Mother Loves A Mariachi

This morning I was so tired that when Indy held up a pair of zip ties cut off a bike helmet and said, "Look mom," I said "Ohhh, so cute honey."

Like she had crafted those zip ties with love?

Indy watched me with a confused frown on her face as I proceeded to pour toothpaste into my coffee.

Mother's Day weekend was one of extremes. On Saturday I stayed up until midnight, which I haven't done since 2003, drinking Espolon Tequila in my quest to "know all about all the tequilas, and stuff," (education, people) and watching Supernatural after NieNie's memoir became too much for a Saturday night.

Sunday morning when my husband and daughters came with breakfast in bed, they woke me from a dream in which I was buying ALL THE BOOKS. I sat up confused, unsure if this line of people coming in to my dream state were part of a parade or a funeral procession and wherefore all the books? But they brought me Belgian Tripel Angelfood pancakes with strawberry confit. That's right. My mother's day pancakes had beer in them. Which was good, as I needed a bit hair 'o the dog, as people say and I didn't know what they meant until I looked it up.

Then Mr. V went to work and I spent the rest of the day: cleaning, plunging toilets, saying "what did you put down the toilet? Just tell me, I won't be mad, I just need to know. Is it marble sized? Baseball sized?Was it alive?", mixing Bloody Mariachis, securing Gotham, eating walnut shrimp, giving gifts, receiving Wellies and these beautiful huge orange tulips that I would like to call "Super Tulips", eating Panang curry, buying bike helmets, boldly going, rotating three loads of laundry, opening cards from my girls that made me cry, looking at bees, making Nutella silk dip, feeling guilty, packing lunches, telling my sister that I want to travel to "everywhere, except maybe Cincinnati. Maybe," and finally, eating Tahitian Vanilla Bean and Pistachio gelato before retiring to bed with a book.

And somewhere in there, my sister and I donned our Super Hero goggles, because, Moms: Finding Remedies for Onion Tears since 10,000 B.C.

Until next time, Avengers.

-V

Austerity Now

On Saturday I made that pizza and it was so good that I made it again for Sunday lunch, and just now for Monday linner.

I left off the chicken and the bacon because I'd intended to go pescetarian again anyway, but then we went to the Boulder County Fair and I had a moment. I was starving and didn't want anything fried or on a stick, so I ordered a pulled pork sandwich. Then I followed the girls around the corner and there were the happy piggies, panting in their pens.

I had them in my mouth.

It was really weird. I felt bad and backed away from the jolly fellows. We meandered through the livestock pens, where I witnessed one farm girl sobbing and clutching her sold-off goat, and where all the chickens and turkeys and roosters were in individual pens, in a room with a few big fans in it.

And I didn't like seeing them in those cages.

And I thought about how much worse things are for the animals I actually consume.

We've been making delicious Roovy Smoovies nearly every day, as our purple-stained carpet would happily bear witness too. The girls christened them so, I don't know if they heard it, or misheard something, or just made it up. My brother-in-law Z once told me that I know smoovies aren't healthy, don't I? And now I would like to latently tell him to suck it. We make our Roovy Smoovies with lots of frozen berries and bananas, fat free organic yogurt, almond butter, wheat germ, and flax seed. You know what? Sometimes I add a scoop of Nutella and I declare that dandy. My point is that now I'm going to start tossing in handfuls of kale and spinach. You know, for protein. I hear you don't taste them in there, and I can afford that now because remember?

Pescetarian.




I also made Frozen Cherry Mojitos over the weekend. In fact, I made them twice. I didn't have any rum so I made them with some 1800 Tequila. Because I'm down like that. I ask you: is this the kind of action taken by a person who always has to follow the rulcipes? No. I can cut loose. Get jiggy, and all that. You know what other rule I scoffed? The mint rule.No mint, no rum, no problem! We are not bound by tradition here.

I left out the mint because the store was out.

It would have been better with the mint.

The mojitos were delicious, and also an appropriate send-off for my uncontrollable drinking. Just kidding, I've never imbibed uncontrollably, but I do have a confession to make.

I feel bad because all this time, I've been misleading you. I've been letting you believe that wine and I are always off together, having a good time. Relaxing and feeling all happy and cool and stuff. But that isn't true. The truth is, wine and I aren't having that much fun. Wine and I are exhausted. I have half a glass and I'm useless for three hours. And beer? You know how I'm always telling you about me and beer, and all our wonderful adventures, the tandem bike rides and the ice skating in the park? Also not true. When beer and I get together, I just feel bloated. Hard liquor? We actually feel kind of sea-sick together.

