processes and procedures. 2. It will make you cry.  Check that, it will make me cry. 3. It will test your limits of patience. 4. You'll find out how much of a "satisficer" you are (at which point you say meh, good enough ) 5. It will make you feel like you really accomplished something, when it's all said and done. 6. Some people just walk in the light, you know, when it comes to this form of artistry.  Accept it and move on.  You won't be good at everything. 7. Cake decorators (the good ones) are totally justified in asking for hundreds (thousands) of dollars for their wedding cakes. 8. Marshmallow fondant is easy to mak...

Today marked the penultimate day of Cake Decorating...and it was by far the most stressful of the last three weeks...and I mean, to quote the youth, I was a hater . But, that time is done and gone.  Here's what happening right now: A glass (which may turn into a bottle) of a Riesling I have not had in quite some time (read about that here ), and a episode (or more) of AMC's The Walking Dead . Let me clarify...quickly because TechMeat's got the Netflix cued.  School friends of mine went on and on about this TV show, so I got nuts one night and watched the first episode (with Brent, natch)...and now, we're kinda interested.  We're on episode 4 of Season One, so yeah, a long ways to go to catchup. Honestly, the last time we had this much interest in a TV show was Spin City and Dharma and Greg in the early 2000s.  For real.  We don't do a lot of TV around here.  Movies, yes.  TV, no. I'm going now.  To recover my strength and gear up for t...

Today we say hello to the one reader in the United Arab Emirates.  Thank you for your (accidental, likely) readership.  I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know where the UAE was until I Googled it. Which brings me to today's blog post.  My ignorance and and subsequent Google search, that is.  But really, I have something far more scary to talk about. Apathy.  Many of the people I go to school with and are very much in contact with are afflicted with this particular disease.  Of which there may be no cure.  Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road , has perhaps said it best, "It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little Goddamn mediocrity.”  I would amend Mr. Yates's statement by attaching two words to the very end: "...and entitlement." By nature, I am not an optimist.  I have rather high expectations of people, and naturally, they d...

Cue your 'Footloose' soundtrack, readers!  Get that Mike Reno cranked up loud! Almost Paradiiise...we're knockin' on Heaven's door... Blahblahblahblah....how could we ask for more....? I know that Mike and Ann (Wilson) was talking about Lori Singer and Kevin Bacon, but the moniker applies to my adventure. Des Moines. Farmer's Market A chilly, sunny (mostly) October Saturday morning. Yep.  You probably know where I'm going now.  Fresh, local produce.  Free samples.  An general goodwill camaraderie of like-minded people.  Free samples.  And the vegetables!  Vegetables, I tell you!  Vegetables that became my dinner. Iowa pork chops.  With a salt, pepper, and sage dry rubs.  Grilled until yummy! Parsnips.  Peeled, cubed, and boiled...much in the same vein as potatoes.  Butter, milk, chives, and garlic added to the puree. Brussel sprouts (Spencer seen scoring in the background) that would later be pa...

I've been chronicling my cake-decorating adventures in the bakery here at Be Food. And it's been interesting and riveting, to be sure. Today, however, I find is not a day for words, but instead, pictures.  Today I achieved a great milestone, and I will trumpet my joyousness here on the Internets through pictures. We've had a guest in our bakery class, a professional wedding cake designer and maker.  She's shared some recipes, tricks of the trade, as well as her tools and skills.  And today, for the first time ever, I covered and decorated my first fondant cake.  This has always been a daunting thing for me. Fondant has always seemed scary.  Until today. Probably hard to tell, color-wise, what exactly is happening here.  A bright yellow fondant-covered cake, purple fondant pearls there at the bottom, purple and yellow fondant flowers on the sides. I had my daughter, Kirby, in mind when I did this, and she will turn 13 (I know, I know, next ...

Let's jog the ol' memory tonight. Nah...let's more like shake the crapness out of my memory until it wets itself and surrenders any and all information I ask it for. If you read between the lines (not the Blurred Lines) on my Kenny Rogers-related post, you'll get that my childhood family meals were pretty Amurican.  Beef stew, pot roast, pan-fried pork chops.  I do recall cans of La Choy Chop Suey and chow mein noodles, and in the later years, tacos (and that was ethnic food at our house).  But, for the most part, Hamburger Helper (and this was long before Tuna, Chicken, or Asian Helper) and Swanson's made up the bulk of my childhood eating. And here's where things get even more murky: What in world did I eat for lunch when I was a kid? Take a moment to ponder this very question for yourselves.  Are you having as much trouble as I did answering this question?  Or am I just getting old?  Or have I repressed it? I know I did not get the cafeteria ...

Achilles' Heel.  Soft spot. Kryptonite.  Dragon's Underbelly. I have a chink in my armor, and it is called Cake Decorating. I don't mean the general icing and frosting of cakes and tortes (as reported earlier this month).  I mean this kind of stuff... This right here is the laborious and meticulous work for all the cake decorating lovers out there.  It requires the precision and patience of a surgeon...and I'm ashamed to say I'm often not any of those things. It depends, of course, on what I'm doing.  If I'm writing or planning a dinner, I'm precise and meticulous to the very core of my being.  And patient, no.  I can't think of a situation in which patience comes naturally to me. Wait.  2004.  The birth of my third child.  I was almost two weeks days past Elliot's due date, and I opted not to induce labor with drugs (like I had with the previous two).  That was the last time I remember being patient. After the...

In the sense that, "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away, know when to run." Gods bless my baby boomer parents: products of Great-Depression era, hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-living parenting themselves. Anyone my age has lived in confusing times - what with growing up with VCRs, rotary phones, microwaves, cell phones, and the Internet...but, my generation has embraced all those changes rather well. Then I consider my parents, who've lived with those same technological advances, but their archives reach way back further than mine do.  I mean, we're talking wood-burning furnaces, hot water bottles, stay-at-home moms and cooking from scratch!   They grew up with mothers and grandmothers who made their own pies, gravy, canned their own goods, etc.  Life was simple, it was rough, and everyone did their share - nobody was exempt. So that's my parents' frame of reference when they had me and my bro...

You know me and my rhymes. But first, let's have a good news sharing moment.  Today shall be known as The Day In Which Technology And I Play Nicely In The Sandbox. I discovered something today, and its name is Bluetooth.  I know, I know, this wireless technology has been around awhile and is practically Stone Age, but for me, it is a momentous, pivotal thing. I'm stuck in 2006, you see.  I carry a Verizon slide-phone with a QWERTY keypad.  I don't have access to the Internets on my cellular device, and I don't have the fancy Steve Jobs-o-Rama widgets and wadgets and gizmosthingies.  And for the most part, I've gotten along just fine.  There's a certain amount of pride that comes with being a relic, you know? But.  Any pictures I've ever taken of food (which, for the past year, have been a lot) get sort of lost in space.  I'm the only one who sees these pictures of my creations - I have no digital portfolio, really, to speak of.  And w...