Anger Burger

Occasionally, I register my disgust on the internet, like so:

I was so disappointed today when I went to purchase my usual
weekly box of Alpen and discovered the familiar, cheery red and white
box was now a badly-designed dull brown.  Such poor graphic design!  The
photographs of the grains and the color palette look like something from
the 70’s – and not in the happy, Scandinavian way that Alpen looked
before.  I’m not sure what possessed you guys to change the box so
drastically, but I’m sad to see it.

Sincerely,
Sunday

What am I going on about?  Oh, why, just this totally retarded box redesign from my favorite healthy cereal, Alpen:

Please tell me I’m going nuts, because where I’m standing from, this looks like a lovely, sort of retro but pretty delicious-looking cereal that has been transformed into a 1970’s-made-for-TV-movie cereal comprised of mulch, horse hay, compost and owl pellets.

Alpen had this to say in its defense:

Thank you for the email giving us your review of the new Alpen box
design.  We are very sorry you didn’t like the new graphics.

We appreciate receiving our customers’ suggestions and comments about
our products, and we have forwarded your comments about the packaging to
the appropriate department to take under consideration.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further comments.
We hope you will continue to enjoy our other products in excellent
health!

Regards,
Kathy Zorn
Technical Services Coordinator
Weetabix North America
Barbara’s Bakery Division

Kathy, I didn’t respond because I don’t want to be the lunatic who keeps emailing you about the Alpen box, but I just want to understand what is happening.  Do you want Alpen to fail?  Was this an act of vengeance?   A spurned lover down in the box design department, perhaps?  Some Republican scheme to torture eaters of hippie cereal?  The last part I’d understand, but in all seriousness, it’s working.  Each time I pour a bowl of Grim Alpen for myself, I think, here’s one bowl of muesli closer to my demise.

I know I’m gonna catch eternal shit for this, but I have to do it.  This, friends, is my mother, making fun of me (specifically the expression I made while eating banh mi in this post):

And this is me:

photo by Sean Frego

Nature or nuture?

Can we briefly discuss the “express” or “15 item limit” lanes at the grocery store?

But first: I used to love the self-checkout lanes.  It was so nice to be able to bag my own groceries and not talk to anyone.  Misanthrope’s dream.   But then I switched to reusable grocery bags¹ and discovered that no self-checkout machines are capable of dealing with your own bag.  The machine preforms seppuku when you set your bag on the shelf, unable to comprehend a world where a 2-ounce discrepancy exists.  Briefly at Ralphs there was an option to check “I’m using my own bags” and that option was deleted when people realized you could add a tiny stolen item to the bag at that point and the machine would ignore it.  After weeks of having to flag down the employees each time to get a machine override I gave up.

There’s a humanist belief that within us each is the capacity to respect one another, and when we all understand this our world will drastically alter.  Violence will stop.  Hunger will stop.  Great minds will work toward ending disease and poverty instead of making themselves richer.

This will never happen, and anyone that has stood in an express lane at the grocery store knows this.

Every single time I ago there are two distinct people:

THE CHEATER
The cheater is almost always an affluent person in a kind of faux-rush, an absent-minded twat with their car keys in their hand as though a scenario where their car will need to be started without warning is imminent.  They are guaranteed to have about 20 items in their basket.   They will, when the checker asks “Did you find everything ok?” answer sincerely that they did not.  Anecdotal case-in-point: the girl who whined “I looked everywhere for Tapatío hot sauce and I couldn’t find it,” after which the checker sends a bag-boy off to the hot sauce isle to find the giant display of Tapatío.  Meanwhile 400 people in the check-out line grow old and die.

THE INDIGNANT LOSER
If your blood pressure isn’t raised by the Cheater, then the Indignant Loser will surely do it for you with their passive-aggressive sighing and attempts to assault with mere eye contact.  Occasionally they will talk to you in an effort to gain solidarity, “Can you believe this?” (”Yes.”) and even more awkwardly might scold the checker, “This lane is 15 items or less, right?  Why are you allowing her to be in this line?”

I fall into an amorphous third category wherein I start out as being an Indignant Loser and then once I see other Indignant Losers I lose all my steam and fall into an atheistic funk involving fantasies of secret compounds and gun hoarding.  And in the event that neither of those are in front of me in line, it’s almost certainly some batshit crazy loon buying a single packet of soy cheese slices while paying with a sack of pennies.

