Caesar Salad, a Recipe

Have I told you about my amazing recipe for Caesar salad? I am going to do so right now. It is extremely garlicky and lemony and potent. I believe that the end product tastes better than the recipe might look, but if you like a mild, creamy or dominantly cheesy Caesar, this one probably is not for you. But it's SO GOOD. Try it.

(All the ingredients are a rough estimate--you should mos' def adjust to your taste buds)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 garlic clove
Anchovy paste (I buy it in those toothpaste-looking tubes and squeeze out a 1-3 inch section)
Olive oil
Parmesan, freshly grated
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Romaine lettuce for as many people as you are serving (P and I can eat an entire medium-sized head for an entree-sized salad), washed and dried and chopped to be salad-sized

1. Slam down and peel the garlic. Sprinkle some salt, preferable a course kind like Kosher, over the crushed clove. Use the flat side of your knife to smoosh the salt into the garlic. You can also chop the garlic, but the smooshing action is most important. Press down and away until you have a salty, pulpy garlic paste. It will be potent (duh)--if you are making this salad for guests whose taste buds are unfamiliar to you, I would suggest using a fraction (1/4 to 1/3) of your total yield of garlic smoosh. If it's for you and you like to smack your lips on some garlicky salad, go ahead and add it all!
2. Add the garlic to a big salad bowl. Then squeeze in the lemon and the anchovy paste and lots of pepper and some of the cheese.
3. Whisk it so everything is combined. It will not be pretty! The anchovy paste turns the whole mess quite gray.
4. Keep whisking. This time, add the olive oil while you continue to mix it. Stir like crazy until everything is emulsified.
5. Take a piece of lettuce, swirl it around in the dressing and eat it. How does it taste? Too lemony? Add more oil. Too oily? Add more lemon juice. Too...you can't quite tell but it needs something? Try more cheese or pepper. I rarely add anchovy paste--it's definitely a background flavor, you know? Also, consider using more salt.
6. Anyway, once it tastes good to you, it's time to dress the salad. You have two choices: you can either add the lettuce straight to the salad bowl where the dressing is, or you can pour the dressing into a smaller bowl and pour it over the lettuce. That's how I do it anymore--it's easier to mix completely, and it often turns out I have more dressing than I need. That way I can save it and use it for other things.*

*Like marinating whatever meat I'm using to top our salad! Shrimp

is just so good on this. Maybe that sounds gross? I don't know. Nor do I care. It's positively delectable, so bright and lemony and crunchy/pillowy/tender. This is what it looks like in close-up:

(Oh, this is also a catch-up post! We make this salad all the damn time, but I took these photos in June)

Here is a Picture of a Turtle

REALLY trying to post daily for a little while, at least in order to get into some kind of groove. Not going to go crazy and write a ton because that wears me out and then I'm like, blogging takes forever!

So, in the interest of continuing the catching-up-on-the-long-sabbatical, here is a picture, from May, of a turtle we found in our back yard:
(Just think of how awesome this would have been if we had our awesome camera when the turtle showed up!)

Consumerismmmmmm!!

We're getting a new camera! We're getting a DSLR Canon with so many buttons and switches it's going to take me ten years to figure it all out!

We're trading in credit card points for Best Buy gift cards and we might go buy the camera on Black Friday (Eek! Never been! Hate shopping!) because it will be on sale that day. We have to get our gift cards in time, though, so my fingers are very much crossed.

We visited a very nice camera store this morning in Columbus, and the guy was very helpful and he convinced P that I was right about the Canon Rebel T2i (which I'm not linking to because it's gobsmackingly, you-could-feed-a-developing-nation-for-that-amount-of-money expensive). I did a lot of research but: a) I had a hard time communicating the results of that research when it came time to relay the information to P; and, b) I have a husband who is maddeningly distrustful of my ability to do consumer research. He had to hear for himself, from an incredibly helpful and knowledgeable and nice camera expert, that the camera I want to buy will be the right camera for our needs.

