Sometimes there’s just not a whole lot to say, though that’s not normally the case with me; I can flap my jaws about nothing for days and days only to realize that the only person listening is the cat. And that’s just because she is required to in order to get fed, and she is an indoor cat with no means for escape. Oh, and she isn’t really listening at all since SHE’S A CAT. Incidentally, Monkey, that long suffering pet of mine, is also quite possibly the best birth control on the planet. See, I have a gallery wall of pictures of her in my upstairs lounge. An entire wall. And as soon as any of my dates sees this wall, it’s all I can do to keep them from fleeing into my parking lot for their very lives.

Being at a loss for words already, I was also having a really difficult time settling on a menu for this month’s soupapolooza!. Say what you will about the difficulties of cooking (it’s hard! I can’t boil a pot of water without burning it! I cut the crap out of myself every time I use a knife!) but I’ve found that probably the single most essential element of cooking is finding and using the right recipe. It’s tricky and fraught with peril; just like shooting a movie: you can have a solid script that makes really bad film, but there is no chance in hell of a good movie coming from a bad script. It’s impossible. And slightly more expensive than screwing up a pound of turkey meat. Flawed recipes and subpar ingredients never a good soup make, no matter what. So, always consider your sources when you get the itch to cook.

For this month’s soupapolooza! I pried myself away from making cat videos (only slightly more disturbing than Princess Beatrice’s wedding hat, consider yourself warned) and watching the William & Kate wedding loop long enough to go through probably two dozen cook books and ten different google searches. As I so long-windedly pointed out in my blogpocalypse about baby showers/ party throwing, menu planning is daunting, and I was totally in violation of my “figure it out five days in advance and then don’t make changes” rule.

PostedMay 5, 2011

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriessoup

Tagsmeatball, saffron, recipe, soupapalooza!, Monkey the Cat, shaved asparagus, Jenni Jihad, turkey, atomic strawberry cake, crazy cat lady, mycatisawesomebirthcontrol, soup, Legal Eagle, Semi-sweet Bitters

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Miss Maria Hold-the-Eggs did not, as her pseudonym suggests, actually “hold the egg”, and went and got herself all kinds of up the duff. As in preggers, mit kinder, knocked up, in a family way, riding the baby train, all blowed up on baby... in any event, she failed the rabbit test, all right, in a big, bad kind of way.

Which is great for a lot of reasons, the least important of which being that it gives me a fabulous excuse to stop with the dour posts about OCD, antidepressants & other mental mishaps not otherwise specified/diagnosed. So it’s a win-win for you, dear reader, too; A soft pink palate cleanser to wash away the existential soup pain.

Because Miss Maria Hold-the-Eggs is one of my all-time favorite people on this planet, her pregnancy gave me a great excuse to co-host a Sunday party-- like I’ve ever needed an excuse to do that-- and with a tremendous amount of help from her lovely sisters, we threw the parents-to-be one really fun fete. No games, no crustless cucumber sandwiches and no estrogen-only requirements for admission, oh no. It was rock and roll, a burger bar, a boatload of beer and champagne punch and boys and girls from all sorts of creative provenance. In short, it was a really fun party to welcome our newest future ‘poloozian to her fold...and we all seriously cannot wait to meet her.

I’ve been asked before how it is that I throw parties for large amounts of people without killing myself (and, more often, the cat), and I think this party made for a really great template anyone can follow to have an easy time of it. Here is a list of some of the things I have on hand and some of what I have learned from a year and a half of steady on-the-job training...

PostedApril 19, 2011

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriesparty planning, gear and miscellany, desserts & sweet treats

Tagsit's a girl!, special pan, mit kinder, boozy baby shower, williams sonoma, party tips, nutty, burger bar, baking, honeybee almond cake, Maria-Hold-the-Eggs, baby shower, honey bee

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There was a period of time, oh almost a decade ago, that I completely lost it. I joke that it was my Maria Carey meltdown (you do remember the time in her “Glitter” era when she started speaking gibberish on TRL while pushing an ice cream cart around only to wind up in a “sanatorium”, don’t you?). Well mine was exactly like that minus the fame and the money, the butt shorts and the Carson Daly. I had wound up, after a decade of living on my own in California, back in my hometown working in the mall I used to troll as a preteen. It was so not pretty I can’t even tell you. Every so often I would look up from folding a t-shirt (I spent an inordinate amount of time folding t-shirts) to see the schadenfreudic-full face of some girl I went to high school with strolling with her baby while wearing a two carat VS1 diamond on her finger. I cannot tell you how many uncomfortable and humiliating conversations I had during that period of my life, in between the time I spent traveling from the putty colored walls of my shrink’s office to the hallowed halls of Baybrook Mall’s very own Banana Republic to the zombied-out hours I spent watching “The Bachelor” and “The Swan” on my mom’s couch. It was truly pitiful, not to mention ridiculously expensive due to the megadoses of anti-depressants and sleeping pills I popped every day.

The how I got there part isn’t really all that important, but suffice to say I was in the midst of this full-blown major depressive episode by my own making. I had been on a fast track to a life that I thought I wanted, that I thought I was entitled to, only to have all of it blow up spectacularly in my face; I was suffering wildly at discovering that no one is guaranteed anything in life, certainly not everyone gets a happy ending and what made me so special to think I was so special? I was barely 30 and still young, but I held zero hope for my life ending up as I had plotted, planned and engineered with a Machiavellianish intensity.

PostedApril 14, 2011

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriespositively piggy, gear and miscellany

TagsMariah Carey Meltdown, book report, The Dirty Life, life lessons, Kristin Kimball, All Things Considered, farming

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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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We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog post to inform you, dear soupapolooza! reader(s), of a nifty new feature on the site: the recipe section.

Yes, borne of an acute anxiety attack, there, up in the left hand side of the nav bar is a new header entitled appropriately enough, “recipes”, and if you click on it you have access to a breakdown of all of the recipes made here in the ol’ test kitchen. Feel free to ignore the ramblings of the neurotic cook and skip directly to the yum...

A new post is imminent, so prepare to have your minds blown next week. OK, maybe not blown, exactly, but be prepared anyway for more insane musings and a delicious recipe or two.

Until then...

Soup on!

PostedApril 8, 2011

Authormelissa mcclure

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Spanish saffron with turkey meatballs: consider the source

honey almond bee cake: a boozy baby shower for the bomb of a great friend

soupapalooza! book report: The Dirty Life and making peace with your Maria Carey meltdown

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

blog update: now with handy recipe section!

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.