I hesitate to offer a solution since I know it won’t be entertained, but here it is: have a lane called a “Luxury Lane,” and that alone will draw off all the people who also rent “Luxury Apartments” that are really just low-quality ant farms with faux-granite countertops and stainless steel fridges.  So, the Cheaters, basically.  This will leave the other lane, which will be renamed the “Budget Lane” to people with only a few items but who actually have their cash out and ready to pay.   You’ll also have to install a simple coin-counting mechanism into the register for the batshit sack-o-pennies, but that’s pretty easy.

Ugh.  Now I have heartburn.

¹The RuMe bags are by far my favorite – they have long handles, long enough to actually hoist over your shoulder even when the bags are full, and they have squared corners and bottoms.  When I first went shopping for reusable bags year before last I was surprised to discover they all had seams on the bottom, which makes the packing of groceries stupidly harder.  It’s seriously like these people have never packed a bag of groceries before in their lives, which now that I think about it they probably haven’t.  The RuMe bags also fold up and seal with velcro, which no one else was doing.  Everyone else either folded up into large, sloppy pockets or had little separate, loose covers, like, I wonder how long it would take to lose them.  Ten minutes?  Five?  AND RuMe makes an extra-large “macro” size so that you can have bags for those awkward toilet paper superpack buying rampages at Target.

I know what you’re getting for your birthday!¹  I’m pretty certain I have all the kinks worked out, and I’ll be adding more items as the whim strikes me, but there you go.  At the top of this page now, below the logo, is a new link called “shop!“  That way you don’t have to find this post every time you want to find the Anger Burger link at Zazzle.

Enjoy!  And for Christ’s sake, drip some ketchup on the front.  It’ll be like 3D!

¹I mean, from someone else.  I’m not getting you anything.  Sorry.

***UPDATE  1.27.10 ***
My shirt arrived in the mail today and the quality is pretty much what I expected: pretty good quality with a few slight flaws that only I would notice (the color is a little over-saturated, for example, but I imagine it is better than under-saturated).

As an aside, I ordered a LARGE in the women’s dark shirt and it is borderline too small.  It’s fine, but it’s a hair tighter than I would normally purchase for myself.  I’m 5′6″ and 135 pounds, so this is a pretty silly “large”.  To be fair, Zazzle warns to buy one to two sizes larger in this particular shirt brand, and I agree with an emphasis on “two”.

Anyway, all this is to say: I love it!  And I think you’ll love it too.  Photos coming soon.

I hate writing this word because I feel like I should have the skills to communicate this feeling with actual words, but I can’t, so: sigh.  Once again, my web hosting service is totally bjorked and as near as I can tell, they plan on continuing with this “service” model.  It’s pretty discouraging, and I don’t have the faintest idea of how to migrate services (and I don’t want to bug my WebNerd, Dan, because I bug him non-stop already), so instead I’ll just mope around my own website.  Dramatic!

Here is an unrelated series of asides:

• Television, having had a few years of greatness there (see: Battlestar Galactica, House, Bones, The IT Crowd, etc.) has taken a turn for the ‘tarded.  V, for which I had high hopes, feels like a high school class on scriptwriting.  FlashForward, for which I had high hopes, is mysteriously and deadeningly boring.  It has John Cho!  And a big budget!  And science mystery!  And yet, each time I watch it I black out for 45 minutes, after which I have the memory of an event that hasn’t happened yet set 9 months in the future, where I’m watching a different TV show.

• But!  My utterly embarrassing penchant for Legend of the Seeker (which I inevitably call Legend of the Legend for some reason) has returned with season 2, and with Charisma Carpenter guest starring!  Ms. Carpenter is possibly better recognized as Cordelia from Buffy and Angel, as well as having a reoccurring role on the epically and tragically mistreated Veronica Mars.  I can’t in good conscious actually recommend that you watch Legend of the Legend Seeker, but it appeals greatly to the 13 year-old Sunday who still misses Covington Cross, an early 90’s dramedy TV show about a family in the Middle Ages that no one ever watched but me.  True!

