the two things i know about soup

on monday the weather got nasty, so i decided to make some chicken soup.

this was the first truly successful soup i've made, and i have to attribute my success to two people: carroll barlow and joey mayes. the two things i know about soup, i learned from them. they are probably things everyone knows already. but i didn't.

from carroll: if a recipe says to put in one bay leaf, you had better put in two, if not three. i put in four.

from joey: all the good chicken flavor comes from the fat under the chicken skin. when using chicken meat, better keep the skin on. this soup was extra chicken-y because i let two great big bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts cook in my pre-made broth.

while the chicken was cooking, i chopped up an onion, a few carrots and celery stalks and sauteed it all in butter with garlic and salt. cook's illustrated said to stir in some flour with the vegetables to thicken the soup. i followed their advice. it worked. half a cup of heavy cream helped it along too.

once the soup was good and thick (or thick enough, since i was getting impatient by this point) i dumped in a bag of frozen peas. i forgot how tasty peas are. normally i hate eating them because they're just impossible to get off your plate--they roll around too much. in soup, though, they're perfect.

then i made some dumplings. i was a little nervous because i had never done this before. but it is so easy. you would not believe how easy dumplings are. here's what you need:

flour
baking powder
salt
heavy cream

stir those four things--four things!--together. make little balls from the dough. drop them in your simmering soup, cover your pot, and in fifteen minutes you have more massive, puffy, delicious dumplings than you could possibly eat. but you do anyway, and you are full and happy.

it's magic.

god bless you, smith's

sometimes i get down for no good reason at all. i've been this way for the past couple of days. last night, though, i finally got tired of laying around, and went to smith's.

i biked because the nights have been so cool and nice lately. perfect for biking. and here's something weird: i have this obsessive-compulsive need for my knees to touch as i'm pedaling. as a result i have little bruises on my inner knees.

late-night grocery shopping is my ideal cure for the blues, or reds, or whatever it is. i like to think that i'm channeling that ginsberg poem. what peaches and what penumbras! so god bless smith's for being open 24/7. the 7-11 has the chocolate cake donut and raj but you can't wander the aisles in there like you can at the grocery store.

i park my bike and who is there having a smoke? my favorite cashier! all i know about him is that his name starts with "cha," he smokes, and he hates his job, but he's always so nice to me. i love the way he says "thank YOU" in response to my "thank you." another reason why i prefer going to smith's at night is because that's his shift. the night shift.

the only things i really needed were bread and orange juice but wandering the aisles makes you realize all the things you need. bananas, blackberries, red potatoes, an avocado, grape-nuts, oatmeal, shredded wheat, cream cheese, darjeeling tea: all these things were added to my cart.

cha-- had the longest line. i waited for ten to fifteen minutes but it was worth it. i can't explain it. i just love that guy.

the groceries and i made it home safely, all in one piece. not that i was worried. the only time groceries have fallen out of my basket was when a car and i had a collision in the middle of university, and university avenue was pretty slow last night.

once inside i saw the empty apartment as an opportunity to blast aretha franklin's greatest hits as loud as i could from my little portable speakers. i seized that opportunity. i poured myself a bowl of grape-nuts. i made some milky darjeeling. it turned out to be a good night.

s'more

here's me in writing fiction this morning.



recently i discovered how much i love pop tarts.



and how much i hate how i love pop tarts.

yes, i have a super high fiber intake. yes, i eat a lot of whole grains. yes, i enjoy kale and assorted greens. but i am still such a sucker for junk food. beto's texano burrito, the 7-11 chocolate cake donut, pop tarts: these are my weaknesses.

the past, the present, the future, and some hyperlinks

it occurs to me that nearly every post i make starts out with "when i was thirteen" or "i did this when i was nine." how lame is that? from now on i hope to blog in the present, and maybe in the future too. so here are things that have happened to me in the past week, and a few things to come in the week to follow:

1. i got inscaped, which really isn't much, but it's nice to know that people like my poetry. there was a release party that i wasn't planning on going to until i was asked to read. so i read. the best thing in the magazine, though, is a story called "the instinct to climb a fence." it's about a kid that gets mauled by a bear.

2. i saw burnt reynolds & his hot bones play at kilby court. i love those guys. on the way up to salt lake i told jessica she should come to the show, and she did. i love her too. she is such a pleasant person to talk to and be around.

3. i ate at pete's lunch with joey and newlin and two people whose names i remember but am not sure how to spell. pete's lunch is a place i spotted when i first moved to provo, and i have been longing to go there. there are few things i love more than a legit diner. i got the denver omelette and i am shocked to say that it may top the veggie omelette at andy's in highland falls, NY. honestly, the only thing andy's has that pete's doesn't is homefries. homefries will always trump hashbrowns. then i had a bite of newlin's chicken fried steak, which also delicious. however, it is impossible to find a better chicken fried steak than the one found at the tip top in san antonio, TX. actually, it is impossible to find a better diner--period--than the tip top. good lord.

4. for a while i was considering becoming a vegetarian. it made sense: i don't eat a lot of meat to begin with, and i discovered that vegetarian proteins are not hard to come by (and i was getting a lot of them). but then i had a bite of that chicken fried steak. then, today, i was watching that diners, drive-ins, and dives guy eat brisket. and i thought of the bottle of rudy's barbecue sauce in my grandpa's fridge that can only go on barbecue. then i thought of my grandpa, who owns a meat plant, and grills me a steak practically every sunday, rain or shine. so i decided that i will never be a vegetarian, and got some skirt steaks from the freezer at the meat plant.

