The rumors are true. I’m heading back to China for a couple months. I guess I need to catch up on my diarrhea. Actually, I’ll be doing a special courses at a Chinese school, turning Chinese tweens into writing rock stars, or at least decent better wordsmiths than the person who wrote these: I’ll be blogging about my experiences in […]
Flipside Bound
Pickle Bucket Pancake Warmer
It sounds like one of the gadgets you can only buy at Christmas time along with a Chia Pet. A pickle pancake warmer. No batteries or assembly required. All you need is an old pickle bucket, bubble wrap, hot leftovers and a heart for the homeless. We had the idea today in the kitchen when we had a surplus of […]
Kitchen Bitchen
There are a few phrases I hate muttering in the kitchen. Today it was this: If you drop a spoon in the coffee grinder, don’t wait a week before getting it out. Here are a few other gems I hope I never have to say: #1. No eating out of the compost bucket. #2. If a clean plate touches your armpit […]
Chinese-American Test Kitchens
The four letter word terrifies me. Rice. Every time I pull a pan out of the oven and peel back the aluminum lid, I cringe. Will it be fluffy or mush? Rice is the standard by which cooks in our kitchen our measured. There are roughly seventy two hundred grains of rice in a cup, and in our industrial size kitchen, we literally […]
SWIPED!
These guys are slick. They swipe your ATM card info on Monday, then wait until the weekend to use it. That way, the banks won’t be monitoring suspicious activity. And you won’t get the SUSPICIOUS ACCOUNT ACTIVITY alert in your inbox until Monday…or two thousand dollars worth of withdrawals later. And of course, the phone number on the email in your inbox […]
Off the Grid
The words were stuck in my mouth like a dry piece of dressing. Not even the green Jell-o could help out. “No, I don’t live in a shelter. I live with people who operate the shelter.” “Are they homeless, too?” “None of us are homeless,” I tried to explain. “We live in an intentional community…by choice.” I thought about the weird […]
The Best Recipe I’ll Never Eat
As a cook for a Motley Crew that serves the homeless in Uptown, I have come across a lot of recipes that I’d never eat. They include Indian curry using beef scraps from an Italian diner. I’d always be afraid I’d find a pinky ring in the scraps…still attached to a pinky. Then there’s the recipe for roasted Brussels sprouts […]
Weeping Flowers
I love flowers. They are hard to come by in Uptown but when you see them, take your breath away. Like this petunia growing out of the cracks in an alley behind Friendly Towers. There are also a lot of flowers in the private garden, like this purple blanket of color, thanks to our resident gnome, Ted. He’s responsible for keeping […]
Eight Cents a Toe
There were more shoes in his cart than a centipede had feet. “Dang, sir, ” I started, eyeing the blue platform pumps hanging over the push bar, “What are you going to do with all of these shoes?” “What I do, no business to you,” he snapped in a thick Belizean accent. You think I had asked if he was wearing women’s underwear. The […]
W!
The fall night couldn’t get any better. The air was crisp. The trees looked liked someone dumped a bucket of melted crayons on the leaves. The Cubs won the series against the St. Louis Cardinals. I had to walk down to Wrigley field to witness the event, cialis buy stuff at least them raising the “W” flag. W for Win. […]