Candy Everybody Wants

Back in June, our maintenance staff sent an email to let us know that a bunch of furniture from various places around campus was about to be sent out to the surplus furniture warehouse, and they asked if any of us wanted any of it before it was trucked over. Looking through the pictures attached to the email, I decided that my office needed an end table, so I wrote back and the next day my table was promptly delivered:



It really classes up the office, right? Not as much as cleaning out that bookcase and getting rid of all those sloppy stacks of unfiled papers on it did, or moving that shredder to someone else's office did, but it was a step in the right direction. The table was nice looking, and paired nicely with the fancy armchair that Angi and I rescued from the hallway when someone at the other end of the building was sending it out to be surplussed.

Once I had the table, though, I had a small problem: It needed something on it. Just look at it. It cries out for ornamentation of some sort, but what? I couldn't get a plant, because my office has no windows and plants die. I didn't want one of those little office fountains, because the noise would be grating, rather than soothing. Fish were out of the question, too, because then I'd just feel sad when the fish died since it would just reiterate that I'm incapable of nurturing. Maybe some art? Possibly a sculpture?

Yes, I thought. Perhaps I'll place a bust of Pallas, there beside my chamber door? Maybe not. After all, a raven might perch upon the bust of Pallas, there beside my chamber door. It might perch and sit and nothing more, and then perhaps might quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

Maybe not a sculpture. I have to work in there, and don't have time to beg phantom birds to take thy beaks from out my heart, you know?

I decided instead to get a candy dish. People like candy dishes, because people like candy. I could fill the dish with candy, people would come and eat it, and they would leave my office happy. Putting a candy dish on my shiny table was a win/win situation, and even better was the fact that I already had an empty glass pumpkin on the shelf above my desk, because my staff gave it to me filled with candy for my birthday the year before.

For a while, the candy dish worked out exactly as planned, but then I was reminded of something horrible that I already knew and had somehow forgotten: No good deed goes unpunished. In this particular case, I learned that if you steadily provide candy, people will eventually feel entitled to it, and then they will start to feel entitled to give opinions about it.

"All you have are Jolly Ranchers? You should get some other candy."

"Are you going to get chocolate next time? I really like chocolate."

"Why are the Skittles that color? Are they the regular kind?"

Today a person who will remain nameless leaned into my office, noticed that someone had finally eaten all of the Christmas candy left in the dish, and told me, "You're out of candy. You better go get some more."

Oh really?

Fortunately, they left my office before I could smash the candy dish over their head, but I spent a good portion of the next ten minutes before I was distracted by the telephone seething with rage. I realize that, by giving candy freely for several months now, I have tacitly agreed to continue doing so for as long as I continue to work here, but still, a little gratitude or at the very least a little bit of manners doesn't seem like too much to ask. I thought about not refilling the candy dish, but then a worse thought occured to me, and I suddenly felt all warm and cheery inside.

I better go get some candy? I better go get some candy? Oh, you bet I will. I know exactly what kind of candy that dish needs, because I know that sometimes candy is not your friend. Sometimes candy is the enemy, because sometimes candy... is Durian Candy.

My friend Sandy introduced me to the horrorshow known as durian candy way back in 2006, in the parking lot of an IHOP near Chattanooga. Sandy warned me that Durian Candy, which you can sometimes find at the Asian grocery, "has kind of a strong flavor," and offered to hold my camera while I tasted a piece.

What follows is a frame by frame documentary of the Durian Candy experience.

It started out with a deceptively innocent looking piece of wrapped hard candy:



which I carefully unwrapped:



and then put in my mouth. The effect was immediate:



This candy was not good. Really not good. The longer it sat in my mouth, the more not good it became:



Oh, God, it was disgusting. It was like a fruity candy wrapped in rotting meat and then doused with turpentine and photo-developing chemicals. I don't think I even made it through a full thirty seconds before I couldn't take it any more and spit it across the parking lot:





After that I spent about five minutes spitting continuously, trying to clear my mouth, before we went inside and I let the waitress know that I needed an orange juice RIGHT NOW while Sandy giggled and pretended to be sympathetic.

If they had candy in hell, it would be Durian Candy.

And I think I might head to the Asian grocery store this weekend and see about getting some for my candy dish.

