Hey 2010, You Were Pretty Great.

Almost Nude Year, eh? Usually I do this whole Year in Review thing at the end of the year - or, I guess, in the beginning of the next year because I'm a slacker at times. In the past, I've filled out a survey of questions, as well as going through my goals/thoughts from the previous year and assessing where I'm at with them. Man, that all seems so boring to me right now! Frankly, 2010 was an effing good year. I say that despite tragedy, sadness, scariness, health stuff, funerals, hospitals, and very anxious drives between states, among other things. Really, the year was quite tumultuous. But nevertheless, there was some really good stuff this year. Stuff that makes me feel better and happier and healthier than I have in my entire life. Stuff that I feel confident will continue in the coming new year.

But let's not get too serious here. Going in to all that would require hours and patience and probably some booze. And frankly, I have some houseguests and a lot of things to eat and drink, so let's not do that. Instead, let's look at the year in pictures. Here are some glimpses of some of my favorite moments of this past year:

New Years 2009 - 2010. So smart. Until all the booze froze.

Madison skyline, taken by Helen. I've come to love it so much.

Trip to Florida with my oldest friends, Gina and Sherin, and their husbands. Husbands are great when they love your best friends as much as they do.

Dipping my feet in the water; necessary for a mid-Jauary-suffering Wisconsinite.

Dad makes juice while Father Paddy cuts bread. Much love to these two men.

First daffodils of the year.

Genia cooks me a beautiful dinner.

Meeting the parents in Milwaukee. Doing nothing more than walking around and taking pictures and laughing.

Emil and Mladenka visit Wisconsin and we go to Devil's Lake.

Remembering Love in New Orleans.

Genia and Helen with Smokey Johnson. Total OG.

The grand opening of the National Mustard Museum with Lynn and Jess. We met the "Duchesse" herself!

Emil and I on our sibling date. He takes me to eat what I think was the best sandwich ever. Seriously, like ranked #1. This is a big deal. His was called Hide the Salami. Please ask him about it.

Alex comes to visit. We spend time with caterpillars and Dr. Evermore. He's a gentle soul, this Alex, believe it or not.

Visiting Sarah in Michigan. We happened upon an Orchid Festival. Of course.

Mom cooked a lovely dinner and we ate in the backyard surrounded by trees and birds and love. And vegetables!

Sampling chocolates at David Bacco with Lia. This was before they changed their name to "DB Infusions." DB, eh?

On a walk with Genia near Lake Monona, watching waterskiers.

Darwin Day and the Procession of the Species with Anna. Smiling giant puppets.

Cooking with fresh food from the farmer's markets this summer.

Sweet talking a bouncer at a meat and cheese tasting with Emil and the rest of the family. I'm getting way better at sweet talking.

After seeing Trombone Shorty at La Fete de Marquette with Genia this summer. This was one of those epic nights of which you cannot share all the details. But I will tell you that we danced for a zillion hours and ate tacos and at the end of the night, there were beautiful fake eyelashes on my bathroom mirror. Actually, they're still there!

Nordicfest in Decorah, Iowa with Anna and JB. This ice cream is made with some sort of special crystals that makes it more delicious. Seriously.

Annd and JB at Seed Savers Exchange, being adorable.


This is right after I got my new fake tooth! I'll spare Emil and not put up the picture where you see my broken tooth. But it's a good one.

Visiting Sara in Atlanta for 9 days. Mostly we did things that involved animals. We drove an hour and a half to see a zedonk (yes, half-zebra, half-donkey) and found this friend along the way.

The Atlanta aquarium is a remarkable, beautiful place. I definitely cried twice at this part. We saw whale sharks eat! I mean, they opened their mouths and ate, and everything was amazing.

Besides the animals, though, we also looked cute and went out a lot. With Layla!

Aaaaand...we dipped popsicales in vodka. Chocolate popsicles in whipped cream-flavored vodka, to be specific. And to be awesome.

Sarah came to visit Madison and we hung out with Cody. Brunch at Marigold Kitchen.

I saw the love of my life, Nick Urata, and Devotchka in Chicago with Mladenka. They still shake me. Best band ever.

Attending Sara's big event in DC. So proud of my sister - she speaks to hundreds of people and gets her point across eloquently and professionally, with just the right touch of loveliness in there. No wonder she's the big boss, eh?

Photobombing with Dad. We've always had fun, but this year I think we had the most fun together.

Mom and my two aunts dancing with Jiddu at Thanksgiving. Such a treat and honor to see Jiddu in good form, dancing.

Oh hey, did you know Emil got engaged? Here we are at his engagement party, helping him calm down by doing sibling shots. Two was the magic number.

Jiddu shows love for Mladenka. Welcome to the family, M!

Aww, love! I'm so excited for these two!

Dad and I did about zero shoveling on this day, but we did have a shovel/broom fight. Okay, I'll admit. It was fake and we were just posing for pictures. And I was still in my pajamas. But come on now, we're great!

The clan at Christmas. So lucky to have all these crazies as my family.

My wonderful BFF Sarah at the Botanic Gardens. Isn't she pretty?!

