woman on the verge

All I do lately is proofread. That's not true: Sometimes I edit.

Look, it's Chester!


The yachtsman has been away for ten days, but now he's home and claims to be working on a Yachtsman Recommends. I am working on not having a nervous breakdown. Wish me luck!

workin' hard or hardly workin'?

I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.

apropos of nothing

What I'm trying to say is that I really will post a recipe one day soon. As God is my witness.

for whom the bee stings

I'd intended to write and post something here tonight, but it's 1:30 a.m. and I just got home from my one-day-a-week job (I need to ask for a raise). So apropos of nothing I'd like to share with you my new favorite poem, the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which my friend (and cocktail-boat captain) Kate D., who's taking a beekeeping class, recently sent me.

Schmidt Sting Pain Index
1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t

Sent from my iPhone, bitches.

The blurry pastry pictured above is called a donut muffin (I just tried several times to properly spell donut in that last sentence but ultimately could not figure it out and settled on the convenience-store spelling. Seriously though: Donought? What makes this especially ironic/pathetic/frightening is that the photo above was taken a couple hours ago at my one-day-a-week proofreading job. Dounghut?). Do you know what a donut muffin is? It is delicious. It is cinnamon-y. It is sugary. It is cake-y, yet also fluffy. It is one hundred times better than the whole wheat muffins (which I just spelled m-u-f-f-i-n-g-s, but that was more of a typo than a complete loss of mind) I made this weekend and will tell you about later when I have learned to spell. For now, I'm going to bed, where I'm pretty sure visions of donut muffins will dance in my head.

the bl*g mistresses must be crazy

I know what you've all been wondering: How's Chester Arthur?

He's well, thank you, growing longer every day.


And busy: There's his full-time job here at GFD, and he's taken a variety of lovers—squeaky toys, mostly—with whom he spends his afternoons napping in the sun.


It would be embarrassing if I told you that I'd bought those squeaky toys because they match our furniture, or that I had created an e-mail account in Chester Arthur's name. So I'm not telling you those things.

What I will tell you about are the chocolate-chip cookies I mentioned last week, and a delicious tomato sauce that is fit for both picky-eater yachtsmen and their wives with well-developed palates. Not now, sadly, because I'm too busy chaperoning Chester Arthur on his many dates, supervising all the GFD employees, eating the best chocolate-chip cookies ever, and also proofreading. But I hope to get around to it this week. Complaints about my lackadaisical bl*gging habits can be addressed to GFD's customer-service department at chesterarthurmiller [at] gmail [dot] com.

holiday dessert wishlist item #3: the parade of peppermint and chocolate marches on

Did you know I have folders full of pages pulled from Martha Stewart Living, tasteful crafts I will never do and recipes I will never make? Does this confirm your suspicion that I'm a hoarder? Because I think of myself as an archivist. An archivist with a sore, throbbing finger from holding a pen while proofreading: 11 hours today, 9 yesterday, 10.5 on Saturday ... shall I go on? Frankly, I'm not sure I have the strength.


Perhaps one of these Chocolate-Peppermint Cookies, from the December 2008 issue of MS Living, would revive me. Or perhaps not. On the one hand, I don't really like white chocolate; on the other, they're so pretty! And they feature what is apparently one of my very favorite flavor combinations (right up there with chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste great together).

But this is a dessert wishlist, so I don't have to be practical (see four-layer collapsing cake, below) or worry that I don't like one of the main ingredients. I'm never going to make these cookies—they look nearly impossible, and I can barely type with this gimpy finger, let alone make cookie dough, roll it out, cut it, bake it, melt the chocolate, dip the cookies in the chocolate, and sprinkle the whole mess with candy bits.

My only hope is that they will appear on my countertop like Jesus was born to Mary in the manger, a sort of virgin baking event wherein I sit chastely in my kitchen doing nothing but end up with a plate of cookies. A real Christmas miracle.

how i spent my thanksgiving weekend: moto photos & pie

On Thanksgiving the whole family went for a motorcycle ride:


But on Friday and Saturday I had to stay home and do freelance work. In addition to Instead of sulking, I rewarded my hard work and discipline with leftover pie. (When I said last week that I don't like pie, I had no idea my sister was going to make a chocolate version of the usually fruit-filled dessert.) For every page I proofread, I ate a piece a bite of pie.


We're still in Florida, and I'm still not cooking (except for a pot of rice I scorched while my family went out to dinner tonight and I stayed home to work), so there won't be any recipes this week. But I'll try to post something other than vacation home videos and photos of Thanksgiving leftovers. Not that that pie is anything to sneeze at. Especially if you have swine flu. If you have swine flu, please don't even read this bl*g, let alone sneeze on my pie.

Who am I kidding? That pie has been devoured, which is making it nearly impossible to get any work done.

it's business time

I've gotten a couple of requests for an easier way to access recipes that have appeared on GFD, and I'm so excited that anyone wants to cook something they read about here, I've created an index.


That's right, an index! I may not have graduated from high school, and the last time I had to do fractions I ended up taking a valium and eating dip instead of soup, but I can make an index! I think. Click here to check it out (there's also a link on the right side of the page); I'll update it when I get around to cooking something more complicated than peanut butter toast. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about food you saw here and tried at home: Leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail at gruelfordinner [at] gmail [dot] com. Or, if you don't feel like cooking, you can send me photos of your own personal Couch Jedi outfit (I'm happy to have inspired lazy TV watching in others, StephFace).

And while I'm getting all TCB, a bit of news: I've been trying to post here every weekday, and though I'd rather hold photo sessions with my lunch than do actual work, I don't think I can keep up this pace and not get fired (which is hard to do when you're self-employed, and yet me as my own boss is concerned about me as my only employee's productivity). So I'll continue to post a handful of entries each week, sometimes every day, sometimes not, and I'll let you know if I'm ever going to be away for long.

Thanks for reading...

ladies who lunch & the gentlemen who iron maiden them

To make up for missing the Neko Case concert last night because I had so much g.d. freelance, I am now sitting on the couch watching a documentary about Iron Maiden's reunion tour and wondering whether I can talk the yachtsman into writing another bl*g post. Things are not looking promising: He is captivated by the washed-up, balding-yet-long-haired metal heads on the TV screen.

So it's just you and me again. You and me and lunch. We'll always have lunch. Well, I'll always eat lunch, anyway.

Slightly congealed balsamic dressing warming up in the windowsill: 3 tablespoons evoo, 1 tablespoon of your nicest balsamic, 1 small shallot (minced), some chopped herb, s&p.

The sweetest, prettiest little cherry tomatoes in the world. If I were a vegetable, I would take them a'courtin'. But I'm not, so I ate them.

Baby romaine from Half Pint (who also grew the tomatoes), goat's-milk feta from Doe's Leap, walnuts from who-know's-where.

I cannot in good conscience tell you to watch Iron Maiden: Flight 666, but I unequivocally recommend this salad. It's crunchy and salty and tangy and sweet and savory. The yachtsman is playing air guitar. Life is gooooooooooood.