Yawn. It’s 2:00 a.m.

I’m in the middle of reading this series about the zombie apocalypse, and I should have known it would be poor reading before bed. I can drink coffee and fall asleep like it’s my job, but zombie gore gives me fitful dreams.  So I thought, oh, writing, of course, that’ll get the adrenaline down. Not likely.

I tore through Book Three tonight in one sitting. It’s that engaging. I have but my boyfriend to thank, for his is the golden library card that allows me to borrow books like this one, and this one and this one. The part of Glenview we live in doesn’t collect taxes for any library, so we simply don’t get to apply for cards, even to Glenview Public Library. It’s a stupid beaurocracy we live in. And in these uncertain times, it’s fortunate to have someone in one’s life who understands the need for zombie graphic novels and borrowed cookbooks.

 

To Be One’s Own Mrs. Garrett

In the distant past I periodically wrote entries in my hand-written journals or my livejournal (R.I.P.) called “The State of the Sandy,” intended to be a way of setting goals, checking in on my progress and letting my far-away friends know what’s really going on in my life. And, really, to take a look at how I feel about some things because sometimes a truth pours out through my fingers that my conscious mind wasn’t aware of. Thus, the beauty of journaling in the first place. This is something like that.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. This has been a difficult year. I moved back to my hometown (Chicago) after ten years living away, to a family dealing with a lot of grief and a terrible money situation. My large, tight group of friends here are no longer very friendly with one another. I’m evolving and realizing that the career I’ve sacrificed everything for in the last six years isn’t making me happy in its current state.

It’s a time of change, and to think about these things too hard is to light a wick that leads to self- implosion and over-consumption of ice cream. There’s a lot to deal with in the business of my life that’s currently out of the hands of myself and most people involved. We all know how we got here, and some of it is shameful and some of it is remains beautiful in our memories. Mistakes were made, small victories have been celebrated, and life still goes on in a course one can’t predict, despite our efforts. But that’s always been true.

Focusing on the things that are still in my control, being thankful for what I do have and realizing that every day is truly a new one is what I’ve got to work with, so with that I’m keeping positive. I’m exploring new paths for my work, even though it means I’m broker than usual right now (Risks! Love them).  My family is heartbroken over their losses, both personal and literal, but I’d much rather be here with them in their trench, baking cakes and doing favors and trying to remind them they have a sense of humor, than blissfully unaware of it all in New York.

I still feel like a stranger here, starting over without really starting over, 50% of my life still in boxes in the garage waiting for the next move.  I’m feeling the weight of the immense lack of stability in my life, but I’m thankful I’m at a point in my life where it’s just added poundage, not a load that’ll topple me.

I share stupidly personal things because I know a lot of my friends are going through questionable moments too, and history has taught me there’s something about the mind’s pressure valve that eases down when one knows they’re not alone. I don’t feel alone; all I know about is everyone’s problems right now. Despite it all, life’s not bad. If I’m smiling, that’s just me happy to be in a good moment with good people. There’s no rule that says when times are hard they have to affect everything. Change is good, and the way I look at it, I’m just in the middle of another bout.

Also see: “The Facts of Life” theme song, below.

 

A Story in Brooklyn

From http://frankwinters.wordpress.com

The Martha Stewart Show today was a rerun from November where she and a friend visited the Brooklyn Flea Market. They wandered to the artisanal craft booths, the organic ice cream cart, the ASIADOG stand and the pupusa makers, only making me feel homesick. I’ve never used “homesick” to refer to New York before. Now there’s a lump in my lung where the breathing is supposed to be.

What always amazed me about New York was the drive people had to create niche businesses and pursue their art in a way that made the goliath city feel like it had secret farms, old-world artisans and that sneeze-and-your-neighbor-knows-mentality. Or at least the first two. A village feeling while being the center of the business and entertainment universes.  Home cooking adjacent to glass and metal. People who do pickling at home and others who actually appreciate it and buy it. I know Chicago must have lovely small-batch foods and unique wares on every scale, but all the strip malls are obstructing my view. If anyone has ideas of great neighborhoods to walk around or places I must stop by knowing what I like, your walking tour ideas are welcome.

