my friend lisa

The other day I was complaining to my friend Lisa that Vermont winters are making me fat. I've gained weight since we moved back here, and I've gained it all between November and March each year. Lisa told me that this is because our metabolisms slow way down in the winter, which is a relief: I was worried it might be the ice cream.

Salted caramel ice cream.

Let me repeat: Salted caramel ice cream.

I was inspired to make ice cream because (a) I got an ice cream maker for my birthday, and (b) my friend Lisa makes the best ice cream, in crazy flavors she's invented (like sweet potato, maple-banana, and horchata), using unusual ingredients (like tea, balsamic vinegar, and jalapenos). I'm hoping she'll share with me one of her recipes so I can make it and post it here; in the meantime I started with salted caramel, which I found at Epicurious, where it's described as "sultry." I would add that it's "luxurious," "delicious," "worth slapping someone over," and "not at all fattening, that's just my metabolism slowing down."

first creemee of the year

'Bout time.

there is no enriched flour in a creemee

Sometimes it is necessary to eat slice-and-bake chocolate chip cookies. For example, when you go to the creemee stand at 9:10 on a Friday night to have your first creemee of the year and find that the delinquent teenage employees have closed early. After shouting at the delinquent teenagers through the locked creemee window, you go to the fancy natural-foods store looking to satiate your sweet tooth. You are staring vacantly at the selection of Ben & Jerry's and tofutti ice cream when inspiration strikes: slice-and-bake cookies. But the natural-foods store does not stock the Tollhouse or Pillsbury slice-and bake cookies you were hoping for: Instead they carry a $7.49 tube of Vermont-made cookie dough. Skeptically, you buy it. On your way home you think about how much these cookies are going to suck, because you're a negative person and because you are scared to trust after you got burned by the creemee stand.

At home you find the dough is nearly impossible to unwrap -- the little story on the label says that the couple who started the company couldn't decide whether they should go into the frozen burrito business or the slice-and-bake cookie business, so they packaged their cookie dough like a burrito. This story is so asinine you almost throw the unwrapped cookie dough across the room, but instead you persevere, finally making it through the outer wrapper, the foil, and the inner wrapper.


This perseverance required scissors, however, and it turns out you've cut through the directions, which are absurd. Steps 2, 3 and 4 read (I shit you not), "Break the disk in half. Invert the two pieces 90 degrees so that the rough edges face up. Press the base of the two pieces back together, leaving the rough edges on top. You now have a tall ball of dough with a rough top -- a cookie rose." You reread and consult the diagrams, pausing to thank god you are not stoned. Ultimately, you work harder preparing these cookies than you did assembling your Ikea furniture.

When your slice-and-break-and-invert-and-press-and-bake cookies are finally in the oven, you look over the ingredients. You remember reading somewhere that enriched flour is what is making Americans fat, and you wonder how many of the other ingredients, many of which have names that sound like chemicals, are derived from corn. You change your mind and wish you were, in fact, stoned.

When the timer finally goes off twelve minutes later, you open the oven, your expectations low. And it's no creemee, but it'll do.

i hate cherry garcia

This little indulgence at the Denver airport did not make up for all that came before it and all that came after, which included a canceled flight, a delayed rescheduled flight, a one-hour wait for the shuttle from the Chicago airport to the crappy hotel, and the fact that, I shit you not, a Grateful Dead concert at the convention center attached to the crappy hotel was getting out just as our much delayed shuttle finally delivered us to the crappy hotel lobby at 1:00 a.m. Which meant the crappy hotel lobby was made even crappier by the presence of hundreds of white people with dreadlocks. Hundreds of wasted white people with dreadlocks. Hundreds of stinky, wasted, loud white people with dreadlocks.

And not only were they in the lobby, they were roaming the halls, stinking and playing their didgeridoos and calling each other "bra" and "mon." And not only were they in the halls they were smoking pot and holding drum circles in most of the rooms. And not only were they in the rooms, there were thousands and thousands of them in the convention center parking lot that my crappy hotel room overlooked, where they spent the rest of their long, strange trips juggling fire and blaring bootlegs from their car stereos while I laid in bed holding my finger in the air, hoping for a miracle.