and now for something completely different

>>HOLD UP, I forgot a very important part of the recipe--the lemon juice! See below for revised recipe.

i've been into cooking a lot more lately, and i'd like to think that i'm getting better at it. of course, i always watch the food network when nothing else is on, so maybe i'm subconsciously getting inspired. (like yesterday, giatta was working with chocolate and made the most delicious looking panini out of brie cheese, chocolate, fresh basil and sourdough bread, which pretty much represent my four food groups. i have yet to try it but i'll let you know how it goes).

anyway, here's a less fattening recipe for my hummus, which has gotten good reviews at some recent parties. it took me a long time to arrive at this recipe, which is a conglomeration of other recipes and my imagination.

Tee-plate's Curry Hummus

In a food processor/blender*, mix:

1 can drained Garbanzo beans (reserve some of the juice for later)
4 1/2 Tbsp Tahini
3 Tbsp Olive Oil
5 Tbsp Lemon Juice
2 cloves Garlic
1 Tbsp Curry
Couple dashes of Cayenne Pepper
Couple dashes of Sea Salt

Mix it all up, then add some Garbanzo juice if it's too thick. Add more salt, curry, cayenne to taste. Delish!

Sometimes i double the recipe just to make sure it lasts. This stuff is good with triscuits, carrots, on sandwiches, with blue corn chips. And it's pretty healthy, right?

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*RL got me a food processor for my birthday last year. He also got me a Kitchenaid mixer by mistake, because he accidentally forgot the name for Cuisinart. Anyway, i do appreciate them, but i think it's funny that for our very first Christmas/birthday together he got me two kitchen appliances. I mean, didn't he ever see Father of the Bride?

yeah? well you smell like nail polish

Sunday was a fairly uneventful day, seeing as it was snowing when we woke up. So we decided to go on a little shopping excursion (RL got a little J Crew gift cert for his birthday. yay! except none for me. That place is pricey.). But then we got to go to PF Changs for those delicious lettuce wraps. Yes it's a chain restaurant, but those things are like crack.

Afterwards, RL decided we needed a little manicure action at the local nail shop*. As he explained to the woman doing his nails, we spent some time shingling a friend's roof on Saturday and our hands needed a "treat." I'm pretty sure that his manicurist spoke little to no English and couldn't have cared less about our Saturday even if she did.

My lady was a different story. She was friendly, asked us questions about us, what we did, etc. Finally she asked us what we had been doing that day. I told her about the shopping and the PF Changs. She was like, "Oh, yeah, I thought you smelled like Chinese food."

Ummm, thanks? What kind of a thing is that to say? I would never say that to a friend, much less someone who was expecting a tip from me.

After that I didn't know what to say to her. She finished my nails, pretty shoddily, and I decided I don't really like manicures. I don't want to have conversations when I'm being pampered, much less conversations about how I smell. From here on out it's all pedicures.

As long as I can stick my nose in a magazine and keep my Chinese-food stench away from everyone, I'll be okay.


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*RL does like his manicures. It's these getting-in-touch-with-his-softer-side moments that make me love him.

politicians, god love em

Okay, i know i'm treading in dangerous political waters here (well, at least for a blog that's supposed to be light-hearted), but i just have to share this.

For school i've been doing a little research on my home town of San Diego, figuring out just how little their major media outlets are talking about their impending water crisis. In my research i came across a little clip of the Republican mayor of San Diego speaking out for gay marriage. Apparently his daughter is gay (Hi. Dick Cheney? Are you watching this?) as are members of his staff, so he's now asking the city attorneys to pass a resolution to allow gay marriage. In San Diego of all places!

Watch at least the last half of the video. It's amazing that he's so emotional about this--gives us a little insight on what it's like to be a politician that's promised one thing to his constituents, and another thing to his family. But kudos for actually doing the right thing for once (Hi! Dick Cheney? Are you watching this?).



In other news, Barack Obama recently linked his faith to his environmentalism. Wha? God never told us anything about taking care of the earth. Oh wait, yes he did.

can't i just have a normal hug?

there's a new epidemic in the world of hetero relationships*, and it's called, for lack of a better term, "over-excited affection." boys, it seems, have a hard time administering affection that's not either:
a) bouncing up and down
b) picking their girlfriends up and tossing them (nicely, but still tossing)
c) poking in inappropriate places/at inappropriate times
d) grabbing or squeezing all manner of body parts

Now, it's understandable that boys like to show their affection in a variety of ways, but when it's done in one of the above ways 90 percent of the time, it's also understandable that a girl's gonna get annoyed.

