Oeuf-Ta.

I have a real bone to pick with the internet board of directors.

And fellow bloggers out there.

And you food-crazy recipe hounds.

Within our first year or so of marriage, I had a pretty good idea of what foods constituted C and I's culinary happy place.  It was a short list.  And cheap, which was awesome, since I was doing most of my grocery shopping in the banged-up-can aisle and the bakery seconds rack.  Along with being short and cheap, I dare say that cooking from this list would make any sane person happy.  Unless you're one of those health-conscious eaters.  Then it's not for you.  Neither are hot wings or beer bread or empanadas or anything else good and perfect in this world.

More for me, then.

So on our list were approximately seven things:

• tortilla chips
• salsa (or on rarer, more sophisticated occasions, salsa ingredients)
• jalepenos (already included in the above if this day is a sophisticated day)
• bread
• red kidney beans (or some other canned legume)
• eggs
• cheese

You can probably already see some of our potential meals.  Monday night: Nachos with beans.  Tuesday night: Fried eggs.  Wednesday night:  Poor-man's juevos rancheros.  Thursday night: Grilled cheese and jalepeno sandwiches.  Friday night: Chili (beans, jalepenos, salsa) with cheese and tortilla chip garnish.  Saturday night: Cheese crisps (pan fried piles of cheddar with a jalepeno coin in the middle - DIVINE) and toast with salsa/bean puree, topped with a poached egg.  Sunday:  Juevos, again, because it's good and it's been since Wednesday.

Yeah, I dressed up some of our dishes.  Mostly I just wanted you to get the full picture, which is that C and I could go a full week on these ingredients and still want more.  And you should really try the cheese crisps.


Which brings me back to my original point.  I have searched around and around, and I cannot find a food blog that is egg-centric.  How has the internet done me wrong on this??  I thought for sure that I'd find, like, a gazillion blogs with cheesy names like For My Eggs-wife or Oeuf-Ta!!, which is what I'd name an egg-blog if I started one.  WHICH I MIGHT BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT.

Where.  Are.  The  blogs.

One exception to my rant was a scrambled egg site, but I don't really count this, because if you don't like the ooey-gooey, popping-a-water-balloon kind of egg yolk, you don't really like eggs.  If you do like these perfect little fatty, yellow-orange spheres of flavor, then you get my point.  A good fried or poached egg can go on anything.  Salad?  Yup.  Sandwich?  Everyone knows it.   Soup?  Drop it in and give it a stir!  Rice and beans?  Protein pack it!  Spaghetti?  Have you heard of carbonara??

Italians love the egg.  The Swedes eat 'em raw.  The French followed that Eve of chickens around until that first oeuf fell out the bottom, and never stopped chasing her for more.  Indonesians make nasi gorong.  Japanese wrap nori around it.  How could there not be a blog?

If you're not yet as freakishly passionate as I am about the high stature of this elementary ingredient, go ahead and start throwing it into places it doesn't belong.  I'm speaking strictly of food dishes here, not medicine cabinets and the foot of your sisters bed (under the covers), though that sounds like a blast, too.  Throw it on a pizza at the last second and give it a minute to broil.  Stir it into a chicken noodle soup or fry one up and slide it onto your cold spinach salad.

Go on.  Slide your knife through that golden center.  Spear a cluster of green leaves, let the buttery yolk drip off the teeth of your fork ... and know the truth.

Then find me an egg blog.

And For Their Final Act

I'm sure you're tired of the exclamations that I start these posts with, but... I'm not.

Holy Toledo.

Last Thursday, C and I (with some very valuable help) loaded our every belonging into a 26-foot U-Haul truck, went out for sushi with the best mopper/sister, and returned home to fall asleep on an air mattress in our house.

For the very     last     time.

And what's remarkable is that it felt ok.  It wasn't like I was leaping for joy or popping some bubbly or having any kind of warm, fuzzy feelings, but all the same, I wasn't weeping and clawing at my hair, which really must be some kind of small victory, don't you think?  Maybe more than small...

What's also remarkable is that the very mattress that we slept on has been continuously inflated for... wait for it... FOUR YEARS.  And it hasn't leaked, period.  If that doesn't totally shock you, I don't know what to say, other than to say  lay off the meds, for both our sakes.  This is my shameless and enthusiastic plug for the Simmons Beautyrest air mattress.  Go.  Buy one.  Mine's flawless, but if yours pops, don't come crying to me.  I'm sure it will be your fault.

So Friday morning, we deflated the mattress (for the first time), threw it in it's bag and closed the garage door behind us on our way out.  C hopped into our pickup truck and I clamored into the U-Haul.  There must be a height requirement for truckers, because I had a seriously hard time getting into and out of the cab of this thing.  It was a strange turn of fate when we first laid eyes on our 26-footer.  You know how U-Haul's have those fairly tacky cartoonish pictures of random world destinations?  Like a sumo wrestler and a giant Macy's float in the shape of a Spicy Tuna Roll painted on the side of a trailer with the words, "Visit Japan!" written above the picture in Indiana Jones font?  Well, I'm pretty sure that this particular U-Haul was manufactured especially for us.