My Christmas with Superboy and Coq au Vin

I know I shouldn't be annoyed that people are concerned about me spending so much time by myself. It's nice that people care, and that they worry. Lots of people have no one who cares or gets worried, and it bothers them, so I should be grateful for what I have.

I still get annoyed.

I have explained, more than once, that I like being alone. I find it restful. Being alone helps me to decompress from work, personal stress, or whatever else is bothering me, but everyone I know seems to see it as some horrible fate to be avoided at all costs, and it's all I've heard for the past week and a half.

"You're not going anywhere for Christmas?"

"There's no one you can be with at Christmas?"

"You're going to spend Christmas... all alone?"

Eventually I got tired of just saying, "Yes, that's right," while giving people the blank uncomprehending stare of a social outcast, and I decided to find someone special to spend Christmas Day with:



Superboy, the man who's never let me down.

We did all the usual Christmas things. I poured myself a tall glass of eggnog, and then we spent some time trimming the tree:



The Superman ornament ended up near the top, of course, while Spider Man ended up on the bottom, in the back. Once the tree was trimmed, we spent some time opening my Christmas presents:



Thanks for the Starbucks card, Mom and Dad!

Once that was over, I made some snacks (cocktail weenies in BBQ mustard sauce and leftover deviled eggs from Christmas Eve dinner at Jeannie's house), and then Superboy and I settled in for a day of heartwarming family movies:



After the movies, I decided that I was going to cook a large, complicated Christmas dinner. I've been saving my friend Scott's Coq au Vin recipe for this for several months now, and after going shopping yesterday I was all ready to work on it today. Before anyone says anything, I (and, I assume, Scott) realize that this is not a traditional French coq au vin. It's a simplified American take on it using chicken breasts and only an hour or so of actual cooking time, so please don't lecture me like Tom Colicchio did to Casey on the third season of "Top Chef" when she said she was making coq au vin but really only made chicken in wine sauce for three hours.

Other than the hour of cooking time, this took me a little over a half hour of prep time, because there is a lot of slicing:



I repeat, a lot of slicing:



I did the bacon with kitchen scissors, because it was fast, and this marks the first time that I've ever used mushrooms in anything I cooked. I don't like them, particularly, but the recipe implied that they would cook down, so I went for it after I wiped them down with a damp cloth as I have been instructed by the Food Network. Rachel Ray says that if you wash them they absorb too much water, and you should wipe them down with a damp paper towel instead. I was also worried that if I left them out it would remove too much liquid from the recipe.

As you can see from the picture above, I had everything set out in bowls based on when it had to go into the pot, so that I could move from step to step. Not doing this used to trip me up horribly when I was trying to follow complicated recipes, but several seasons of "Top Chef" have finally drilled the importance of a properly prepared mise en place before I start into my head. Using the term "mise en place" also lets me imply that I know a lot more about cooking than I actually do, and really, who doesn't like to look smarter?

Once everything was ready, I rinsed my chicken breasts, almost lost one down the garbage disposal while performing the gross-ectomy ("gross-ectomy" is my own term for the process where I hold the chicken over the sink with tongs while carefully trimming off any pieces that look gross to me; this includes weird fat globules, big red veins, pieces that look a little gristley, etc.), and then dredged them in flour and arranged them in the bottom of the pan in some melted butter and olive oil:



After the chicken was browned on both sides (I gave it four minutes a side), I removed it from the pot, set it on a plate, and dumped in the bacon and minced shallots:



After that browned for about five minutes, I added the mushrooms, which steamed a lot, making the picture a little hazy:



After five more minutes and a couple of stirs, I returned the chicken to the pan and added the herbs:



I'm used to rosemary and thyme, but this also called for herbs de Provence, and you would not believe the smell. As soon as it hit the chicken and the heat opened the herbs up it was indescribably appetizing, and I decided that I want to add herbs de Provence to everything, forever. I pretty much gave myself a facial leaning over the steaming pot to repeatedly inhale.

After the chicken and herbs were in the pot for a minute or two I added the carrots and the cabernet sauvignon:



and then stirred it repeatedly, making sure to scrape my wooden spoon all over the bottom of the pan to deglaze it. They always say to do that on the Food Network, because all of those little bits in the bottom of the pan are where the flavor is.

After that, it just had to simmer with the lid on for a while:



As a side note, I highly recommend watching Dead Ringer, with Bette Davis, while preparing this. The movie starts out a little slow, so you can work on your mis en place and then go through the setups and cooking steps, and by the time you set the pot to simmer alone for a while the movie has picked up to the parts where you want to give it your full attention. It's a win/win for everybody.