Replica of the Chicago Skyline, made only from plants.

My mom had the fantastic idea of going over to the Gardens right before it got dark, and we got to see everything all lit up and magical. My mom is totally the best ever!

Leaving the gardens. P.S. I love christmas lights. It was such a lovely year! I'm hoping for more loveliness next year, and for the amazing things that surrounded me to extend to others. I'm hoping for the continued family, friends, peace, positivity, and light(s) in my life, and the same in yours. Because it's been really wonderful so far.

A Christmas Miracle!

Remember how I don't like to touch raw meat? Well, guess what happened...I made meatballs! It truly is a Christmas miracle. I'll let the pictures do the talking this time:





There's always room for a photobomb!





Truly, a Christmas miracle. Happy Christmas, friends! Also, whatchu talkin' bout everybody!

Snow Day and Hummus

It snowed last night. It snowed about seven inches, which, in the big picture, is not that much considering some of the days we had last year and what Minnesota got today. I do tend to get overwhelmed by the snow, but I do my best to calm the hell down and not to freak out all the time. Sometimes the Crazy Lady comes out, but I think it's probably entertaining to some of you, especially my sister, so I'm okay with it.

My friend Lacy says that living in Wisconsin and getting through the winters probably makes us hearty. I love that. I'm sure that all the shoveling and pushing cars and trudging through knee-deep snow would help to build muscle and strengthen something. I don't know; your core? Your spirit? Something. Unfortunately, I had almost none of that today. My new downstairs neighbors are big proponents of "throwing money at the problem" and thusly hired somebody to come plow our long-ass driveway. I mean, it's really long. You know what? I am fine with this. That's totally cool; I'll just stay inside whilst somebody else does the work. No problem. As I waited for the four stout men to show up and plow, I thought I'd make some hummus. So many people ask for the recipe, and although I can't give measurements (seriously, it's all just adding stuff until it tastes good), I can provide some pretty pictures of the process!

Here are the basic ingredients: canned chick peas, tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and salt. Some people use dried chick peas, but you have to soak those overnight, and then you have to plan ahead and lately, I can't plan beyond the next half hour, so canned it is! You can buy tahini anywhere - it's basically a sesame seed paste (my dad uses it like peanut butter!). The garlic, as my dear friend Jess pointed out, should probably be fresh, not jarred like this. But I was snowed in, man, and I had zero fresh garlic. Anyhow, the ingredients:

You should probably get a Magic Bullet if you want to make hummus quickly and with little clean up. Food processors and blenders work just fine, but the Magic Bullet has a much better infomercial, I'd be willing to bet. Have you seen it? I love it so much. I've seen it at the very least 50 times. You should definitely watch it. Oh hey, here it is!
Part Two is here. "Dinna's always a production!" says the young actress dressed as an old lady with fake cigarette ash. "Yuck, I hate broccoli!" Grown ass man...But I digress. Back to the hummus! Drain the juice from the chick peas, but keep it somewhere - you'll use it later.

Dump in some tahini. I'm so bad at estimating, or guesstimating, if you will (do you know "guesstimating" is a word? Spell check didn't even underline it! Wow), but I think it's somewhere between 3-5 tablespoons.

Throw in the lemon juice, some garlic, and some salt. I can't give measurements because I think it all depends on how garlicky you want it, how salty, etc. You can probably add your own spices at this point too (a lot of people like cumin), but it's really good this way, with nothing else added!

This is the hummus when it's basically done. I put it through the ole Bullet for quite awhile to make it as smooth as possible. At this point in the process, I also pour in the liquid from the canned chick peas little by little to help moisten it. You don't want to put in too much as it will get too watery. So be patient. And use discretion.

When you're done with all this, put it in a tupperware and refrigerate it for awhile before eating. So delicious!

Wonderfully enough, by the time I finished making hummus, the men from Mr. Plow had come. I mean, I assume every plow company is called Mr. Plow. Or the Plow King. Either way. Look what they did to the front porch!

And look at this beautiful long and sort of snow-free driveway! That driveway is seriously long. There was a good 5-6 feet behind where I was standing, and the driveway goes all the way back to those faraway trees, and then to the right and behind the house. So much to shovel...

I was in heaven when I saw this. It only took me about 20-25 minutes to dig out my car and shovel around it. This, compared to hours otherwise. Wooo! All of a sudden, I don't mind snow so much!

To celebrate a successful snow day, I had some booze with some cute star-shaped ice cubes. I'd been talking to my sister on the phone when she mentioned that she'd had a few tiny wine glasses of sweet vermouth this evening. This is something we always used to do when we'd go to Jiddu's (my grandfather) house on Christmas, before going to the big family dinner. It's customary to visit everybody in their own homes around the holidays. We'd go to his house and sit for awhile, eating candies and potato chips out of small glass bowls, and eventually, somebody would bring out a tray of these tiny wine glasses with sweet vermouth in them. Delicious! Cheers abu cheers, Jiddu!

Okay, to be honest, I didn't have any sweet vermouth. This is actually Amaretto; it was the closest I could get! Still delicious. And I have no idea how this got in my house. Who bought this?