5. i picked up horses, by patti smith, on vinyl at gray whale. i'm not a particular fan of gray whale but i worship patti smith.

things to come:

1. i have an art history exam tomorrow. turns out i'm not so bad at those. i got a 91 on the last one. here are a few reasons why i do all right on these exams: (1) i'm pretty good at remembering names and dates. (2) it is an essay question. (3) it is not given in the testing center. i have mentioned before that the testing center gives me the willies, and this is still the case. i had to take a midterm in there last week and my heart started pounding as soon as i opened the door.

2. baking. the last thing i baked was a hot milk cake with fudge frosting. this is my comfort food. it fills a 9x13" pan and i intended to eat it all, but i only got like four pieces before my roommate ate the rest. anyway, it's been at least three weeks since i last baked, and that is far too long.

3. loaning out my copy of trout fishing in america, which is my favorite book. i've written all over it. i've written not one, but two term papers about it. the reason i'm nervous is because the last time i loaned out a book i really loved, it was lost. i don't hold it against the guy but it was on the road, and i had written all over that one too, and it was nice and bent and worn and soft. also, i'm pretty lenient when it comes to loaning out my stuff. i don't ask for people to give books back until they've read them, movies until they've watched them, etc. unfortunately, i often loan things to people shortly before they move.

4. doctoring some t-shirts. i have a huge collection of t-shirts but only a handful are actually wearable. for example, i used to buy only youth-medium t-shirts from michael's and draw on them with fabric sharpie. youth medium t-shirts show my tummy and my ill-fitting jeans fall below my hips. i used to find this attractive. these days, not so much. other shirts are just too big. the graphics are cool but the shirts themselves need cuttin and sewin.

5. reading more essays and nonfiction. the last nonfiction work that i devoured--i mean, really enjoyed--was the feminine mystique. that was like four years ago. right now i've read half of an essay collection by wendell berry and a handful of food essays. then i should probably finish fear & loathing in las vegas, which is not non-fiction, but pretty autobiographical, and highly enjoyable.

a brief history

honestly, i just want to be cindy wilson. just look at that dress and--oh, lord-- those extensions. cindy wilson is someone i will never be, though. nor will i ever be a musician.

i'm convinced that every mormon girl is subjected to piano lessons at some point in her life. i went through six years of them. like everyone else i hated them, and argued with my parents every week that i wasn't getting anything out of it. it would be so much easier for you to let me quit, and then you wouldn't have to pay anymore, i said. but no, no, no, they said, and you'd get better if you practiced. blah, blah, blah. i want to play drums, i told them. so i joined band in sixth grade.

then my dad brought out this guitar. not that guitars were anything new in the house, but this thing was electric, and it was a fender, and it was red. i had to have it. even though piano lessons had been a failure and a waste of money, they agreed to buy me an amp and find a teacher. the amp was a baby vox. the teacher was tim. tiny tim. i could look him in the eye and i'm only 5'3". at my first lesson he asked me to make a list of all the bands i liked, and every lesson thereafter was tim giving me simplified tabs of led zeppelin and weezer songs.

i hated guitar lessons too. i could noodle around on a piano and know what every key meant. someone could put a sheet of music in front of me and i would know what that meant too. frets and strings didn't make any sense to me, and the only kind of tab i could read was tim tab.

in high school i started going to basement shows and was jealous of all the kids that could play stuff. yeah, i was still in band, but once band directors found out i could read music they put me on mallet percussion. which was cool, but one cannot easily throw a marimba in a van and tote it around. my friend kirstin had a synth. my friend dante wanted to start a band. i bought a keyboard, named it the beast, and got with those guys. so all those piano lessons had come in handy. the problem was that i couldn't improvise. kirstin already had ideas in mind so she basically wrote out parts for me, but with dante i was on my own, and i didn't last long.

i still can't improvise. i'm too nervous. a few weeks ago, though, james was kind enough to show me the fingering pattern for bass scales. it clicked within minutes because the bass was presented to me like a piano. here is this note, this is a major third away from that note, here is the octave. i figured out arpeggios. i don't have a bass so i haven't played since then, but at my grandpa's house there's an acoustic guitar. i play scales and noodle around on the first four strings. i'm hopeful.

i was nine when my dad started bringing beatles albums home for me. until i was fourteen, not a day went by when i didn't listen to at least one of those albums. i remember one of the college stations in san antonio had a three-hour "best of the beatles" program every sunday. once that was over i'd put in revolver, or beatles for sale, or the white album. this is no exaggeration.

sometime after i started high school i lost interest. i'm not sure why. every once in a while i'd put revolver on my stereo or something, but i didn't feel obligated to listen to them all the time. i didn't have that sense of devotion any longer. instead i got into indie.

not too long ago i was driving with my aunt when "imagine" came on the radio. there was a time when i wouldn't let anyone talk when that came on the radio. it was silent then and i thought back to that time. i felt like i had lost my religion.

don't get me wrong. i like the kinsella brothers as much as the next guy. i've seen the microphones three times and i'd pay to see him again. i have a not-so-secret crush on calvin johnson. but sometimes i just miss the music i listened to when i was younger.

there was one "greatest hits of the 60's" compilation that i remember with particular fondness. "incense and peppermints," "so happy together," "gimme some lovin": it was all there. so were the kinks. i would never have admitted to liking any band more than the beatles, but "you really got me" hit me in a way that no beatles song did. paul revere & the raiders had a song on there too--"just like me"--and i think it's safe to say that my parents would be happy if they never heard that song again. now i realize that this was the rock and roll paul mccartney didn't have the guts for.

so rather than stepping back into the beatles house of worship, i started looking for things that hit me the way the kinks did. the sonics. james chance. the who's first album.

it feels good. if of montreal makes me feel like putting on metallic leggings and a miniskirt, james chance makes me feel like dancing in my underwear. i'd call that a nice change.