Lusciousity

I’ve been a little slow in following up on this luscious tip from Frida, but today I finally managed to get my behind to the nearest Target and pick up a tin of Dark Chocolate Altoids. Yes, you read that correctly. Dark Chocolate (possibly my second favorite food on this planet, right after red wine) + Altoids (it’s not a mint, it’s an Altoid–I’ll never forget my first Altoid encounter on an afternoon break from Double Reed Camp in Holland Michigan. By the time I got back to rehearsal, my airways were so clear that I could play whole pages without taking a breath.) = oh yes please. There’s nothing really to be curious about in that formula: it is sure fire success. It’s dime to ditch the Junior Mints and get luscious with your breath freshening choices. These things are just about everything you could want in a mint or a chocolate–and they’re both. It’s multitasking for your mouth, but in an indulgent rather than overworked way. Thanks Frida!

No, the title of this post does not mean that I am either crying in the bathtub (that would be a bit treacherous for my beloved Mac friend) or leading a sing along. It means that I have been listening to my weekly does of All Songs Considered, a podcast by NPR music critic Bob Boilen, and that this week’s featured artist was Emily Haines (also of Broken Social Scene) whose latest album is The Knives Don’t Have Your Back, and that was how she introduced one of her songs. The podcast has a brief interview with Ms. Haines and, best of all, several songs recorded from a live performance she recently gave in DC. I just discovered All Songs Considered this week, and I’m pumped. It looks like it has a pretty decent line up of featured bands and artists, and I’ve generally enjoyed Bob Boilen’s music reviews on Fresh Air. Best of all, it comes straight to me even though I don’t have an iPod, because you can subscribe to it via RSS feed and listen directly through your RSS reader. That means I don’t have to download anything or be at the computer with my iTunes on it. It’s web based, and it sounds good, and it might just give you an extra peek at some cool music.

Hello Luscious Ones! After a long and regenerative silence, Lusciousity is back and ready to take on the new year with our usual collection of aspirations, inspirations, and other half-thought out glimmers of immortality through luscious living.

Now, on to that prickly new year’s topic of resolutions. Resolutions, for or against? As usual, Lusciousity likes to have it both ways. Yes, we want to aim high and higher. We want to be the change we want to see in the world. We want to spend our treasures of time and health and money more wisely and give more freely and learn something new before we’ve even opened our box of bran flakes every morning. These can help make life more luscious. And yet… most new year’s resolutions involve the word “better,” and the word “better” kind of goes against Lusciousity’s philosophical stance that the world is probably already good if we make the effort to notice it (not so much the case if you are a resident of certain war-ravaged countries, but you get my general meaning). So while resolutions at their best foster hope in the potential for a more fully self-actualized life, they can also foster dissatisfaction with the riches that our lives already offer us. My conclusion is, make them but only take them as seriously as makes you feel good.

In that spirit, I’ll start the year off by sharing one of my perennial resolutions: To Have Better Taste in Just About Everything. Fortunately, two of my good tasting… oh wait, that doesn’t sound right… sophisticated friends have sent D and me music mixes to get our year started out on some good notes. Thanks LCB and Editor Steven! And, due to the generosity of Diego and Frida, we can now listen to this good music on our speakers wirelessly, so that will give us no excuse not to fill our apartment with tunes. So on the music side of good taste, I have great guidance to start me off. Now onto fashion… well, I am pretty much a hopeless case in this area, but I do try to fake a theoretical knowledge of it through reading articles such as this NYT commentary on the decentered world of contemporary fashion. Money quote: “Has it ever appeared more inevitable that the cult of the designer is slated for the cultural slag heap, there to join all those other monuments to the outmoded notion of the grand career (retrospective albums, DVD collections, the Great Novel)?” (Wow! Gotta blog about that over on LS asap.) But now on to the food side, where typically have the good sense to say no to my budget and yes to my stomach. For example, D and I spent the very first hours of the new year (yes, I do mean 1am to 5am) cooking pecan sticky buns (recipe courtesy of Ruth Reichl’s Gourmet Cookbook) and it was well worth the hours of watching dough rise just to taste the buttery flaky sweet goodness of fresh rolls and have something truly yummy to offer our guest with an early morning flight out. There’s still a week of homework-free life left before spring semester kicks in, and in it I resolve to cook from scratch at least one meal (even if it is just a Rachel Ray meal… that Good Fennels Pasta last week was really tasty and lasted us eight servings–bonus).

Now I’ve got my own marching orders, better start following them. Onward to lunch!

Oh my! It’s been two weeks since my last substantial posting and still flying by is the season of Christmas. Okay, in the interest of your valuable time, here in list form, is what I have and have not been doing to lusciously celebrate.

Have Not:

1) Put up my Christmas tree.

2) Baked a single cookie from scratch. (Though this will change soon!)

3) Listened to or sung The Messiah.

4) Lit an advent candle.

5) Put a dollar bill in a Salvation Army bellringer’s jar (where are they all? I haven’t seen one yet).

6) Sung a carol. So sad! “Wassail, wassail all over the town!” Okay, that’s better.

7) Frozen my ass off at some parade involving marching bands. Some traditions are better dead.

Have:

1) Set my Firefox theme to Tinseltown. Thought this was so much fun that I have also downloaded Firefox onto all of my work computers just so I could set them to Tinseltown.

2) Downloaded the aforementioned Sufjan holiday song and also Aimee Mann’s cover of I’ll Be Home for Christmas available on Salon’s Audiofile.