If you’re curious about the flea market’s wares or other reasons why this Brooklyn episode was great/made me hungry, you can watch clips or the whole thing here. There’s also a pupusa-making demonstration, mmm.

 

Adventures in Baking

There was a time when I was so determined to learn how to properly decorate a cake that I woke up early on Saturday mornings, sometimes still drunk, to get to my Wilton cake decorating class at the Queens Michael’s store. I imagine that someday I will tell young people the tales of my early three-quarter-mile walks with pounds of pastries and mixed buttercream on my back. Oh, the sacrifices I made so an engaging, flamboyant cake decorator from New Jersey could teach me how to make iced roses while I pretended I wasn’t about to fall asleep in a pile of cupcakes! Because those are the stories kids like to hear, right?

I must say, I rarely use the skills I learned in that basic class. I probably should have taken more $22.50 Wilton classes, but Saturday mornings just weren’t my thang. I personally think all one needs to make beautifully-decorated pastries is decent tools and some imagination. Example: Can’t a frost a cake evenly? Frost as evenly as you can, then apply pressure to the cake with the flat side of a butter knife tip and pull away. If your frosting is still fresh, it should spike out. Repeat all over and voila, you have a pretty gorgeous, spiky cake without disturbing your perfectionist within.

Seriously, creativity will get you everywhere. My inspiration has most recently been the book Hello, Cupcake! (that I got on sale at Home Goods) and various other Google image searches of tasty treats.

For my nephews’ 2nd and 4th birthdays last week, I made them birthday cupcakes shaped like Thomas the Tank Engine and a dozen dogs.

For the Thomases I made vanilla cupcakes from my cupcake guru Shelly Kaldunski’s Cupcakes book and half a batch of Martha Stewart’s royal icing recipe (which was still way too much icing for this) and tinted them (it takes a lot of patience to get the color you want, adding in dye paste little by little so you don’t over-do it) in five batches: black, blue, grey, red and white (which I didn’t have to mess with, as white”s the icing’s original color. Then I “glued” on the Oreo “wheels” with some more dabs of royal icing and let them sit and dry overnight. Bonus tip: I bought small squeeze bottles (2 for $2.49 at Michael’s) and used them to pipe the royal icing. Awesome, easy control.

As you can see from the tear, it’s hard for small children to have these dangled in their faces while they eat lunch without wanting to touch them. When it comes to dessert, I can relate.

I also made a dozen dogs of three varieties:  chocolate labs, chihuahuas and schnauzers.

All these are a rather simplified version of the original from Hello, Cupcake! Snouts are all marshmallows covered in buttercream, eyes and noses are  royal icing, the floppy brown ears are melted and rolled-out Tootsie Rolls, the Chihuahua ears are Oreos with buttercream piped on and the schnauzers get their body from a mini cupcake sitting on top of a big cupcake.

To make the fur I filled a pastry bag with white buttercream and used a star-shaped decorating tip that looked like it would do the trick and copied what it looked like they did in the picture in the book. This isn’t high-school math, you can copy anyone you please.

I won’t lie: this took a while. I can’t stand the taste of store-bought tub frosting and I’m not a big fan of boxed cake mixes, so I made all the batter, frosting and icing from scratch (if kids are going to eat sweets, why not give them the good stuff?). To learn how to properly use royal icing, which I’ve never made before, I just Googled around for a few tips. Like I said, the Wilton class more helped me not be afraid of using weird ingredients (like meringue powder for the royal icing) than taught me to be a badass with a pastry bag. Anyone can make pretty outstanding dessert decorations with some patience and some research.

In that vein, here are a few good resources for those with questions about the ingredients and how to handle them.

Wilton’s Cake and Dessert Decorating 101 Certainly this is a brand’s Web site, but they kind of have the monopoly of baked-goods doohickeys, so they at least know their stuff.

