Daily Newsie

Unlike most children born in the 1980s (’81, represent!), I didn’t really know anything about Michael Jackson until I was in middle school. We didn’t have MTV (or cable) at our house, and were expressly forbidden from watching it at my grandmother’s house. (She not only had cable, but air-conditioning as well, plus string cheese and soda.) It wasn’t until I got my own radio and could listen to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 every Sunday that I was introduced to his work from the “Dangerous” album; songs like “Billie Jean,” “Smooth Criminal,” and “Thriller” remained unknown to me until I got a little older, but I loved “Black or White,” “Remember the Time,” and everything he did from then on. I remember watching briefly his performance at the Super Bowl, but my parents didn’t like him much so we didn’t watch the whole thing. (I think my mother was mystified by his dancing.)

It’s not a stretch to say that my middle school years were shaped by music, and Michael Jackson was definitely at the forefront. Even the songs I didn’t know, like “Beat It” or “Bad,” came to life through Weird Al’s parodies. I bought a Jackson 5 box set from BMG (remember BMG?) and brought it along to my senior portrait session — the photographer snapped a picture of me dancing to one of the songs in between poses. I was in college when “Invincible” came out, and was a big fan of “Butterflies” and “You Rock My World.” I remember the trial, the marriages, the dangling of the baby over the balcony, and came to accept that the pop icon of whom I was so fond was also a little strange. It didn’t matter. He made good music and that’s what counted.

I was at the pool yesterday when the announcement came across the radio. It wasn’t a “where were you when JFK was shot” kind of moment, but it was definitely sad as all of us reminisced about jamming to MJ in our younger years. I spent this morning revisiting all my old favorites — I absolutely loved “Scream” — and singing along. My childhood wasn’t nearly as rough as his, but his music still helped when it seemed like there wasn’t much to be happy about. He will be missed, but never forgotten.

I have a job interview next week! I’m not going to say where just in case spies who seek to ruin me read this blog (one never knows), but suffice it to say that I would be delighted to get this position. I suppose you could point out that I would be delighted to get any paying position at this point, but whatever. I applied for this job months ago and have been quietly disappointed ever since that I hadn’t heard back, but apparently the gears turn slowly (and in my favor, which is nice).

There is a bit of travel/night and weekend work involved with this job, which has led a handful of people to emphatically state that I shouldn’t have applied for it. I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that when someone has a job interview — especially someone who’s been unemployed for a month — it would be ideal if you would refrain from using any of the following exclamations:

“Ugh!”
“Why?”
“You don’t want to work there!”

… but rather, things like:

“Good luck!”
“You’ll do great!”
“You would be so good for that position!”

This applies to any and every job for which a friend is applying, be it CEO of some fancy corporation or Video Rewinder/Glass-Eye Polisher at Uncle Smut’s Adult Emporium and Taxidermy (”You’re the best eye-polisher I know!”). And trust me, this job is much more resume-friendly than alphabetizing the magazines at Uncle Smut’s, so a little support should be a no-brainer. I could use it — my shoe-buying habit has suffered greatly over the past few weeks, but I did find these beauties on sale at Macy’s yesterday:

Rest easy, my pretties. Soon you will have many, many new friends.

Unfortunately, I can’t wear them to my interview, but I will be wearing the coral-colored pumps that have seen many other momentous occasions in my life: presenting at the Central States Communication Association, graduating, and dropping off my transcripts to the school where I’ll be teaching in the fall. Those gorgeous blues will have to wait, but never fear — I have big plans for them.

I have big plans for me, too. Keep your fingers crossed!

In this month’s issue of “Real Simple” magazine, they advertised an essay contest that invited readers to share the moment they knew they were really an adult. The seemingly-obvious answer for me, of course, would be the instant I found out my mother had brain cancer … but then I started thinking about it and realized that I have never felt nor do I currently feel like an adult. When I was small, 28 seemed ancient. I figured by now I would be married (to someone rich, of course), have a batch of children and at least a few pets, and spend my days happily doing laundry like the little housewife I was sure I’d be.

Allow me to pause here for a great big chortle at my naivete. It’s funny how we don’t really know ourselves as children, isn’t it? Having a boatload of kids and getting to run the washing machine seemed like the perfect life back in the day, whereas now my goals run more toward the academic, travel, and community service. My mother — thank God — forced me to go to college even though I was certain I’d never need a degree, and I’m so glad she did. I never would have gotten the good shake I needed had she kept her mouth shut.