3) Baked some non-from scratch cookies.

4) Eaten several holiday cookies of from scratch and non-from scratch varieties.

5) Traveled home to Michigan to see my family, give them gifts, get gifts from them, and eat cookies at the annual holiday party.

6) Ordered the Peppermint Hot Chocolate at Starbucks several times. It’s a yummy, caffeine free alternative to the mocha.

7) DVR’d the Chrismakkah episode of The OC… although I haven’t watched it yet.

Mailed Christmas cards with a cute tropical theme that will almost assuredly not arrive in time for Christmas.

9) Wrapped several gifts.

10) Found a good recording of “Jesus Christ, The Apple Tree” on the Classical Music Library online. Haven’t found it free online, but here are the lyrics.

11) Agonized over what to get my boss.

12) Bought a bottle of Beujolais Village. Oh wait, I don’t need Christmas as an excuse to do that. But this bottle I bought with a Christmas frame of mind.

Okay, that’s the round-up. More later I hope.

Start your Tivo’s and make yourself some boozy hot chocolate, tonight is the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. 10pm, CBS. Gisele for the boys, Justin Timberlake for the girls, or vice versa if you swing that way, and let us not forget the stunning lighting effects for the stage designers among us. This is one hour of television that has been a tradition for us Editors, ever since Christmas 2003 found us gathered in Steven and WA’s apartment, crowding into the futon and remarking on the jaw-dropping, um, runway surfacing. Consider this a luscious alert to your chance to join in.

Yesterday, I was knocking the New York Times for their tasteless expensive gift recommendations (it has crossed my mind that the slide show was ironic, but that’s an awful lot of ironic for a typically straight faced paper), but today, I find that their cups runneth over. This post was originally supposed to be about the Hot Dominicana, the hot cocoa drink variety that is, but I can’t find the link to the video of how to make it at home. In short: 10 oz of the most expensive dark chocolate you can find, a type of rum I’ve never heard of, a coffee flavored liqueur that I think I might have heard of, two cups of whole milk and 1 cup of heavy whipping cream. But looking at that ingredient list, I think, why mess with success? How about I do the rum and the liqueur as a shot, and then linger over what must be some kick-ass hot chocolate as long as I please, undistracted from the warm thick chocolate goodness in my hands? I have never needed the excuse of alcohol to get me to drink some hot chocolate.

So then I moved deeper into the Sunday Styles section, and found this brief aside about why writers really need to drink. In short, it improves their writing. Just ask Scott and Papa H. For really improved writing, you could try mixing up what they call the Orange Blossom. It’s simple: 20 oz of gin and 4 oz of orange juice, and you better pour that into a champagne flute before something mistakes it for a Slurpee. 24 oz of artistic brilliance I would say.

In honor of Bartleby, the scrivener, I am going to prefer not to do much of an update tonight and get back to this (dialectially stimulating, gut wrenchingly non-referential, unabashedly lyrical yet completely crazy ass, ask me tomorrow if I think it means) John Wilkinson poetry.

The answers to yesterday’s burning question of lusciousity: anything to do with take-out pizza, Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough, and strategic Blockbuster rentals. Swooping into our 700 square foot pit of gloom, Daniel proposed a radical change of agenda for the evening hours and facilitated an honest to goodness group brainstorming session that led to a little something for everyone and a lot of junk food to boot. First stop was coming the New Releases section of Blockbuster to find something that everyone could agree on and no one had seen. Victory came in the form of Inside Man, which turned out to be a tightly plotted bank heist/ hostage drama. I’ll say no more. We also managed to swing a few votes into the Casanova camp, which we had from Netflix. Next stop, Publix for the post-nutritional processed food orgy of our dreams: pre-made cookie dough, root beer, kettle corn, ice cream, and just for kicks a little Florida OJ to go with the balanced breakfast we would surely need to fight our sugar hangovers. Final stop, Cannoli Kitchen, Boca’s finest in New York style takeout pizza pie. Yum and yum, and lusciousity, done and done.

George Orwell told us that all writing was a political act, and in this 2005 Guardian editorial George Saunders spells it out for us a little more. It is titled “The Battle for Precision” and is a good reminder even to the non-journalistically inclined among us that we ought to say what we mean, as soon as possible.

Meetings of the Wild Bunch never fail to involve large measures of culinary delight, and last night’s meet-up in celebration of Diego’s birthday was no exception. For starters, seeing as we were a group of four relatively overworked people after this particularly long week, we took the luscious option of ordering out for two excellent coal fired pizzas, one with fresh arugula to add on top that was especially tangy and yumsome. And of course, a respectable amount of wine was consumed.

The grand finale stole the show, however. Just when we thought some candles on top of a cake were going to emerge from the house, Frida presented us each with our own enormous ice cream sandwiches on a stick, each one completely covered in what I think were little pieces of Oreo cookies. This was my first experience of the wonder that is Carvel. Either Michigan does not have any of this luscious stuff, or my dairy deprived childhood existed in complete denial of its existence. It was heavenly, and thanks to the cool November evening, we didn’t even have to rush through eating it for fear of losing even a drop of the creamy vanilla middle to the wicked melt of the Florida sun. Frida was also kind enough to share the location of the nearest Carvel store, which is the only place you can purchase the finest in Flying Saucer Ice Cream Sandwiches. Given that it is conveniently located midway between home and Miami, I predict that this blog may soon be overrun with UFO sightings.