January 2010
January 25, 2010 at 10:02 am
As I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen yesterday evening, I realized something. I hate cooking! Cooking sucks! Sure, I have occasionally been charmed by gadgets such as the apple slicer and I enjoy eating new recipes that turn out tasty and delicious, but I still hate cooking. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I hate standing in the kitchen for an hour chopping and stirring and measuring and flipping. I hate being confused by recipes that say to squeeze the juice out of grated ginger when no juice seems to appear. I hate cleaning a dozen measuring spoons and measuring cups and dirty bowls when I’m done. Drive-throughs and pizza delivery are popular for a reason.
Still, I managed to cook some of my bok choy and ginger using the recipe for Stir-Fried Shanghai Bok Choy with Ginger from Epicurious.com. I started by peeling the ginger with a spoon over the trash can as some of you advised. And DAMN, you were right, that stuff if potent! As soon as the skin came off the [...]
January 21, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Last week Farm Fresh Delivery dropped off a crate of fruits and veggies at my door, as I have paid them to do. Included among the familiar apples, pears and mangos were these items:
At first glance they appeared to be a mutant strain of lettuce and a set of reindeer antlers. However, I have since determined that they are bok choy and ginger root. I figured this out after eliminating everything else on the invoice that I could identify.
I have absolutely no idea how to cook bok choy or ginger root. Actually, I’ve seen ginger root in the grocery store and considered buying it for my old Lick the Produce series, but decided it look far too funky for me to attempt cooking with it. Am I supposed to slice it? Grate it to get ground ginger? Tape it to a headband, paint my nose read, and call myself Rudolph? I have no clue, but now I have some in the house, so I’d better do something with it!
After some Googling, I’m leaning towards trying [...]
January 19, 2010 at 3:20 pm
I just about burst out laughing when I saw boxes of this product stacked up at the entrance of Bed, Bath & Beyond.
It’s the Snuggie for dogs! Hopefully you are already aware of the Snuggie, one of the most popular infomercial products of all time. I can just imagine the marketing team sitting around the conference room brainstorming. “How can we build on the success of the Snuggie? I know! The Snuggie for dogs!”
I particularly like how the text on the box says “Keeps you warm and your paws free!” as if it is directly addressing the dog, who is presumably reading the box by your side at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I hope the dog has got a wallet too.
January 18, 2010 at 11:08 am
The Beck Diet Solution is a six-week program of cognitive therapy which aims to make you change the way you think, which in turn helps you change your behavior. Cognitive therapists believe that all actions start with thoughts. You think about scratching your head, so you scratch it. You think about eating a bowl of cereal, so you eat it. Our thoughts and behaviors are a bit more complex than that, but if you can change the way you think, it is believed that you can change the way you act.
I will be following the Beck Diet Solution for the next six weeks and blogging about it every Monday. I’m actually at the end of week two right now, but I’ll try to catch the blog up with my real time behavior in the next few weeks. The book assigns you one task a day, letting you gradually change your behaviors little by little until you’ve changed the way you think about food and exercise. Dr. Judith Beck says it’s sometimes ok to do two [...]
January 17, 2010 at 2:12 pm
If you’re reading this post, congratulations! You’ve successfully followed the blog to its new home. This weekend I switched from the Movable Type blogging software to WordPress. You shouldn’t notice that many changes except for the big one: any links you have bookmarked for http://www.pastaqueen.com/halfofme/ should be updated to http://www.pastaqueen.com/blog For your convenience, any links to the old site are redirecting to their counterparts on the new site automatically, but it’s best to update your bookmarks as well. The good old http://www.pastaqueen.com/ link works the same as usual.
Attention Feed Readers!
If you read my site via the feed, make sure you are subscribed to my latest feed address: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pastaqueen
If I’ve moved everything over properly, you shouldn’t notice much of a difference on the front end, although WordPress will make things much easier for me on the back end. I’ve wanted to switch to WordPress for over a year, but didn’t want to hassle with importing 5 years of entries, converting all my templates, and redirecting all my old links properly. However, the current barrage [...]
My latest tweets
"What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams and what we do to make them come about." - Joseph Epstein