(Note: This is not a rant against housewives. My mother was a darn good one, as a matter of fact. I’m just grateful she saw fit to push me somewhere I didn’t want to go because she realized the value of the education and socialization you get at college. Either that or she just wanted me out of the house so she could have some quiet.)

I spent a semester in Germany by myself at age 20 and didn’t feel like an adult. I buried my mother at 21 and still didn’t feel like an adult. I graduated college at 23, got my own apartment and my first job, moved in with a boyfriend (and moved out), and still didn’t feel like an adult. I went to graduate school and got married and wrote a thesis and graduated and I still feel like a teenager who lucked out by getting a sweet apartment and the freedom to eat Funyuns and Diet Pepsi for breakfast if I want to. All signs point to adulthood, but my mood is one of permanent adolescence.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about why this is. My first thought, truthfully, is that I don’t feel adult because I’m short. Adults are tall, right? So my 5-foot-2 frame must be firmly stuck in teenagerhood. My second thought is that it’s probably because I’m a student, but I was in the so-called professional world for four years before going back to school and that didn’t seem to change anything. It’s not that I willfully try to stay in a juvenile mindset; I just never got around to growing up.

Frankly, I like it that way. I was just telling a friend the other day that life is always interesting when every little thing makes your day: finding fruit leather at Trader Joe’s, ordering a mushroom pizza, finding out the lunch place at school will let me substitute awesome provolone cheese for gross American cheese, serendipitously wandering into the coffee shop the day they have chili. I’m glad I managed to retain that sense of excitement at the world after all the crap that’s happened. I hope I make it all the way through life living out the maxim on my father’s old T-shirt — “I may grow older, but I’ll never grow up.”

This is a good weekend, blogfriends. I passed my thesis defense with flying colors yesterday — the former department chair said it was the best thesis she’s ever seen come out of this department — which makes me officially Dumbass Gourmet, M.A. We celebrated last night by going to a gallery showing featuring some works by my favorite local artist, followed by a heartbreaker of a game at the local minor league ballpark, followed by some red velvet cake ice cream at a downtown cafe. Today, The Husband’s father and brother came to town to visit so we traveled up the highway to Maker’s Mark for a bourbon distillery tour, then came back home just in time for dinner.

Naturally, that’s where I come in. Earlier this week I located a recipe for chicken marsala in a cookbook we bought by mistake several years ago — the absentminded Husband forgot it was in his hand when he went up to the cash register — so I decided to tackle it. We didn’t have marsala wine, so I substituted in a Yellowtail cabernet for the sauce, which is a mix of diced garlic, wine, chicken stock, flour, Worcestershire sauce, and heavy cream, with a healthy dose of mushrooms mixed in for good measure. Betty Crocker kindly offered up a recipe for rosemary onion potatoes, so I shoved those into the oven and got to work on the marsala sauce.

Turns out it takes a while to make marsala sauce. The potatoes were roasted nicely before the chicken was even cooked through, so then commenced a juggling act in which I attempted to cook the chicken, stir the marsala sauce, keep the potatoes warm, and make a salad. And you know what? It actually turned out OK:

Salad with blueberries, blackberries, apples, and mushrooms.

The main course.

Of course, quick work was made of the rest of the cabernet, and now we’re settling in for some watermelon and Yuengling. Look for a bonus Dumbass Gourmet this week, since I’m planning to make the famous breakfast casserole for tomorrow morning.  Of course, if the brewskis keep coming, I might decide to scrap that plan and give everyone plain toast instead.

The time has come, the Walrus said, to defend my thesis against those who would seek to keep me in the Department of Communication forever. The big day is Friday, and I am currently exhibiting a healthy level of nervousness that will, no doubt, blossom into full-blown anxiety in the next 24 to 36 hours. This is it, folks — if I ace this, I’ve officially earned the hood that DNC draped around my neck last month (without knocking off my mortarboard, may I add). If I make a big mess of it, I’ll throw Sheldon B. off the College Street bridge and become a crazy cat lady on the west side. It’s always nice to have goals.

In the meantime, I’m keeping myself busy with the class I’ve been observing and teaching (with training wheels, of course). The students have been doing persuasive and “call to action” speeches this week and last, and I was so happy today that several of them came up to me — to me! — to see how they did. (I’ve been grading them and then comparing my sheets with the professor’s.) We stood there and had long conversations about the good and bad in their speeches, and they actually listened to me and valued what I had to say. This amazes me! I’ll be teaching Beginning Public Speaking in the fall, and I’m actually really excited about it despite previously vowing never to teach such a boring course. This professor taught me that it doesn’t have to be boring, and now I’m energized and ready to go all Dead Poets Society on everyone.