Baking 911 Whoever made this put a lot of time and love into answering just about any question you could have about baking measurements, techniques, tips, and anything having to do with adding sugar to butter, eggs and flour.

 

Stay Hungry, Chicago

Maybe I’m obsessed with food because for my family, and for so many others I know, every bite is love on a fork. Feeding other people is sustaining them and nurturing them to us, not unlike the effect art or music have on those who appreciate masterfully crafted paintings or songs. Food, however, is something you literally can’t live without (though good arguments are to made for any kind of art), and so by some weird force a cook is further connected to his or her diners by their food’s literal consumption. What a cook creates literally becomes part of the eater. If you are what you eat, then I am certainly my mother’s mashed potatoes. And every cheeseburger in New York City.

It’s been a big month of cooking for me. It’s likely you didn’t get to eat my food, so I want to share some pics and recipes here for your visual and inspirational use.  I like making fresh, simple food with uncommon techniques and ingredients that I’m still learning about. To all my far-flung friends, I hope we’ll someday be around a table enjoying the same tasty morsels, becoming what we eat on the same gluttonous evening. Until then, let’s eat with our eyes.

Elotes. I’ve been finding this Mexican corn dish on menus all around Chicago this summer, and everyone does it differently. I was inspired by the dreamy off-the-cob Elote Con Queso y Crema at Maiz in Humboldt Park to attempt it myself.

Grilled Elotes Recipe For Dummies Gringos (makes 10 elotes on the cob)

Special tools: A grill, a pastry/basting brush

Ingredients

1/4 cup Mayonnaise

1 Tbsp lime juice (use the real stuff, people)

10 whole corn cobs

6 oz. queso fresco (I used 1/2 package of LaLa brand queso fresco)

salt (to taste)

pepper (to tase)

paprika (or any ground red chile pepper, optional)

If corn cobs haven’t been husked, peel down husks and cornsilk until cob is totally clean. For looks, it’s good to chop off the cobs’ stubby ends, but I like keeping them on until the end to use as a convenient handle to hold the hot corn while dressing it. If you own those little corn holders, more power to you.

Put cobs in a pot big enough to hold all of them with extra space, fill with water until all cobs are covered and set to heat on a stove over high heat. Corn tends to float while it boils, and my solution for even cooking was to submerge a heavy heat-proof plate over the corn to hold it down.

While the corn is cooking, in a small bowl combine mayo and lime juice and mix until smooth. If you can’t taste the lime in the mixture, add a little more but don’t let the mix get watery. In a bowl or plate wide enough for a corn to lay in flat, grate the queso fresco using your grater’s large grating holes.

When the water boils, turn heat down to medium and cook corn for 10 minutes. Corn should be mostly, but not entirely cooked through because you’re about to grill them.

Place cobs on the grill, rotating when each side is crisped/charred to your liking. Best not to get them too black. My dad grilled the corn for me and let it go a bit too far, but it was still delicious. Cobs should be on the flame for less than 10 minutes.

With a pastry brush, spread mayo mixture all over one corn cob, then sprinkle with as much salt and pepper as you like. Then roll the cob in the grated queso fresco until it’s covered to your liking. Repeat with all your cobs. Sprinkle paprika over them for color and taste, chop off stubby ends if desired and serve. When eating, put on a sombrero and pretend the glorious Mexican sun is relentless. Margarita consumption is strongly recommended.

 

The History of Us

Much in the same way that family tree included  in the opening pages of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a great assist in telling the story of the Buendia’s many Aurelianos, if I had my own family tree to share with you, I could explain my mother’s vast side of the family much better. But that’s an undertaking that more than one family member will have to help me with.

My mom’s aunt Raisa, now approaching her 90′s, wound up in the hospital last week after a bad fall, which  facilitated my first visit to her in years. I did spend five years away in New York, but I’ve been back for seven months now with no excuse for not visiting except my own shame. It took this.