• Furthermore, the new Stargate Universe has me totally hooked.  It’s not that it’s good, but it certainly isn’t bad, and I feel like it has the potential to get its legs under itself.  And I miss BSG and Farscape so badly that I’m willing to pretend, at a distance, and mostly drunkenly, that I’ve found a new show I will love.

• Okay, so, feminine napkins¹.  Here’s the thing that I will never in my lifetime understand: why do they change their product every 6 months?  It’s fucking true.  And if they don’t change the actual product itself, they change the packaging so that you can no longer quickly identify what you want.  THIS IS FUCKING TRUE.  Here’s an example: I’ve used Kotex brand pads for years now, and before that I wore Always but had to stop when Always switched to inferior materials.  A few years back Kotex had what I thought was actually a great idea: they were going to have a different kind of flower (gag) on each package so that you could quickly grab your preferred product.  Say you want regular pads, unscented.  Well, they had an orchid on the package.  Easy!  Overnight pads had a daisy on the package.  Easy!  And then, one day, all the packages had orchids on them.  Wait, what?  And then more recently, none of the packages have orchids on them, but all of them have small stylized daisies on them.  What kind of foul trickery is this?  Either way, I have to carefully read the package every time so I don’t end up buying some scented monstrosity that makes your ladyparts smell like damp laundry.  I can think of no other products that are so determined to confuse and anger their customer base.

• My totally bullshit diet continues and is working.  I feel better after having purely just cut back on sugar and outrageous fat intake (i.e., no more beer steins of eggnog).  However, it’s starting to get cold here in L.A., and all I can think about is junk food from Trader Joe’s, like their Brandy Beans, which are basically just cocoa butter and sugar.  And this brings up my whole weird psychology with “dieting” which is that I don’t believe in it.  I mean, I believe in eating healthier for a specific goal, i.e. feeling better, lowering cholesterol, etc.  And my eating healthier has been done specifically with feeling physically better, part of which, I must admit, was how my pants were getting too tight.  And how to Brandy Beans fit into that scenario?  Not well, I assure you.  I think I’m closing in on convincing myself that 1 or maybe 2 a day is just fine.

¹ How great is this term, anyway?

**Note: all the TV shows mentioned (with the exception of Covington Cross, RIP) can be seen for free at Hulu.com. I don’t have broadcast television, I just watch stuff on the internet.

Something I keep forgetting to discuss is my curious bad luck with Air New Zealand.  They are consistently rated among the top airlines for a whole array of things (punctuality, food, etc.) and yet, somehow two of the three flights I’ve taken with them have had a major minor plane malfunction occur.  The first was on my return from Auckland to Los Angeles in 2005.  Our plane was badly delayed for takeoff due to (get ready!) the failure of an engine.  It just wouldn’t start, and all within my delighted eyesight at the Auckland airport.  The workers swarmed over one of the engines with carts and tools and duct tape¹. After an hour the engine started and we all boarded on the plane as though nothing catastrophic had happened.

Until about an hour into the flight, at which point a major chunk of the plane’s electrical system went down.  I happened to be sitting next to the panel that housed the plane’s breakers, and watched as a pilot came back and helped a flight attendant throw the electrical to try and reboot the system.  When it didn’t work they made the announcement that since none of the outages affected the plane’s ability to fly, we’d carry on.   Fine by me, even though it meant I had to sit in darkness.  About an hour after that, a passenger who was fairly actively dying of cancer began to have seizures.  Oh yes, I said that.  Apparently the woman essentially smuggled herself onto the plane, since the airlines have strict rules about passengers with unusual medical needs having to register with them before flight.  I was sitting near enough to hear the entire story, which basically was: she wanted to get to America to be with family before she died thought it would just be okay if she laid down in the floorboards (!) during the flight.  The attendants refused, telling her that if she were incapable of sitting in her seat we’d have to turn the plane around and remove her.  She informed them should could sit just fine.  An hour later she had a seizure, requiring that oh-so Hollywood of requests “Is there a medical professional onboard the plane?  We seem to have a passenger who could use some attention” from the pilot.  There were two ER nurses onboard, each of whom couldn’t decide if she needed immediate attention.  Upon learning that the closest airstrip for said attention would be in Guam, the nurses decided to heavily sedate the passenger with a morphine drip (which they have on planes!!!) (I then faked a seizure but got no attention) and continue on.  We did, she was doped the entire flight, and when we landed she had to be removed via ambulance.  Dramz!

