Meetzorp

Deal of the decade

Dec 21st, 2012 by Meetzorp

This is a box of Taylor’s of Harrogate Earl Grey Tea. By anybody’s standards, this is a pretty damn good box of tea. I got it at the corner shop for $3, which is seriously a steal.

At The Better Cheddar down on the Plaza, Taylor’s clocks in at $9 for a box of 50 tea bags. Which is still not really a bad buy when you consider that the regular grocery store will charge you nearly $4 for a measly 20 sachets of Twinings.

I intend to become a regular customer of this store in my neighborhood, and hope that I can eventually convince the owner to order in some Lapsang Souchong for me. A lapsang hookup within walking distance would be pretty freakin’ sweet.

Besides being a bargain retailer of fine tea, this little oddball mini-mart happens to have a very good selection of ingredients for Indian cookery. I stumbled on to this knowledge by accident this past summer. I was out running errands and it was wicked hot, so I though I’d just stop in this sketchy-looking convenience store and buy a bottle of soda. Once I was inside, I realized that it was no ordinary convenience store I was shopping in. Because I’m lazy as hell, I’ll crib my Google+ review of the place as follows:

This store is a hidden gem. If you judge by the exterior you could be in danger of writing it off as a dodgy liquor mart, but if you overlook its shabby frontage, enter, and have a look around, you will find an unexpected and well-stocked shop with a concentration on ingredients for Indian cookery. You can buy paneer here, pre-mixed seasonings for various curries, several types of lentils, dried garbanzo beans, poppadums, sesame cookies, and other sub-continental delicacies. If you live in the Downtown area (of KCMO or KCKS) it is well worth a look-in for specialty ingredients.This store also has a broad selection of Midwestern and Latino staples, the expected beer cooler, sodas, candy and chips.

I was in there today to get paneer and poppadoms for our Christmas dinner, and happened to notice the tea while I was browsing the shelves (I was hoping for regular malt-flavored Milo powder). It is so hard to find malted-milk powder that doesn’t also have chocolate flavor in it, and I have been tasting for malt powder in a smoothie for quite some while.

Oh well, our holiday Saag Paneer ought to be very satisfying, and it’s nice to have a handy source for goodies like that.

Posted in Delight, Food & Snacks, Holidailies 2012, Recommendations, Shopping, Well I'll Be Darned | No Comments »

Probably not what K-Mart had in mind

Dec 20th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Hadn’t realized what was printed on the bag until after I’d finished cleaning the cat-boxes…

Posted in Beastlies, Cats, Holidailies 2012, Photo entries, Utter Silliness | 3 Comments »

Saved By The Bell

Dec 18th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Yes, yes, I have fallen down on my Holidailies duties. I’ve got my first heavy-duty cold in about two years and have taken to a hot bath and been coughing up my lungs since last you heard from me.

In fact I am coughing myself stupid as I type, but besides from my rebellious lungs, I feel pretty good now.

I don’t know if it’s fever dreams or what, but I have had some of the weirdest, creepiest gross-out dreams just lately.

I just woke up from one, and I’m going to record it now before my brain mercifully erases it.

I dreamt I was on one of those extreme cooking shows where they make a lamb-brain fritter drizzled with a gastrique of grass. So, suspend disbelief and join me in dream world, where there are domesticated hairy elephants which are about the size of a goat and are covered from end to end in rough chestnut hair, softer than pig bristles, but stiffer than Labrador hair.

The item we were “cooking” was one of these hairy elephant trunks, and due to the host’s plans, it needed to be hollowed out so it could be stuffed. I was tasked with removing the chunkier and more unyielding slabs of cartilage. That sentence alone should give you a pretty good idea of the gross-out level of this dream. Oh, and we didn’t skin the trunk nor remove the hair. The hairiness was meant to be part of the presentation when it was served. (gag) So, then the trunk was stuffed with cheese mostly and baked. And either end of it (the snoot end and the end where it had been severed) looked like a medical illustration of diseased genitalia.

Right before the celebrity chef (whom I didn’t recognise) was about to start slicing it up, my alarm clock went off.

The night before last was no better. I dreamed that I was taking a tour of some sort of cloning lab, where they were making individual organs and stuff for people who need transplants. At first, I was in a rather cool and hope-for-the-future type of dream. Then the office weirdo blessed me with a special viewing of his pet project. It was supposed to be a person, but what it was was a grey, gelatinous dome about the size of a travel thermos with liver-colored, hairy tentacles, a beak like a parrot, and two milky eyes toward the bottom of the dome. It was dead; it had been soaking in formaldehyde in fact, and the weirdo felt that I should be honored to view its dissection. He wanted to slice it open to see how much progress he had made and what he had done wrong.