When I ask my mom questions about her family (“If you’re from Moldova, how did some of you end up being raised in Ukraine?”) she often has the answers, but sometimes she only wishes she did and defers instead to either the deceased who would have known had they made it this far, or to her aunt Raisa. Raisa’s memory is long and petrified, details hovering in her gray matter like amber-encased ancient bugs. I can’t remember the last joke  I  heard, but she remembers the whole story of why her husband’s Mark’s last name is Kipervaser but two of his brothers wound up with Kipervas.

My cousin Anna and I were visiting her together tonight, asking questions and swimming in answers. Then the two of us moved the operation to the IHOP around the corner and continued the conversation with Anna’s dad, Yasha. I so wish I had a tape recorder with me. I warned him I’d have to ask him all these questions all over again. For almost three hours we sat and talked about the real reason the “er” was dropped from “Kipervaser” that Raisa (Yasha’s mother) can’t talk about; how she escaped a concentration camp as a pre-teen; how Mark’s brother Mozya survived being a WWII P.O.W.; how some of us indeed ended up in Ukraine; that our family lived on the same street in Chisinau, Moldova for decades.

This part of the world still keeps secrets from me. I’m going to find them all out.

 

Unnecessary Sex, Wrong City

Should they have made a “Sex and the City 2″? When I attended the press junket for the first SATC movie in New York, Cynthia Nixon told us this when asked about a sequel possibility: “That’s really a Michael Patrick (SATC’s exec producer) question. If he feels he has a story to tell, I for one would be delighted to tell that story with him.”

Here’s my entire summed-up impression of the movie: “Things are fabulous! There’s no recession when you’re rich! Muslims are so silly!” The whole thing was as if Stuff White People Like made a baby with First World Problems.

If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read on.

At this point, Carrie and Big have been married for two years and Carrie feels like “the sparkle” is going out of their marriage because Big enjoys bringing gourmet take-out home and watching old movies on TV with her. Charlotte’s nanny doesn’t wear bras and seems to have no inhibitions, making Charlotte crazy with husband-stealing paranoia. Miranda gets talked down to at work by her male boss. Samantha gets a PR gig for a luxury hotel in Abu Dhabi and brings along her girlfriends for an all-expenses-paid trip there, which leads to Shenanigans! Scandals! And a lot of cultural confusion.

When one’s biggest problems in life are the ones this film’s designer product-placed characters have, I develop my own: no suspension of disbelief. These characters have always been fab fab fab and have always lived a pricey life in one of the priciest cities in the world. But it’s all a little cringeworthy now. The only nod to the recession is that Carrie and Big couldn’t sell her old apartment in this market, so they kept it and now comfortably pay for two apartments. In Abu Dhabi, each of the four women is driven around in four separate cars. Gourmet take-out is a problem. Female empowerment gets a big yes, yet Charlotte can’t get up the gall to ask her nanny to lock up her knockers in front of her children (or just let her be).

I don’t think every movie needs to be aware of the current state of the world. We go to movies to forget and to have fun, to watch great stories unfold and let ourselves go for a few hours. But I just couldn’t. As a fan, how come all of this never bothered me before?

It comes down to story. As one for whom HBO’s young-and-single chronicle Sex and the City was appointment TV, I hung on every scene because I could relate. Those were my love life problems too. And my friends’. And I never knew anyone who owned a pair of Manolos. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t diss Cinderella because she lives in a castle, do we? But her story is well-told and has an inspiring lesson: if you work hard and have a pure heart, good things will happen. That lesson may not be very realistic these days, but we still love hearing it and pretending each of us is the princess with the good luck. Being able to internalize those dreamscapes is one of the big reasons we read stories or go to the movies at all.

