Hairy Times

Yesterday I got a haircut at The Hair Gallery. I wanted it shorter but I wanted my fat round face not get fatter or rounder. I have been watching Buffy and part of me wanted to say 'hey you know how Willow's hair gets in the mid to late part of season four? Yeah I want that.' Problem is that probably would have led to extremely fat face me. And I simply don't need that right now. So I got a basic cut instead...then I went to CVS and got me some hair dye....and became a punk.
Then a raver.
Then an idiot.
In the end I have rather red hair that I forgot to take a photograph of before going to the library. So I'll let you imagine it.

Crab Wontons and Rangoon Pockets

I haven't been eating too shabbily here but I haven't been making anything too exciting. It's hard to get excited when the only person eating the food is yourself. So I asked my parents' friends/kind of mine too who invited me to dinner to come to my house so I could make food for them. These are the test run crab wontons and rangoon pockets I made as appetizers for them. They turned out well. Of course, the problem was that I assumed that the husband wouldn't eat them as he's a vegetarian but that his wife would (I have totally seen her eat meat and my mother often comments on this aspect of her...or smoething) but I was wrong. So I made these pretty things and then neither of them could eat them...which made it seem like I was some cold-hearted cook taunting them with shellfish. I also made salad and lasagna...so they did get fed.

Shriiiiimphttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

This is the link to how to make the shrimp I made a while back. Go there. Learn.

The Culprit of Worry

The worry is strong with this one.

Oooky, Scary, Nasty Exploding-With-Babies Spider

Yesterday morning I woke up. I fed the cat. I went to open the back doors for a wee bit of air circulation and that's when I saw this horrifying, terror-inducing sight. It's a spider. I'm not generally scared of spiders, you can't be when you live near or in woods...they're everywhere and that's just how it is. But big furry spiders and spindly legged wimpy spiders are two different things. And as you might not be able to see since the spider wouldn't stay still for me the spider I saw yesterday morning was not so spindly. Complicating my feelings even further was Zul's interest in the spider. Now I don't know for sure, but I think this spider was probably harmless and yet I didn't want the cat messing with it. Beetles? Sure. Crickets? Eat the hell out of them, buddy. But this thing freaked me freaked me freaked me. So I made a split second decision to kill the spider and save myself and the cat. Ah! But, oh my god, how that didn't work out for me. I used a wooden shoe and went SMACK but when I lifted it (with fears that the spider was the kind immune to killing by shoe) what I saw was worse than the spider being alive....the spider exploded! Exploded with nine billion little spiders just like it. It was awful. Haunting. I think I might not conclude the story with what I did next because the spider demons are going to get me. Oh god. It was so, so, so yucky gross. And once again I'm not some girly idiot.

Veggie Tales...Without God, Thanks

Perhaps on the same day as my little stroll I had cucumbers sprinkled lightly with kosher salt and sesame oil for a little snack. Then a day close by that one I made a chunky salad that featured: radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans from my dad's bean plot, red onion and perhaps something else. Can't remember. I got three cucumbers for a dollar at the Saturday farmer's market which was not half as exciting and mind-blowing as, say, this one. I had hoped for heaping selections of tomatoes and other asundry things but this market had about six vendors and their variety was lacking. Some guy tried convincing me I wanted a pink cookie. But I didn't.

Walky To The Steep

Around Monday I walked to Morgan's Steep. It's not that far from the house, really, but I still felt accomplished doing it. Next is getting back into actually hiking around the perimeter...the town's on a mountain you see so there are edges and gulleys and steep, steep, erm, steepness. But that day I simply walked there and then went down the steps...
I've tried to give you a sense of how steep and whatnot the stairs are. I also took photographs of the not gently sloping as much as sheer droppingness which is the area unfortunately I don't think I really succeeded. Oh well. Above: stairs going down. Below: looking up at the stairs and rock and whatnot.
Sewanee and the surrounding area is chock full of cool rocky overhangs and little caves and big caves and stuff.

Fun With Stuff

Little fancy plate I made for myself yesterday with smoked salmon, capers, boiled egg, red onion and caviar. The whole existence of caviar is due to the fact that my parents had it in the fridge and it was a smidge past its best by date. So I figured better to used it just a smidge after than a landslide of time after...

Breakfast With Heretofor Unknown Cousins At Waffle House

The title says it all (does heretofor have an e at the end? or spaces in between it? I'm lazy and don't feel like fixing it). I had sausage (dry), hash browns with cheese (good), eggs over medium (I feel I may have gotten an extra egg and that was fine with me) and grits (I'm never as amazed by grits as I think I will be). It was all very good. Here to fore?
Thanks for the breakfast!

Book Reading

I've just read the first three stories of Helen Norris' One Day In The LIfe Of A Born Again Loser...and I like them very much.

It's Just The Story of What I Do

On Saturday my cousin had his annual solstice pig party kind of thing...it may be semi-annual or bi-annual. Though he did say this would be his last one. So what do I know? Anyways. I made deviled eggs for the event and topped some with wasabi others with caviar and the rest with paprika.
Behold the tent under which all food was held.
The above is a photograph of a little cousin of mine and her grandfather's dog, Abby.
Above: distant cousins never met before.
Above: the pig. Below: some of the sides.
My personal plate.
Mmmm chocolatey blueberry lemon carrot!
The cave at the cousin's that made it so lovely lovely...it was hot by the food but it's always cool by the cave...or hot by the cave it's the winter time.
This kid ran around non-stop for at least three hours. It was awe-fear inspiring.