The gelatin turned out to be very tough, so he ended up cleaving it with a hatchet. The noise it made was the most disgusting thing, kind of a sucking and crunching all at once, as the gelatinous dome turned out to be interlaced with bands of cartilage and little chips of bone, as well as filled with a viscous pink gel. In my dream, I blew chunks. In real life, I woke up and needed to blow my nose.

Going to sleep has been too damn strange lately.

Posted in Holidailies 2012, Oh, for fuck's sake, Weird as Hell | 2 Comments »

The Ghosts of Hairstyles Past

Dec 13th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Well, hell. I’m getting that mid-winter hairdo restlessness once again.

Right now, my hair is just about jaw length.

Basically, it is like this, but with bangs, and brown instead of red. This is an old picture, but I can’t be bothered to take a new one, so imagination will have to suffice.

I am severely tempted to revert to my old Sue Perkins hairstyle. I love it short and choppy and shove-back-able.

But on the other hand, I am a little bit tempted to grow it long again, just because I can.

Because it is very, very thick, it does long nicely.

And I can do some really cool shit with it.

But the downside to having it long is that I can put it in a ponytail, and if I can, I probably will. Most of the time.

I’ll tell you this for free. No matter what I’ll never again have my hair this long again!

Ridiculously Long Hair

Posted in Hair issues, Holidailies 2012, meh, nostalgia, Photo entries | 1 Comment »

WARNING! Actual Holiday-Themed-Content Ahead!

Dec 12th, 2012 by Meetzorp

So, the other day I posted this:

which the astute among you might recognise as an old Tupperware box full of cookies shaped like pine trees. They are, in fact, a modified version of Neva’s Sugar Cookies, flavored with peppermint essence and run through the Mirro Cookie Press.

Before I continue, I’d like to provide y’all with what I consider an heirloom recipe. When my mom and her brother were little kids, their neighbor down the road used to bake these cookies. Mom remembered these cookies fondly, and as an adult, asked her old neighbor if she could have the recipe for them. It is as follows:

Preheat oven to 375 F.

2 C. Brown Sugar
1 C. Shortening (I use butter)
3 Eggs
1/2 C. Milk
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla
5 C. Flour

Cream butter and sugar. Mix in eggs one at a time. Add milk and mix. Add soda & baking powder. Mix. Add vanilla. Add flour one cup at a time. Shape into 1″ balls and flatten with a glass dipped in white sugar. Bake 8-10 minutes.

It works best if you have a vase with a fancy cut-glass bottom to impress a fancy design in the dough.

If you add another 1/2 cup of flour, it makes the perfect consistency to go through the cookie press. If you add an extra cup of flour, instead, it makes great dough for cookie-cutter cookies. If you pursue this method, prepare to make a crap-ton of cut-out cookies. Six cups of flour is no fucking joke is what I’m saying.

Anyway, I made the little pine trees, and lo, they were pretty cute.

Then I took it upon myself to decorate them.

About a quarter of them look like this. Shitty. This is why I never do iced-and-decorated cookies. Because I am completely incompetent.

Luckily, I started getting my groove after a pan of completely messy and awful trees, and about 75% of my output ended up looking like this:

Not beautiful, but at least passable. The first batch look like I iced them with my feet.

My snowflakes, however, are inexcusable.

I had this idea that I’d be all clever and make these chocolate-orange flavored roll-out cookies, cut them into snowflake shapes, then frost them white and sprinkle sugar on it to look like ice crystals. My recipe for the Royal Icing worked perfectly for the green stuff, but for some reason the white stayed really runny. Also, the website I used for reference suggested that a very small amount of blue food color should be added to the plain white icing to make the sugar sprinkles stand out better. I obviously got too much food coloring in it, because these darn snowflakes look more like novelty bathroom tiles.

I considered calling these my “special snowflakes,” not because they included any illicit secret ingredients to make the season more merry, but special in the ‘Oh, don’t mind Cousin JoDean; she’s just a little bit special, bless her heart’ meaning of “special.”

I got a hot idea to try to make snowflake sugar cookies a few years ago, with almost equally rotten results. That time, my icing turned out lumpy, plus the sprinkles that were supposed to go on the icing wouldn’t stick. I had some super-cute sprinkles then: some extra-shiny sugar crystals and some little nonpareil things in the shape of snowflakes. My idea was a beautiful, frosty, glittery, delicate confection of loveliness, but the result was…well short of my hopes and expectations.

As you can see, they were not delicate and frosty. They were kind of lumpy and nondescript. And I should have colored the icing green for the Christmas trees. Like I did this year.

Anyway, I hope that someday I will learn my lesson and stop trying to make pretty holiday treats. Royal Icing is best left to people significantly less ham-fisted than me!

Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, Food & Snacks, Holidailies 2012 | 4 Comments »

How to achieve conjugal unpleasantness:

Dec 11th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Alternatively, it seems Antonia of “Yet Another Blooming Blog” wrote up a useful how-to. Sort of.

Given the right mood and equipment, this can be remarkably effective:

As you can see, it results in complete gratification for at least one participant.

Posted in Delight, Distractions, Holidailies 2012, Utter Silliness | No Comments »

Clean fergot!

Dec 9th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Well, I completely forgot about logging in and posting anything yesterday.

Pretty much this is what the bulk of my day consisted of. Pressure-cooking beans.

Then Joel and I went out to dinner, came back home, and watched Smokey And The Bandit, which Joel had borrowed from the library.

Today, I began the annual holiday Gonzo Baking Extravaganza.

These are from the cookie press. They’re little pine trees, flavored with Mint extract. I’ll be covering them with a green icing glaze and festooning them with a scattering of multicolored sprinkles once I get some green food coloring and some sprinkles.

Besides that, here’s a video that shows the extremely silly facial expression my dog makes when you give her a cream-cheese wrapper to lick clean.

Posted in Food & Snacks, Holidailies 2012, Photo entries, Ruby the Dog, videos | No Comments »

Immediate Remediation

Dec 7th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Some freakin’ jackwagon gang-tagged the shed behind Nancy’s house last night at some point between 5:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.

So, Joel and I went down to our basement lair, gathered up every partial can of spray-paint left over from every bicycle we’ve redecorated in the past decade, and fixed that shit.

It’s not 100% complete, of course, but it’s what you might consider an improvement.

And if I ever catch anyone fucking with any of our sheds again, by gosh and by golly, I’ma gonna hit ‘im with a brick.

Also, I am not what you would consider a tidy painter:

Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, grumbles gripes and pointless bitching, Holidailies 2012, Home Improvements, Kansas City, Oh, for fuck's sake | 2 Comments »

I nearly forgot to post today

Dec 6th, 2012 by Meetzorp

IMG_2718, a photo by Meetzorp on Flickr.

Because I was working on this

You may well ask what in the name of heck it is, and I will answer that question right away.

It should be, with a bit of good fortune, a waistcoat made out of six neckties braided together.

To make it, you line up three neckties parallel to each other, then weave three more neckties in at the top and bottom, pin them, and then whipstitch them together along the long edges (except in the middle where your head will go). It’s held shut at the sides with buckles and gros-grain ribbon tapes.

Fine, fine, if you want proper instructions, here’s what the Bernina Creative Sewing Magazine, Autumn/Winter 1994/5 tells you to do:

Easy-peasy, right?

Well, we shall see how it will look when it’s all done but I must say I am enjoying the look of the silks together. I’m being very careful in whipstitching the ties together so that if I should ever wish to restore them to necktie use, I can pick them back apart without too much effort.

Two of the ties I found alongside the road yesterday when I was riding home from a pre-employment drug screen. The rest are either from Calvert or Jeff; both are gentlemen who have bestowed upon me a fair number of neckties and other accouterments of formal office-wear that no longer pertain to their daily lives.

I tell ya what, if I didn’t bike so much, I wouldn’t find half the free shit I find. Seriously, I could start a whole blog about stuff I’ve found while riding.

Hey, if I run thin of topics this month, I know what to do!

Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, bike commuting, Holidailies 2012, nostalgia, Sewing | 2 Comments »

My first piece of couture!

Dec 5th, 2012 by Meetzorp

Thanks to the kindness and generosity of Ms. Jacquie, I am now in possession of a mysterious Jacques Fath suit which probably dates to the early or middle 1950s. I make this estimate because Fath went out of business in ’57 and didn’t have a US-based boutique until after WWII.

As you can see, the silhouette is not in strict conformity with the New Look figure. The jacket is, in fact, quite blousy, and the skirt is essentially a narrow A-line. It is missing a belt which would have nipped it in at the waist a bit. If I had a narrow black belt, I would style it with a belt and see how the silhouette is affected, but alas I do not. I will be visiting a thrift shop soon, so I will look around for an approximately thumb-width belt for it.

A 3/4 side view confirms the loose-fit of the jacket. When the front is hooked up, I can slide it off the dummy without unhooking anything. The waist of the skirt fits me, so it is approximately a modern US size 6.

The back of the jacket sports three pleats; one on each side at the waistline, and a long pleat down center back which is tacked at shoulderblade level and waist level.

One of the really fascinating aspects of this jacket is that is essentially cut in three pieces (not counting the two-piece collar and facing) and given shape with pleats and darts. There are underarm gussets to allow for range of motion in the raglan sleeves.