We aren't having any fun.

Don't get me wrong. I still intend to get ludicrously drunk at weddings and scream at everyone to do the Beyonce, come on, I said do the Beyonce, damnit! I just think alcohol and I are taking our relationship down a notch. We're going from married and together every night to one night stands. We'll meet up at parties and fun community outings, enjoy each other for an hour, and that's going to be about it.

So that's what I did this weekend. Shaved off some unnecessaries. It always feels good to do that, and anyway, who knows what might pop up in their place? Perhaps a butterscotch hued pair of leather. . . boots. . .that I can. . . wear to the. . . county fair, to see the. . .cows.

Shoot.


Post Script: In case you were wondering: the only thing free about the "free" Boulder County fair were the view of the carnies and the scent of manure.

Post Post Script: I learned that fancy word for fish eater from my cousin. She's got smarts and a sweet job in sustainability. When we were kids and I was buying Sour Punch Straws, she was saving her pennies. I think she might be my hero.

Post Post Script: I hardly ever actually get drunk. It just occurred to me that I assume you all can see my tongue in my cheek. But maybe you can't.

Over and out.

Four Breweries and a Wedding

So, we partied down.

There were three visits to breweries, three visits to brew pubs, don't get me wrong I'm not complaining but I'm starting to think my digestive system is not the biggest fan of beer.


O'Dells is a lovely place to start your brew tour. If you're into that kind of thing. Then head to FunkWerks and try the Maori King. All their beers are delicious but I love the tropical fruit hints in the Maori. If I had to reccommend just one O'Dells, I'd go with the Glider Cider. Brewed with champagne yeast, this baby is light on your tongue, just the right mix of sweet and tart, and goes down way too easy.

Then, stop drinking. Just stop. Your stomach will thank you.

If you can't stop, you're not an alcoholic you're just German and Czech. Make your ancestors proud and continue on to Coop's for the Sigda's Chili beer. Never had a chili beer like it. If, by this point, you find your drinking spirit is willing but your flesh is weak and bloated, ask them to mix you up the Bloody Mary with a touch of stout. You won't regret that either. Look, I swear we do things other than eat and drink when we see our family. We also talk about eating and drinking.

Order the garden salad with smoked salmon if you want to give your body any fighting chance of maintaining it's normal functions. If not, or if this is your first day of revelry and you're still feeling strong, go with the Ring of Fire burger (jalapeno, blue cheese, Frank's, oh my) or the fish n' chips, which Coop's does just right.


I swear my six-year-old is not drinking a beer.

Swing down to Oskar Blues in Longmont. Hit up the Tasty Weasel and order whatever's on tap. There's a good chance it was brewed by Mr. V. There's a better chance it's delicious. What am I saying?? This is why I don't write food/beer/travel blogs.


Next, round the corner to Oskar Blues Homemade Liquids and Solids. These guys have tons of delicious microbrews on tap and do not disappoint. My favorite's were the Widmer Pitch Black IPA, which was caramely and roasty, and OB's Workingman's Stout. Order the fried pickles, which are spicy with a light batter, and the Silo Burger, which is sooo delicious you won't care that you just consumed three kinds of meat. Then be smart like me and let your brother-in-law buy you a cocktail. Get the one with cinnamon and star anise floating on top. Easy as pie. Tastes like it, too.

After we spent two and a half days tasting every fermented beverage northern Colorado has to offer, there was a wedding. Indy and Ayla were tapped to play flower girls. It was touch and go for awhile there, with Miss Indiana Sophie crossing her arms and tucking in her chin and refusing to move. In the end she made it down the aisle just fine. She opted out of the flowers and bore the rings instead. Look, somebody had to. I'm not going to make a Frodo joke. That's because I lost my moxie sometime after switching from beer to cheap, sweet champagne.

I can't say much more about the weekend because I am a dry tap, here. My sweet libations hath all been spilt, my pleasing personality ran for the hills, and I've entered my week of cranky during which I hope to see no one and have sworn to ingest nothing but coffee with soy milk, salmon, and kale. At some point a bird pooped on my head and at another, a group of amazing women danced around me while I shimmied with a bottle of champagne.

Yep. That happened.

The last thing I would like to say is that I loves all five of my sisters and these chicks are welcome to my house any time.

Let's just do wine from now on.

There's going to be a lot of pictures now.


Noah, his Dede, and Ayla at the rehearsal dinner and let me just say, the lesson I learned this weekend is that if you're not at a restaurant that has specialty cocktails, ones they've developed and mix special, just stick with the red wine.


