Don’t mind me, just practicin’ my squiggle-hook and whetting your appetites for, perhaps, a new recipe.

شكرا منير ابن داود

This post brought to you by:
McCoy Tyner

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Silly answers to stupid questions, brought to you by the disconcertingly well-scrubbed (for cooks, anyway) bunch of fair-traders at CHOW.com:

I have never had this problem. Ever. The average lifespan of a full bottle of red wine in my house is twenty minutes, or half that if I have a friend over, or a unit of time so small as to be rendered largely theoretical if I share with the roommates. I can’t even save wine for cooking beyond a single dish, because I ascribe to the culinary school in which every pour of wine into the pan is followed by five or six pours of wine into the cook. (These days, there is much interest among Streep-addled yuppies in beef bourguignon, but students of my school would scarcely survive the recipe.)

Really, who has this problem? If you cannot find use for an entire bottle of red wine in the space of an evening, you can consider yourself a failure as a bacchanalian, a gourmand, and a member of a social species. Assuming you are a seven-year-old girl who can’t finish a whole glassy green of the red stuff all by your be-petticoated self, don’t you have friends? Don’t they like some tasty wine? If they don’t, why did you let them in your house?

Sweet Borei Pri ha-Gefen, next they’ll tell us that a crispy vinho verde cannot be chugged down to the bottom of the bottle in the manner of Sprite.

Seriously, go out there right now (7:30 AM) and drink a bottle of wine. If you get a headache or start belting out La Marseillaise, that’s just your body’s way of telling you that you’re living.

This post brought to you by:
Eddie Hazel

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“SPREAD IT ON YA THANG AND TASTE IT IN YA MIND’S EYE”
.
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I am in the wrong business.
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When you are a civilized type of person, and you have been drinking gin all night, and you step out the front door at 5:50 AM, when the sky remains as black as your most fondly regarded sins, so that you may walk the dog and clear your juniper-besotted mind with an amenable bit of lightly chilled Marvin Gaye, the following should not be anywhere in sight:

• Fifteen full-grown women spread out across the darkened lawn of the middle school, flailing through a series of jumping jacks with little five-pound chick-weights, before setting off, as one, on a determined slog-jog up a large hill.
• One full-grown man, clad entirely in sweat-wicking Spandex and sun-blocking Oakley despite the cool pre-dawn air and rather pervasive pre-dawn darkness, buzzing you in a $5000 racing bike with attached night-light.

One day, should I be awake, I will stride into a gym Saturday at 11:00 AM, just in time for the cardio blitz, wearing pajama pants and a loose-fitting T-shirt, and I will pull up a chair in front of the yoga mats and rhythmically jangle a cocktail shaker in time with the Exertion Grunts, while smoking. If anyone questions me, I will loudly share my thoughts on Modigliani, and demand that someone “freshen my morning tea” while shaking a cocktail glass in their general direction and cackling.

If I have to be confronted with gross caricatures of their kind when I try to take peaceful advantage of the nighttime, they should have to be confronted with gross caricatures of my kind every time they take sweaty advantage of the day.

Cocksuckers.

From the H-E-B store brand Italian Arborio:

“Grown in the fertile Italian river valleys of Northern Italy, this short, pearly white rice is the foundation for the traditional Italian dish risotto. Arborio is unique for the creamy smooth consistency that emerges from it’s large al denté grains. This unique quality allows Arborio rice to either accept or enhance any flavor profile, making it perfect for Italian risotto or Spanish paella.”

I give “it’s” another five years before it’s deemed a valid alternate form of the possessive, and another five years after that, English teachers and proofreaders will probably start marking “its” with the big red pen.

But what really gets me is that whoever wrote the Arborio rice copy is aware of the function of the acute accent in English, but not how redundant it looks in an Italian word.

H-E-B: I am available for proofreading. Call me. Its in your best ĭn’trĭst.

Rosh Hashanah dinner:

• Arugula and spinach salad with thinly sliced apples
• Risotto with applewood bacon, Braeburn apples and Ragusano cheese
• Nutmeg chicken schnitzel with homemade breadcrumbs from homemade sourdough; served with tangy Pinot grigio applesauce
• Honeyed apple cake

The idea was to drown everything in enough holiday-appropriate thematic resonance that the good Lord would overlook the pork-flavored cheese conceits. And if he doesn’t, well, I’ve still got like a week before they close the Book of Life on me.