So while the medical drama distracted me from the mechanical drama, it all came back to me this last flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, almost five years later.  About two hours into our flight I started to feel quite warm.  Normally I find these flights rather frigid and had prepared myself with a sweatshirt, the plane’s blanket and an extra pillow.  However, I was sweating like a zookeeper.  I confirmed with Mike: this plane was hot and getting hotter.  Phew!  Eventually we snagged one of the attendants who sort of grudgingly admitted: “Oh yes, the environment is out in this section of the plane, we’re terribly sorry.  But we’ve turned up the AC in the fore and aft to try to cool it down.”  Then, as if in some clumsy bid for sympathy, he said, “You can imagine, they’re quite chilled.”  I can only imagine it, jackass, because it’s almost 90° in an enclosed tin can I can’t move around in².

Add to that the curious fact that not one but three children on the flight were in the throes a horrific flu that required them to scream and cough until they puked - repeatedly – and then you have a pretty unpleasant flight.  I got maybe three hours of sleep, snatched only by uncomfortably propping myself against Mike and removing my shoes and socks so that I could press my feet against the cool metal bars under the seat.  By the time we landed an attendant came around to apologize personally to each of the passengers, holding a manifest so he could address us by name (well, not us – for some reason he didn’t bother with Mike and I) and give us a 1/2 hour international calling card as apology.  As apologies for near-intolerable conditions go, 30 minutes on a telephone is pretty weak.  I’m certain they were counting on what eventually occured: we were so thrilled to get off the damn plane that we ran off without looking back.

Moving on!

Kiwis love potato chips as much as any civilized person, and its always a pleasure to see flavors other than cheese or BBQ.  One of the Kiwi flavors we Americans have never had a chance to love is chicken.  Each brand of chip has a chicken flavor, which of course means I was too tired and out of it to get any.  I will soon, I promise.  Instead I got mince pie and tomato sauce!

Also known as meatpie and ketchup.  A long while back I remember getting “steak” chips somewhere in the US and not liking them very much.  If I recall, they tasted like MSG and little else.  These meatpie chips happily tasted primarily of ketchup – in fact, I didn’t detect any thing that might be considered ‘meatpie’ in there at all.  Still, ketchup is an unsurprisingly good flavor for potato chips and America should get its goddamn act together.  Especially Kiwi ketchup, which has a stronger clove and sugar note than American ketchup.

Later, Mike and I drove back into Plimmerton for more fish and chips.

This time around I got a photo of how lovely the package looks (with a can of Coke for scale).  No plastic bag, no styrofoam, just newsprint, double-wrapped.  It’s heavy and fragrant and stays hot for a unexpectedly long while.

I can’t tell you enough how much I adore this fish.  The batter tastes precisely like a sugarless doughnut, the exterior is that addicting combination of chewy and crispy, and the fish inside is as flaky and fresh as can be.  And the kumara (sweet potato) chips?  My god.  A medal to the woman who makes these, if not only because she’s not afraid of salt.  Fear not the salt.  Salt is your friend.  Dear, dear salt.  Sigh.

¹ True, but also an exaggeration.  There is a particular kind of tape used on airplanes that looks like duct tape from afar but is much, much stronger.  It’s commonly used to increase strength in areas that are suspicious but not broken.  It sounds horrific, but since the tape is arguably as strong as a metal weld and takes less skill to apply, I’d just as soon they taped that damn thing up whenever they felt like it.  There are a few highly watched videos on YouTube of a workers taping stuff, much to the terror of the passenger filming the event.

²We also had a classic crazy fellow passenger experience – we had the window and middle seats, so the aisle seat was a woman that had (I hope) taken a sedative because she was essentially unwakable when we needed to get out and pee about 5 hours later.  When we did finally wake her — and I’m not exaggerating here, we had to shake and yell in her ear to wake her, enough that we woke passengers in other seats — she was a grumpy cunt about it.  She said sarcastically, “Well, if you have to go, I guess,” (yes, I fucking have to go, I’ve been chugging water because it’s 90 fucking degrees in here)  and then acted like removing her blanket and unbuckling her seatbelt were the most complicated thing she had ever done — and then stepped down the aisle in the direction the restrooms were, so that I had to say, “If you stand there,” (pointing at the other side) “we won’t have to try and get by you,” to which she sort of drunkenly glared.