This film? Not so much anyone can relate to. And it pains me to see whats become of these characters. Let’s go back to the SATC TV show’s finale.  Back then, Carrie moved to Paris with her boyfriend, and they too had problems. But her problem wasn’t that her boyfriend disappointed her unexpressed, unreasonable expectations like in the film, but rather that he completely ignored her for weeks at a time and then hit her. Losing passion in a marriage is a real problem, yes — but Carrie’s problems in the movie were mostly about her own ungratefulness, and it’s hard to believe the Carrie we’ve known for so long is actually that shallow. Since the TV show ended, she hasn’t stopped wearing designer gowns or wearing diamonds, but despite her tragedy in Paris, it still felt real and the story was told with a relatable sense of humanity, even with all the Dior. Considering the way Carrie’s new problems are treated in the film (and with a husband willing to work to fix them, mind you), it’s hard for anyone to sympathize, much less empathize with being unhappy in a happy marriage, unless you’re actually that beautiful, rich, famous, Manhattanite foodie with a Chris Noth-like husband who can’t see what she has. Storytellers can’t demand sympathy from an audience when even the emotions are foreign, and once an audience loses sympathy for the heroine, what’s left? The ending of the film does address what I’m referring to as her ungratefulness, but by then neither this character nor the resolution was working for me and I just kept rolling my eyes. They still hurt.

Now let’s talk Abu Dhabi. Perhaps the women’s trip there paints an accurate picture of the cultural faux pas some Americans make on trips to countries they didn’t bother to learn about beforehand. But it turned cultural ignorance into a farce that I couldn’t get past. It screamed to me “We have it right and you have it wrong! Taste America’s correct path, Muslims!”

There was a time when all Americans knew about the Middle East was genies in lamps and magic carpets and Scheherazade. Actually, Carrie waxes romantic about theMiddle East mentioning exactly those things before the trip. If you take that as gospel, nothing seems to have changed in our mentality of the Middle East since the 1965 Elvis vehicle “Harum Scarum.” The tag line to that movie was “Elvis brings the Big Beat to Baghdad in a riotous, rockin’, rollin’ adventure spoof!!!” I didn’t add any of those exclamation points myself. Most of us now know better. But I don’t think this film does.

I couldn’t help but feel the Middle East was being mocked. And that someone else’s cultural values don’t mean anything if you think yours are better. See: The women feeling sorry for local women wearing burkas, yet never starting a conversation with one. See: Samantha refusing to cover up her cleavage despite knowing the law on modest attire. If this was Absolutely Fabulous’ Edina, I don’t think I’d have as much of a problem with it, frankly. As a bumbling drunk with a credit card she did plenty of offensive things to plenty of undeserving people. But fabulous as her life was, she was not an example anyone looked up to, nor was she ever meant to be. And whatever she dished out always made its way back to her in spades. There is a bit of that price-paying in this film for Samantha and her expected public displays of affection in the end, but she takes it like a teenager who crashes her car and is too cool to take responsibility. One could argue it’s in character for her, but that doesn’t make the disregard for cultural values okay. And unlike AbFab, young women do look up to these characters. What they intended was female empowerment. Perhaps they should have asked the local women what that means to them first.

There were well-written parts. There were some touching moments. There is a decent lesson somewhere in there about handling mature relationships. I think guest star Liza Minnelli should get a standing ovation for her role in every theater this movie plays. As for Carrie and Co., what once was a group of characters that exuded pieces of all the women who look up to them and aspire to be them is now a caricature gone the way of so many a sequel that’s big on distractions and short on faithfulness to itself. Pretty much, what many of us sadly expected.

 

A story about my cat

I’ve been battling a stupid cold since Sunday, one that’s kept me in bed since that night. Well, that, and the painters downstairs with their suffocating white dust and their disco music. In the midst of our house’s many repairs, the kitchen’s been cordoned off and the fridge, which couldn’t take all the excitement, died on us. So this evening, needing both fresh air and nutrition, I ordered some palak paneer and garlic naan from Himalyan Restaurant and devoured it in the backyard with a DayQuil sidecar.

