Mushrooms & Polenta

I have observed that cool people occasionally have recipes on their blogs. I want to be cool. Here is a recipe. I made it up.

Go get:

1 ½ cups of corn meal

½ lb white mushrooms per serving

Some coarsely chopped onion

Some coarsely chopped garlic cloves

Some butter

Some balsamic vinegar

Some goat cheese

Some delicious herbs that you enjoy (fresh)

Salt

I know these amounts are vague; but the ratios are really about personal taste. I don’t presume to know how into balsamic vinegar you are.

Mkay. The thing about this recipe is, the two main parts A) take forever, and B) have a nice long counter life. Therefore, you can make them one at a time in whichever order you wish, or, you can try to multitask and make both simultaneously. You can’t lose.

Part 1: Polenta

Apply some sort of lubricant to a 9 x 13” casserole dish.

Bring 5 cups of water to a boil in a stockpot. Add, I don’t know, maybe 2 tsp salt? I never measure and also never add enough salt to my polenta.

Here is the hard part. Somehow, slowly sprinkle the cornmeal into the boiling water while stirring constantly. I have tried a whisk, a wooden spoon, and an electric mixer. I have tried putting the corn meal in a sifter and stirring with the other hand. None of these scenarios could be labelled a success. You are going to burn yourself on this step. Just come to terms with it.

Turn the heat down and keep stirring until it is smooth. Pour it into the casserole dish and smooth the top with a spatula.

It doesn’t take long at all for the polenta to set up. Poke it for fun and also to check it. Cut it into squares, or if you are feeling fancy, use a biscuit cutter to make cute little circles.

Brown each side of the polenta. This takes FOR-E-VER!! I recommend using a griddle: a buttery, buttery griddle. Then you can do a bunch at a time. The sexy toasty corn smell when they start to brown is totally worth the INSANE AMOUNT OF TIME THIS STEP REQUIRES.

Part 2: Delicious Mushroom Stuff

Clean and do whatever you do to mushrooms. Stem them, quarter them, slice them, leave them whole:  I authentically don’t care. Sauté them over medium heat in a fat of your choice. I like a nice blend of butter and olive oil.

Bout ten minutes in, add the onion and garlic. This is so they will still have texture and structure at the end.

After a bit (I don’t know how long because I don’t know how hot your stove is and how you cut up your mushrooms) the mushrooms will start emitting their mushroomy juices. Add more butter or olive oil, and a decent amount of balsamic vinegar. The sauce consists of the mushroomy juices, butter, and balsamic vinegar, so consider that. Also, if your heat is too high, some of the balsamic vinegar will evaporate instantly into your face and make your eyes all watery and tingly.

Reduce the liquid until it is a little thicker. You can also use flour or cornstarch if you’re into that.

Now to plate this business.

Put down a piece of sexy toasty polenta. Ladle the mushrooms, onions, garlic, and sauce over.  Now do you see why I was vague about the amounts? Mushroom stuff to polenta ratio.

Now top with big glorious chunks of goat cheese and your favorite fresh herb, coarsely chopped (or hand torn, if you are that variety of d-bag). My first choice is basil; but thyme is also quite nice.

OR, if you are feeling ambitious, fry whole sage leaves in half an inch of canola oil for 10-20 seconds. Really no more than 20 seconds. They burn. Your mother in law will not be impressed by your burned sage leaves. She thinks you’re strange enough as it is. Pull them out with chopsticks and drain them on a paper towel.  Arrange artfully atop.

Because of its low protein content, this is really more of a side dish. Perhaps you could main dish it up by putting the whole situation on a bed of arugula and topping it with a nicely-cooked cut of your favorite mammal or fowl. (Favorite EDIBLE mammal or fowl. This dish is good; but it isn’t pet-butcherin’ good.)

Or, God forbid, tofu.

Nom nom nom.

Inevitable Feminist Rant

This might not be what you expect.

The Two-Pronged Attack

My perspective on gender equality is similar to my perspective on equality for any marginalized people. The world does not treat you as it ought. The world thinks less of you than your whiter, straighter, wealthier, more phallus-riddled counterparts. The world needs to change. Yes: protest, litigate, write. Yell and scream at the world. Get in its face. But consider a two-pronged attack. The second prong is YOU.

I believe that the most effective thing that women can do to further the feminist cause is to be An Epic Human Female. If everywhere young people look they see women doing monumental things, they are less likely to grow up assuming that their doctor or mechanic or boss is going to be male. The next generation of women will have more opportunities, and the courage to take advantage of them. The world will be a better place.