Blah blah blah.  I can’t even cool off enough to write coherently.  Is coherently a word?  Appears so.

Also the problem: the heat is bringing the crazy to the surface.  It’s a long and dramatic story (as these things always are) but last night marked the second time this month that police were called on our upstairs neighbor and her fiery ex-boyfriend.  She’s young and possibly surprisingly inexperienced with these things, but looks like Mama Sunday is gonna have to sit her down and give her the honey, he keeps showing up because you keep talking to him talk.

Last night, however, was an exciting clusterfuck the likes of which can only happen in Los Angeles.  At 3:30am I heard a banging and some garbled blustering and I looked out the back of our building to see Bambi (as we call him – it’s a long story) ineffectually kicking her car and shouting into his cell phone while looking pointedly up to her apartment:

“I’m kicking your car so you’ll let me in and give me a chance to explain myself!”

This poor guy.  I swear.  Needless to say, he heard me laughing.  What I didn’t expect is that he seemed embarrassed, quieted and then scampered off into the night.  And then I saw that he had left a single white rose behind.

Moments later a helicopter flew over, low, a sound I’ve come to ignore.  It circled.  And circled some more.  And then the brightest light I’ve ever experienced blasted through our extra-thick curtains and lit the room like an atomic blast.  Spewing forth profanities the likes of which I desperately wish I could remember today, I ran to a window and peered out.   Indeed — the ghetto bird, as we call in these parts — was circling our building!  My goodness!  What a crime car-kicking must be!  I had no idea.

Sitting back on my bed, I miserably considered how long short it would be before I had to get ready for work (I had an extra-early day; Tuesday is “book day” at work, when we place all the brand-new titles, an effort that requires us to be at work as early as 6am, as in today’s case) when I distinctly heard a man talking right outside my bedroom window.  I pulled back the curtain a little and startled two men standing within inches of my window.  I dropped the curtain.  A light flashed over the window and I reached for my baseball bat (hi dad!).  They quieted, and a few minutes later someone pounded on the locked outer door of our building.  By this time another tenant had emerged, and we all crept forward to see two somewhat bewildered policemen at the door.

For some reason all I could think to say was “Really?”

“Can you tell us what’s happening here?” a cop said.

There was an awkward pause.  “I was hoping you’d be able to answer that,” I said.

I explained to him the comparatively unremarkable events of the evening (Bambi kicked the car and ran off) and they asked which car was hers (the one with a single white rose next to it, fellas), and then rather casually asked, “So, did you hear any gunshots?”

“Gunshots!”

It later was agreed that two entirely coincidental dramas were unfolding in my neighborhood, one of insignificance (Bambi sad) and one of dubious significance (unknown gunshots).  It wasn’t until today yet another neighbor reported that a SWAT team had come silently trotting down the street with large riot guns held to their shoulders (and following them a news crew) that I finally, really, truly understood that I live in Los Angeles.  Hollywood, really.  A finer community of drama queens there simply cannot be.  You see, no one was shot.

So, on four hours of sleep, a full day’s labor and 95 temperatures, I come to the subject of dinner.  And decide: cantaloupe.  Cantaloupe for dinner.  And maybe some cheese.

Yesterday I had a chat with my mom about the maple syrup shortage at the end of which we both let out a Homerian “Mmmm, pancakes.”  Combined with Mike’s recent hinting that maybe French Toast was a good way to break out of the All-Asian-All-the-Time cycle, I broke down and agreed, yes, breakfast for dinner.

This is way too much bacon, unless you have a penis.

A while back I switched to baking bacon rather than pan-frying it, and the day will come when for some reason I have to pan-fry the bacon again, and I will loathe that day.  Baking is (aside from the wasteful overuse of tinfoil) so totally superior in both clean-up and flavor that I simply can’t imagine another way.

