Have a Nice Guilt Trip (18 page)

Think of the time you’re saving!

Plus it all goes down the same.

If it doesn’t lodge in your throat and choke you to death.

You remember the Monster Mash.

It was a graveyard smash.

In fact, why not mash all your food up?

For example, we love mashed potatoes. So I bet we would love mashed potatoes carrots oatmeal pizza.

It would completely do away with side orders, but who cares?

They’re so … side.

And it doesn’t matter if one of these things is not like the other.

Don’t be so matchy-matchy about your food.

Think outside the box bag carton tube toilet paper.

The culinary times are changing, and we have to change with them.

After all, we live in the era of mash-ups. I heard this term so much that I went online to see what it meant, and found the definition in the urban dictionary.

By the way, don’t ask me why it’s called “urban.”

Maybe to use it, you have to live in the city.

I’m guessing New York City.

Probably SoHo.

No. No.

Anyway the urban dictionary defines mash-up as “to take two completely different types of music and put them together.”

Great idea, right?

Just think how awesome it would be if Jay-Z and Bjorn were in the same song.

Agree?

Sorry, I can’t hear you. The music is too loud. Or maybe there’s a head-on collision between two freight trains.

In my head.

You could even mash-up your clothes. After all, we know how great it looks when you wear stripes with polka dots.

Like a rodeo clown!

When I was little, if something was mashed-up, it meant it was broken. You could look up the word in the Dictionary, which was an antique thing called a Book, found someplace called a Bookstore or a Library.

Photographs of these things are available online, and I encourage you to know your nation’s history.

But nowadays we’re mashing up our food.

I say it’s time to throw away our plates.

And get a trough.

Demanding

By Lisa

It was the great philosopher Justin Bieber who said, “Never say never,” and boy, that kid knew what he was talking about.

Because lately I find myself doing things I never thought I’d do.

Things I’d read about other people doing and thought to myself, I may do a lot of things, but I’ll never do
that.

It started three weeks ago, when I was looking for something to watch on TV and nothing was on, so I defaulted to On Demand. I’m a big fan of On Demand, mostly because I’m not the demanding type and it’s training me to assert myself.

After all, how often do you get to say, “This is what I want, and I want it right now.”

Right.

Or if you get to say it, how often does anybody do it?

Same here.

So I’ve become On Demanding.

I finally found somebody to do exactly what I want, the very moment that I want it, and his name is Sony.

I wish I could marry him and make him Mr. Scottoline.

Sony Scottoline.

You know what we would name our son?

Tony.

Tony Sony Scottoline.

I started scrolling around the On Demand menu for TV series and figured I’d give
Dexter
a shot, since I’d never seen it. I watched the first episode and liked it, so I figured I’d watch the second, and before you can say “blood spatter,” I had watched seven years of
Dexter.

That would be twelve episodes a year, and the show has run for seven seasons, so I watched 7
×
12 episodes, and each episode is about an hour.

I’ll leave the math to you. Because I did the calculation and I already know the answer:

It’s way too much television.

Not only that, but I watched all seven years in a matter of days, which means almost continuously. I had it on in my office while I worked, and I watched it during lunch and dinner. It kept me up past my bedtime, and I even got up early one morning before breakfast, to squeeze in another ep.

Yes, I say ep.

That’s how I talk now.

Because I’m too busy watching television to take the time to say episode.

I had read about people who binge-watch television and thought, I’ll never do that, but who was I kidding?

I binge-read, I binge-work, and I binge-eat. In fact, I might be a binge-binger.

And once I started watching
Dexter,
I knew that I was going to finish all of it, but not in a good way, like when you start college and know you’re going to graduate. It was more in a chocolate-cake way, in that I know if there is chocolate cake in the house, I’m going to eat it all gone.

So I ate
Dexter
all gone.

Or put differently, I got a Ph.D. in
Dexter.

There’s another thing I’m doing that I never thought I’d do, and I’m thinking it might be related, but you be the judge.

Just don’t judge too harshly.

We all know that I sleep with three dogs, namely, Ruby, Peach, and Tony. And I have the two puppies, Kit and Boone, who are about seven months old and sleep in my bedroom, but they sleep together in their cage.

Let me hasten to point out that the puppies love their cage. At bedtime, they run into it happily, cuddle up together, and fall asleep.

But one night, I looked over at the puppies in their cage, and they looked back at me, in my nice comfy bed, with the other three dogs.

So you know where this is going.

I never thought I would sleep with five dogs.

But now we sleep together, all five of us in the nice comfy bed.

And tonight, we’re starting
Game of Thrones.

Old MacDonald Takes Manhattan

By Francesca

City dwellers can be a little snobby. Okay, a lot snobby. And I admit to buying into the idea that New York City has the best of everything—the best museums, the best theater, the best music, and the best restaurants. I thought the mere fact of living here elevated my taste.

But not when it comes to food.

I hate to burst the city bubble, but fancy restaurants don’t cut it. To really educate my palate, I had to talk to some farmers.

Every Saturday, a farmers’ market pops up in a small park near my apartment. The transformation alone is impressive. On weekdays, it’s just a normal park full of benches and plants that endure more animal/drunk person urine than God intended, but come Saturday—BOOM—it’s an Eden of organic produce and wholesome, shiny-faced people who are cheerful at seven in the morning, and probably earlier, at whatever time they have to leave their magical farms far far away from the city.

I first started going to the farmers’ market because it’s the only place I can go food shopping with a dog. I have a vague understanding that GMOs are bad, but I feel most strongly about making dull errands into fun outings with my dog.

If there were a licensed dentist that did business in the street, I’d give it a shot just to have Pip on my lap.

So I leashed up the dog, put on my cutest pretend-I’m-going-to-the-gym outfit, and headed to market.