If you join the ranks of Epic Human Females, there are no days off. Every day, you must be the best accountant, engineer, teacher, mother, manager, or business owner that you can be. It is exhausting work.

If you are inclined, eschew the status quo. Have you always wanted to coach football? Join the Navy SEALS? Start a construction company? Become a firefighter? Make it happen. You will have to fight hard for it. You may have to get a lawyer. You might make some enemies. However, the next woman will have it a little easier. And the next and the next.

Choose the college major that you actually want, even if you know for a fact that you will be the only woman in all of your classes.

Here is the hard part, though. You don’t get your Feminist Pioneer Patch by simply signing up. You have to kick wholesale ass. This means working harder than you have ever worked before. Like all other marginalized groups, you have to exceed expectations before people will acknowledge that you have met them.

Self-Reliance

While it might be easy and fun to play the “I’m cute; do this for me” game (okay, really easy and really fun,) you are not doing the women of future generations any favors.

Carry your own heavy shit.

Open your own pickle jars.

Hook up your own Blu-ray player.

Figure out how to work a cordless drill.

Smush (or relocate) your own spidies.

Hold the door open for a guy once, just to see what happens. (They freak out.)

Consider familiarizing yourself with the basics of your automobile. Then your mechanic (of whichever gender) might be less likely to say, “See, your gastric serpentine turbine needs a new photon oscillator plug,” and then charge you $800 for something that doesn’t exist. Just cause you’re a chick.

Hey, you don’t have to do any of this. But if you are at all disgruntled by how women are treated, give it a thinky-thinky.

Also

Please stop using the word “pussy” as a synonym for something weak. It doesn’t even make sense. As my idiotic male friends in college repeatedly demonstrated, a mere well-aimed finger flick can fell The Mighty Dick & Balls. (But who doesn’t enjoy a bracing round of Bag Tag?) Meanwhile women shove entire small people out of their…pussies. No one that I know has ever gotten anything more interesting than a kidney stone to come out of his wiener.

I know I said I wouldn't judge you but

If I overhear you at the bar telling your friends that you have to wait until your boyfriend gets home so he can put your framed picture of your kitty on the wall, or put together your bloody Ikea bookshelf for you, I swear by my own ovaries that I will purchase the most caustic drink the bar has to offer, fill it with toothpicks, and then pretend to trip and pour it on your face.

Get out there and be amazing, ladies. I love you all.

Lying to Children by Susanna Grubb

I have been told that cool people have guest authors write articles for their blogs. To that end, I respectfully and temporarily relinquish the stage to my sister and fellow circus freak, Susanna!

Let me begin by saying that as someone who both has a child of her own, and personally knows the children of this blogger: I would salute her if I didn't think she would mistake it for encouragement and have another one. I hope she knows we all expect to someday walk in and find her gnawed-upon skeletal remains on the living room floor with her babies crawling all over her, like those people who live alone and are eaten by their cats when they die.

Lying to children is a divisive subject, raising issues of morality, social mores, and cultural values. While each person’s position is highly nuanced, those nuances are extremely boring and everyone can pretty much be put into one of three categories: those who deceive their children about painful or embarrassing things until they are old enough to handle it (most people); those who are completely honest and answer all of their kids’ questions without mincing words, resulting in children who know what genocide is and who talk openly about their vaginas and penes (that’s right, penes), to the horror of the other children (progressive types); and those who abuse the trusting relationship inherent to parenthood and lie to their children recreationally.

            It should come as no surprise that I fall into the latter category. I am what you call a “bad mom,” mostly because I am a bad person who happens to be a mom. And it turns out that if you want to openly lie to your offspring, nobody will stop you. I don’t bother to lie about stupid stuff like Santa Claus (speaking of which, why do we perpetuate a massive falsehood that only produces disappointment when it ends, and prevents parents from getting the credit they deserve for choosing and buying presents? Dumb.), but lying to kids about other stuff is perfect for getting out of explaining awkward stuff, and also for entertainment.

            For example, when my kid asked me where babies came from, I told her I didn't know where other people’s babies came from, but she came from the experimental fetus the aliens implanted in mommy when they took her up in their spaceship. I put her on the lookout for developing alien powers, so sometimes she tries to levitate, or makes me check her for wings, or asks me to turn the light out in her room and see if she is glowing.

