Catsup for Do-It-Yourselfers

I love to cook.  I love to read about cooking and watch cooking shows.  Not the cable ones devoted to minting and merchandising celebu-chefs.  Not the ones whose stars facilitate cooking wars and abuse masochistic amateur chefs.  Nay, I love the cooking shows on public television.

The PBS chefs are my kitchen idols.  They are all about teaching technique and the chemistry of ingredients, and they are so passionate about what they do that they don't really need audiences.  They make you fall in love with the food they love.  Lidia Bastianich.  Ming Tsai.  Rick Bayless's Mexico, One Plate at a Time and America's Test Kitchen are my porn. 

If you love to cook and love to feed others what you prepare, then you probably read cookbooks for the pure pleasure of it, too.  Your heart skips a beat when you come across a cookbook that beckons you with its siren call from a bargain table in an out-of-the way store.  "Buy me.  I'm 75% off, and I contain recipes cherished and shared by church ladies in Chicken Paw, Delaware.  Caress my pages.  Kiss me.  Let me fatten you up for the holidays."

Recently, I discovered a small cookbook crafted by an author who had inherited her Amish grandmother's old wooden recipe box.  Interspersed with the recipes she tested and put in the book are little commentaries, memories of childhood among the Plain People.  It's sweet reading and, if you didn't already know that the Amish work their tails off all day in fields and factories, you'd be inclined to wonder why they aren't all the size of a healthy rhinoceros.

Anyway, since I came home from the local farmers' market this morning lugging a pile of finally-in-season Jersey tomatoes, (there are no words adequate to describe the perfection of a New Jersey-grown tomato) I sat down to flip through some recipes for possible use for the ones that actually made it out of the car without being eaten.

I do believe this one, from the Amish cookbook, to be the most interesting yet:

Catsup

1/2 bushel tomatoes
1/2 cup vinegar
1/3 cup salt
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 tablespoon pepper

Boil tomatoes with skins on, then rub them through a window screen.  Add remaining ingredients and simmer for 45 minutes.

See, I might have used a basketball net, because you could just throw that in the washer.  But this seems a lot more precise.  For safety's sake, not to mention convenience, I would use a first floor window.  And put something on the floor or outside on the lawn to catch the tomato flesh, right? 

Is It Wrong to Dislike Offshoring?

Dear Babs,

 

So, the call center for A Well-Known Bank (if you kept a list of federal bailouts, you will find it) has, since Wednesday, sent me six faxes (you know, because five just weren't sufficient) asking for proof of renewed insurance on a commercial property whose owner has until Date XX to accept his renewal offer.  

It also deployed one of its human minions to call me three times, each time using a different non-threatening American name -- first "Dave," then "Jim," and last, "Joe" -- assigned to him, to ask for the same information presented in the faxed documents.  

On Call #2, "Jim" noted that Well-Known Bank is the new mortgage lender and, dare I say, overzealous escrow payor of the property owner's insurance premiums. 

Wednesday evening I called Well-Known Bank and asked -- no, shrewishly mewled -- that I had to speak with someone whose first language is English.  I did not apologize for this.

After I was put hold forever and a day, a pleasant young thing named Twitty McCheerleader picked up.  She talked regular, Babs.  See, I don't care if people have accents.  But if their ability to communicate effectively with the people whom they call is a negative nineteen on a scale of one to five, then they need more training.  There's a point at which it becomes inefficient to keep saying politely, "I am sorry.  It must be my telephone.  Could you repeat that?  Could you spell that for me?  Could you just send me something in writing?"


I told her that I had called back several times and left Dave, Jim and Joe the same information:

1. that I had understood the request the first five times I received it over the course of one morning. 
2. that I had advised Manny, Moe and Jack that, once I have the proper documentation in my possession, (documents which have to come from a surplus lines broker, not directly from my rectum or snatched from the air above me as if I were a hockey goaltender) the bank will have the documentation it needs to barf out an escrow check and send it on its way.  

 Well, I said the ass and hockey stuff in my mind, but their voice mail got my drift.

To Twitty, I added, "And if he is so inclined, my client can legally wait until Date XX at 11:59 p.m. to say yes or no to the offer.  That is three weeks from now.  Do you understand this?  And please tell your coworker to stop using fake nicknames.  It's the same representative.  I recognize his voice, okay?  It's insulting."

