One of these days I’ll write a blog where I cook everything in disgusting old cookbooks, but for now, we can just amuse ourselves with these horrors.
A Year-Long Experiment in Vintage Beauty
Tag Archives: Food
Tick Tock Dinner Clock
“Make your husband’s homecoming in the evening an important event. Don’t let him walk into a cold, dark house. Make dinnertime a special occasion.” Arlene Dahl, Always Ask a Man
Ian works two jobs, one as a newspaper photographer and the other as the director at the local Teen Center. But this means that he is home a lot, so there’s isn’t much of a “greeting” phase, since I’m the one that works outside the home, jezebel that I am*.
But Thursdays he works afternoons, so for today’s stunt, I wanted to have dinner ready to go on the table as soon as he got home just after 6. Then he got a call that he had an assignment at 6:30, pushing dinner back to 7 or later. And I STILL panicked about getting it done on time. I was planning to fry the ham, but the instructions said to bake, and clearly, I’m a slave to instructions. The sauce I tried to cleverly whip up tasted like soap, so that had to go. I even got the table set!
But the ham is baked, salads are done, with two minutes to spare . . . but where is the Honey? He’s late, which isn’t exactly his fault, but is there some housewife time-science I’m not privvy to? How did Arlene know when her man was coming home, especially without a cell phone? Or did he just have to eat a cold dinner?
My ex, Aaron, used to freak the eff out if I even spoke to him when he got home from work. He said he needed time to decompress, and since he wouldn’t let me cook, that meant waiting in front of ESPN while he ate cookie dough out of the tub (yes, tub) without offering me any until he was finally ready for the difficult task of getting a pizza. But Ian’s not a jerk, so when he DID come home, he was happy that I stood up off the couch and let him know that dinner was ready.
Ian enjoyed having dinner on the table when he came home…now if I could just get him to come home on time!
Lemon Face
A slice of lemon daily rubbed on the lips just to cause tingling leaves them pleasently red” Cora Brown Potter, The Secrets of Beauty and the Mysteries of Health
Another food-based treatment that doesn’t really work. My lips looked no more red than before, and plus, if you’re all lemony, what man is going to want to kiss those luscious red lips?
Beet Face
“With a tiny gold knife I slice a morsel from the beet and rub it onto my lips and cheek.” Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes (1988).
Beet are one of those vegetables I’m sort of afraid of. I’ve never eaten them, and I wouldn’t even know how to prepare them if I did. But I bought one expressly for this purpose, sliced off a piece with a mostly-dull kitchen knife and proceeded to put it on my face.
The beet gave my lips a slight red tint, less than my Dr. Pepper lip gloss but more than Vaseline. My fingertips took on a brilliant flush, and my cheeks took on the splotchy red tint of acne, or a bad fever.
This is why God invented lipstick–so we didn’t have to rub beets on our faces and could leave them in the ground.
The Glamorous Girl’s Diet (Updated)
HGB suggests that your work day “glamour girl” lunch should be veggies, fruits and non-fat yogurt OR a wedge of cheese. This is a very good suggestion, these are all good foods, but my usual workday lunch, which I eat at my desk, is usually a cup of delicious homemade soup, some peanut butter crackers, a banana and a two fun-sized Baby Ruths, because I deserve a treat.
Five hours into my work day and a cup of oatmeal, 6 oz of carrots and a cup of Chobani strawberry banana yogurt later, I. am. STARVING, with only a banana left to get me through the last four hours of my day.
Also, I have a headache and blurry vision, with bizarre floaters making it nearly impossible to see what’s on my screen like my computer has been taken over by J.J. Abrams. I don’t know if this is related to my hunger or to the fact that when I did manage to sleep last night (which wasn’t much) I dreamed that B.D. Wong was trying to seduce me into going on a crime spree with him, but whatever it is, it’s making it hard to concentrate.
UPDATE (2:25 p.m.) OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO DIE. My head feels like someone is hitting the base of my skull with a rubber mallet while stabbing their thumbs into my eyeballs and grinding an awl through my left temple. I’ve gone past feeling hungry to merely feeling ill. I have not eaten my banana. I can’t concentrate and I alternate feeling overheated and freezing.
BUT I WANT YOU ALL TO KNOW that I have NOT touched the Gummy Bears Cathy brought in, EVEN THOUGH I WANT ONE MORE THAN ANYTHING.
UPDATE: (3 p.m.) Ian just texted me to say he is bringing home more steak, plus shrimp and peppers. I think he’s taunting me. Only my sheer Taurus stubbornness is keeping me going.
UPDATE (4:04). Ate banana. Headache worse, but I think that has more to do with the awful bombing at the Boston Marathon than any mild feelings of hunger.
UPDATE: (4:49) Feck it all. I’m getting some crackers and trying not to cry from the sheer insanity and cruelty of the world. Today is too ugly to diet. (not a link to news stuff, I promise)
Body Issues and Other Fun Topics
“The men who insist they like girls plump are the ones who prefer cleaning rifles or exchanging jokes in the locker room to flirtation. they aren’t sure of their masculinity and appeal, so a chic, glamorous woman challenges them.” Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl.
I’ve never had a problem staying thin. I come from a slender family, I didn’t drink in college (the easiest way to avoid the Freshman 15) or eat a ton of junk food (although Eeon will testify to my amazing ability to smell a fresh BG’s Pizza from half a campus away) and I’ve had exactly eight McNuggets in the last decade. More importantly, I never uttered the phrase “OMG, I am, like, totes fat” in hopes that people would feel sorry for me.
But after I returned home from AWP, Ian commented that I had put on “noticeable” weight. A trip to the doctor’s confirmed that in the last few months, I’ve packed 10 pounds onto my 5’3″ frame. I almost started to cry.