It's Got To Be An Emergency

On Friday I drove down to my cousin's for dinner with a bunch of people I didn't know. I talked baby politics and may have just barely escaped an abortion argument (not sure about that). There was a big ol' smoker smoking a pig for the cousin's big ol' party the next day. I met two distant cousins and a few other people. We ate catfish in a dill/yogurt/mayonnaise sauce with wild rice and a bean and red pepper salad. It was nice.

There Are Shadows On The Horizon

Friday salad. Bit of everything...boiled egg, blue cheese, smoked salmon, palm hearts, tomato, capers, lettuce. Stuff like that. I think it looks really pretty. I also think it tasted deeee-licious.

There's Too Many Cars Round Here

Same old steak only with the addition of tomato.

Retarded Bird?

What is this bird? I noticed it yesterday afternoon sort of perching/hanging on for dear life to a branch near the house. I went out and got super duper closer than any bird should allow a person like me to get. Is it a baby bluejay? Is it developmentally challenged? Was it dead but still moving like it wasn't? I don't know.

Bugs Are For Terrified Babies

This is the terrifying beetle I found in the living room last night. It was gigantic and huge and scary. Next to it is a shoe. And as much as I thought about killing it, I didn't...mainly because it would have made some terrible crunchy crunching noise that would haunt me in my waking moments and sleeping ones. Ooooga!

Salad Chez Moi

Forget exactly when but I made this salad. Greens, red onion, capers, hearts of palm, tomato and a bit of smoked salmon all dressed with some salad dressing my mother made and left in the refrigerator. It was quite good. I may have another almost exactly like this after I walk home from this here library.

Two

To read my not-review of a raw food cookbook go here. I was going to link the shrimp recipe I just posted as well. But it hasn't shown up yet. So I can't.

Southern Lunchy

Before they left the sister and her boyfriend and I went to the Monteagle Diner for lunch. This was mainly because we were hungry and I'd never been and was interested in knowing how it all was. It was all okay. I had the pork platter which, on the menu, came with fries, slaw and corn fritters. It was the fritters that sealed the deal for me...unfortunately my concept of what a 'fritter' is and what the diner does is, well, radically different. Behold their concept of a fritter:
I'd call the above a pancake. Or corncake. Or flat corn breadcake. Not fritter, my friends. Nope. The meat was okay...though my pulled pork was, I think, more tender. Their sauce was better though.

I had coconut pie for dessert. The other two shared peanutbutter pie. I tried a bite of their pie and found it tastier than my own.

Shenanigans

The ebf's sister and her boyfriend stopped by Sewanee day before yesterday. We went to Shenanigans (the only place in town to drink beer) and drank Sweetwater 420 beer. I had a half order of cheese sticks (not so great to be honest) and a turkey blt sub kind of thing...that was good.
They played the first Strokes album and we all couldn't help but jigggle our heads, knees or fingers right along with every song.
To be honest it could have been weirder. It also, probably, was the last time I'll see them. That's the weird part.

Flank

I definitely made more steak than I needed for the cousin and his wife. I've been trying to use the left overs in new exciting ways (ha) and this was one of them: farm pepper, vidalia onion and steak sauteed.

What's The Remedy?

Friends of my parents-well they're my buddies too I guess-invited me over for dinner with them, a great-great nephew, his mother the great-niece and her husband. It was a yummy meal. The hostess is Tibetan but spent some time (I think) in both Nepal and India. So she made a vegetarian potato spinach dish that was lovely and made these steamed asparagus/brie wrapped in wonton wrappers things that were so good that I'm going to figure out something to do with those things too...that is the most empty passage of words ever.

I thank the host and hostess.

It Looks Good, Funny or Blurry

So, I've rearranged the living room in a rather haphazard, self-satisfying kind of way. Two sofas usually at opposite sides of the room are pushed up together to make a pseudo daybed...I'm seriously considering converting it into a full-on sofa fort. Then, where one sofa usually lives I've set up a little writing nook (above). Doesn't it look like I'd get my write on? Yeah, I'm not. I opened my novel up and took one look and decided that a few revisions of essays would be good. But of course revisions became changing "was" to "were" and cutting a few
"actually"s and "really"s. It's all very depressing. It drives me to drink as exemplified below...oh no wait that's a squirrel sucking on the wine cork from when my cousin and his wife came for dinner. Phew.
Can you see the bird of prey? I could and I ran for my camera while yelling (to myself of course): DAMN that's a BIG bird of PREY! It's actually not that big in the photo...it was bigger and sharper and cooler in real life.

Tea

Earlier this week I made a motherload of iced Earl Grey tea. Above you can see what one serving size, with milk added, looked like on a rock. The back rock.

Ugh. I got up this morning with a certain amount of chutzpa(h?) to go to the library and apply to a million zillion jobs. But I get so easily waylaid and bogged down. I've applied for two jobs. Neither of which is really an exciting possibility nor filled with much probability of coming true. Sigh.