It keeps reverting to default.

WP says this is not their problem, that it’s a problem with how the theme is interpreted and blah blah, but what I know is that I found a theme I like and WP is making it not work right. Dear WP, plz fix. So if you’ve stumbled across this site and it’s the standard blue boring Kubrick, come back some other time and it’ll be the prettier modified Atahualpa theme.

In the next few days I’ll be adding a bunch of food-related posts that have been made on Facebook instead of a blog, and that fine tradition will continue here. I’ll explain more as I go, I promise.

Happy almost Inauguration Day!

In the effort to throw something – anything – out of my brain and into the tronotubes, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. It seems like I am falling into at least one pattern of housewifery that doesn’t make me want to tear the heads off Barbie dolls and fling them into the fire. And miraculously, cooking and eating food I would never gravitate towards naturally which, by the way, has been taking me to a place I normally would not ever, ever go.

Whole Foods.

Now, before anyone gets their organic, fair-trade  panties in a bind, I don’t have a moral opposition to healthy or natural crap. I’m a consumer’s consumer, I’ll buy pretty much anything that catches my eye that won’t offend my delicate midwestern financial sensibilities (i.e, i’m cheap). The last part there is why I don’t shop at Whole Foods, or at any other natural foods/product stores. The prices! I can’t stand it! Some part of me just cannot cope.  So, I told you that so that I could continue with this thing about the unusual foods.

I got a wild hair to make vindaloo for Warren. As a general rule, I don’t ever go, “You know, I think I want Portuguese/Indian food.”  I’m not big on curry, lamb, anything that isn’t deep-fried and covered in Crisco and gravy, so on and so forth. But I heard Warren crying in his sleep late one night, and it sounded something like, “Please, please stop making me eat green beans in pork fat. Please, not another bite of pan-fried chicken breast! No, no, no more homemade mashed potatoes with two sticks of butter and half a cup of whole milk!”  It was pitiful, and after I was done mocking him ruthlessly and with vengeance I decided that extra dose of mercy might go a long way towards keeping me from charbroiling in the Lake of Fire..

So, I found a recipe that looked relatively simple and sounded OK and still involved my favorite animal, pork. Mmm, sweet bacon, love of my life. But in this case, pork tenderloin. All of the ingredients were easy to find – except garam masala. I looked for it for three days. I went to Target. I went to Albertsons. While searching for substitutes on the internet, some genius mentioned World Market (or Cost Plus, depending on where you live). So off I trod, toddler-in-tow, to World Market (which, if you’ve never been, is possibly the worst  place to take a kid to whom everytime is grabbytime.)  And yet, I was foiled again. Not to be defeated, I asked a clerk at the World Market if he knew where one might locate such a rare and fascinating spice blend, and lo, he shined the light on the dreaded…the awful…the….

Whole Foods.

At this point, if he would have said to look under an old hooker’s left breast fold, I would have been like, sweet, know where I can find one, but still, I was dismayed because my one previous experience with the place – which until recently was known as Wild Oats, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom – left me with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, something like the taste you get when you see a really cute pair of shoes with a $1,500 price tag. I’m a goer, though, so I went and they had not one, but two different brands of the miraculous garam masala! And even more amazing, they were less than I would have expected them to be. Except one of them was salt-free and I could not wrap my brain around the idea of something being salt-free. Everything in my life has salt.

Unfortunately, I also recalled that I was scheduled to whip up some tacos for dinner that night per my Weekly Menu of Terrible Doom* and failed to get cheese. As you know, one cannot eat a taco without cheese, that would be like eating tortilla chips without queso or an omelette without eggs, and so since I was in an alleged grocery store I might as well go see about the cheese.

I think I had a minor stroke in the dairy section, to be honest with you. $6 for TWO  CUPS OF SHREDDED MEXICAN BLEND, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!?! And then Greyson looked at me and was like, hey, Mom, don’t be such a cheap-ass ho. So I had to call Warren and tell him that he had to pick up cheese on the way home because I would have an aneurism and possibly explode if I had to pay $6 for a miniscule amount of cheese. My phone was breaking up and for a minute I thought he laughed at me and asked for a divorce, but what he apparently really said was that I should stop being ridiculous and buy a block of cheddar to shred myself.

Damn him and his common sense, not that I was thrilled by the price of a block but I have to pick my battles.

So, my tacos were delicious as was, surprisingly, the pork vindaloo. I would probably eat it again, if only to save Warren from having to eat fried chicken yet again, the poor soul. Then I made him fry me up some hot wings because I can’t be trusted with anything that might cause an accidental housefire.

*I thought about scanning a couple of them in, but decided that no one, least of all me, could possibly care.

After months of fruitless longing, I have finally acquired not just a Wii – which was a chore in and of itself – but also my whole reason for wanting a Wii – Wii Fit!

I’m not much of one for reviewing things because I feel ridiculous doing it, but I just wanted to share that I did 35 minutes today of strength training, yoga and balance games and I hurt in ways I was not aware I could hurt.

And here I thought my daily meanderings to the mailbox counted as exercise. Tomorrow is going to be awful, I can just tell.

Anyway, it’s so much fun! I’ve always wanted to try yoga, since I have such a hard time relaxing it seemed like something I would get a lot of benefit from. Earlier this afternoon I was doing the tree pose and Warren goes, "You seem to be well suited to yoga, I hope you’re not insulted by my surprise." or something very like that. I suspect he was commenting on my outstanding natural grace.

OK, fine, or my obvious lack thereof. Anyway, it’s nice to be able to try it out without publicly humiliating myself. So, Wii Fit gets two thumbs up from for that alone, let alone the fact that I can slalom, ski jump and hula hoop!

The console itself was bundled with Wii Play, Wii Sports and Super Mario Galaxy. I haven’t played the latter at all, though Warren seems to enjoy it. Play is very…meh. Wii Sports is bad ass. I never thought I had violent tendencies but I gravitate towards the boxing like it’s cornbread or something deep-fried. I’m all pow pow BAM! It’s impossible to be mature about because the whole time I’m playing I’m hunched over with the remote and nunchuk like I’m boxing for real and trash talking my non-human opponent. I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t enjoy it so much.

So, in conclusion, if you don’t hear from me it’s because I’ve either sprained every muscle in my body or I’m boxing on my Wii. ^_^

And all that, just for the introduction to a short list! Anyway, because I read so prolifically and obsessively, I quickly run out of the authors known to me and hit up the library selecting at random. I carry a green tote of doom to le bibliotheque and I have very little criteria about the books that end up there – I read the first page, then find a more…involved scene in the middle. If I don’t roll my eyes, it goes in the bag. Once home, if I make it 20 pages in without my lip curling in disdain, I’ll keep reading. If I make it halfway through without being bored to tears, I’ll pick up another book by the same author. Really it’s quite systematic and I cannot possibly imagine anyone reading this being interested in my book selection methodology. I’m sorry, I just get so caught up in the setup.

What I really want to say is that Lisa Kleypas deserves public ridicule for a multitude of things, but since I just finished one of her books tonight and this in particular stood out:

The phrase “…amorous, marauding mouth”

I MEAN, REALLY.

Never mind that there are scads of historical romance novels (I favor Regencies, personally) that are so well written that the genre is incidental, that phrase single-handedly illustrates why Warren sneers at my reading material. Well, that and the god-awful cover art on so many of them, but still. Yes, it loosely makes sense, the adjectives fit and contextually it was fine (though no actual plundering in the piratical sense was occurring) BUT IT SOUNDS COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. AMOROUS MAURADING.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go amorously maraud my refrigerator.