This post brought to you by:
Thelonious Monk

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After a long stretch of nocturnality (or “eveningness,” as it’s apparently officially been dubbed), which is my preferred schedule, I have been forced by factors beyond my control to adopt a somewhat more “morningness” guise. This has led me to several conclusions regarding this period commonly referred to as “day,” which differentiates itself from the night¹ via a disquieting barrage of photons and mid-sized sport utility-type vehicles driven by a human variant known as “women,” which do not generally appear at night in any respectable format:

1)The drinking of alcoholic beverages, by and large, is not undertaken during the daylight hours, and those who do drink while the sun is up are commonly regarded as dissolute. This misconception is rooted in the pervasive day person disregard for the habits, schedule and demeanor of the night person. To wit: a night person may drink a martini at 7 PM without raising a single eyebrow hair in civilized environs, even though, expressed in day person terms, this night person is downing two good slugs of Her Majesty’s finest at 9 AM.² Therefore, any person seen imbibing during the day should be regarded as a harmless night person hewing, in his own way, to the societal contract of not drinking until the latter part of one’s wakefulness cycle – unless, of course, the imbiber is seen engaging in an activity foreign to night people, such as jogging.

2) There is this idea – or, I suppose, more of a concept and less an idea – of a meal taken during the early morning hours, which is, for those of you not following along, immediately after a morning person awakes (or at least immediately after their jog). I am led to believe that they call this “breakfast,” and there is a certain type of evangelical morning person who will swear up and down, possibly while jogging, that this affront to good sense, good breeding and the healthy workings of the gastrointestinal system constitutes “the most important meal of the day.” This is clearly untrue, because as we have previously established, morning people do not drink during the day, and as any night person and most of our significant nutritionists know, any meal not accompanied by liquor can hardly be considered “important,” no matter when it takes place. People who ease their way into the day³, as opposed to people who brutally seize the day by its coronae and jog-and-egg-white-no-butter-no-oil-omelet it into cowed submission⁴, are not hungry upon arising. They earn their hunger through several hours of anomie and cocktails. As my mother says, “Breakfast is for peasants” – a great mass of bacon-infused fuel for somebody who has to do…something…to several acres of sorghum for the seventeen hours until the cows come home.

3) As a corollary, I call bullshit on many notable day person foodstuffs. Hash browns? Bullshit. French toast? Bullshit. Oatmeal? Bullshit. Link sausages? Bullshit. Grapefruit? My friend, you are not believing we are having so much bullshit here. By way of contrast, night person foodstuffs include sushi, red meat that bleeds, anything deep-fried, any raw animal product, and Scotch.

4) Little of value has ever been produced during the day. This is not just creative-type-personality-thing chauvinism. It goes without saying, of course, that all great music, art, writing and cooking is a product of the wee-est and smallest of the hours, but I would wager that most of your great strides forward in science and mathematics were made at an hour that would break any mother’s heart. Things produced during the daylight hours are like 18-year-olds: functional in all the fundamentally important ways, yet obviously lacking a certain nous savons quoi.

5) Musical genres favored by night people (jazz, trip-hop, quiet storm, burbly electronica) all sound bizarre in the harsh light of the day. On the other hand, bubblegum and mariachi sound downright sinister at 3 AM. So who’s actually creepy?

6) Day people are remarkably sanctimonious regarding their status as such. During the day, empowered by their clear and present majority, they respond to night people with haughtiness and airs (“You woke up when?”). During the night, barricaded behind doors and porch lights and home security systems, they respond to night people by calling the police.

7) The police are not night people, but rather day people whose enforced eveningness has left them with a perpetual bad attitude. One would think this would give them some sympathy for the aimlessly wandering night person, but unfortunately for us, society has elected to instead give them high-beams and nightsticks.

So perhaps now you, the day person, can begin to understand the travails of the night person. He is a stranger in your temporal land, and should you see him stumbling about, blinded by the sunlight and the glint off your sweat-besotted abs⁵, try to treat him with the kindness and respect you would afford to any well-meaning foreigner. Give him some berth. Cross to the other side of the street when you see him. Never, under any circumstances, attempt to engage him in trivial conversation. Get a treadmill. And maybe, should you be possessed of a charitable nature, leave a bottle of gin by the curb before you retire for the night. Beefeater, please.

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Whatever. It’s not like I was using that fingertip for anything.

Also, I would like the record to state that on the day I cut off my fingertip, I coated the gushing wound in Super Glue and went to work.

Any book with a title fitting the format “NOUN: How NOUN [and NOUN, and NOUN] Have/Are VERB America['s NOUN]” will be terribly obnoxious.

And a little drunk. But not quite ready to break my streak yet. This post is a lie. A tease. It is pretty, empty, pointless, and a little wrong, like a corporate lunch at Hooter’s. But I have the next ten days off, so maybe I’ll get ambitious.

In the meantime, prepare for Saxophone Jesus:

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