The Ideal Cocktail

Oh damn.

I guess, I need to get down to it.  It is the day before T'day.  I have been poking the sleeping bird in the fridge, not to wake it as much as to determine the extent of frostbite.  DH bought a frozen turkey.  2 days to defrost in the refridgerator, the label reads.  Today is day #3 and it's still a solid avian iceberg.   So this morning, cup of coffee in hand, I figured today is going to be turkey spa day.  I filled the sink with cold water, as the label directs and hoisted Mr. Tom into the sink for a long, long soak.

I am a turkey virgin.  I normally find making reservations the best cure for the stress of holiday cooking.   But this year, I couldn't make up my mind: the gorge-til-you-drop buffet at our Favorite Indian restaurant.  I know, it's vegetarian, but the paneer is to die for.  Or should we aim the $200 fancy-dancy formal black tie restaurant up in secluded Marin. I would have loved to get all dressed up, but I know DH, he'd rather stick red hot pins in his eyes than don a suit and tie and drive for 2 hours and pay $200 to eat would be too tired from work, and deserved a day of football on the TV. So, good wife that I am (plus, I am going to be sure that the $200 we save, will be put to good use on Friday),  I suddenly morphed into Suzy-where's-my-drink-Homemaker.

Cooking all day tomorrow fills me with an odd combination of awe and dread.

Doesn't this just make you wanna pour a stiff cranberry ('tis the season!) and vodka martini?

I wish. Silly me, I gave up cocktails after my last job.  Or more precisely, I gave up drinking many, many cocktails at one sitting.   I've been good too, not a drop of vodka has crossed the transom since my decision to face life sober.  If it's in the apartment, it's mine, all mine, to drink.   Actually, my decision to limit my drinking was hardly based on anything as noble as wishing to be sober.  The quest for sobriety played nary a factor in my decision.  Not at all. My choice was based on vanity born from the shock of a double digit dress size.

I swore off buying vodka one day after DH had to help me zip up a dress.  Pliers should never find a place among your beauty tools.  I figured 'twas time to go on a diet.  Calculating that I was consuming enough calories to support a small island inhabited with natives who only thrived on pie and fried chicken, I figured I would forgo the greasy lunches, forage like a bunny on salad for dinner, but give up my cocktails?  My math surely was off.

I actually spent the next week obsessed with googling low-cal or ever the optimist, no calorie vodka.  There's nothing out there.  Organic vodka, artisnal small batch vodka, vodka flavored with exotic fruits or even chocolate or jalapenos, but calorie-free vodka?  Believe me, if ever there was a niche market, there it is. One could make billions.

Vodka, it seems has the least calories of any alcoholic beverage.  It's super fat packing properties, as with all alcohol, comes from its ability to turn into sugar once ingested which circumvents the liver's ability to metabolize the stuff.  Sugar = fat.  Thus, the stuff packs on the pudge like nobody's business and a lot quicker than a month of evenings spent in front of the TV while eating boxes of Ding Dongs and planks of chedder cheese and peanut butter crackers. Drinking cocktails with a devil-may-care abandon has the same effect as injecting bacon fat directly into your butt and thighs and (for me) arms and belly and face (everywhere, except, unfortunately, my hair--fat hair would be nice). 

This sad, lard dripping realization is as traumatic as finding out that Santa Claus is a fraud or that Prada can sometimes be found at TJ Maxx (I mean, if you can buy a Prada purse at a discounter, then everyone else can, making it democratic not special).  Besides, if I really had my choice, I'd prefer my caloric excesses to be chewable.

What I soon discovered was that besides missing inches, I missed that constant jagged fuzziness called a hangover. Mother Nature is a cruel and horrible shrew at times.  One of her best and perhaps cruelest of jokes is that once you pass 30, hangovers seem to last a lot longer. An eternity longer. Now, mornings are no longer things to fear.  I can now put on mascara and not feel as if my eyelashes are bruised.   More importantly, after a bit, my skirts suddenly zipped without help from tools from the garage. Stoked by less of me, I figured I could hasten my shrinkage if I actually got up and moved as well. 

