I have been yammering on and on and on about how I am going to do a breakfast-palooza for almost an entire year. Yes, since LAST APRIL when I did my TV dinner soupapalooza. I am nothing if not a sloth when it comes to executing all the little delights my underutilized brain can conjure...of course, when I dream up these little delights they are always executed quickly, perfectly and I'm wearing a beautiful party dress that doesn't get any food on it. I really loves me an imaginary Best Case Scenario.

After all the plotting and thinking and reality TV watching (please feel more than free to judge me since I judge everyone else ALL THE TIME) I got off my duff and decided to get back on the soup program. Actually I was nudged by a friend who was coming to town for a quick visit and who also wanted to pack in seeing as many people as possible at one time as she could, which worked out well for me because just like starting a blog to ensure that I actually completed the cooking challenge I set for myself, this was a good way to make sure I didn't puss out. Because I do have a tendency to really, spectacularly puss out. Just ask my friend Delia about how I pretended to tighten the tension on the spinning bike in her class, and about the fact that I still almost fell down the stairs after the class because I've been sitting on my ass for A YEAR. And please forgive my Kanye-ALL-CAPS-I'M-YELLING-AT-YOU emphasis, but I think it's necessary to really MAKE MY POINT.

Anyway, I dreamed (dreamt?) up a pretty ambitious menu, though, like I said earlier, I never think it's all that ambitious (and why am I always so cute in these daydreams?) until 30 people are in my house and there are no pigs in a blanket for them to much on while I toss the salad. I consider that a party fail, though I have learned along this journey that it's usually more important to have the drinks ready than the proverbial pu pu platter as guests arrive, or maybe that's just because I have pretty boozy friends, I don't know, but whatever works.

People in my family don’t win things. OK, maybe we win spelling bees, but not stuff like cars or money and none of us has numbers in the lottery. It’s not that we see ourselves as unlucky. In fact, we’re statistically pretty advantaged in most areas. But I’ve never won anything. Even from KCRW, our local Public Radio station that every single one of my friends has managed to score free concert tickets from for DECADES (thanks again, Jihad Jenni, for taking me along to see Scissor Sisters. Those $20 beers were pretty badass). Of course I’ve always been more interested in dating the DJs than in getting free tickets because a girl has to have priorities, but that’s a different blog post all together.

There was this one year, 1981, that we McClures were on fire with both the radio giveaway and our love of the legwarmer (I’ve got awesome blackmail pictures to prove the latter). First my brother won concert tickets to see Neil Diamond (they’re coming to America! Today!), which I think excited my mom a whole lot more than him since she insisted on chaperoning. And then she turned around like a month later and won an Amana microwave on KRBE, Houston’s very own hitmaker (tm). Of course memory is an imperfect thing, and the Tiny Dancer remembers things a little differently-- that she, in fact, won BOTH the tickets and the microwave, and that it wasn’t really a microwave that she won at all, but $50 that she put towards a microwave of her choosing. So mom, it turns out, is the luckiest McClure of all. And that probably has something to do with the fact that she wasn’t born one. Marrying a McClure, maybe not so lucky, but that was her choice.

The microwave was like this magical appliance in our house. It could make POPCORN (popcorn that tasted like burnt toast). And boil water in ONE minute! But we were not allowed to stand in front of it because we might get cancer. Lots of logic in our house, a strange meditation on faith and reason or a lack of either at any given time. But still, this exotic little box that chirped like a mechanical baby bird when it was finished cooking was God in our kitchen, which is saying a lot for a kitchen full of Presbyterian appliances.

PostedApril 2, 2012

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriesstocks and broths, soup

TagsTV dinner soupapolooza!, recipe, #worth it, microwaves are the enemy, comfort food, nostalgia, homemade chicken stock, pot pie, whole lotta chickenness, green peas, spring pea, spring has sprung

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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.”

homefry potato soup with hashbrown, bacon breadcrumbs, fried egg & sriracha: there's a whole lotta bacon goin' on

chicken pot pie soup: ode to the TV dinner and you can blame it on mom's dumb luck

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.