Amaretto makes pretty pictures. Jess, did you bring this over last Nude Years? Thanks for the pretty booze.
One last thing about the snow day: boots everywhere. There are four pair of black boots sitting inside my front door. Four. Ridiculous.

You know what? Snow days make me feel disjointed. There ya go.

You've Got to Know Your Chicken

I think I might barf before I even begin this one. Sigh...the lengths we go to for our art. Or our blogs. Whatever. So, you may have heard that I'm a picky eater. It's funny, because in my immediate, surface thoughts, I really don't think I am! To test myself, I start making a list of foods I don't like: seafood, most fish, peppers...that's it, right? Then I remember where the pickiness comes in: I don't like mixing certain vegetables or meats with eggs. I don't like to mix meats with each other, unless it's bacon on a sandwich that already has another type of meat. I pick out green parts of things sometimes when I don't know what they are. I believe that on certain nights, things taste way better eaten out of bowls. Milk has to be ice cold. If chicken has a funny texture at all, like even a 0.5% funny bite, I'm done with it.

But these things all seem very reasonable to me! I mean, look. Lukewarm milk can be really, really gross, dudes. Maybe it's just that I'm a particular eater, not picky. Regardless of what I am, I'll tell you this: I am not able to cook meat. Don't get me wrong; I'll eat the crap outta some meat if somebody else prepares it for me. But making it myself? Barf. That means I'd have to look at and handle raw meat! Sickening. Especially chicken. To be fair, I have dealt with raw fish and beef before. I don't like it, but I've done it. I once dated a guy who bought us meat to make burgers for dinner and made me make my own burger. What an ass! But I did it, and it was fine, and no, I didn't learn anything from it or feel any better about raw meat, so maybe he should have been a gentleman and just made me the effing burger himself. Damn. Tis the season to handle the raw meat for me and let me lay around with a glass of wine making hilarious and witty comments, "gentlemen." Jeez.

My mother tells a story of coming home from work one night while I was in high school, expecting me to have started preparing dinner. She had called and asked me to trim some of the skin off the boneless chicken breasts she had defrosting. Man, I remember starting that chore soon after she called, and her drive home from work had to be a half hour at the very least, maybe 40 minutes...yet, as she walked in the door, I was standing there at the counter, facing away from the chicken on the counter, trying to cut tiny pieces off the chicken whilst simultaneously not barfing. I gagged a lot. My mom laughed a lot and finished making dinner.

So, as you can probably see, chicken is a difficult situation for me. I was explaining these "particularities" (yeah, that's what we'll call them!) earlier today to a friend when I remembered this one time I tried to cook chicken. Well, I should rephrase: I remember this one time I "tried" to "cook" "chicken." You see, in a fit of good intentions, I'd bought the most inoffensive, easy to deal with, and probably lamest chicken ever: boneless, skinless, frozen chicken breasts.

Ew. Even looking at that box grosses me out right now. Oh lord, I hope it's not still in the freezer. I'll check later. Anyhow, they're packaged individually so they come out looking like this:
Blech. Ack. Ooajhs. Lmnop. Sick. Looking at these pictures is really hard. At the time, even taking off the plastic was difficult for me. And yes, the chicken was still frozen and hard as a rock. I cut open the plastic, holding the irregular-breast-implant-looking-thing at an arm's length and dumped it on a baking sheet. Oh man, it was all glossy and slippery looking - I cannot believe I actually eat this.
After extensively researching salmonella and what happens when you bake chicken without defrosting, I thought it would be safe to do so. Yes, one might think that somebody as particular as me would have a few more qualms about food safety and preparation, but oh no! If one little unreliable site on the interwebs says it's okay, then it must be! Why bother checking any further? You'll understand more when I write a certain story about a certain burrito, but I can't write about it until next March. You'll see why when you read it, I promise. Oh hey, FORESHADOWING!!!
With the chicken in the oven for some amount of time at some temperature, I went about preparing the rest of the food. See, I wanted to make a barbecue chicken pizza. And yes, that is a tortilla instead of pizza crust. Sometimes I cook awful things. But look, this wasn't too bad: barbecue sauce, red onion, tomato, and cilantro.
Oh look, the chicken got all cooked! I cut it open in these three places, and then in about 27 more after I took the picture, to make sure it was cooked. And by some miracle, it was!
I chopped up the chicken, tossed it on the "pizza" (ahem), and added some cheese. I baked it in the oven for some other amount of time, and it came out like this:
Not too bad! Half-assed, yes. Mediocre, definitely. But fine. Apparently the particularities do not limit me to food that's sort of crappy. Wah wah!
So, are you ready to cook for me, specifically chicken? I'm pretty easily impressed. As long as you don't hold up an entire raw chicken in front of my face, I'll probably be happy with it. I might be okay if you hold up two chicken breasts over your chest and dance around a bit, because man, I do love prop comedy. But honestly, you'd be taking a chance with that one. I'll leave it up to you. Good luck. And get ready to possibly deal with me barfing. I'll try and do it as charmingly as possible.