I discovered that moderation and movement make the ideal cocktail.  I am serious about never saying no to anything that tastes good or makes me feel good.  Pleasure  rocks!  I don't kill myself running, and I never turn down a cocktail.  I just turn down the 3rd and 4th! and I make sure to put movement somewhere into my day. To me, this seems the most healthy.  I can never understand people who derive smugness from self-deprivation.  Where's the fun in that?  I think I'd rather have the chocolate and the chance to share it.  

In fact, the other night, DH and I stopped for cocktails and I had a mojito made not with the traditional mint, but cilantro.  Yeah, cilantro...pretty cool.  But since DH ordered a plate of crab puffs, I had only the one drink in favor of half of the crab puffs.  With the caloric save, I didn't feel the urge to pick up a spoon to check my reflection to see whether or not I had suddenly grown pointy ears and a piggy nose. 

So for Thanksgiving, I have am anticipating a glass or two from wicked bottle of Shiraz DH picked up last night and just a healthy serving of everything!

Besides the turkey...I'm making a red wine and cherry reduction to glaze the bird:

Here's an easy recipe--it's good on almost any meat:

Red Wine & Cherry Glaze

2 cups of good red wine
1 12oz  bag of frozen cherries (unsweetened)
2 tbl of honey
1 tbl minced garlic
1 tbl minced ginger
a dash of thyme and red pepper flakes

Simmer until the wine reduces by 1/2.  Use a pastry brush to baste the glaze on the turkey, chicken or pork.

May your Thanksgiving be filled with lots of good things--if ya gotta pig out, pig out on the love and warmth of family and friends.  If that doesn't work, go ahead, pour yourself a stiff one!  But just one or two!

Notes from the Center

Sometimes I am the center of my own universe.  Let me tell ya, it's a quiet and lonely place.  Living there is like being swathed in bubble wrap with cotton wool stuffed in my ears. My, what a pretty image!  I can't see out, nor hear a peep.  Or rather, the bits and pieces of reality that manage to seep in arr more often than I like to admit, really distorted.  Oh the downfall of solipsism no one tells you about!

Yesterday, I had a major epiphany as to how steep a slope this downfall really is.  Let's go skiing, right?  Well, really, this is not a happy ride to take. Usually that abrupt ending--kinda like a free fall--is met with a resounding thud.  The truth can be as hard as the very ground upon which we walk.

As I got ready to run errands yesterday, I donned my leopard print trench coat.  I bought this a year ago.  At the time, I was working outside the home. Part of the cache of the job, besides a paycheck, was that my office was surrounded luscious dens of grease and salt.  When lunchtime rolled around, I would push my way to the elevator and then scurry to the lobby...standing on the sidewalk, I felt like a kid in a candy store.   If I turned left and walked 1/2 a block, I had two Chinese restaurants to choose from--one was decidedly Americanized--but very cheap and super fast. If I turned right and walked around the corner, I had a Cajun restaurant--yum! Deep fried catfish and cheesy grits or a Tex Mex dive that served pork burritos the size of my cat.  I often went to the left.

In the Americanized Chinese hole-in-the-wall I could eat and be back at work in about 30 mins. In under 10 minutes and for about $5!, I'd be dining on a shiny shimmering platter of chow mein with a FREE egg roll.  But the other place was heaven!  Much more authentic.  I could devour all things fermented and brined:  Salted fish and duck egg fried rice was often my drug of choice.  Meals like this connect to an almost reptilian memory buried deep inside of me.  I am half Chinese, I grew up within walking distance of San Francisco's Chinatown. My mother, was anglo -- dust bowl Okie -- but was a fanatic about things Chinese.  She raised her children to appreciate smoked duck feet and thousand year old eggs. If it reeked to the untrained nose, we knew the truth, it tasted good, really good.  Heck, she would eat and often much to our horror, offer us the opportunity to eat things that would make me leap up from the table or sit there, frozen by the fear that the dish might come alive and slither or fly off the plate.  To this day, my one culinary rule that is never violated is that if I am eating meat or fish, it cannot look anything remotely like it did when it was scampering or swimming about.  Calamari must be cut into little rings...not bluish little baby squids bobbing up in down in a salty fish broth.  I remember my mom ordering that dish in a Chinese restaurant, as the grownups ooo'd and awww'd, I sat there frozen in utter horror.  I was prodded to 'just try a tiny bite...' I did, leading me to form culinary rule #2: Food should not bounce when you bite it. But if I focused on the crab in lobster sauce, the baby squid would leave me alone.  There was always something good, if not too scary to savor.