Anyway, we actually held the camera in our hot little (or in P's case, hot gigantic) hands and touched and twisted and clicked and marveled at the coolness of the thing. Then we looked at lenses and then at bags and then we left and while P was amenable to the fancy camera plan before, he is now 100% on board and looking at photography stuff on the internet and getting as excited as I've been all along. It's going to be so fun!

Ironically, if I want to show you a photograph of the actual camera, I will have to take that photo with our old point-and-shoot. So it will be kind of a crappy photo compared to the other, new pictures we take. I love thinking about our new camera. I can't wait to get it.

P.S. I have this military jacket I've been wearing all autumn and I love it but feel like it makes me look considerably more intrepid than I actually am. The camera is going to increase my intrepidness quotient considerably, so I will be as intrepid as I look--just in time for the weather to be too cold for the jacket. More trivial irony...

Catching Up and Then Some

I was going to cut and paste the whole ketchup joke from Pulp Fiction as the title for this post--you know, baby tomato isn't walking fast enough so papa tomato stomps on him and says "ketchup". . .

But after a very brief search, I couldn't find it word-for-word (except I did--please see below*).

Also, I was going to post a photo from each of the intervening eight or nine months and that way, it would be easy for me to get into blogging on the regular. But when I went to look for a photo from, like, March. . .

There weren't none! The cupboard, as it were, was bare.

It appears that we did nothing worth photographing between Christmas and July. . .

Well, that's not exactly true, either. I found a few pictures, but I can't exactly say why I thought some were worth photographing at the time. Like this one from May:

What the--?

I don't remember taking it and I can't imagine why I chose to take it, if the photographer in question was, indeed, I (it could have been my man; it could have been a creepy stranger who wasn't very good at being creepy after all--photos of me and the ol' husband sleeping would be way more menacing than an inexplicable snapshot of one of our many junk drawers that is also our liquor cabinet).**

Plus, the drawer is open! And there is a lottery ticket (Winner? Loser? Expired? Still in the drawer as I write this, some six months later? Stay tuned to find out!) perched atop that never-watched PBS documentary about something so boring I haven't bothered to read the back...the DVD is resting on a used-but-not-discarded puffy shipping envelope. And those three things are actually, come to think of it, piled on top of an ancient iPod speaker which we blew out before we got married and moved into this house! So, the speaker has been worthless for at least two years and yet we went to the trouble of moving it into this house; we keep it in our liquor cabinet in a corner of our postage-stamp-sized dining room where space is already at something of a premium.

*Sigh*

Here I thought this post was going to be about how this photo is and always will be evocative of our little rented house, because that wine rack and that lamp and that painting and the little cabinet are probably never going to share the same space in any of our subsequent homes. I was going to go all breezy and zen and let's be honest--it would totally come across as smug when I went prematurely nostalgic on your asses about how I have no idea how this photograph came to be taken but it's just so reminiscent of our moments in this little house blah blah blah/ha ha ha/my-life-is-so-accidentally-perfect-and-worthy-of-photographing-and-publishing-to-the-internet-at-any-given-moment. . .Except, jeez, this isn't a pretty picture at all. It's junky and boozy and weird. And crooked, for the love of God. Not actually evocative of our lives--ummm. I'm going to ruminate on that one. . .

I think it is telling to note that instead of following through on my intentions of getting nostalgic and waxing poetic about how my dad painted that (admittedly awesome) painting in 1968 and then gave us that lamp (after he bought it on sale at his favorite warehouse store) forty years later, I got all (justifiably) butt-twitchy about the contents of that drawer. I need to tell you I didn't have to check the contents before I cataloged them. I am, in fact, not at our tiny rented house right now. I have memorized the contents of that damned drawer after looking in it for batteries or stamps or matches or a flashlight or my college transcripts or our passports like thirty-thousand times. Yet I have never cleaned it out and turned it into a place to store useful, needed items. Do I need to restate the definition of insanity right now? I didn't think so (*but even after the rest of 2010 has moved past it, I'm a little enamored of that thing where you link to something a tiny bit unexpected but punch-liney--it's like David Foster Wallace and his compulsive footnotes only, you know, far less intellectual and literary and brilliant and may-he-rest-in-peace).

Where was I? I mean, besides on my fourth cup of coffee (goes without saying, you say?). . .