Twitty agreed vigorously, apologized profusely and said she would immediately instruct her colleagues to stop carpet-bombing me with the same request every seven minutes.

That worked out real well.  By 10:00 a.m. on Friday, there were four more phone messages and another fax.

In voice mail #2, from "Joe" of Well-Known Bank, which he pronounced Veeeeeddnobenka, (of course I have changed the name of the benka in order to protect my own hide) the identity of the client was again given, this time with a helpful letter-by-letter articulation delivered thus:

"Kdanstone Eyebuhdeet: 'C as in Cat, Ahd as in Umbredda...'"

I s--t you not, Babs.  R as in "umbrella."

Best Regards, 

K

Lipstick on My Pig

The dog greeted me at the door this evening sporting what I first took to be blood-covered teeth.

"What happened?" I shrieked. "Let Mommy look in your mouth," I begged, trying to pry her suddenly-clamped jaws open while frantically and irrationally surveying the living room for the remains of whatever she had killed.

Similar requests are always met with extreme resistance. This is a dog who has, inexplicably, always responded to the question "Hey, can I look in your ear?" by becoming airborne and flying out of the room at the speed of a Formula One race car. No matter how casually I say it, no matter how soft and non-threatening the delivery, no matter who says it, (it was just too tempting to let friends and family in on her secret phobia) she flees and, when located, serves up malevolent glares.

There is not and never has been any reason to perform an invasive, painful inspection of her ears. She is lively, healthy and far better groomed than I could ever hope to be. She adores her groomer and shows off for her veterinarian. As she has moved from puppyhood through adolescence and into young adult doghood, though, she has evidently never gotten over the psyche-scarring notion of showing humans what I assume is a private area. Go figure. Lie on the floor, flat on your back, displaying your wares like a centerfold in a canine version of Penthouse, without shame, but don't dare let anyone lift up your ear flap.

Her breed is a mystery to me anyway, and I've had members of her tribe since I was a child. Rather than bark, the last one chose to stand on her hind legs and swat at wind chimes hanging by the back door to announce her desire to come inside. The one before that could open the refrigerator, steal leftovers and shut the door behind him to delay discovery of his crimes.

This one showed me how to open child-proof pill containers last year. I watched her take a bottle of Excedrin Migraine off a table, examine it briefly, then squeeze it just below the neck, immediately popping the cap off. Transfixed, I gave her some more to open. One by one, the vessels fell -- aspirin, Advil PM, Vitamin D, Vitamin E. Now I get her to open anything that defeats me. "Maybe the pharmaceutical companies should hire you as a quality assurance engineer," I often suggest. "You could stand to get a job. I really don't think the furniture needs someone to hold it down all day. I've never actually seen the couch floating in midair."

So. Bloody maw.

After I hunted her down in her usual touchdown site -- my bed -- and managed to restrain her long enough to peel back her lips, I realized it wasn't blood but something waxy and fragrant. A candle? A jar of raspberry jam?

Then, in the waning light, I spotted something dark and chewed-looking in the middle of the bed, next to the day's selection of ratty stuffed friends and faux-bones. Formerly a clever little tube of Neutrogena Revitalizing Lip Balm, (Sunny Berry) with a set-in knob that dispenses the perfect amount of this most perfect product, it had been reduced to a flattened, battered corpse, riddled with tooth marks. The cap, however, was in mint condition.

"This is your m.o.," I snorted. "The popped-off top, the punctures where you squeezed the container. Not to mention your rose-colored teeth. What's the matter -- you couldn't figure out how to operate the knob to get the stuff out? And by the way, how did you get this out of the bathroom without knocking over the basket where the makeup is? Hey, can I look in your ear?"

After I apologized for teasing her, we made up. After all, I might need someone to show me how to open some orange juice I just bought. Those plastic peel-and-pull tabs underneath the cartons' caps are weird.

Push My Buttons

Some philosopher, either Socrates or Dr. Phil, once said that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Since I

1. pretty much slept through philosophy classes in college and
2. watch so much television that I have legitimate cause to fear one day being able to afford a Craftmatic® Adjustable Bed and a giant, wall-mounted flat screen tv, dropping off the social grid altogether and eventually being discovered fused to the mattress, buried in a pile of empty saltine boxes, I am guessing that it was Dr. Phil.
   

Anyway.