            So if you are someone who isn't particularly hampered by a sense of right and wrong, try lying to your children recreationally today. Chances are you have already been lying to them about things that are much more meaningful, so you might as well have fun with it. 

Twins Are Creepy

As children, my sister and I were less The Parent Trap and more The Shining. I think twins are creepy. Why are there two of them? If nature couldn't afford two faces, what else do they share? A soul? If you pinch one, does the other one feel it? Why are they looking at me like that? They have sharp little teeth.

In northern Ohio there is a city called Twinsburg. Every year this city hosts The Twins Day Festival, and the city is flooded with these genetic anomalies and their hangers-on. There is an alarming number of sets of twins that marry sets of twins. Eesh. Have fun spending the rest of your days living out a gimmick, weirdos.

What most people don’t consider is that being a twin is not all Doublemint commercials and switching classes to see if anyone notices. (They don’t.)

Your mother dresses you the same until you figure out how to sharpen a stick to fight her off. 

You spend your whole life with that eerie feeling that someday you are going to stumble across a warehouse full of tanks with thousands more of you floating in suspended animation. Waiting to awaken and spread across the landscape like locusts.

At any given moment someone could wander up to you and start a conversation, only revealing once you are too far in to explain that you aren't your sister that the two of you had some sort of connection that you really should be able to recall and give specific details about. Sorry, confused coffee shop guy.

These are the things I live with every day.

By the way, you are a total jerk if you have ever:

      1. Squinted at each twin in turn, rubbed your eyes, and then asked, “Am I seeing double?”
2. Asked which one is the evil twin
3. Sighed and said, “I always wished I had a twin.”
4. Hit on twins as if they were a unit, or possibly some sort of buy one get one free deal. 

          Contrary to what the porn industry would like for you to believe, we aren't into that.

Having said all of this, I will reveal to you that the sole purpose of this article was to introduce the guest author for my next article. Keep your eyes peeled for my next post, because it will feature the unholy sass of my own personal duplicate.

And by my estimation, she is (give or take) 105 pounds of grade-A biotch. So this should be interesting.

Stay tuned!

Rebecca on Tattoos & Piercings

I like my nose; it is cute like a button.  So I did what Beyoncé told me to and put a ring on it. I felt the same way about my tongue, the entire length of both earlobes, both nipples, and that little nub that stands guard over my ear canal. Tragus?

Most of those piercings went away in favor of things like nursing babies and successfully pronouncing words that contain lingual phonemes*. However, I still think, in general, that piercings and tattoos are pretty neat, suckas.

Why do it? Both tattoos and piercings, by my logic, fall into the category of expressive self-decoration. Throughout history, cultures around the world have altered their bodies for decorative purposes. I would argue that if you have ever straightened your hair, applied lipstick, or even donned an article of clothing for its form rather than its function, then you should probably shut your silly noise hole about tattoos and piercings.

That shit ain’t washin’ off.  The majority of people’s objections to tattoos center on their permanent nature. What could possibly be so important, they wail, that you must INJECT IT INTO YOUR SKIN FOR ALL TIME? I say that is what makes tattoos that much more interesting. Unless your local tattoo artist did a very bad job of explaining things, you are pretty aware that that shit ain’t washin’ off.  This lends a great deal of gravity to the content that you choose.

Tattoos are art. This is what makes me love them.  One must transform an important idea, a facet of one’s personality, or an event that merits commemoration, into a visual symbol. The body as a canvas is a nuanced concept. It is a living surface. The tattoo interacts with the contours of the body, the lines of clothing. Gestures, posture, even muscle tone become part of it.

Although… Having said all of that, I will secretly roll my eyes if you do the following:

1.       Get super drunk at Parents’ Weekend at your daughter’s college and get the footprint of the university mascot tattooed on your butt cheek. Really wild, mom.

2.       Get anything off the wall at the tattoo shop. Ever. Ever. For any reason. Ever. Think for yourself, you lemming.

3.       Get any symbol representing a sports team or band unless you are a member of, own, coach, or manage said organization. I don’t care how big of a fan you are. It’s not okay.

Accept the Consequences. You can do whatever you want. You are free like that. But you live in mixed company. If you decide that your bliss is to pierce everything that protrudes and get “We come in peace” tattooed in runes on your neck, I say go for it. When the diner owner won’t hire you, it isn’t because she is an a-hole. It’s because she is not an idiot. I like tattoos and piercings; you like tattoos and piercings, but there are a lot of Americans who don’t.  And it is money out of the cash register if a customer is put off of his tuna melt because his server looks like that guy from Hellraiser.

