My default setting is “solo”, romantically, socially and professionally speaking. I haven’t always been this way, and I’m sure it would be great fodder for the psychiatry I imagine I desperately need, but I’m comfortable in safely saying that I’m pretty much a lone wolf.

I do almost everything by myself and I am used to the solitude in an almost upsetting way. Like I’ve gotten to the point where it almost never occurs to me to invite people along on any of my many adventures and the ushers at the Arclight movie theatre in Hollywood know me as That Creepy Chick That Sees Matinées by Herself Every Other Wednesday at 11am. I bet they instinctively know that I’m also a Krazy Kat Lady (tm). They do. I look like the kind of gal that might have a Kolony (tm) on her Katio (tm)*. The Kollection (tm) of strays even has outstanding names: Miss Peaches, Lady Saffron, Herman, Pip, Genghis Kat and That Other One.

But here’s the thing-- I LOVE people even more that cats. I really, truly and deeply do. I am constantly amazed at the inspirational qualities that live inside of everyone. And I mean everyone, even in evil freaks like Hitler, Jennifer Love Hewitt or the “Call Me Maybe” girl. And you don’t have to look very far to be surprised at the goodness in people, unless, of course, you’re driving in LA, and then all you’re shit out of luck, swimming in a sea of tasteless, moronic salmon. And that’s totally another blog post, somewhere, I’m certain.

But I started doing soupapolooza! for purely selfish reasons, not out of any sense of community or goodness inside myself.

PostedMay 25, 2012

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriesvegetarian, soup

Tagsrecipe, soupapalooza!, lONEly, Bossy, cat-astrophe, Italian, soup, Legal Eagle, past e fagioli

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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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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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I did not read “Eat Pray Love” and I most certainly did not see the movie and that is saying something since I take great pride in my ability to sit through absolutely anything, from the simply tedious to the morally agonizing. I am quite the connoisseur of crap chick flicks and beach reads, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put up with Elizabeth Gilbert. I thought the book was kind of offensive, actually, though I guess it’s not really fair for me to judge since I read less than a paragraph before I commenced with the eye rolling and with the throwing of it across my loft. If I hadn’t been permanently scarred by an incident when I was four that involved a Winnie the Pooh picture book, some scissors and my irate dad shaking his finger at me, wildly screaming, “WE do NOT deface books in this house!” (I couldn’t bring myself to even highlight books when I was in college and I still have an unnatural fear of libraries), I may have lit it in a ceremonial bonfire in an act of literary rebellion and out of personal disgust.

But love it or hate it, you certainly can’t deny Gilbert’s impact on people-- lots and lots of people. I was having a hard time understanding exactly why anyone else really cared about Gilbert’s personal journey; how their own longing was connected to this privileged woman’s premeditated (a nice book advance makes for some pretty awesome truffle pasta, some swanky caftans and lots of elephant rides) and fully funded-by-someone-else’s experience. I thought maybe it was that we’ve all just gotten used to this conscious/ produced faux reality because of the current trends in television programming, but the Bossy Blonde offered up her own theory:

“The book is successful because, even though she doesn’t give great detail as to why, you find her at the beginning, in total devastation, rock bottom and destroyed on the floor of her bathroom and you instantly care about her and where she’s going.”

PostedSeptember 30, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriessoup

Tagsmint & chile butter, spice station silverlake, bad movies, recipe, crostini, spice, aleppo, romesco, five spice ice cream, red lentil, homemade chicken stock, soup, Legal Eagle, lentil, burrata, pistachio biscotti, soupapalooza!, tabouleh avocado and feta salad

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pasta e fagioli (version 2.0) with garlic confit: one isn't really the loneliest number

Spanish saffron with turkey meatballs: consider the source

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!

red lentil with aleppo chile and mint butter: eat pray ladle

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.