Unfortunately, DH isn't always as appreciative of the more savory aspects of Asian cuisine.  I married a white guy from Houston.  However, I will admit he has impressed me more than a few times.  He knew what Pho was before we met.  He will go for Dim Sum on a crowded Saturday morning--and politely decline the chicken feet instead of gasping when the waitress proffers the dish.  But things aromatic?  I have to use them judiciously.  So, things like salt fish and jars of pickled cabbage make rare appearances in our kitchen.

So, when I discovered a restaurant near my office that served these things, I was home.  I'd order a heaping plate of fried rice that had salty unctuous chunks of salted fish and juicy cubes of fatty bacon made from duck.  I wanted to hug the cook.  I'd waddle back to my office all shiney and more than a little sleepy but inordinately happy.

Waddle is the key word here.  To increase the waddle, four hours later, I would be back home, cooking a gravied and creamy dinner for DH and me.  To make this happen, I was slightly lubricated with a couple of cocktails to assuage the effects of a teeth-grinding commute and the normal tensions of a workaday life.  After a year of this gourmande exuberence, (I really mean 'gourmande' in the true French sense of the word:  Gourmande = glutton, whereas, the word gourmet = is one who appreciates good food, why people fail to know this, amazes me), I had almost doubled my dress size.

I was amazingly blind to this.  When I went shopping for clothes, I really was perplexed as to why sizing had changed.  I figured they really had.  A large was really yesterday's small.  Oh, that wacky fashion industry!  I know, this makes no sense.  But when you are the center of your own universe, you call the shots.  Your reality, is your reality.  The leopard trenchcoat is proof of this.

I fell in love with its picture in a J. Crew catalogue. Oooh, I had to have it.  So I ordered it in the size I had worn for the last 10 years.  I have always been a perfect speciman of that size--it was weird, I would pick anything in that size, and it fit--always.  When the coat arrived, I put it on and the arms were snug.  I could wear it, but not over a sweater, I figured.  I couldn't button it, but it's a trench, I could tie it like a bathrobe, I thought.  No problem.  But damn!  I was incenced by the shoddy sizing.  For the price, and reputation of the company, I wanted more.  I fumed every time I wore it.  I should write them a nasty letter, I often said out loud as I stuffed my pudgy arm into the sleeve.

The letter I would have received in response to my misguided missive would have started "Dear Fat Ass:..."

I know that.  When my job ended, so did my foray into the exotic land of lard and salt.  Also, it slowly dawned on me that I really was out of breath from being f-a-t, and not suffering from a weird allergy...I had increased in girth and the apartment had not shrunk. So, I started working out, quit drinking quarts of Vodka and ate more salads.  Amazingly, this worked.  There is now a lot less of me, and I am back to the size I have always been.

Yesterday, as I was getting ready to leave, I put on the leopard trench -- I was flabbergasted--it buttoned and I was wearing it over a bulky sweater dress.  J. Crew had not conspired to sell me a shoddily sized coat after all.  All that angst and anger!  Imagine!

Sometimes, it is a good idea to step out of your own center and to take a peek from the outside to see what is real.

I mentioned in a previous post that DH and I eat a lot of chicken.  For the most part, it is healthy...or at least, a teenier bit less in calories than fattier beef.  Here's what I did last night:

Pomegranate Chicken

3 chicken breasts
1  bay leaf
Pam nonstick spray -- Olive oil
1 tsp of red pepper flakes
1 packet of McCormick's Grill Seasoning packet
1 16 oz bottle of POM pomegranate juice
1 12 oz bag of sliced crimini mushrooms

• Spray the chicken breasts to coat with Pam Olive Oil spray
• cover with the contents from the grill seasoning packet and red pepper flakes
• place coated chicken and mushrooms in a pretty deep baking dish
• cover with the POM -- add a little chicken broth if necessary.
  
• Bake at 400 for 40 minutes -- let the chicken brown a little as the liquid cooks away.

Enjoy!