*Look it up.

Rebecca Likes Swears

Profanity is tits. “Tits” isn’t profanity, but I wish it was.

I was really, really not allowed to use profanity as a child. I still don’t curse around my parents. I sincerely hope my mother does not read this. Ever. But as I became an avid reader and sometimes writer, I developed affection for the spectrum of words. Profanity makes good things great. It is the MSG of language.

Don’t act all offended. I believe that if you looked into your heart, you would agree with me. Your favorite line from Gone with the Wind contains profanity. Your favorite line from Die Hard contains profanity. The dialogue of The Big Lebowski (according to unlicensed, unbonded sources on the interwebs) includes 271 incidences of the word “fuck,” and it is the best movie ever made.

Now, it should be noted that there is a time and a place for such juicy vocabulary choices. People betray their ignorance when they cannot differentiate betwixt formal and informal communication. I am a high school English teacher. I would never, ever use profanity in the classroom, in written or spoken feedback to students, or in conversation with my colleagues. This blog, by contrast, is quite informal. Its objective is to amuse and possibly generate thought and conversation. You dipshits.

Here are my thoughts on profanity:

·         Words are words. I wish I could mutter “lumos,” all Harry Potter-style and illuminate my darkened bathroom in the dead of night. But sadly, words are just words. “Shit” and “poo” mean the same thing. If the objective of language is to communicate, profanity succeeds in doing so. All profanity that I know has synonyms. None exclusively represents a concept so reprehensible that avoiding it would brighten humanity’s existence in any way.

·         Variety is good. Language is like food, in that it is best to seek out the widest variety of both that can be acquired without causing harm. I would prefer to eschew food that results from force-feeding geese or putting calves in boxes or gutting pregnant fish; meanwhile, extended exposure to profanity fails to even blister the skin.

·         Profanity drinks the blood of its enemies. What do I mean by this? Connotation. Let’s say Ned comes across the word “bitch” in the novel he is perusing. In that instant, he recalls every annoying tsk noise, every lowered brow, every shaken head, every “Oh dear, oh my,” that he has witnessed in association with this word. Then he thinks, “Well damn! The author must really mean what he or she says here.” The more people react, the more of an effect the word will have. It’s brilliant, really. Like Chinese finger cuffs. Or quicksand, maybe.

My editor tells me to add more profanity to make the article edgier.

“Ass.”

Fine. I don’t have an editor.

Strangely, I am interested in my readers’ thoughts on this.

I may have been arrogant in putting the apostrophe after the “s” there. Time will tell. Leave a comment!

Personality Quiz

What sort of person are you? Your existence can be summarized and analyzed once and for all by taking this quiz! It makes perfect sense.

1.  Which organization would you most like to join? 

               a)      Cirque de Soleil

               b)      The Borg

               c)       The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

2.  Alcohol and peer pressure are most likely to induce you to:

              a)      Eat gum from the underside of the bar

              b)      Get the lyrics of “Danny Boy” tattooed on your back

              c)       Marry a drifter

3. You would rather visit:

              a)      Oz

              b)      Middle Earth

              c)       Narnia

4. Which clouds are the cutest? 

  

              a)      Cirrus

              b)      Cumulus

              c)       Stratus

5. If you were going to catfish someone, you would pose as:

              a)      Me

              b)      A black market art dealer

              c)       President Obama

6. What is the best thing about David Bowie?

              a)      His music

              b)      The Labyrinth

              c)       The fact that you can’t tell if he is a boy or a girl and you LIKE IT!

               (okay, b and c are pretty much the same)

Mostly A’s:

You will have no idea what to do with yourself once this hipster thing is over. Go crouch behind a food truck, stroke your handlebar mustache, and listen to Sun Kil Moon.  I loathe you.

Mostly B’s:

You are the worst kind of person. If people were places, you would be Flint, Michigan. Sit down. Make a list of the last five major life decisions you made. Then go back and do exactly the opposite.

Mostly C’s:

You have the class and subtlety of a set of trailer hitch testicles. Let’s be best friends.

Please Note: There is no actual correlation between the questions and, well, anything. It was just a thinly-veiled excuse to insult you. Although you should definitely let everyone know which one you were in the comments.