I left the screen door slightly ajar to see if my cat Lapka might join me. And tentatively, she did. In her three or so human years on earth, she’s gone from New Jersey floozy, birthing kittens in a co-worker’s backyard, to queen of Queens, and finally housecat in suburban Chicago. She hadn’t stepped a padded paw onto fresh grass, nor seen the world without the jail bars of a window screen since before we met. And you could tell.

She mostly stuck to the deck at first. Birds’ maniacal mating tweets caused her panic, though she’d heard the same ones many times through my bedroom window. She regarded the breeze as a stranger, one who taps you on the shoulder and then disappears when you turn your head. She circled my dinner table, gave me a pensive look, and cautiously scampered off the wooden platform. I followed her as a mother would, suddenly afraid I’d given her kind of freedom I wasn’t prepared for.

I followed her around the yard at a distance. She let me, pretending I wasn’t there, nothing existing but her and the grass blades she was so determined to gorge on. I left her, deciding she could handle it. I sat down with my naan, nervously munching, my child out of my sightline, listening.

I ditched the bread and got back up.

I found a cow.

A cow, with her own field of delicious treats, grazing as the sun turned down invitations to stay the night. Lapka’s a real Bessie. When you realize she looks the part, like Cate Blanchett pulling off her Bob Dylan, it’s hilarious and you wonder how you never saw it before. A cat, but with the coat and appetite for grass to challenge any four-stomached hoofer.

“You’re no vegetarian,” I chastised, but my human words were no match for the insatiable and nonsensical urge that told her to eat of this earth. Then I wondered, “Have my parents had the lawn chemically sprayed yet this season?” I winced. Then I scooped her up and took her home and gave her treats and shut the door.

It didn’t take her long to become this girl again.

Now she sits in her cat bed next to my work desk, her chin at rest on the synthetic fleece, breathing my canned air, impervious to my old-man coughs. She may not be very good at catching bugs or digesting plants, but as company she’s tops.

 

I Can Has No More Cheezburger?

If you’re my friend, you know I’m no hippie. I’m not even a very good activist. I believe in things, yes, but it’s not often I’m the person who’s blogging up a storm on one topic, spreading any type of “good word” anywhere. In terms of mind-changing — perhaps because I’m a journalist — I tend to be a little more libertarian-like about taking stands to one side or another of broad issues: Make your own bed, live your own life, but please be well-informed before you do or tell someone else how to live theirs. I don’t claim to know the answers (I think that’s up to each of us for the most part), but what I do believe in is education and open debate.

Having said that, I’m open to being educated and debated with concerning my possible switch to vegetarianism.

There are a few things you should know about me first.

1) In the past few years, I’ve been on a personal quest to learn about nutrition and have been reading significant amounts of literature on diet and food. I’m no expert. I’m just deciding what’s good for me.

2) I love how meat tastes.

3) I have never been a vegetarian.

4) I don’t have moral objections to eating meat.

So here I am, wondering myself how I got to this point where I’m thinking of throwing in the towel on future purchases of Superdawgs, Island Burgers and all the other meaty things I proclaim to enjoy. And the quick answer is, I read a book and it opened my eyes to what I’m stuffing my face with. The book is certainly not without its flaws or apparent biases: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” is written by a vegetarian who previously has only written fiction, is written mostly in the first-person, and I haven’t yet attempted to verify many of the facts he puts forth that so affected me. But I plan to before changing my lifestyle. I would hope any person would.

Foer’s main point is that factory farming is the norm in meat production these days, and the mechanism is toxic to all involved.  According to the book, animals aren’t raised in pastures and allowed to roam and feed until they become our sustenance anymore. They live indoors in cramped quarters, have shorter lives but grow bigger thanks to new genetics, are often skinned while still alive, are pumped with antibiotics just to survive long enough to be slaughtered, are often in bad shape before slaughter, and up to 10% are in such bad shape they don’t even make it to slaughter day. And even if the animal’s life is no concern of yours, the book argues those drastic changes to food production are taking their toll on our health too. In the end, it’s not so much meat he objects to, as what it’s become as an industry we depend on and a purveyor of what we currently consider nutrition.