The intentionally-snapped photograph of this particular junk drawer raises many questions. One of them is: did I actually intend for my subject to be that bottle of scotch? Boy, that's one for the ages. But the other questions...the other questions are making me tired. I just want to draw some really obvious conclusions now, please.

For a long time, I've been very understanding of the way people can live in really messy or badly- or under-decorated homes: when you see it every day, it becomes more familiar than it is unsightly. Spending the last hour geeking out over this junk drawer thing has refreshed that feeling for me--I've blocked out this black hole of space in our house. I've totally failed to see it as anything other than a drawer which never, ever, no matter how many times I optimistically (insanely) pull it open, contains an item for which I'm actually searching. I understand how these things happen, but when I'm forced to look at it for what it is, I still agonize over how it could have happened to me. After all, that drawer could be so many things! It could be the place where we keep napkins!

"And if it were," says my internal, skeptical, kick-ass/feminist/sensible psychoanalyst, "would you be a happier person than you are right now?"

And I give her that look that Dr. Phil's studio audience members are wearing at predictable intervals of his show. That "it just dawned on me, slowly and reverentially like the most beautiful glowing angelic light" look. Only my look is real, not the result of crazy bald-man brainwashing. Because the answer to the question is "no." In fact, it's "hell, no"--as in "hell, no, I won't go." You know? (Aagh! The rhyming! Stop the rhyming!) I mean, I'm protesting right now.

I have to snap out of it, out of the assumption that my messy house is an indicator of one or all of the following things:

1. I am unhappy, miserable, depressed and said condition is, like, leaking out and manifesting itself in the messy spots of my home.
   
2. I am inferior in every way to people whose lives are in a constant state of peaceful, ravishing, seemingly-effortless photographability
3. I am rough, gruff, unpleasant and slovenly.
4. I am unprepared to be someone's Mom, Mommy, Mum or (most of all) Mama.

Yeah, this is internalized anxiety in a lot of ways. But I didn't invent it out of thin air, y'all (or more accurately, y'none--don't worry, I haven't lost sight of your nonexistence). We still, like, deify the women who exemplify domesticity. We still slobber all over their graceful, sun-dappled kitchens and children and perfectly-imperfect "corners." We fall all over ourselves trying to recreate the paint colors and the flea market finds and the food photographs.

(And I think I do mean "we," by the way. I'm afraid I sound manifesto-ey, or at least a little presumptuous by going plural, but I don't think I'm alone. However, I'm going to switch it over anyway because it's making me feel a little neurotic.)

I have really gotten in to sewing. I like it; it's an awesome way for me to feel both creative and productive. I make a huge mess and I do it in fits and starts and sometimes I go months without touching a sewing needle. Some of the things I've made are really beautiful to me, and some of them are quite ugly. I started this blog because I wanted to be part of the community of people who "craft," but after almost two years, I still haven't had the nerve to share this stuff. Ick.

It is totally natural to want to show our best face to the world. I know I'm not the only person with multiple junk drawers and latent teenage inferiority anxieties. We take pictures from the best angles and we crop out unsightly stuff or stand with the pile of trash bags behind us when we do the photo-snapping. I mean that literally and figuratively.

But I don't want to do it anymore. It's exhausting. I want you to know that my junk drawers often stay open to reveal the expired, losing lottery tickets inside. I want you to know that my sewing room goes from this:

to this:
almost the second I pick up the rotary cutter. While we're on the subject, I want you to know that I once mauled the hell out of my finger with my rotary cutter.

I want to be able to tell you I feel kind of pathetic and amateurish, but I don't want you to assure me--patronizingly or otherwise (although I'm convinced there's really no "otherwise")--that I'm "really awesome :)".

That's it. I can't shut up!

