Wee Feast

There is something extremely soothing about making homemade bread. It’s great for those weekend mornings when you wake up at the time you’d usually be up for work (early), and just want to putter around the house. You can even watch a mini-marathon of The Millionaire Matchmaker and pretend like you’re just watching it to pass the time during your loaves’ rises and baking time.

If you’re not southern (and really, that’s tough), you might not appreciate the glorious substance that is buttermilk. Buttermilk is what’s left over when you churn cream with some milk to make butter. The milk is really more of a milk bath, as all the cream becomes butter, and you’re left over with some tangy, low-fat milk. You can also make buttermilk by souring regular milk. This ethereal liquid adds a rich, sour flavor to baking. It’s sort of like the sour flavor in yogurt; subtle but creates body. It also makes your finished baked product tender with a fine crumb (as all milk tends to do in baking), with just enough fat to be interesting.

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Your friend sends you an e-mail asking if he heard something you said or did through the grapevine correctly. He’s not mad—far from it, he assures you—he just want to make sure they have all the facts straight.

Your coworker says she’s completely behind your team’s idea. On presentation day, she calls in sick.

Your roommate walks in the house, slams the door, and throws his bag on the floor. He jerks open the fridge, cracks open a beer, and kicks the cabinets closed. “Bad day?” you ask. He walks right past you and locks his bedroom door behind him.

What to all these scenarios have in common? They’re indicative of passive-aggressive behavior.

Everybody has a different definition of passive-aggressivity, but for me it’s very simple. Someone has angry feelings, and they lash out at others indirectly in an attempt to deal with those feelings. The benefit of the indirect action is that it allows that person to deny their feelings or actions. This is because this person either don’t know how to or chooses not to deal with his or her feelings in a more productive way.

Steps to becoming less passive-aggressive

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Sola is a real, live, single lady dating in an urban metropolis. I’ve asked her to share some thoughts with you, my lovely readers, on online dating and good general rules to follow in the dating game. Enjoy! Coop

Read dating commandments 1-5 here.

And I’m back with the second and final exciting installment of Dating Commandments! I must thank Match.com for some truly amazing experiences that inspired the making of this list. Thank you, Match.com, I truly could not have done it without you!

6. Thou shalt be thy best self.
This is more of an expansion on commandments 1-5, but this stems from the fact that, miraculously, your date (usually) doesn’t know anything about you as a person. When you date someone, you get the chance to reinvent who you are, to show him or her how charismatic, witty, thoughtful, charming, and fabulous you really can be. If you do end up in a relationship with this person, then and only then can you introduce him or her to your cranky self, your neurotic self, your downer self, and all the other less than flattering aspects of yourself, because by this point you’ve got them hooked and their tolerance for bullshit is much higher…because, let’s face it, they’re willing to put up with a lot more just to get some.  Telling slightly self-deprecating stories to prove that you don’t take yourself too seriously: okay. Going over every fuzzy detail you can recall from last weekend before you blacked out and woke up naked in some stranger’s bed: not okay.

7. Thou shalt NOT break up…before five dates.
Here’s the thing: dating is meant to be casual. Very few strings are attached, and you have little to no obligation to the person you are dating, a simultaneously wonderful and frustrating thing, depending on your level of attraction. If you don’t want to see someone again, don’t answer or return his or her call…it’s that simple. You may feel that the ‘right’ thing to do is to be completely honest about your feelings and have some sort of confrontation, but in reality, being vague is ideal, especially when you’ve only gone out on a couple of dates. Admitting (over the phone) that you just don’t feel the connection if your date confronts you: okay.  Waiting until the very end of the third or fourth date to tell your date, unprovoked, that you’re just not attracted to him or her at all: not okay.

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Have you ever noticed that your basic jar of tomato sauce tastes one of two ways: sweet or flat? Even when they claim to be slow-stewed or made with fresh ingredients, they taste either cloying or one-note. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy making your own pasta sauce from an onion, canned or fresh tomatoes (maybe both), and whatever herbs you have lying around. This sauce is a great way to add a little depth to your basic homemade sauce by reducing about a cup of red wine in the sauce. It makes your basic spaghetti night a pleasure, helps you finish up that bottle of wine without a hangover, and takes your pasta bake or casserole to the next level with relatively little effort.

In short, you should make this sauce.