I spend a lot of time in a multi-floored building that houses numerous doctors' offices - mostly those of pediatricians and psychiatrists. The elevators are constantly populated with very young children who get glassy-eyed with delight when they step on and see floor buttons, (intended for easy access by riders who are in wheelchairs) at their own eye levels. Presumably they are the patients of the former, as they have not been on the planet long enough to have sought the attention of the latter. One of the things that fascinates me about riding up and down in their company is their unwavering obsession with depressing those buttons.

They seem fearless and driven, pounding away at the control panel with abandon, often openly encouraged by their parents, who then smile wanly at other adults on board as if to say, "I'm sorry, but little Madison is so cute and bright that we must not stifle her intellectual curiosity, must we. It takes a village to indulge my child, after all."

Most of the other riders are accommodating and faux-genial, or at the least silent witnesses. I like to imagine their interior monologues. "Good luck establishing any boundaries with Madison ten years from now, lady. Start saving bail money." I sulk in a corner, somewhere between annoyance and awe.

At Fictitious Madison's age, I was petrified of elevators. I entered them, but not voluntarily. I didn't fight it because I was a polite, quiet child who trusted that grownups knew what they were doing, and knew that the two who raised me would keep me safe.

But I didn't enjoy being in what amounted to me to be metal rooms that left their moorings and rumbled up and down the insides of buildings. It felt grossly abnormal, only slightly less creepy than being on subway trains that travel underwater. (And I often wondered if whoever tiled the Holland Tunnel in that caterpillar guts-green shade did it deliberately, to mimic the bottom of a dirty swimming pool, so that when the murky Hudson River came gushing through some undiscovered crack in the wall, I would drown more peacefully. I kept my eyes closed every time I had to ride through it as a kid. The only reason I haven't as an adult is that you don't hit as many cars if you keep your eyes open while driving.)

I have come to terms with my irrational fears, but I don't know how today's toddlers can be so cavalier about crossing through the Flapping Portal to Claustrophobia. And I resent their prolonging my ride by making me stop at virtually every floor while they wait for more unwitting victims to enter.

I forget what point I was trying to make. Oh. Now I remember. At the other end of this strange Bell curve of ridership is the adult version of the button-banger -- the Supreme High Ruler of the Elevator. Like the pediatric versions, it comes in both male and female, and is characterized by an odd obsession with blocking access to the control panel, even when there is just one other rider in the box. The S.H.R.E. pastes his or her abdomen against it, loudly braying "FLOOR?" at everyone who gets on.

The S.H.R.E. is not to be confused with a normal, courteous passenger, the one who depresses floor buttons on behalf of riders with armloads of parcels and tote bags, a parent trying to manage a stroller or one of those infant-toting bucket things, or riders who are disabled and dealing with canes, walkers or wheelchairs.

Oh, no, indeed. The S.H.R.E. is textbook passive/aggressive and controlling, starting with his/her physically limiting access to the buttons and establishing a barrier that, if breached, produces loud sighs and hisses emitted through pursed lips. Just try responding with, "Thanks, I can push it myself," or "None of your effing business," or worse, leaning toward the S.H.R.E., slipping your unwanted arm in there like a plumbing snake and hitting your desired button without permission. You'll see what sort of reception you get, especially if you don't shower the S.H.R.E. with verbal expressions of gratitude for denying you your freedom of choice.

So. I have a theory that the enthusiastic tots who must, absolutely must push all the floor buttons and turn tolerable elevator rides into inefficient pit stops in which the captive passengers stare glumly out into empty office building hallways -- or dive frantically to commandeer the "Door Open" button at the sound of a faraway voice calling, "Hooooooooooooolllld that, pleeeeease?" -- grow up to become Supreme High Rulers of the Elevator. Not that I want one, but I bet some bureaucrat down at Disneyland-on-the-Potomac would give me a federal grant to spend twenty years attempting to prove it.

And I will go one step further to posit this: The S.H.R.E.s are also the people who smile primly and hold the door of the public building open for you, when you are at least half a parking lot away, forcing you to start sprinting to take advantage of their self-styled goodwill or suffer momentary pangs of guilt for walking at your preferred pace, failing to honor their benevolence. When I am on the receiving end of The Prolonged Door-Hold, I just pretend I'm in the Holland Tunnel and keep my eyes closed, or stare off into space, as if transfixed by the parking lot surveillance cameras. Eventually they give up.

I know. If I don't like the heat, I should take the fire exit stairs. Shut up. You can't make me.