Susie, Sophie, Mercy. Hotness.


Flora, Fauna, Merriwether, flower chicks.







Kojo, Nyenna, Lady Ci, Ayla, Brother Trey in suspenders, and Titus, the only man who asked me to slow dance








The gorgeousness of Lucy and Nyenna.


The gorgeousness of my sisters Mercy and Lucy.


Susie almost drops the wine.


My sister Lucy and her sister Kiah. We're the new nuclear, baby.


My dad, my amazing niece La Violetta, and my mama.


Don't you guys think I am fascinating???


Moi with moi belle whatever is french for sister, Heather.








PS: Next time you're in Ft. Collins, get yourself to the Little Bird Bakeshop in Old Town Square. A latte so delicious it's ruined Starbucks for me, and the best croissant I've had since I departed Paris one sad day, ten years past. I went twice. It was grand.

Battle Pizza

Whenever I go through a creative period, I become interested in cooking. I have several theories for why this is, all of which are pretentious and irritating, so I won't be sharing them here. Instead, I'll be posting my lofty and obnoxious ideals to my twitter feed, a practice I find pretentious and irritating enough to keep up with my theories.

My point is this: I've been doing a lot of "about me" decoupage collages on paperboard lately, cutting out pictures from O mag--spiraling suns to symbolize my soul, Mary Oliver quotes to prove to me how sensitive and intellectual I am--and so after the man finger-attacking his keyboard at the library became too much to bear, I put down my scissors, got up in a huff, and checked out a Mario Batali book of recipes, naturally. Which is not the same thing as a cookbook; cookbooks are for women and are stupid and amateur, they are about the home; books of recipes are for men, they are very serious will change the world, and they are about America

After flipping through the book, the thing I was most anxious to make (I was going to drop dead if I didn't have it) was the pizza. Now listen. I've been making the Pioneer Woman's pizza for awhile. But I knew that when I made her pizza dough I was just a glorified 'housewife', one who knew how yeast worked, maybe, but a housewife nonetheless. I wanted to make Mario Batali's pizza dough so that I could be something closer to a serious chef. Even just a home chef would be better than a housewife, which is a person who stays at home to surf message boards and post angry comments about how Brittany from Glee is a dancer and an artist, dammit, and not a modern sex worker. Not that I have ever done that.

Before we go any further, I should admit two things here:

1) I cannot cook, but I can follow a recipe, and

2) I like making pizza dough because if feels both pretentious and earthy at once, and that makes me smug. I pat it like a baby's bottom and remark about how well it "came together", at which point Mr.V grabs another beer and rolls his eyes at that one spot on the wall that really annoys him.

The best thing about the Pioneer Woman's pizza dough is that, here we go again,

1) it's yummy, and

2) It's really easy.



source: thepioneerwoman.com

I've never managed to screw it up. Although one time I had lost my measuring spoons (Mr.V threw them on the floor because he hates me), so I had to "guesstimate" (a term invented by Alton Brown) on all the ingredients, from the salt to the sugar to the yeast, and it came together--there goes Mr. V again--perfectly, which can only lead to the conclusion that "P-dubs" is a sucker and I am the best pizza maker alive. For ever and ever. Amen.

(Don't even get Mr. V's family started on who is the best pizza maker alive, because that gets ugly fast. No joshin'.)

P-Dub's recipe, though, is idiot proof. Sprinkle some yeast over some warm water. Combine flour and salt. Stir in water. Voila. The happy housewife has made a dough that bakes up flaky and slightly crispy, and it takes just a few minutes. If there's one caveat, it's this: P-dub recommends you let her dough rest in the fridge for 3-4 days, and 4 is better than 3. This is totally fine if you are a person capable of thinking beyond where they are going to get their next cup of coffee and how they are going to hide it from their husband.

I am not.

Usually I mean to have pizza for dinner, but I remember the True Dough Waits thing, make the dough, heat up spaghettios, and make the pie the next day. It's always delicious.

However. Last night, in order to become like a real chef and not just some woman "playing around" in the kitchen, I made Batali's recipe from his book of recipes, his culinary grimoire, if you will, Molto Gusto.



I was a little afraid going in, anticipating lots of delicate steps and that ambiguous "knead" direction--but I was happy to see Mario's recipe is nearly as foolproof. It's almost identical, except Batali has you whisk the yeast into sugared water, which, now that I think about it, how does P-Dub's yeast activate without sugar to eat? But everything I know about yeast, I learned from listening to Mr. V talk about his "Craft", so I could be off on the details. Both forget to list one important step, which is "take time to smell the yeast water'. So I'm telling you here. Take a moment. It smells delicious.