When the timer went off I forked out a chicken breast, and decided to taste it immediately. It was so good that I was three or four bites in before I remember that there were also carrots I could be eating and that I should take a picture:



It's really good. I want to thank Scott for the recipe, even if I did wait three or four months to actually cook it.

I also want to thank Superboy, for making sure that I didn't spend Christmas... alone.

My Weekend with Superboy

One of my friends, who will remain nameless, decided to confront me this week with her worry over the fact that I allegedly "spend every weekend alone". When I casually argued that this is not true, she went on to inform me that no, it really is, and that I also "kind of hate people".

OK, for the record, I do not hate people. I like working with people, but the problem is that I spend all day, every day, interacting with people in person, on the phone, and over email, often at the same time. Because of that, I often need at least part of my weekend to just decompress, and exhale, and not have to talk to anyone. That way I'm all recharged by the time the weekend is over and I have to go work with people again. I tried to explain this to my friend, and got the response that "it's not healthy to do that."

"But it is! I'm an introvert!" I totally am. A number of reliable sources on Facebook said so.

"I don't think you are. I'm just telling you this because..." (insert weighty sigh here) "I'm worried about you. It's not good for you to be so alone."

"I'm not alone. You just think 'alone' means 'lonely', and I'm not lonely."

"I'm just really worried about you."

I kind of stewed over this all week. I understand the concern, but I also don't need an intervention. In the end, I decided that the best thing to do would be to not spend the weekend alone, so I looked around and decided to spend it with the first man I saw:



I spent my weekend with Superboy, and oh, what a time we had.

Our weekend together started with breakfast:



Superboy didn't really eat, but I enjoyed a delicious bowl of generic Kroger brand "Life" cereal. After that, I showered alone so that Superboy's paint wouldn't wash off, and then we headed out to pick up some groceries:



I didn't want my friend worrying that I spent the whole weekend locked up in my apartment with Superboy, though, so I decided to show him the town, starting with lunch:



It's hard to read the logo on the glass of Coke, but I had a nice late lunch at the S&W Grand, a nice historical restaurant downtown by the movie theatre. It was a cafeteria for many years, then closed in the 1980's. The building sat vacant and crumbling until being renovated in our new urban boom, and reopened last year as an upscale restaurant. This was my first time eating there, and it was delicious.

For a starter, we had homemade potato chips with blue cheese fondue:



and then I had the Italian four cheese pasta bake with Mornay sauce and parmesan crust:



I was so full that I didn't have dessert, and I certainly didn't get on the S&W's historic vintage scale:



Instead, we felt like walking around for a while and taking in the sights:





I even took Superboy past the graffiti boards on Wall Avenue:



to see if there was anything new painted:



Lunch out was just the prelude to the day's real excitement, though, which was roller derby. The last home bout I went to was the one at the World's Fair Park when the sprinklers exploded, so this was my first one at the Civic Coliseum even thought it was the second one there. I have to say, derby suddenly feels legit:



There are bleachers instead of folding chairs, a scoreboard that's not projected onto the wall from a laptop, and a huge flag:



that they spotlight during the National Anthem:



On the one hand, I like the changes, but on the other hand the team seems so far away now:



They still knock people down, though:



so it can't be all bad. We won both bouts, and had a great time watching:



We also saw a rather familiar halftime show:



Yes, Vinyl Michael Jackson and Lisa Turtle stopped by, and they're still dancing to "Thriller":



It did seem a lot better here than it did at the Smokie's game, but that might just be because they weren't dancing on grass this time.

After derby, we headed downtown to meet a few people at Patrick Sullivan's:



where someone who wasn't me (because I was driving) had a Red Stripe:



This morning I decided that the weekend still wasn't over, so Superboy and I headed to the university gardens:



and walked around for a while. I saw another one of those black butterflies that I saw last week, and was able to get closer this time:



I like the gardens because it's quiet if you go early in the morning and there aren't many people there, and it's pretty:









After that, Superboy and I decided to catch up on a little work at the office:



and then I decided that yeah, that was enough weekend for me and Superboy. My friend should be a lot less worried now that she knows I didn't spend the weekend alone, but instead spent it with an action figure.

There's totally no need to worry.