Trudging Toward 2012

You Say Febyooerrry, I Say February

Was there ever any resolution to the presumably countrywide debate concerning the correct method to say what year it is, now that we are more than a decade into the twenty-first century?

"Two thousand" was essentially a no-brainer; 2001 is forever truncated in my head to "Nine-Eleven." (Thanks for playing, Osama. Sorry we had to cut the parting gift down to five virgins. It's the economy, stupid.)

I never gave the naming convention issue any thought until the next eight years were already in the rearview mirror. I'm more of a follower than a trailblazer; whatever Everybody Else decided was fine with me. Now that the most recent season of Survivor is over and the season postmortem on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills looms large, however, I have had more time to redirect my critical thinking. Although "Twentytwelve" takes less time to say and "Two thousand twelve" sounds as if I'm counting the miles between the next lightning strike and wherever I am cowering, I think I will go with the latter.

Excuse me. I have to go close a window. The smoking guests banished to the porch of the house across the road are partying like it's one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.

~~~

Ghosts of Holidays Past

There's nothing like telling the truth to bring water cooler conversation to a screeching halt. My holiday tales -- not the ones from childhood; those are very pleasant, like Frank Capra movies -- tend to get more depressing by the year. In retelling, they take on an almost psychotic quality, like a child's bedtime story, but written by the novelist Patrick McCabe. Because I have bad luck with (or bad taste in) men, there's always a generous supply of material, including:

• The time I found a used lawnmower under the Christmas tree. Rescued from garbage collection by a compulsive trash-picking attorney boyfriend, it had been "rehabbed" with a new spark plug and air filter. It was a self-propelled type, but that feature no longer worked and he'd chosen not to attempt finding a new part for it. "It will be great exercise!" he bellowed, when I asked why moving it was roughly equivalent to pushing a car with a dead battery. "Thank you," I offered. "Let me just get a dustpan so I can pick up those bits of dried sod that fell out when I was pushing it across the rug."
• The New Year's Eve when a fiancé timed his announcement that he'd realized I was "a rebound situation" with the stroke of midnight, in the romantic glow of tiny multicolored tree lights. Teddy Pendergrass was on the sound system singing Wake Up, Everybody. Good advice.
  
• A group date-sort of New Year's Eve in which fellow refugees from similarly odd romantic entanglements went to a comedy club and rang in the new year, after which we found ourselves face to face in a subway car with a would-be robber who was sporting a pair of pantyhose on his head. Before he had the chance to (presumably) booze bottle-whip me to death for rolling my eyes at his choice of hosiery color -- sheer nude rather than a more seasonal opaque navy or black -- he fell flat on his face and we all skipped off the car, exhilarated by our narrow escape from an unspeakable end.
  

Then there was last New Year's Eve.

They Tried to Make Her Go to Rehab; She Said No, No, No

I spent it sitting at the bedside of my mother, who had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance at dawn on Christmas. Although she had fought her way back from death in the emergency room, I knew by the close of the year that she would not be going home. My family found out at some point in the holiday period that the only reason she had been moved to a rehabilitation facility was because she had survived the admission to the emergency room. They hadn't expected it and they didn't know what else to do. It was the end stage of a rare medical condition for which there are no good outcomes.

The rehab process was doomed from the start, partly because she was dying, and partly because she was not interested in lifting weights. Her games had been golf and bridge. When I asked her what she had been learning in rehab, she startled me with, "I have no idea." Terrified that she was disengaging at warp speed, I whispered, "What do you mean?" She said, "I am too distracted by the lack of facial hair maintenance. I haven't seen this many bearded ladies since the circus was in town. Don't forget to bring me my tweezers, by the way."

The room in which she spent her last two weeks, with the stroke of a pen in a hallway waiting area, was transformed to a hospice. There was no change in the furnishings, no sign on the door that read, "This was a room of hope. Now it is where she waits." There was no more rehab. There were only loving hands, smiling faces, pain medication and angels in scrubs, speaking softly to her and encouraging her to push the call button - something she never once did during that stay.

After she died, in the days preceding the funeral, I sat down to check her mountain of unanswered e-mail, close her online bill payment accounts and delete her e-mail address. I found a small piece of paper under her computer’s mouse pad. She had torn it from a book or perhaps a calendar. I like to think it was a message she’d left behind. A verse from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, it reads:

“I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch where through Gleams

that untravelled world.”

Happy travels in 2012. And that's pronounced two thousand twelve.