It’s a Deborah Madison recipe, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

Make the sauce

1. Open a bottle of red wine, preferably something smooth and tasty you’re in the mood to drink. Pour yourself a glass. I used Barefoot’s Cabernet Sauvignon. The taste won’t blow you away, but it’s cheap and surprisingly smooth. Very drinkable.
2. Finely chop up an onion or two. Cook it in pan with a little olive or canola oil until transparent to caramelized, depending on how you like your onion flavor. Stir in a teaspoon each of dried oregano and savory, if you have it. If not, choose whatever herbs you prefer. Basil would also be a good compliment. When the onion is almost done, add a few cloves of finely chopped garlic. You need to add garlic at the end, because by the time the onions are cooked, the garlic would be burned. Burned garlic is awful. Just stir until you start to smell the garlic flavor being released by the heat.
3. Using a liquid measure, measure out 1 c of the wine. Pour it in to your onion/garlic/herb mixture, and reduce for about 10 or 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Open a big (28 oz) can of crushed tomatoes in tomato puree (not the juice liquid, the puree) and pour it in. Careful, it spatters.
5. Reduce further (but not so much it becomes your own version of tomato paste), and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve over pasta, baked into casseroles, swirled wherever it feels right. You won’t regret it.

I love cinnamon rolls. Love them. One of my many baking dreams has been to make my own cinnamon rolls, like it’s Christmas morning any day I want. And now that this particular dream has come true, to paraphrase McFadden & Whitehead, ain’t no stoppin’ me now! Above you can see them in their cinnamon-y glory, icing free (although I later iced them with a cream cheese icing, which was good but not even necessary).

I used Alton Brown’s overnight cinnamon roll recipe (and icing recipe). I’ll start with the good news: this turned out a forgiving dough that made a tasty cinnamon roll. It was more dense and pastry-like than bread-like or biscuit-like. I got crowd-pleasing reviews, and they were amazing with a cup of coffee and provided the sugar rush necessary for a bout of outlet shopping.

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Allison spent her childhood urging people to not tread on patches of clover to protect bumblebees from getting trampled and cultivating a garden during recess. Known for her loyal love for her friends and whiskey, she’s a resident of the amazing borough of Brooklyn. She spends her time drinking coffee, writing, answering life’s questions, and pursuing spontaneous adventures. Bio with help from Laura.

I’ve asked her to share her job-quitting journey with you for inspiration.

I recently quit my job. It was an impulse decision, but looking back I think I had some damn good reasons, even if they were subconscious and impossible to articulate to my H.R. Director. So for the benefit of my fellow burned-out, over-educated, and under-paid office workers, I have put together a list of the five main reasons that YOU too should quit your job. Take my advice—and ignore the doomsday stories on CNN—unemployment is much better than the alternative. Here are five reasons to quit immediately, if not sooner.

Garden (Metaphorically)

You weren’t made to toil in a drab office every day. Even if you don’t terribly mind your job, you can sense you’re not built for office life. It makes me think of Genesis, where humans were created to hang out in a garden, playing with wild animals and making up funny names for plants. And then there was a Fall, and then there was a curse, and then suddenly humans had to work for a living. Living for living’s sake—living for the joy of it—was the original intention, and work was a curse. We all probably yearn for that playful, carefree garden and that’s why, every once in a while, you should just stop working. Quit your job, even for a month or two, to remind yourself what life should feel like. And this applies whether you believe a word of Genesis or not.  You don’t need me to tell you that your office is slowly killing your soul.  If the highlight of your day was either a fire-drill or a g-chat conversation, that’s a pretty bad sign. Coop would like to point out that the epic satirist Voltaire sums up the meaning of life in Candide with, “We must tend to our garden.” Hey, it worked in worked in the late 1750s, and it still works now.

Fear Not, and Fuck the Recession

You should quit because everyone’s telling you not to. They’re telling you that, in these difficult economic times, you should stick it out in a job you hate because you might not get another one, because America may or may not be in a Depression, because it’s an irresponsible, short-sighted, and outright stupid thing to do. I can’t really argue the validity of those points. But do you know what’s an even worse idea than squandering your savings during a global recession? Making decisions out of fear.  If fear is what’s keeping you at your job, you should quit. Take a stand for—or have a youthful dalliance with—living life with courage.  (Plus, check out this article on hyperopia.  It means extreme far-sightedness, and it’s dangerous psychological epidemic sweeping our country. Don’t let yourself be taken down by it. Your grandchildren will forgive you a little impulsivity; they probably won’t want to go to college anyway.)

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As a young person, your brain is constantly taking in new experiences and information. You never know what moments are truly shaping your character until you evaluate them with the distance of time. I’ve listened to a lot of rap and hip-hop (other things too, of course, so I guess you could just say “a lot of music,” but that dilutes my statement). As I was relaxing the other night, my thoughts turned to the Ying Yang Twins. Why, I asked myself, did I spend so much time in the early 2000-years listening to them? The more I mulled this over, the more I realized, I was learning so much more from them than I realized at the time. And the same goes for a number of artists I’ve listened to for hours. I was learning timeless life lessons! Because I’m a generous person, I would like to share them with you.

