After getting up at 5am Sunday for a Seattle-to-Newark flight, I knew it would be nigh-impossible to make it through the end of the Oscars that evening. Luckily, Tivo came through for me and I got to see the last hour or so last night … but only because Gil helped me extend the programming time. I can be such a girl.

The main reason I tuned back in was to see the Dreamgirls medley — also, Peter O’Toole munching on tasty human brains. But PO’T exhausted himself with a vigorous round of blinking, Jennifer Hudson’s jiggle was more controlled than her singing, and Beyoncé didn’t have the oomph we’ve come to expect. Maybe she gets her verve from clingy fabrics, I dunno. Just as I was about to declare the whole thing a bust, Anika Noni Rose stepped up to show why she belongs on stage; she morphed into a diva and reminded us that there were THREE women in that movie anddon’tmakemetellyouagain.

I’m posting a clip of the segment so you can behold Ms. Rose’s gown — my favorite of the evening — as well as her performance. It’s a mystery to me that the dress didn’t get love on any of the websites I’ve seen. Petite women can have such trouble not being overwhelmed by formal wear; she owned this look.

Air travel can be so draining — dealing with rude people and their screaming kids, long waits at the airport, cramped quarters, and general inconveniences — but yesterday was filled with pleasant surprises. We arrived at the airport a little later than usual and walked right onto the plane without any pesky waiting around. Six hours later, Seattle rolled out the welcome mat with sunny skies, fairly balmy weather, and people so super-friendly and polite they won’t even jaywalk — freaky. Hertz upgraded us to a Grand (Biz) Marquis (sing it with me now: “Oh baby YOOOU! You got what I NEEEEED”), then the hotel moved us to a king suite with a supremely comfortable bed.

And then there’s Nordstrom, only a short walk from the hotel. Laura Mercier is supposed to be all that, especially for ever-so-slightly mature skin, so I hit the counter. I got my products and the (super-friendly) salesperson made a nice little commission; it’s my way of giving back to the city that already has made me feel so welcome. Product review tk, once I’ve had a chance to test drive them.

Today promises to be another good one. Gil and I plan to meet one of his grad school buddies for lunch before wandering around and doing the touristy thing. Later on, some of my St. Louis friends (and another of Gil’s school friends … more of THAT on VM) will meet at a local seafood restaurant that has a 25-cent oyster special at the bar. I figure it’s a win-win situation: If the oysters are good, we’re getting a steal, and if we get food poisoning, we’ll be healthy again by the wedding Saturday night.

And look at that: The sun just broke through the clouds. Gotta love this place.

Throw me something, mister!

Show you my WHAT?! Absolutely not! I’m no tourist, and I’m old enough to be your mother, anyway, you little …!

A kiss for a long bead? Well … ok.

***

It’s carnival season again, folks. Time to drink heavily from dawn till dusk, dance in the streets, and chow down on some delicious Cajun/Creole cooking. When the Official MI Husband and I invited people over for the Super Bowl a couple of weeks ago, we decided to make it a Mardi Gras-themed evening, so I whipped up some traditional Louisiana dishes for the occasion: Pimento cheese for snacking, red beans & rice, and king cake for dessert.

While pimento cheese isn’t really Cajun — probably every Southern family has a version of the stuff they’re partial to — it served as the “trashy” element necessary for every Super Bowl gathering. Recipes abound, but they all involve the same three primary ingredients: Cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, and pimentos. I know, but before you turn up your nose at the very thought, you really should give it a try sometime. Not when you’re home alone, watching Lost or Grey’s Anatomy, but when you have people over and feel a bit more outgoing and positive about your life. And I got the recipe from Food and Wine, so there! Even serious foodies don’t mind it, so just get off your high horse. When the flavors are balanced, it’s delicious and creamy, and feels deceptively light on the tongue — the perfect snack for game day.

***

For the two of you who don’t know, red beans and rice is the traditional Monday meal in Cajun/Creole areas. Monday was laundry day, so the women of the house needed something to cook that wouldn’t require too much attention, and nothing fits the bill better than a big pot of simmering beans. Most versions call for some kind of pork, but my family managed to squeeze in four types last time I visited, so the sky’s the limit on porcine deliciosity, really.

***

King cake. Hmmm, people almost come to blows over their preferences for this carnival dessert. I’m partial to a version made by MacKenzie’s, a local chain bakery in New Orleans, now sadly shuttered. Their brioche-style king cake was plain, but inspired real devotion among many of us. People with a serious (and non-discriminating) sweet tooth are pretty happy that they don’t have to deal with this dry, bland king cake anymore and they’ve moved on to the gooey, diabetes-in-a-bite monstrosities bakeries are churning out now, but I still mourn the loss of MacKenzie’s.

Saddened by another cream cheese and jelly-filled coffee cake version of king cake shipped to me last year, I decided to do some research and make my own. I found no shortage of people bemoaning the loss of MacKenzie’s, but very few of them knew anything about the secret recipe. But I persevered and managed to track down a couple of recipes on years-old threads, and began to adapt the recipes to something that would work in my kitchen. I’m pretty happy with the results.