The bacon we ate this time was the nitrite-free Trader Joe’s applewood smoked variety, and I honestly felt it was a little too campfirey to buy again.  When it was cooking it was really as though someone had rolled around in a wet, extinguished campfire and then rubbed a few pieces of ham on their body.  The taste was better, luckily.  It cooked up with an excellent texture, but a still-lingering over-smokiness.  I mean, I’d cook it again in a pinch, but you get my point.  Campfire.  No.

I’ve been using the Joy of Cooking pancake recipe for years, which my mother doesn’t like but this is how I rebel.  I make it with buttermilk and always add fruit and ground flax.  Though, since we started eating a dose of flax oil every day (to lubricate our brains) the ground flax is redundant, but I still like the way it tastes.  Maybe I’ll switch to wheat germ.   Mike prefers bananas in his pancakes, and I just discovered that I prefer feijoa.  A lot.  In fact, it was the best pancake I’ve ever eaten.  It was perfect.  You can’t hear it, but my stomach is snarling as I write this.

As I was getting our plates all nicely settled and we moved into the livingroom to watch a DVD while we ate, our room began to shake with the familiar feel of tectonic plates slipping.  I set my fork down on my plate (which then fell to the floor, and thus became the only Anger Burger household quake victim of the evening) while Mike debated picking up the plate of bacon as we exited to a safer room (one that isn’t ringed in bookshelves) (which are anchored to the wall, mom and dad, relax).  Anyway, bladda-bladda, by the time our brains caught up it was all over.  And then I forgot to take photos of our final meal.  So, here’s the recipe for the pancakes instead:

Joy of Cooking Basic Pancakes
cut down for two people

¾ C. AP flour
2 T. sugar
¼ C. ground flax seed (or wheat germ)
¾ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt

¾ C. buttermilk
2 T. melted butter
1 egg
½ tsp. vanilla

• In a large bowl, mix all of the dry ingredients together.
• In a small Pyrex measuring cup, measure out the buttermilk, then add the melted butter, egg and vanilla.  Beat lightly until egg is broken up.
• When griddle or pan is preheated to medium, stir the wet ingredients into the dry.
• Fry (if nonstick, there’s no need to use butter or spray to grease the pan) the first side until large bubbles leave a few open holes on the top of the pancake.  This effort might be thwarted if you’ve sprinkled fruit pieces on the top, but that’s why you use a spatula to lift and peek under the pancake’s skirt.
• The second side will brown much faster.  Cook just until the middle is puffed and springy.
• Eat with incredibly expensive maple syrup.
• Bring along extra fork in case there is an earthquake.

I Can’t Believe it’s Not Asian!

(Just wait for the avocado smoothie post.)

So, a while back I told my dad I was interested in juicing because of a theory I had that raw fruit and vegetable juices without the fiber would be okay for my intestines.  Which is what juicing is, right?  Right.  Since he is an avid garage-sale-man (he calls it “flim-flamming,” which isn’t exactly accurate) I asked him to keep on the lookout for a good used juicer.  And what should arrive at my doorstep but a brand new Jack LaLanne Power Juicer Deluxe?

He had been at Costco and there it was, significantly below retail cost and he thought, because he’s a sweet, caring, loving father, that he would just buy it for me and send it to me as a surprise.

Surprise!

Internet, heed my words: this juicer is awful.  In a flurry of excitement I ran out and bought a heap of fresh produce (a sack of carrots, a bag of beets, some apples) and hustled back home to juice those fuckers.  It was nearing dinnertime, but I figured a bracing glass of beet juice was as good a way as any to pique the appetite.  And long story short: 20 minutes later I was still trying to get that beet juice.  The motor was just too weak to process anything but apples, taking minutes for a single length of carrot to render down, and longer for a hunk of beet.  I went online thinking that I was doing something wrong, but no, other people had the same complaints.  I didn’t even take photos of the ordeal I was so distracted, which is saying something.

So, I returned it to a Costco here in L.A., who insisted on giving me cash back (!) after which I promised my pop I’d spend the money on something fun.  So I did.

Behold, the destroyer of matter!

I bought a blender.  I chose the one that looked the coolest at Target, and when I got home I set about making a smoothie.