I myself am often a victim of a, c, and d, with an occasional butt slap thrown in. early on in our relationship, RL stopped hugging me normally and started hugging me while jumping up and down (with weird sound effects). When i asked him for a normal hug, he said "come on! this is the deluxe hug! you're so lucky!" the other day i asked him again and he complied. for about five seconds. then he says "boorringg" and starts bouncing again.

now the "deluxe" has come to mean any sort of bouncing that RL does, and my least favorite is the i'm-still-sleeping-and-RL-is wide-awake deluxe. usually he does this because he wants me to wake up, and sometimes it works. My favorite is when i wake up to him standing over the bed with a wild-eyed look on his face and his body poised to jump on me.

when discussing this with my girlfriends, including Sara over at
Dating Tales, we realized that one of the issues is that you have to laugh when someone is bouncing/poking/grabbing you, which naturally means that the boys think we're enjoying it. Which we're not. But laughter is the go-to response that we fall back on, and sometimes we just can't help it.

So what's a girl to do to stop the over-excited affection onslaught? More importantly, why do boys have to be so difficult?


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*i have no idea how this is playing out in other types of relationships, and it may very well not just be limited to the heteros i know. it does seem to be kind of a straight boy thing, though.

my bf, apparently, is 12 years old

But he's cute. Which is good. Because on Wednesday he decided to wake up at FOUR O'CLOCK in the morning to drive an hour and a half and stand in line for three hours to ski two runs at Arapahoe Basin, the first mountain to open in the United States. RL was wearing a pumpkin costume, which got him some good coverage in the Denver Post. In one of the longer quotes, he decided to rub winter in my face by saying something like "summer's over!" it's funny because when he was saying that, i was still sleeping warmly and comfortably in my bed.

Just in case you need a visual:

In other silly bf news, he got an original Nintendo for his 30th birthday last week. I was excited because i thought i could relive my childhood too, but then he bought Skate or Die (sp?) and Commando, which i never played (i was rooting for Tetris and Bubble Bobble). Then the other night he called me from work saying he was going to be late because he had just bid on Excite Bike on eBay and he had to wait for the auction to close.

Aside from the primitive graphics and music that are fun to laugh at, for some reason Nintendo is really easy now that we're adults. I'm still trying to figure out if this has something to do with an increase in our intelligence or just an increase in familiarity with technical gadgets. Or maybe it's easy because RL, somehow, remembers all the secrets that we worked so hard for when we were little.

Actually, as we speak he's trying to conquer Mario Brothers for the third time in three days. Excuse me, I've gotta go help him out.

...my dear, i don't give a damn

being the super-anal grammar and language person that i am, i always notice when people say things repeatedly, or wrongly. when RL and i started dating he said "to tell you the truth" a lot, which i thought was funny. when i pointed it out he stopped doing it. i sure hope you're still telling me the truth RL!

he also said, "least we forget" until i corrected him. apparently all of his life he'd been laboring under the assumption that the least we could do is not forget.

my current boss' name is frank. he says "frankly" a lot. as in "frankly, i think the design isn't what we need right now." it's like he's using himself as an adjective. like, what other way are you going to do things but frankly? i wonder if he notices the inherent irony. i do things tee-plately. how do you do them?

one of my professors is moroccan, though he's lived in the states for awhile and is a working journalist. for the most part he's got the language down, but there are always a few words he just can't pronounce right. my cohort and i sit in class and make notes of his weird pronunciations and then compare after class. the other day he was telling us a story about a coroner, but the way he said it sounded like Tony Danza ordering a mexican beer. Cor-OWN-er ("Hey Angela, go get me a coroner."). it was hard not to giggle in class.

but my absolute favorite saying of this professor is the substitution of the word "gouge" for the word "gauge." as in, "think about your surroundings and gouge your stories appropriately." i'm sure he doesn't even think about it, but the word takes on a totally different meaning when you pronounce it this way. does this not happen in morocco?

and it's got some hip music, too

on the heels of britney not being fat, let's all take a moment to watch Dove's new internet ad about caring for your daughter's body image. it's like they heard my cries! at least somebody's paying attention.