**P.S. That was one of the most grammatically confounding paragraphs I've ever written, or recently written, anyway. Why was it so hard to get it right? Not that I got it right... Jeez. The sheer illiteracy of it has followed me down to the postscript! I mean, "if the photographer in question was, indeed, I"?! I (indeed) ask you! What goes on here? What is the meaning of this?! Also, puh-leez. And that's leaving aside the length of time it took me to decide how exactly I wanted to describe the following: "one of our many junk drawers that is also our liquor cabinet." I mean, huh? The problem was, I felt dishonest calling it "our junk drawer" because that implies we have only one junk drawer (scoff! One junk drawer is for organized people who consider a junk drawer to be a place that contains useful items such as batteries and flashlights and, well, see above). So, sorry, nonexistent reader. Just working out some kinks before I go around telling the internet my blog exists. I guess I'm gonna have to build up one hell of an archive so I can be sure this guy gets buried deep.

In which the Inexcusable Blogging Sabbatical is Excused by Tremendous Before and After Photos

Here's why I've been gone so long (she writes to the nonexistent readers, who've--what?--been checking in loyally for the past nine months, just wishing this day would come...):

(Before)

Yeah, that's my sewing room, basically for the last six or seven months. I've probably cleaned it once since the last time I posted here, but it quickly deteriorated to the condition pictured above. May I just say, Egads. I was frightened to go anywhere near it until circumstances dictated that I simply had to deal with it.

I was ready to grab the dog, torch the house and use the photos (Yes, there are more! Each grislier and more shocking than the last!) as my defense when the arson case came to trial. I bet the right jury would have let me off with probation and a suspended sentence or something. Not bad when you look closely at this photograph.

But I didn't gamble on the vagaries of our loophole-ridden legal system! I behaved like the grown woman I am, like the Better Homes and Gardens subscriber I am, like the wife and wannabe mom and gracious host I am. Not like the scatterbrained, sloppy, lazy, drunk and oblivious lunatic I used to be. See, the Sarah I used to be entertained notions of arson-as-a-viable-solution much more seriously than the Sarah I am. Plus, that other Sarah didn't have a Dyson. Or a husband who has probably never entertained the notion of arson-as-viable-solution, seriously or otherwise. (There is still enough of the old Sarah in me to admit that the Dyson was more of a motivator in this instance than was the level-headed husband.)

When I finally tackled the wretched project (with elbow grease, and not the kind that doubles as a fire accelerant), I'm ashamed to say it was finished in a matter of hours--I could have done it a lot sooner. Fabric and old files are so thoroughly pile-able, you know? Once the piling (and folding and cramming-into-trash-bags and stacking boxes and sorting and vacuuming picking-needles-and-straightpins-out-of-the-carpet...) had been done, it was kind of like...

****poof!****

(After)

OH MY GOD I COULD LOOK AT THESE PICTURES ALL DAY!

Then I came here to blog about it and I realized the last thing I posted was a little crazy (if you're there or ever were, sorry). Maybe somewhere there's a place for that stuff, but I think I'm going to say this isn't that place. So it will be a return to the domicile around here--food, sewing, maybe some before and after pictures of our bedroom once our long-term (and very welcome) houseguests move into their new digs sometime in the next few weeks. Also, I have a very big (for still-a-slowpoke-beginner me) project I've been working on since last year, which I'm very slowly finishing by hand these days. I think I'm ready to post pictures sometime soon.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, girl. Let's allow this image to soothe the savage, sloppy beast for a little while longer:

Repackaging, without a new name

Here's the thing: I like having a blog, but 2010 is like 35 days old and I have turned my sewing machine on only once. I've just been putting it off. Husband and I went on an insane diet kick and my days are filled with working out and thinking about not being fat anymore.
And I would love to have documented some of that on this blog, but (and by the way, WTF? since no one reads it...) bitching about my diet has nothing to do with sewing. And the blog is supposed to be about sewing.
I could have started another blog, and don't kid yourself: I considered it, but that would have been insane! What, when I want to write a blog post about my diet, I go to "sadiestarves.blogspot.com" and I tap-tap-tap away about how I put a teaspoon of sugar in my oatmeal and now I have to spend twenty more minutes on the elliptical? And when I want to write about sewing I come back here and tap-tap-tap about the house quilt I'm (not) working on for my parents?
And what happens if I develop another interest? For instance, once I lose twenty more pounds (God have mercy), we're going to start trying for a baby. Sadiepeesonastick.blogspot.com? Then when it works...
The ins and outs of this one are a little too dicy for me. It's only 8 am. The fact is, I want to share sewing stuff with other people on the internet, but I also want to share stuff about my personal life--not so much with other people on the internet, but I feel better once I've put things in the right words. And something about publishing it all, and the possibility that someone might stumble upon it...that is a balm.
The only place I ever share this site address, though, is in comments on sewing blogs. And so I started to feel kind of...beholden to those people. Like they'll go "oh! This person looks forward to trying my technique for ironing seams open. I wonder what project sadie is sewing right now?" And then they'll visit here, only to discover some half-starved fat girl pounding away on her keyboard about her latest neurotic obsession. And *gasp!* swearing like a sailor.
I feel like the title of the blog misrepresents me, but I also feel like I want to have it all in one place: the photos of quilting projects; the rants about how blogging is a weird thing to do; the half-drunk, profanity-laden tirades; the raging fury directed at that goddamn animated Wii Fit balance board who's all like, "That's overweight!" every fucking time I step onto the scale. And politics! I want this to be a place where I can be a lunatic when confronted with the lunatics on Facebook who post things like :

"Thoughts Perez? RT @PerezHilton: Fox News had the top 13 programs on cable news in total viewers for 5th month in a row"

I really don't know exactly what this means, but I think this guy is calling out Perez Hilton (whom he almost certainly doesn't know personally) regarding the "dominance" of Fox News programming?

Aaaaand, with that, I have staked my claim. This blog is no longer just about sewing! I will no longer feel furtive when I post something that doesn't involve a photograph of fabric! (Or food, which I felt comfortable writing about because it is somehow akin to sewing in its apolitical hominess)...
Right. Clearly what might have passed for my eloquence is deserting me. This has all been a ploy to keep me off that damnable Wii Fit scale anyway.
But quickly: if you secretly read this and do not want to be discovered for some reason, and right now you're in the grip of some kind of panic that I'm about to turn into one of those chirpy "Fitness-and-nutrition-changed-my-life!-I-lost-one-tenth-of-a-pound-and-I'm-so-proud-of-my-progress!!" people, fear not. I promise not to write about the diet every day, and I promise not to be falsely positive about every fucking ounce I take off. I have too much weight to lose, and too much longing for huge forks full of fresh fluttery, buttery pasta to toe the party line of those other weight-loss blogs, to which I misguidedly turned in the early days of this diet. I believe that being positive is important. But nothing grates more than the vapid positivity pressed upon fat girls by skinny, patronizing diet gurus. "Oh, [furrowed brow, lower lip jutting out in this-is-what-Barbie-looks-like-when-she's-being-sympathetic fashion] I know it seems hard right, when you've been working out like crazy and eating like 1400 calories every day and STILL haven't lost a pount, but keep your chin up! It just takes some time!!"
No. I am pissed. I have lost weight, but I have a lot more to lose and that just fucking sucks. Admitting that doesn't make me fatter and it doesn't mean I'm less motivated. Those chirpy, perky celebrate-every-ounce people have got to be carrying around some of the same discouragement--and "well, I'm disappointed but I know it's a marathon and not a sprint" just isn't a totally natural way to express yourself. It's good to keep that in mind, but being pissed that you're fat is a valid feeling, dammit! And when you're spending every waking moment controlling the stuff you put in your body, giving free rein to your frustrations and anger is a good feeling.
So I will write more about the diet as I (hopefully) continue to lose weight at a fat sluggish snail's pace. I will tell you a little more about the skinny girl I truly am. I will even include some rational descriptions of my approach and the history of Fat Sadie. But there will be no false cheer. I love food and I love excess, so dieting is pretty damned grim for me.
That's all. Time to go add a disclaimer to the banner of this blog, whose title will from this moment on be a little misleading.

Finished!

The front:
The back:

A little close-up:

The binding:

The dedication:

The way it looked when I sent it off:

I will tell you all about how this was both a success and a failure eventually, I think. Or this will be the last you ever hear of this particular quilt. I am a little sick of the way it looks, I think. I hope J. and the baby like it. I hope they don't hate the way it looks. Please cross your fingers for me.