When I was a kid my mom went on a brief smoothie-making rampage, and the important thing I remember from this period is COCONUT MILK.  Coconut milk makes everything better.  I also genuinely believe that the saturated fats from coconut milk are good for your body,  but I don’t base that on science so much as blind hope.  Nevertheless, a tablespoon or two of coconut milk isn’t going to kill anyone, and it makes the smoothie taste a bazillion times better.

This one isn’t quite ripe, but I ate it anyway.

I was also pretty shocked to find my 2nd favorite New Zealand fruit at my local Ralph’s grocery store, and at a mere $1.99 a pound!  Holy shit!  They’re called feijoa, and to my delight Kiwis pronounce it with a hard j, fee-joe-ah.  Anyhow, at 30¢ a fruit these fellas add a really fabulous tropical fruit flavor to anything.  The Kiwis have feijoa cereal, yogurt, vodka, just about everything.  It is called a “pineapple guava” in other countries, which is an accurate description.  It tastes primarily like a guava – again, a fruity, tropical flavor hard to describe with similes – but with a high acid note like a pineapple.  The skin can theoretically be eaten, but is often bitter (when not bitter is is tart, which some people don’t like but I do).  The texture of the flesh is what makes is better, perhaps, as an ingredient than an eating-fruit, as it inherited the grittiness of a guava along with the flavor.  But oh, what a flavor!  Here’s a true story:

How Feijoa Saved My Life
by Sunday Williams

When I was in New Zealand on a solo trip, one day I was out in Wellington enjoying a sunny, summery day when I suddenly had a blood sugar crash.  I was pretty familiar with the feeling, though surprised (I’d eaten breakfast) and took my time finding some lunch.  As there are a lot of Indonesian and Malaysian restaurants in NZ, I stopped at one for a noodle plate.  Except, even as I ordered the plate I felt almost faint with hunger.  Why was I so hungry?  My hands shook as I handed over the money.  I sat and waited at a table for an epic 20 minutes, too out of it to seriously consider just leaving and heading to the corner market for a candy bar while I waited.  When my food finally arrived I packed it into my eat-hole as fast as I could, not tasting a single noodle (I still only remember it as “oily”).

Within 10 minutes of leaving, I felt the familiar, toxic flush of MSG poisoning.  Now, I have a decent tolerance for MSG (I can eat a lot of Doritos, for instance, and never feel goofy) but high doses make me have a strong reaction.  I first discovered this in my early teens after eating at a Chinese restaurant with my mother and sister and then having the worst migraine of my life within an hour.  More recently I’d eaten a bowl of phở and narrowly avoided the migraine by a near-instant ingestion of Excedrin and a gallon of water.  But here, on a strange street corner in a country 10,000 miles from home?  The zingy, hyper-sensitive flush spread over my face and neck and I looked around in a panic.  I estimated I was a 20-minute fast walk from the hostel, if I could get my bearings and head straight there.  I took out a map as the flush turned into a high-pitch ringing in my ears.  My eyes were getting light-sensitive already.  My throat itched.  I determined which way to walk and within five minutes was really worried – this one was coming on hard.  That was some industrial-fucking-strength MSG.  I skidded to a stop next to a small drugstore and ran inside looking for aspirin.  Except, out of all my preparation for this trip, I didn’t know that:

• acetaminophen is called “paracetamol”
• aspirin is generally not sold as a generic and is instead called a brand name like “Dispirin”

Which led to me looking for painkillers for probably 10 minutes in the store while I became increasingly disoriented.  I was well into the floaters of a full migraine, the vision-blocking clots of light that hit just before the pain really does.  I grabbed a few boxes of Dispirin and practically ran my ass back to the hostel.

For the next 4 hours I lay in a dark room (thank Cheebus I got a private room) sweating and gripping the sheets.  I draped a wet sock across my face in lieu of owning a washcloth.  By the time the worst of it broke I remembered that I had a pint of feijoa icecream in the freezer.  I crept out to retrieve it and terrified some German tourists by hissing menacingly at them as I approached the fridge.  I crept back to my room with the icecream and a spoon, where, in the dark, I ate it.  And it was the best thing I’ve eaten in my life.

Now, it might not have really been the best thing, but at that moment it was.  Sweet-tart, fruity without tasting like candy, creamy, cold.  The last sharp talons of the migraine left as I ate it.  Sugar surged through my veins. I would survive.

Fin.

