If anyone out there in Cyberville has a clue as to how to get the smell of toasted cumin out of a plastic mini-prep, I’m all ears. It’s true that I’m the jerk who probably melted the plastic of said mini-prep by adding toasted cumin seed to it straight from the stove without cooling it first, but someone somewhere must know how to rectify this sorry state of affairs. I tried scrubbing, I tried soaking in soap and then in white vinegar. I even tried steel wool both to the chagrin of the skin on the knuckles of my right hand and also to no avail, and I’m ready to say Uncle.

I’ve been a little overly, well, scrubby about things lately. I mean the cumin smell in the plastic isn’t exaggerated at all, but it is sort of indicative of a kind of OCD-like desire I’ve been having to scour things clean and to contain stuff. The result of cleaning and organizing is great; certainly it makes life a lot easier, but building what is essentially a bomb shelter in your chemical room (yes, I did this a couple of weeks ago) may not signal the height of rational behavior.

In the Clark Kent portion of my life I’m a goldsmith. And being a goldsmith that actually forges and welds gold myself, I’m required to have a space with a hood to contain the fumes from various chemicals I use that either remove or add oxidation to metal. When I moved into the studio space that I live and work in (if you’re curious, you can see pictures of the space here), there was a back office area that conveniently already had a hood built in, which was great, but it also had a pile of crap in it (panes of glass, 15-20 carousels of slides, a slide projector, apple boxes, a slab of iron that weighed at least 500 pounds, a ladder, sand bags and rusting C- stands). Which would be fine if I hadn’t already spent the first several weeks of my occupancy ripping down walls, painting and cleaning up the previous tenant’s meshugas. So I “organized” these things into a few corners, brought in the bedraggled fridge from the kitchen (it makes a great beer locker) and added my chemical tables to the mix. And then there were the extra boxes that soon piled up (what if I need to move my Le Creuset 15.5 qt french oven someday?) , the odd items that I was holding in storage for my gay boyfriend (whose computer and SCALE--why I don’t know-- I am babysitting while he is teaching in China) and a panoply of shit that almost reached the ceiling. Looking through the glass windows into the room was giving me heartburn.

PostedApril 12, 2011

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriespositively piggy, soup

Tagsspinach salad, recipe, mint, OCD, soup, Legal Eagle, cumin, Hoarders, creme fraiche, serrano ham, spring pea, bee cake pan, soupapalooza!, piggy piggy piggy, blood orange vinaigrette, lemon lavender ice cream, poblano, Semi-sweet Bitters, green peas

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I’ve almost never fully understood what my currency has been at any point in my life. What a waste my twenties were in this regard and what a crappy thing to have silly things like ideals. I remember giving up an invitation by a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to attend the Oscars with him because I thought he was a little suspect and aged (I think I’m older now than he was then, by the way) and I didn’t like his hair much, because I was that nit-picky. I also thought that surely if an opportunity to go to the Oscars was being presented to me at 22, I would certainly have others-- I didn’t realize that it was youth and naivety that were my sources of power at the time (I thought it was just my plain ol’ ”badassness”). What giant lady balls I had! I would stomp on kittens to have any number of those lost opportunities now. Yes, I said stomp on KITTENS. Or even BUNNIES, though at this stage of the game I would try and use my feminine wiles to get the dude to cut his hair, which I am quite sure at this point he already has, or at the very least make sure he didn’t take Corey Feldman as his backup date, which he actually did, much to both my disgust and to my delight.

The only time that I can think of in my past when I did know what it was that was my source of advantage was my senior year in college. I was one of the few people (I think there were fifty of us total) that petitioned to live in off-campus housing and had a non Middlebury sponsored residence, which meant I had a nice kitchen and a wood burning stove, which was cozy, if not completely necessary, since this was Vermont and we were all semi-lame pseudo-hippies that smelled good. Anyway, because I wasn’t on the meal plan in the dorm and because there was a food co-op right down the street and because that co-op sold ramen noodles and Annie’s mac and cheese and because I washed down every meal with at least three cans of Milwaukee’s Beast (that’s not a typo), I had acquired quite the culo. My solution? Use whatever means at my disposal to lose the fat ass. And what was at my disposal, you might ask: why, my kitchen and my (sort of) ability to follow directions.

PostedOctober 12, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriespositively piggy, soup

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Nobody wants to be the person with the facebook addiction that is obsessed with airing their narcissistic crap in their status updates. You know them: they put something out there about the unfairness of their ex boyfriend/ girlfriend/ husband/ wife, something so numbingly cliched and oversimplified that it garners passionate responses from overly enthusiastic “friends” that have no real insight into the situation? You know what I’m talking about.