Maybe this isn’t a big deal. Maybe some of you are saying, “Get over it, Twiggie, and eat a Twinkie.” But like all food-related issues, it goes down to something much, much deeper. For me, it’s a reminder that I’m edging up on 30 and will not always be effortlessly lithe and that’s sort of a drag. But more than that, it’s intricately linked with fears of failure.
I am terrified of being perceived as lazy. My generation is looked down upon by Gen-Xers as being spoiled little marshmallows, and the Baby Boomers that raised us think we’re a bunch of moochers who selfishly want them to give us jobs after college. And worse, we’ve got a squishly little (redacted) like Lena Dunham prancing around pretending to be the “voice” of our generation when really she’s just a rich girl writing in her diary about how hard life is for a girl to make it when her parents gave her everything, like a TV show. Life is TOTES UNFAIR, LENA.
Point is, if you’re not working three jobs eight days a week 24 hours a day, politicians in ugly suits will tell you that you are WORTHLESS SCUMBAGS and FOOD-STAMP GRUBBING WELFARE QUEENS who take the HARD EARNED MONEY (left over from their parent’s fortune) and have A HUNDRED ABORTIONS each. So I work. And I work and I work and I work and at 30 I’m homeless, unmarried and underwater on my student loans.
But with laziness also comes not being beautiful. I know wives who resent their husbands for desiring them and who believe it’s their right to wear nothing but sweatpants and eat bags of chips and watch TV, because that’s what being a woman has become to them. And I always laughed at them, thinking how selfish they were being, because honestly, if you want your husband to not be a fat lazy toad, you can’t be one yourself. I have always tried to dress for every occasion, even if it’s searching around a junkyard, because I hate looking slovenly. Looking nice was a way of telling the world, “I take this seriously.”
But for the first time in my life, I felt a little of that kind of resentment. I was angry, because I too wanted a little space to breathe, to eat, to relax without feeling guilty. I was mad at him for saying something because I wanted to believe that I had earned the right to go a little soft after everything that’s happened in the last few months. I worry that there’s a divide between wanting to be fed and wanting to be loved.
I also have major food issues that I’ve never told anyone about. I do love food, but when I get depressed (usually because I haven’t eaten), it becomes about “deserving” food. I’ve gone hungry more than once. I’ve eaten lunches made up of free samples, but when your choices are pay rent or eat, well, sometimes you have to take the risk that someone else will feed you because no one’s going to pay your rent but you. Or there are days when I get so caught up in work that there isn’t time to eat. I used to work a lot of terrible retail jobs that gave you 15 minutes break for six hours work. I know what it’s like to go hungry, and it’s a raw, brutal fear that burrows into your gut until you feel so sick you can’t eat, even though you know you have to, until the actual act of eating becomes either a forced chore or all-out gluttony as I try and eat as much as I can for fear that there won’t be any tomorrow.
But Ian’s making me lunch now. And I’ll start working out again (Arlene Style!), trying to take time for meals. And maybe somewhere in this mixed-up crazy stunt, I might actually find a way to love myself.
Doubtful, but hey, HGB has a diet where you drink wine and eat steaks, so there’s that to look forward to.
Dinner Challenge #1–Gritty’s.
“In a restaurant, let your mate or date do the ordering. It’s more fun to eat hot dogs with a man than caviar by yourself. You may know more about vintage wines than the wine steward, but if you’re smart you’ll let your man do the choosing and be ecstatic over his selection, even if it tastes like shampoo.” Arlene Dahl, Always Ask a Man
“I’m going to take you to Gritty’s,” my BFF/writing partner Matthew said. “Because I want you to feel like you’re at home.”
If I had a Pop Tart right now, I’d eat it in the bathtub!
Matthew and I are up in Freeport, ME for our annual graduate program alumni meeting and he is the subject of tonight’s study in having men order me dinner. Here’s the thing: I like food. A lot. Eating delicious food is one of my greatest joys in life, and Freeport has some of the best food in the world. Great seafood chowder, amazing lobster rolls, Wicked Whoopee Pies in Red Velvet and Orange and Gingerbread, and Gritty’s pork fries with maple sour cream, (which I will NOT be smearing on my legs.) And beer. Oh the beer!
Matthew and I travel a lot together, and he knows what I like to eat, so I put him in charge of picking where we were going to go and ordering for me tonight. He hemmed and hawed over some menus and decided on Gritty’s.
Once there, I didn’t even look at the menu. We were seated at the same long table as a father and son. The dad complimented my herringbone cap. I felt very pretty. I wanted a glass of water, but everything was up to Matthew, so I didn’t say anything.
“This is nerve-wracking,” Matthew said, pouring over the menu. “Do you like mushrooms?”
I let slip and said no, because mushrooms are gross. Oops. I would have pretended to be ecstatic if he’d ordered something with mushrooms, even as I silently gagged on them. For drinks, he ordered us two Red Claw ales, which I had never had. Normally at Gritty’s, I get the 21 IPA, or, in the summer, Vacationland. For dinner, he ordered us each a pork shank with ginger, because he had never had one either.
“I wanted us to have the same thing because I wanted us to be on equal footing,” he said. We really are partners.
The beer was excellent and the pork was delicious. Perfectly seasoned, but way too much of it. We probably could have split one and still had leftovers. The bacon hash on the side was a little much, probably could have gone with potatoes or something a little more carb-y. But all and all, a genuine good pick, and I’m not just saying that because Arlene told me to.
“Buying Food” (1950)
If I’m going to cook for Ian and my Panel of Gentlemen, I guess I’d better learn how to buy food–that Hannaford can be so confusing sometimes!
Geek Girl Goes Glam 