Anyway, so smoothies.  I was super-excited to see the feijoa and set about making a banana, feijoa, mango, berry, yogurt, coconut milk and maple syrup smoothie.

I believe there was also some orange juice in there.  Looking at the photo I’m going to have to vote yes, yes there was also orange juice.    Also!  Algae, there is a spoonful or two of green algae somewhere in there.

Result?  Blender works great.  I read some reviews online out of curiosity, and most people complain it is too loud, which I have to say: the engine is housed in METAL.  Yes, it is too loud.  But it’s also a blender I didn’t expect it to sound like mice sighing.  Other people complain it can’t even blend frozen fruit to which I say, huh? It suffers from the same problems most home blenders do, which is that the underpowered blade creates an airpocket that doesn’t promote easy blending (you have to stop and stir it a few times), but it blended with enough success that we were slurping down a totally fucking awesome smoothie in a mere five minutes.

In conclusion: thank you dad!  Thanks for the awesome blender.  I know it’s not the same as helping me try and healthify myself with juicing, but it’s close.  Actually, it’s not close as I have already had a milkshake for breakfast this morning (TRUE!), but still.  I love it.  It’s perfect.  And I have money leftover to buy a new pepper grinder!  Yay for papa!

Lately work has been sucking my will to cook, which isn’t surprising.  I’m on my feet for 7 hours — which includes running up and down the central staircase and/or pushing carts full of books and a combination of squatting and stretching to shelve them — and I walk to and from work for a grand total of 4 miles.  I bought a pedometer to try and track how much I really walk during the day, but I bought the cheap kind and it keeps stopping its count at 1650 steps¹.

Anyway, by the time I get home what used to be a calming, grounding activity instead is something I have to stand during.  Which makes me reach for the pack of turkey bologna, a bottle of wine and a relatively clean spot on the floor where I can curl up and suckle on each.

A few days ago I made what has turned out to be one of my all-time favorite comfort foods, chilaquiles.  It’s supposed to be a breakfast food that uses leftover tortillas, but like all great breakfast foods it tastes a little better at dinnertime.  I’ll be listing a more in-depth recipe in the next month or so (I sort of forgot to take photos of my last venture), which is no longer terribly Mexican, as I’m sure you can imagine a household with a Norwegian and an Irish Scottish-Melungeon would produce.

If you don’t want to wait for my walk-through, be advised that the frying of the chips isn’t as necessary as the recipes would make you believe.  Instead, I suggest using a pastry brush to lightly coat a stack of corn tortillas with canola oil, after which you can cut them up and toast them in a 350° oven for about 15 — but watch them closely!  They go from well-toasted to nearly-scorched in about a microsecond.  In a hung-over pinch, a bag of unsalted tortilla chips from the grocery store comes out nearly the same.  Not as tasty, but nearly the same.  The darker fried the chips, the better (again, avoiding the scorched level), as the whole thing gains a mature, nutty flavor.  Like me!   Minus the mature part.

Basically, chilaquiles are the lazy-man’s enchiladas, which is perfect because I’m lazy and I love enchiladas.  I poach some chicken, fire up a big pan of enchilada sauce, crush in a heap of crispy corn tortillas, stir in the shredded poached chicken and some monterey jack cheese and voila.  Well, almost, I’m leaving out some stuff.  You’ll just have to wait for it.

On another recent night I just wanted some bread and salami and while talking to Mike managed to hack the end of my thumb with the knife.  It was one of those moments where I had a freeze-frame sensation of the knife hitting something hard.  Mike, for his part, heard it hit, a sound that pretty thoroughly queased him out.  We both assumed I’d cut my thumb clean off.

Three days later and it looks like a paper cut.

After a minute of gripping it with my other hand I finally took at look at the damage … and saw that I’d basically barely nicked it.  Or rather, it was a lucky fucking hit: I indeed had pretty much ricocheted off the bone, but my thumb had been completely bent and provided a very thin, very healable level of tissue.  In other words, I’d barely cut myself.  To the bone, yes, but in a way that sounds about 1000% more dramatic than it really was.  And it smelled like salami.

¹Of course the best part is how many times it took me reading little piece of shit before it finally dawned on me that I was probably not walking coincidentally the exact same amount every day.