I was feeling a little excited because if you've ever made pizza at home, you know it's a trick to get the dough cooked through in the middle and, especially if you are using good mozzarella, to keep it from getting soggy. To prevent this, Batali has you first parcook the crust on a super hot Mario Batali pizza griddle, or, if you don't have that, your lame ordinary lodge cast iron will suffice.

The dough toasted up super nice on my lodge; and I should also add that both Batali and Pioneer Woman tell you to use your kitchen aid mixer, which they do only to taunt me because they know I don't have one. But then at the end they're both like, "oh, if you DON'T have this kitchen aid mixer, you are an inferior human being and just mix it with your hands/wooden spoon/cave-husband's club, and that will be just fine for you and your kind." But whatever, they are right to mock me, because I don't have a kitchen aid mixer. The dough comes out fine without one.

Mario's recipes do have a few minor glitches. For one, he told me to use "3 and 1/2 cups of "OO" flour". It could have also been "00" flour, as in double-zero flour, as in secret agent flour. It might as well have been because either way I don't know what the crust he was talking about. I skimmed the whole book for an explanation and didn't find one. And for the sauce, he left me flailing. The directions say to use something like "1 and 1/2 cup of Pomi tomatoes". Um, what the hell? What the hell does that mean? Is that a type of tomato? A brand? Is it a sauce, a puree, are they chopped, diced, stewed, or whole? Should I buy fresh tomatoes and saute them, or should I just set them, whole, on top of my dough and hope for the best? I suspect people who live in Manhattan or Orange County could translate this for me. Why doesn't he just say at the beginning, "Look, if you are a housewife, especially one without a Kitchen Aid Mixer, this just isn't the book for you. Just wait til we get to the anchovies, you are in so over your head here"?

Mario's Book Of Recipes has several pictures of really yummy-looking pizzas that have anchovies on them. I wanted those fishies on my pizza. The instructions just call for "anchovies", so I went out and bought four tins of anchovies from the fancy section at the King Soopers, you know, the section where the aisle bulges out like a rich belly.Because that is where they keep the foods for rich people. That is also where I bought a can of San Marzano tomatoes, because nothing said "Pomi" and I'd heard good things. Well. The anchovies were disgusting, and I won't embarrass Ayla by telling you that she ate several of them, whole. They appeared to have hair sticking out of them, but it may have been bones. They were salty and fishy, like sweat plus Dead Sea, and looked nothing like the ones in the pictures, which I suspect were fresh.

I'm just saying, it would have been helpful to write,

"Anchovies, fresh. God help you if you buy canned anchovies, you stupid, stupid woman."

instead of simply,

"Anchovies".

The San Marzano tomatoes were whole, in sauce, so we just used the sauce and put on our toppings, which also included a sliced serrano pepper and kalamata olives. You won't believe it but the pizza came out soggy in the middle--even after that promising parcook. I blame my stupid sauce, and also my fancy mozzarella. The next day for lunch, I took an unused crust, skipped the sauce, put some mozzarella on it that I had inadvertently dried out by leaving it out on a "tea towel" (by which I mean kitchen towel from the dollar store) for four hours. I added some fresh sliced tomato on the top, and after it baked, some sliced avocado. It was awesome. And not at all soggy.


What I know now:

I'd probably use P-dub's recipe in the future , just to save time by skipping the parcooking step. I'm going to start drying out my mozzarella. I suspect this might solve my sog problem. I guess I'd give fresh anchovies a whirl if they are ever available here. I think I saw them once at Whole Foods. But frankly, Pioneer Woman's toppings are amazing--carmelized onion with prosciutto, anyone? Or would you prefer roasted eggplant and tomato with garlic? Look, I don't want to declare a winner because Batali had lots of wonderful combinations, especially if you can afford things like caviar and glass eels. And I still dig the theory of the parcook, even though it didn't work for me. His Quattro Fromaggi pizza looked like a true, rustic beauty. A great, simple pleasure. But to get something like that worth eating, you have to execute it perfectly. And I just can't.


I am Vesuvius and Ayla wants to try the caviar.

Hungry

I'm always looking for good recipes. Here's one. I could eat this at least once a week. I would, if it wasn't made of cheese and bacon grease. Cheese and bacon grease? You had me at hello.




Paupered Chef's Pasta Carbonara

Image from The Paupered Chef.