Also keeping me busy has been my new freelance gig with a local magazine. It’s not much, but it lets me write to my heart’s content and, therefore, stay sane in the face of unemployment. It’s been a month since I graduated and I still don’t have a full-time job, but these little bits here and there are helping to pay the bills. The Husband and I are lucky in that we started living together while he was unemployed, so we got used to living on my newspaper salary and making it work. Now that I’m not bringing in much cash, our standard of living has dropped somewhat — but it’s nowhere near where it was back in the day. Still, it’ll be a relief to finally find some gainful employment.

What’s new with you?

*trumpet fanfare*

Hear ye, hear ye! The Dumbass GourMetpron has arrived!

A bit late, but always fashionable.

Blogfriends, there has been so much going on lately, which is a poor excuse for depriving everyone of Dumbass Gourmet but is nevertheless the truth. I’ve been learning to teach and securing a freelancing gig and getting my arse handed to me at fitness boot camp that meets at six in the morning and networking like you wouldn’t believe so I can get a job, and somewhere in all that it occurred to me that we never had sloppy joes when I was a kid. Not one single time. I’m not sure why this is — Daddy, help me out here — other than that maybe sloppy joes weren’t in my mother’s Betty Crocker repertoire and the stuff in a can was too gross/expensive to buy.

Great. Now the Manwich theme song is looping in my head. At least it replaced the permanent repeat of Adam Sandler’s “Lunch Ladyland.”

A lot of the recipes online list sloppy joe ingredients as ground beef, ketchup, mustard, sugar, relish, and the like, but I don’t get up at the crack of dawn to do high-knees, curls, lunges, squats, and what-have-you just to throw it all away on one little dinner. One suggested slopping some beer into the mix, but I prefer mine on the side:

Don’t mind if I do!

A little more searching led me to Rachael Ray, who — although she spells her name wrong — had a recipe for turkey sloppy joes with tomato sauce. A little onion and garlic, a pinch of Mrs. Dash, some brown sugar and Spatini, and we had sloppy joes on toasted hamburger buns with French fries!

Slop, sloppy joes!

I just had another one for lunch/dinner (Linner? Dunch?) and it was quite good. Being unemployed gives one a new appreciation for leftovers, I suppose. My Sims are making all sorts of delicious things on the Sims 3, and I have been inspired by their little Simlish praises to give ratatouille and/or carbonara a shot. Stay tuned!

It was just me and my sister-in-law, sitting at her kitchen table in Indiana amid a stack of church-lady cookbooks and taking turns reading aloud grimace-inducing recipes involving cream cheese and grated carrots. Since I needed a Dumbass Gourmet and she needed something to feed her guests, we decided to grill steaks — despite neither one of us knowing how to turn on the grill — and were searching for a suitable side salad that didn’t make us want to hurl. Having grown up in a Baptist church that held potlucks every month, I didn’t think anything from a Presbyterian or Lutheran cookbook could faze me, but that was before I learned just how frequently lime Jell-O made an appearance on their respective pages. One by one I scanned and abandoned the collections of religious nibblies until all that was left was a cookbook sold as a drama-club fundraiser. There, nestled in the “salads” section, I found bacon-avocado potato salad with lime-mayo dressing — bacon! potatoes! avocado! — and the townspeople rejoiced.

This happy discovery was slightly overshadowed by the name of a neighboring recipe that caused us to dissolve into giggles — Sweet Yam Balls. Allow me just a moment here: BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Don’t people proofread these things? As a former newspaperperson, I know the importance of reading headlines with the filthiest gutter mind possible because if you don’t catch a potentially embarrassing headline, someone else will. Beyond that, how can you serve “sweet yam balls” to your guests with a straight face? That’s like the local store that always has a sign out front advertising “Boston butt” (which, by the way, was a very useful directional marker when guiding a lost person to my old apartment). Maybe I’m just a child (you bet your sweet yam balls, I am), but I can’t take seriously a recipe that makes me snort in fits of teenaged laughter.

Right — avocado potato salad. Off we went to the grocery store — they were handing out free Ben and Jerry’s! — and the meat market, then returned to their lovely little home for preparation. While SIL chopped potatoes and green onions, slicing them in huge chunks so I could easily pick them out, I rubbed the steaks with garlic, salt, pepper, and chili powder. Then it was time for one of my favorite things about cooking — peeling and removing the pit from avocados.

Thwack!