Life lesson: Play to your strengths, but never rely on them so much you get stuck in a rut.
Who taught me this lesson: Ying Yang Twins

The Ying Yang Twins came out with some popular club songs at the start of their career, such as “Whistle While You Twurk” and ”What’s Happenin.” But the song that took their career to the next level was “Wait (The Whisper Song).” This song’s not bad, and these two got a lot of mileage out of the whisper conceit in mainstream radio music (much like R. Kelley rocked the ignition conceit a few years earlier). Then all of a sudden, every song Ying Yang appeared on had the whispers. And it got old—really old—quickly. The question I ask you is, when was the last time you danced to a Ying Yang Twin song? Your take away: playing to your strengths is great, but you need to make sure you’re not a one-note player.

Life lesson: Never underestimate the power of a makeover.
Who taught me this lesson: Missy Elliott

Missy “Misdemeanor” or “Miss E” Elliott’s had a lot of hits and production credits in her day. She made a name for herself as an artist first, but secondly a “big girl” artist. All of a sudden, about 4 years ago, she lost a drastic amount of weight. She admits she lost the weight for health reasons, but for the mainstream media, it was more of a “Woah, check out Missy!” kind of thing. Her first post-weight-loss album features a sexier version of herself on the cover, and her “greatest hits” tracks inside. This album sold around half a million copies worldwide, her most popular to date. Of course, the point I’m making is not that you need to slim down to make a change. Rather, it’s that sometimes a makeover can help people see you in a new way. I mean, I could easily argue that it was the fact that she stopped wearing tracksuits was the key to her success over the new workouts. Your takeaway: make the change for you, but if you need motivation, consider that it could have a huge impact on how others respond to you.

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You’ll have to forgive the blurry iPhone picture, but I knew if I didn’t take a photo as soon as I sat down to eat, there wouldn’t be any evidence. Using my homemade vegetable stock, I whipped up this homemade risotto for dinner. Served with garlic bread, wine, and lemon cake, it was a wonderful transition-to-spring meal, full of fresh vegetables, but still warming.

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Sola is a real, live, single lady dating in an urban metropolis. I’ve asked her to share some thoughts with you, my lovely readers, on online dating and good general rules to follow in the dating game. Enjoy! Coop

This year, I embarked on a new, scary, ridiculous, frustrating, and ultimately interesting adventure: online dating. Always the ‘relationship girl’ until now, I embraced my newfound singleness and decided to just dive into Match.com and get myself some positive male attention. While I would love to recount my adventures from the beginning, and may likely do so other posts, I felt compelled by my most recent experiences to begin my guest blog writing with a set of dating commandments, applicable to both men and women. I do believe there are more to come, so stay tuned for numbers 6 through 10! And here we go:

1. Thou shalt not mention an ex. Any ex. Ever.
When it comes to dating, the experience is all about suspension of belief. For the next few hours, this person is the only person, was the only person, and will be the only person in your love life. Until the date is over. Then you can go back to rehashing the details of lovers past….with your friends. Dates are really not the time to even mention your past relationships. I mean, let’s face it, your baggage is not an asset at this point. Nobody needs to see your baggage, at least until you are dating exclusively and in a committed relationship, and there is more incentive for your significant other to not run away screaming. Even then, tread carefully. There really is such a thing as too much information. Vague references to having actually been in a committed relationship to prove that you can actually have one: okay. Specific details regarding the exceedingly tragic downfall of your last relationship on the first or second date: not okay.
 

2. Thou shalt look nice and take the time to do so.
Dating is all about first impressions. You get to start fresh with someone who knows little or nothing about you, so it’s all about ‘dress to impress.’ Sure, you don’t want to be high maintenance, so it’s not like you need a salon visit and a manicure before every date, but it’s like you’re interviewing for a job; you want to look good. Taking a shower, shaving, and taking more than five seconds to pick out a cute outfit: okay. Riding your bike ten miles to get to the date and then telling him/her you need to change ‘really quick’ in the bathroom at the restaurant: not okay.

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I picked up Kim Sunée’s Trail of Crumbs on a whim at Target from the “New Voices” section, balancing my basket filled with sunscreen and birthday cards, glancing only at the recipes before I made my purchasing decision. You’ll probably enjoy this book even if you’re not a foodie, because the major theme besides the culinary is a search for identity—something to which most of us can relate.

Sunée’s memoir kept me entertained on my recent vacation. The story has it all, living abroad in the south of France, love and romance drama, eating delicious food, growing up, dark secrets and crippling fears. It’s a meandering tale that will tantalize your intellect, and creep into that “gut” area where stories stick with you. I took my time reading this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Her descriptions of place and food are the best parts of the book. It whet my appetite to see new things, make new things, and think of my life as a story unfolding.