I was that person earlier this week and I am not too embarrassed to admit it. Well, I did erase all evidence of my self-satisfying rant, so maybe I’m a little ashamed of my middle school need to pull as many poor suckers as possible into my completely pedestrian, completely mundane drama. But OK, I had a moment.

Once upon a time there was a girl who dated a guy. The guy (we’ll call him Vanilli Willie) and the girl lived coasts and sometimes countries apart. It was not ideal, but Vanilli Willie and our girl had some real laughs, but then it was just time to say adios. Unfortunately, the pair never really had the conversation where it was officially over and a pretty big debt that Vanilli Willie owed the girl wasn’t settled. And our girl, ever the non-confrontational pushover, let Vanilli Willie get away with this douchey behavior and let it be a source of deep seeded resentment to herself, which is pretty silly on her part, no?

PostedSeptember 10, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriespositively piggy, soup

Tagsscorpacciata, croque monsieur, local local local, move on, crouton, cognac, Vanilli Willie, piggy piggy piggy, buck up, facebook narcissism, Let's Just Call Him Mario, onion, brandy

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It is HOT today. Maybe not Houston hot, but for the first time in my adventure in Umbria I understand what some seasoned Italian travelers meant when they said it might be a little “uncomfortable” at the end of August in landlocked central Italy.

I feel like Italians have an almost pride in their pain the same way they do their regional pastas, so I wasn’t about to believe their doom and gloom scenario, either. After three weeks of mild, lovely weather with a few rain showers in between, I was convinced they were all just prone to this exaggeration in the same way they’ll pooh-pooh any shape of pasta other than the ones they were weaned on. I had no evidence to believe them when they said this loveliness was just a fluke and that soon I would roast under the Umbrian sun.

Roast we did today. Like beets at 450 degrees under tinfoil.

We were too steamy or “Panica-LAZY”, as Bossy proudly said, to make a third trip (a full fifty yards!) back into town to pick up arugula and vegetables for a lunch time salad. Our only other option: the sad tatters in our fridge, which seemed at the time like we were completely giving up, but turned out to be one of my favorite meals of my trip so far.

PostedAugust 21, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriessalad, positively piggy

Tagssalad, viva italia!, recipe, guanciale, cucina povera, panica-lazy, positively piggy, august adventure, umbrian adventure, soupapalooza!, cabbage, vintage gelato spoons, lunch, your arugula is only 50 yards away

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Driving up switch back after switchback on a single lane road through the Apennines, Bossy turned to me and said “[Blonde] and McClure are keeping our eyes on the road.”

We had just made the two hour trek from Panicale to Norcia (the “Disneyland of sausage” according to the owner of our villa and the Bossy Blonde’s sometime boss, the Contessa di Mozzarella), and were heading towards Castelluccio, the place where the best lentils in the world are found. All of this sounds well and good, I am sure, but we were winding up this steep, steep mountain like a corkscrew and there was barely a guardrail keeping us from plummeting to our deaths in the valley below.

“Neither [Blonde] nor McClure are billy goats, so this is good.” I said, trying my best not to rubberneck when we noticed an ambulance scraping an unfortunate motorcyclist off the road while four of his distressed, luckily leather-clad, biker friends looked on in panic about a mile or so up the climb.

I’d never really given lentils much thought. They’re beans and I’m American. I eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day because I’m both southern and superstitious, but other than that I wouldn’t say that they really have a place in my diet. But Bossy has made a couple of batches of lentils since we’ve been here and I’m kind of obsessed with them now. Even our Italian friends have been super impressed with the flavor and texture of her recipe, though one of them did tell me that lentils are basically just eaten in the winter for them, too, just like our black eyed peas.

PostedAugust 20, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriespositively piggy, soup

Tagsviva italia!, recipe, panicale, the Disneyland of sausage, Castellucio, lentils, billy goat gruff, motion sickness, umbrian adventure, august adventure, Apennines, Italian adventure, Norcia, Its a small world, Bossy

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spring pea and poblano with cumin and mint crème fraîche and fried serrano ham: there’s a whole lot of cumin goin’ on

sweet potato with pancetta rosemary croutons AND roasted yellow pepper/ roasted heirloom tomato with serrano cream: soup(s)apolooza!

brandied onion soup with croque monsieur croutons: Vanilli Willie, scorpacciata and making peace with getting burned

cabbage and guanciale salad: cucina povera. who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?

walking in a lentil wonderland: lunch on the moon (or just the highest settlement in the Apennines)

Why? Because soup is cheap, delicious and easy. Kind of like me.

a weekly attempt to eat well and to savor life. or to see how much food I can get on my clothes.