The awesomeness of bacon is canceled out by green onions. Sorry, bacon.

My brother-in-law hauled the grill out into the backyard and showed us how to light it, giving us the complete grilling experience by neglecting to clean the thing. (Love ya!) SIL took care of that part, complete with girly hand motions:

Not exactly the funnest job in the world.

She did a great job cooking the steaks, and then the photojournalist took over for our mealtime glamour shot:

Yes! Yes! Work with me! You’re a lemur!

We pulled the kitchen table out to the porch for what SIL called “Dumbass Gourmet al fresco,” which sounds a lot fancier than it actually was, what with all of us in bare feet and various neighbors traipsing around. It was a lovely little dinner, though, which we followed up with some good old-fashioned porch-sitting in white wicker rocking chairs. The boys read a bird book while the girls thumbed through decorating magazines and drooled over jewel-toned mosaic fireplaces (me) and wood floors painted bright pink (SIL). Dessert was some strawberries purchased from the farmer’s market that morning, the perfect end to a wonderful day.

You bet your sweet yam balls, it was.

Dear Body,

I fed you all the things the Red Cross said to feed you — chicken, turkey, fruits with vitamin C, spinach, and so on. I quit drinking tea because it apparently saps the iron from your blood. I started taking a multivitamin and exercising regularly. I drink so much water I might just float down the Barren River one of these days. So why, dear body, is your iron count still too low for me to donate blood? What do I have to do, lick a skillet?

Very sincerely,
DailyNewsie

Before we begin, we here at Dumbass Gourmet HQ would like to issue a heartfelt apology to our respective parents: We are very, very sorry for spending our childhoods balking at eating vegetables. I don’t know about The Husband, but I have very vivid memories of sitting alone at the kitchen table staring down a plate of cold lima beans while everyone else was in the living room watching M*A*S*H or whatever. Our palates have apparently matured, because not only do The Husband and I both love a wide variety of vegetables, we planned tonight’s menu around — of all things — the spinach we had in the freezer. (And, funny enough, I have come to be a big fan of edamame, which is like the lima bean’s high-falutin’ cousin who summered in Japan while lima bean was playing the banjo on the farm.)

We were discussing spinach in the first place because I’m going to give blood tomorrow, and I need to load up on iron. Two weeks ago I got turned away because my iron levels were too low, so along with starting a multivitamin …

L-R: Orange elephant, cherry bear, grape monkey, orange lion.

… I’m trying to give our regular menu a healthy overhaul. (Being unemployed gives you lots of time to think about these things.) The Husband was thinking about turkey burgers, mostly because he picked up a great tip on Lifehacker that suggested putting a pound of ground whatever into a freezer bag, pounding it flat, then using a pencil or chopstick to draw lines in the meat:

Frozen turkey in repose.

That way, the turkey thaws faster once it’s out of the freezer, and you can bend the package along those lines to break off only what you need. He cracked off four patties and set them to thaw while preparing a mixture of finely-diced onions, garlic, and spinach, and by the time he was finished chopping the veggies the meat had thawed. Meanwhile, I was using the non-garlicky side of the cutting board (we only have one) to cut strawberries and oranges for a little salad, topped with a citrus/balsamic vinegar/garlic vinaigrette of our own invention. Other than forgetting the french fries and having to stall dinner for a few minutes so they could bake, everything went off without a hitch.

The patties are suddenly round because The Husband had to mash up the turkey to mix in the veggies.

We decided to make double turkey burgers with fancy cheese — mine was havarti, his was pepperjack — and good, old-fashioned, eight-months-expired Kroger ketchup, and photograph them as if we were on the Food Network:

The picture with the fries wouldn’t upload, so just imagine them in that bare spot.

The texture was a little strange — ground beef makes a more solid burger, while these kind of mushed together as soon as you took the first bite. Still, the flavor was excellent. I mostly tasted the garlic and turkey, but there was definitely a hint of the spinach too. As it turns out, spinach is high in iron but also in an acid that blocks your body from absorbing iron, so you’re supposed to eat it with foods like strawberries and oranges that counteract the acid. Stupid contradictory spinach is lucky we just happened to pick those two fruits for the salad or there would have been hell to pay at the Red Cross tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I’m making scrambled eggs with leftover spinach, cheese, onions, and garlic, plus leftover ham and potatoes from a dinner we had last week. And speaking of eating healthier, I got on the scale this morning to find I’d lost five pounds. Whether that’s from the good-for-me food or the running I’ve been doing lately, who knows — but I’ll take it!