Jeremy and Rita came over last night. We told them we had cabbage, tofu, sweet potatoes, and onions. They brought over mushrooms, parsley, and wine. Jeremy is a much better cook than I, so I committed to making our little cupcake friend above. Jeremy and Rita committed to making cabbage roles, without knowing that when we said "cabbage," we meant "purple cabbage." Also, Jeremy later admitted that all along he was picturing lettuce wraps, not cabbage rolls. So basically, we're lucky we ate at all.
Um, let's see...things we learned. Cabbage rolls take HOURS to make. If I was in a spelling bee and had to spell "parsley," I would definitely fall prey to the bell. Jeremy learned to cook with mushrooms. I learned that even if you husband turns down the oven down to 270 (!!!) in the middle of baking 12 mini souffles, those little souffles will be just fine so SORRY, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT I DIDN'T MEAN TO RUIN YOUR STUPID CUPCAKES ALREADY, says Tim. We also learned that boiling a purple cabbage turns the water a nice shade of window cleaner blue.
1. I've really been meaning to spend more time watching the winter Olympics. Being a midwestern, snowy, Norwegian type of lady, I really enjoy the history of winter sports.
2. I would say that when I was a single lady, red hair was something I found attractive. And I like the red that is in Tim's beard. But I can't help making this comparison every time I see Shaun White:
Sorry. I know. I KNOW. It's wrong. But I can't help it. It's the long red hair, I just can't get it out of my head.
Also..
How tasteless is this? All I wanted to know is why this American woman is wearing a tiara to receive her silver medal? I wanted to pull for you---you're the underdog! Lindsey "too much makeup" Vonn won and I wanted to really be happy for you. Sad. Really sad.
Also...
I love Bob Costas. You're so calm and know everything about every sport. Love you, Bob.
I brought Tim up to Janesville, WI last weekend to view a sing-along of The Sound of Music. We both needed a stop at Taco Johns as soon as we crossed over state lines (did you know they have a burrito with Fritos in it? Just think it over for a bit...doesn't sound so bad) so we arrived late and missed the costume contest, where one person reportedly dressed as Leisel's self esteem. Heh.
The Sound of Music sing along also encouraged several crowd responses to the action on the screen:
Barking when Ralph came on screen Hissing at the Baroness Booing any Nazis Cheering for Maria Swaying back and forth with a plastic sprig of edelweiss (provided for you) Laughing at the seven grown-ups in sweatshirts with Do, Re, Mi, Fa (NOT FAR, stupid sub titles), So, La, Ti try to keep up with the Von Trapp children. Pretty funny.
Why did we go to Janesville for this? Our friend Liz invited us! Liz is a friend that has seen (and verbally repeated many times) me on my worst behavior, usually because she was encouraging or at least enjoying the same bad behavior. She has more student debt than you can shake a stick at, reads more books in a week than I do in a year, and will let you know if you owe her a phone call. She's one of the two people in my life that call me Ruthie. There are typically no surprises at this point of a friendship.
Which is why I was surprised that she loved the Sound of Music. We both tend to lean more toward Bikini Kill than musical scores, but apparently both Liz and her little sister Emily spent every Christmas at home singing along, dancing, and doing actions to the Sound of Music with their mom. So. Watching her and her sister sing along word for word on every song, and scream "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" along with Leisel was a high point of 2010.
My friend Stephanie and I have been trading a couple Sundays a month to teach each other how to bake goodies and Indian food. We decided pizza was our next baking tutorial, and used a great honey pizza dough receipe that we found on-line, asked people to bring a couple toppings, and ended up with a kitchen full of banana peppers, spinach, goat cheese, mushrooms and pineapple. Woot woot!
The pizza dough was great, and we ended up making two double batches and spreading them between five pizzas. This gave us five crusts on the thin side, but we were lucky enough to also have three pizza stones to use. We heated up the pizza stones, rolled out the dough, and then put the pizzas together on the stone. We baked them for 12-15 minutes at 450.
All but one pizza had red sauce and a smattering of ingredients. To make a scruptious and simple sausage and onion pizza like you see above (adapted from Daisy Cooks), brown 4-5 links of sausage in a pan until they are cooked through. Then remove from the pan to cool and add 4-5 thinly sliced onions and an inch of water;cook on medium for 15-20 minutes. The onions will get soft and translucent and take on the flavor of the sausage (meow). Then spread the onions evenly on the pizza and tuck in sliced sausage pieces and bake. Declicious, and you really taste the pizza bread this way, too.
Congrats to us for having just the right amount of pizza and beer for what ended up being 15 people, and boo to the Saints who took out the Vikings. Boo.
My friend Rita and I got together for a good 4 mile run on Wednesday before catching a ride up to The Vic in Wrigleyville for their Brew and View series. I didn't really know what to expect---I knew that it was an old vaudeville theatre that hosted concerts and on their off nights played double or triple features for $5. Wednesday night's package was a triple, but we paid for a double of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Rushmore.
There was no seating left by the time we got to the theatre, and we opted to sit on the first tier of flooring----the whole place was set up like a Las Vegas supper club with terraces of bench seating and tables tossed around hap hazardly. It was dark and noisy, and sitting cross-legged on the floor and craning my neck up at the screen made me feel even more like a kid sitting on the floor of the city hall or high school gymnasium in Hebron, ND. Except for the beer. There was a private party in the upstairs of the theatre and we could periodically hear yelpings and shouting. Also, the projector cut out for about 10 minutes in the middle of the movie. But you know what? NO ONE CARED. We paid $5 and were watching a great movie surrounded by a bunch of other Chicagoans trying to fill their Wednesday night.
Mr. Fox was great---watching stop motion animation always reminds of this great PBS show my brother and I used to watch that was hosted by James Earl Jones called Long Ago and Far Away. Somebody spent time curating and programming that show with claymation (a sad/weird story about a circus), stop motion puppets (The Fool and the Flying Ship, a five day extravaganza!), delicate animation with pastels (Bunny, the story of a brother learning about his autistic little sister), and short stories with kids playing almost all the roles (the story of a boy deciding to go and live in a tree to escape his stressful family life, where neighborhood kids would send bologna sandwiches up to him in pails he lowered down). I owe much of my love of performance to that show.
After Fantastic Mr. Fox ended, most people left so we grabbed some cushiony seats, extra beers, and a box of Dots. I haven't watched Rushmore for a long time on the big screen, but the combination of watching the movie with Rita (who had never seen it), Stacey and her box of Dots, and hearing the familiar music and characters gave me the sense of belonging in Chicago. I feel the same way after seeing a surprisingly good play or a musical performance that puts me in a trance. How am I one of the few people here, in this room, able to take in this once-in-a-life-time note, line, or moment in front of art? The note will never be sung again by that performer ever again. Not to our audience. Being that happy just based on what I am hearing, seeing, or feeling, takes me back to my childhood when I saw something for the first time---a lizard, a gun, flowers from mom's garden, or the BBC's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So even when I'm sitting on the floor of an old theatre in Chicago surrounded by a bunch of hipsters and Wrigleyville students, I feel like that little kid on our farm again.
I took the suspension of disbelief home with me. My husband and I both have jobs we like, we're meeting people we would have otherwise have never met, living iamongst a culture we knew nothing about, seeing art that is being performed no where else, and going home at night happy to see each other and hear about our best friend's day. In a city where there are million dollar mansions down the street from me, hoards of people who can afford to put their names on buildings, and Bentleys being driven down State Street... sometimes I feel so lucky.