King cake (originally galette des rois) was traditionally served on the Feast of the Epiphany (Twelfth Night, or January 6), which commemorates the arrival of the wise men in Bethlehem. Since that night also serves as the start of carnival season, the king cake gradually became a treat baked throughout the season, ending on Mardi Gras day. Bakers hid a small china — later plastic — figurine in the cake to represent the Christ child, and the person who found the figurine was expected to host the next party or purchase the next cake.

My sister always celebrated her birthday — January 6 — with a king cake and I did, too, but had to rely on a late Mardi Gras for the treat. My birthday actually fell on Mardi Gras a couple of times (the better of the two was my 21st), and it was like the whole city threw me a party. So much fun! But now that I know how to make the cake myself, I can have it anytime I please (if I want to go to the trouble of making it).

Recipes after the jump.

(more…)

Jane Galt’s open thread on her favorite poems got me thinking about how my taste has changed over the years. When I was young, poetry was something that really moved me, but I don’t get it the way I used to — is it something a person can outgrow? Maybe I’m just too crusty to appreciate its charms in the same way.

And yet, the final lines of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill still touch me. While I’m generally an optimist about the future and do my best to avoid wallowing in nostalgia, the way he portrayed the essence of dumb/blessed childhood before snapping shut the tomb door still gets me:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

John Donne remains my favorite poet, even though I can’t choose a single one of his poems to elevate above all others here. Like I’m not going to love an unrepentant smart-ass…

And even someone whose work is as familiar as air can surprise us with his lesser-known works. Robert Frost’s Acquainted With the Night fits the bill:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain –and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I guess I don’t read poetry so much anymore because a lot of it seems precious and irrelevant, but reading Clive James is like a biting into a lemon wedge: He’s brrrrracing! So for its relevance to my petty life (and because it’s about as juicy as a Page 6 item), The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered is my entry for favorite poem:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book –
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots–
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun”.

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error–
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

For the past couple of days, I’ve had my eye on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon from Anthony Bourdain’s wonderful Les Halles Cookbook. It’s a classic recipe perfect for this ridiculous February deep freeze that keeps hanging around like a drunken dinner guest. Yaaaaawn. Is that the time? You wouldn’t believe how early my day begins! … Oh, you get to sleep in tomorrow? That’s … great. Heh-heh. It couldn’t be simpler — ten ingredients stew for two hours and emerge as fork-tender meat in a rich wine broth.

Or that was the plan, anyway. Gil picked up the beef, onions, and carrots for me last night while I took care of things around the house. The onions looked slightly better than the cancer-ward limes he brought back for his gin & tonic, so I figured they’d be ok. “Ha-HA,” fate, she does laugh.

We caught an early showing of Pan’s Labyrinth (terrific fairy tale movie, but not as fantasy-driven as I expected from the trailer) at the mall today and I hit the kitchen just as soon as we returned. I took out the cutting board and my lovely new santoku knife, ready to make short work of the onions sitting before me. But the first onion had a large weeping spot near the top when I cut into it, so into the trash it went. The second felt oddly deflated near the root end, so it followed the first. The third obviously suffered great misery at the hand of its tormentors so I performed a merciful act of euthanasia. Numbers four and five will haunt me for weeks and I … still can’t speak of them.

Sigh. So I prepared a vacuum seal bag, thinking I’d freeze the meat and cook it when we return from Seattle next week. After pulling the package from the refrigerator, I realized that there were two long tears in it on opposite sides, so some of the beef had oxidized. Not wanting to unintentionally poison us (as I almost did with undercooked-looking sausages last night), I consigned the beef to the same pauper’s field as the onions. May they find peace.

Yes, there are good things about living in Ringwood, but a lack of competing grocery stores isn’t one of them. Lucky for us, Luigi’s Pizzeria is, so we’ll be ordering in tonight.

*When I give my work friends the weekend recap on Mondays, I always feel like the 40-Year Old Virgin describing how he satisfied his egg salad craving. So I’ve decided to own it and spare them the conversation by posting weekly updates of my cooking exploits for all to see, share, and nod at sadly.

Hey, folks. As Gil promised, here are my photos from the San Diego trip last weekend. Sorry I’ve been out of touch, but I picked up a nasty bug from the SARS Family Robinson seated behind us on the flight. Bah!

Anyhoo, enjoy!

Back when The Anna Nicole Show was on the air, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Unlike the slightly less addled rocker on The Osbournes, she didn’t seem to be in on the joke or even get that there was a joke and I felt dirty for seeing her in such a state.

Given her fluctuating weight, substance abuse problems, and the recent death of her son, I’m sure no one was surprised by today’s news. But I think we should all reflect on happier times, before she started her final spiral, when she was really just a bosomy Dan Quayle.

For the best weekly Idol recap since Dave White’s, check out Briantologist’s photo study on Flickr.

Trust me.