Along with a picture of our favorite neighborly woodland creature, our U-Haul was showcasing the up and coming Canadian hotspot - Saskatchewan!  It was like someone just knew where we were headed. I cackled up a storm driving that thing north toward the border - driving increasingly slow, mind you, because if a moose ran in from of that gas hog, there was going to be a very small chance that I'd manage to avoid it.

We arrived at camp around 11:00 PM and unloaded one important passenger - a gigantic jade plant that has been in my family since I was a little girl.  A certain jade plant that was now (sorry mom) frozen solid.  The leaves snapped like sheets of ice, and were scattered on the floor of the truck.  Jades are members of the succulent family, intended to inhabit an arid climate, which is distressingly far from the  -10 degree temperature that night.  I still haven't given up on her, though.  We brought her drooping body in from the chill and I gave her some water and whispered some nice, I'msosorry kind of words.  The next day I pruned off the limbs that felt like water balloons, because there is just no way that a texture like that could be healthy.  So now she's a little ragged, and probably still dying, but we're not letting her go without a fight.

On a related note, this summer I kept a Bonsai on my desk at the rafting office.  This plant, too, got sick and dried up, but I had recently read about the ever-important "cut off the gangrenous limbs or you'll lose the patient" policy and quickly got to work.  A month later, the plant was sailing into the woods where it became part of the earth again, and not simply a prickly naked single stalk of what used to be a thriving maze of branches.  I have a tendency to get carried away with scissors.

So Mama Jade, Kiwi the cat, our air mattress and cookware I haven't seen in a year are finally in one place.  And even though the process was tedious, maddening and sometimes ugly, it's made for a good life story.  And as one of my dear friends, Amy, put it:


Soon it will be all over (for now, for a while) and you'll be settled in to a cozy log-ish home with far fewer moose than you're accustomed to, that is not a small kitchen-less apartment above a restaurant, and that does not come with its own wheels. 


Thanks, Amy.  You always know how to make a girl feel good.

In A Flash

A lot has happened since last time we met.  Sorry about the lag time.

At this moment, C and I are sitting on the couch, watching the Broncos play the Steelers.  I’m usually one to hop on the underdog bandwagon, but in this case, I have some surprisingly strong feelings - mostly in the vein of having a case of the hots for Troy Polamalu (The blocking!  The speed!  The Head & Shoulders commercials!), but also… it seems that I just don’t like Tim Tebow very much.  Every time I hear something nice about him, I dislike him even more… is that bad?

I apologize - I didn’t get on here to write about the game, but the Tim Tebow Superstar stuff gets me a little riled up.  I wanted instead to give you a brief, slap-across-the-face summary of the past few weeks, which have been exciting, depressing, hilarious, and almost below zero already.  Here goes:

Pack it up!

We will be closing on the sale of our house in just 12 short days, so we headed down about a week before Christmas to try and box up our effects.  Good: I didn’t have a meltdown on the kitchen floor, an event I was positive would occur.  Bad:  There’s no food in the kitchen anymore.  Ugly:  Take-out pizza for 4 out of 6 dinners.  We needed to eat some apples, like whoa. 

Out at breakfast one morning, C “accidentally” left the pepper shaker top mostly unscrewed.  I'm sure he did it because he knows how much I like heaping mounds of black pepper on my eggs.

Christmas

It’s hard to describe how much my dad likes Christmas.  He has a real reverence for the significance of the holiday, but I’ve also never met a kid more excited for the morning than my father.  Or for Christmas Eve.  Or for whenever he can persuade us to start opening presents, which on this particular year included nose flutes.  The Good: No present was larger than a beach ball.  The bad: No beach balls.  The Ugly: No beach.

Get [chilly] Together

Each year over the New Year’s Eve weekend, we host a camp reunion for staff and students.   The weather is usually a significant factor for the success or failure of said weekend.  One year it was terrifyingly cold with lunatic winds and snow that felt like tiny hypodermic needles.  Last year it reached a balmy 40 degrees, and felt like we ought to pull out the canoes.  This year it was somewhere in the middle - a nice balance.  The Good:  No one fell through the ice.  The Bad:  I am too much of a sally to stay up until midnight anymore.  The Ugly:  I couldn’t find the right cookie cutters, so for the “Christmas Cookie Decorating” activity, the kids had to slap frosting on women in dresses, circles made from drinking glasses, and get this… pigs. 

Low & Slow

When I was ten, I was given a Christmas gift that was beyond my dreams.  Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs that morning, sitting next to the tree was a glass cage with a small Chinese box turtle in it.  Lois has been a trusty companion since then, and at 21 or so years of age, she has waddled her way into the corners of our house and the nooks of our hearts.  She has become fairly free range at this point, mostly wandering around the first floor of our cabin or my parents living room until she finds a place to take a nap.  Well, friends, she’s moved on to new pastures.  The Good: Lois is alive and kicking, and was a Christmas present herself this year.  The Bad:  She’s keeping another family up at night as she bangs into the sides of her cage like a jailed army tank.  The Ugly:  Here’s to hoping she doesn’t give them salmonella. 

s-a-l-m-o-n-e-l-l-a. . .

Other things have happened in the last few weeks as well, but I don’t want to keep you here forever.  I will work hard to post consistently, but another recent development is that I’ve started a new job, so I’ll have to get organized with my time.

I'm a pretty on-time person, so that should be easy.