On chicken (p. 106-107):

The very genetics of chickens, along with their feed and environment, were now intensively manipulated to produce either excessive amounts of eggs (layers) or flesh, especially breasts (broilers). From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of “broilers” increased by 65 percent, while their time-to-market dropped 60 percent and their feed requirements dropped 57 percent. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintones vitamins.

…These genetically grotesque birds didn’t come to occupy only one portion of the industry — they now are practically the only chickens being raised for consumption.

Long story shorter, the chicken you consume exists today because companies figured out a way to produce more meat with fewer resources and money, and allowed the animal to be compromised. You’ve heard stories about overcrowding, de-beaking and Thanksgiving turkeys raised with breasts so big they can’t mate on their own, and it’s easy to think that’s not what happened to the animal at the end of your own fork. But this book has sources that claim all of this is true, and that it’s not a few crazed meatworkers or plants mucking things up, but  the norm in modern chicken production to keep down costs. It’s everywhere, and all of us are eating it.

But perhaps animal welfare is not an issue for you. Perhaps your own health is? (p. 134) After slaughter:

Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the “water in these tanks has been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around… After industry consultation, the new law of the land allows slightly more than 11 percent liquid absorption (the exact percentage is indicated in small print on the packaging – have a look next time).

… US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid.

I don’t know about you, but I personally love eating poop water and paying extra for it.

There are a lot more reasons the book gives, but this is a blog post not an essay, and if your attention has stayed with me even this long, I thank you. Do some research, know what you’re eating and what you’re feeding others. I may not be an activist, but I don’t like senseless cruelty or being robbed blindly, and none of those things has to be inherent in food production, even with meat.

When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be all personal memoir, stories about food. I read no reviews. I don’t like knowing what I’m in for. I didn’t know it had parts that resemble a modern “The Jungle”. I just knew I tend to love his writing, so I wanted to read his latest. And after finishing it last night, I went from planning a Bacon Explosion this summer to considering vegetarianism. Books don’t usually do that to me.

But hey,  if you know some good vegetarian recipes or starter programs, email me. I know a crap ton about nutrition, but mostly that which focuses on meat as a protein. So I could use some help.

 

My Top Model Obsession is Stalking Me

Sorry I’ve been gone for so long, kids. I passed on blogging for a while to focus on getting things in order here in Chicago and to work on a side project with On Look Films. But I’m back! And talking about fashion. What?

I’m a closet America’s Next Top Model lover, it’s true.  And though I’ve had to wean myself away in recent years, I watched all of Cycles 1-12, DVR’d them when I had to, and was the last of my friends to abandon it. “Hey guys, did you see what Nijah did last night???” I would ask, far after anyone I knew stopped caring. I’ve given it up only now, only because my TV schedule is so packed these days for work coverage. Do I miss it? I do. Has it jumped the shark? Honey, it got swallowed by that damn shark years ago. Yet somehow, Tyra still lives with herself.

Then I was going through designer fashions sale site RueLaLa.com yesterday, (another thing you’re allowed to question me for), clicked Catherine Malandrino’s collection and came across this one familiar face posing the whole collection.

It’s Fatima from Cycle 10! I wish I didn’t know that! And she’s posing for a CATHERINE MALANDRINO collection. That woman is tops in both the clothing and scathing honesty departments, or so she has appeared to be in judging Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel. But back to Fatima. Who knew the Snotty One We All Hated could fly so high? Checking out her Facebook account, it seems she’s been quite busy posing for BCBG, walking the runway for the Kardashians’ Bebe line at New York Fashion Week and walking in Milan Fashion week too. I’m not a fan of her ‘tude nor of being quite so acquainted with her skeletal structure, but I admit it’s nice to see someone from Top Model doing so well. Now if I could just afford/squeeze my ass into Catherine Malandrino’s clothing, that would be truly something.