Right off the bat I got the idea that I’m doing it wrong, because while I was looking to buy all the conventional foods: chicken eggs, romaine lettuce, Jersey tomatoes, the people around me are getting duck eggs, “dinosaur” kale, and small, discolored “heirloom” tomatoes.

I had much to learn.

After the age of six, it’s embarrassing not to know the names of fruits and vegetables. But I was completely stumped by a pile of mystery veggies that looked like bright green
churros,
minus the cinnamon and sugar. I swallowed my pride and asked the female farmer what they were.

“Okra.”

I thought that was a color.

“Most people describe it as slimy,” she added.

Now there’s a winning advertising campaign.

I passed on the slimy
churros
but chuckled at a sign that read “Young Lettuce.”

“Oh, we’re lucky we got that this week,” she said. “Young lettuce is more tender and silky. It’s so delicate, it practically melts in your mouth.”

I was
this close
to calling Produce Protective Services.

I backed away from the pedo-farmer and bought a bunch of barely legal arugula instead.

Next, I went to a poultry and dairy farm stand to buy eggs and yogurt, and as I was paying, a woman pushing a baby stroller came up beside me. I didn’t hear what product she asked for at first, but she had a complaint about last week’s purchase that pricked my ears.

“There were black spots last time,” I heard her say.

Oh no,
I thought,
might the eggs be bad?

“That can be the result of natural bruising or marks from the yard,” said the farmer. “They are free-range, after all.”

The woman nodded. “All right, I’ll take another bag.”

Bag?

The farmer reached into his cooler and pulled out a plastic bag of severed chicken feet.

And I thought I was adventurous for getting
Greek
yogurt.

The only meat I eat is fish, but the line at the fishmonger is always superlong. At first, I thought it must be because the seafood is so fresh and delicious. Then I noticed the line consisted of mostly women. Then I noticed these women, young and old, were buying a hell of a lotta fish.

Then I noticed the fisherman.

When I say “fisherman,” you might think Gorton’s. Instead, think Romance Novel. Think Daniel Day Lewis in
Last of the Mohicans,
but in an Irish knit. Long, dark hair roughly tied back, skin only so weathered as to connote experience, not age, eyes squinting slightly, not from the sun, but from looking into your soul.

If mermaids were real, he’d have no trouble catching them.

I don’t have the money to buy extra filets just to talk to him, so instead I stall by asking him for cooking tips.

“Uh, a squeeze of lemon, maybe a little olive oil,” he says.

“Should I bake it, or pan-cook it?” I bat my lashes.

He shrugs. “Either, I guess.”

Stop it, you’re making me blush.

Okay, so maybe fisher-hottie isn’t biting. But I have learned to cook a great tuna steak, fried flounder fish tacos, sole meunière, and the perfect seared scallop.

On the other hand, my dog, Pip, gets everyone to fall in love with him. He gets a treat at every stand, and sometimes two.

At this point, Pip thinks the farmers raise antibiotic-free Milk-Bones and organic Beggin’ Strips.

With each Saturday I spent hanging out at the farmers’ market, I grew a little more sophisticated. Now I pay extra for raw honey with bits of honeycomb and “bee debris” in it, because the heat treatment of conventional honey kills its natural vitamins and nutrients. I make blistered shishito peppers as an afternoon snack. And I speak fluent kale: I can tell the difference between curly, rainbow, and Russian kale, but I also know that Tuscan, Lacinato, and dinosaur kale are all the same thing.

Maybe one day, I’ll even try the okra.

Desitin Days

By Lisa

I came back from book tour with something for Mother’s Day.

Diaper rash.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I’d been on a book tour that started in Philadelphia and traveled all over the country in the same jeans. I had no way to wash them, and I only have one pair.

That I can fit into.

I wore the jeans on the planes, in the hotel rooms, during the signings, out to dinner with readers and booksellers—anyway, you get the idea. What happened was that I started to chafe in Buckhead, which is too ritzy an Atlanta suburb to start itching in your pants.

Call it The Sisterhood of the Traveling Itchy Pants.

So I went to see what was going on down there. It’s not a region I usually visit, as I have better things to do. In fact, the last time I inspected myself was when I was thirteen and trying to learn how to use a tampon, folded directions in hand.

Too much information? Welcome to our book. Every woman in the world knows exactly what I’m talking about. Men, I trust your intelligence to follow along.

It wasn’t easy to inspect myself, given the location of the problem, and I didn’t have a hand mirror. The only mirror available in the hotel was over the bathroom sink, and to put it in a ladylike fashion, my hips don’t move that way.

Anymore.

The only way to see the rash was to take my iPhone, switch it to the camera function, then put it on the selfie setting, as if I were taking my own picture.

Or sexting myself.

Anyway, and I’ll say this as gently as possible, what I saw in my iPhone was that the chafing had morphed into a pink rash on my inner thighs. At first I thought it was athlete’s foot, just higher up, but there’s no such thing. Then I thought it was bedbugs, but thanks to my wonderful publisher, I was staying at the Ritz.

So I did what I always do with any kind of problem.

I denied it.

Rashes and problems do not go away if they’re ignored, and by San Francisco, I was whipping out my iPhone in every ladies’ room and watching the spread of my rash, which was forming a relief map of the seven continents. It went from a pretty pink to an ugly red, although at least it hid my cellulite.

I took pictures, and in no circumstances will I show them to you.

By Los Angeles, not only was it itching, but hurting. By Houston, I started walking like a cowboy and fit right in.

By then I got on the Internet, found pictures of my condition, and diagnosed myself. At age fifty-seven, I had given myself diaper rash. So I took myself to CVS, where I bought the remedy recommended, namely, a tube that read BOUDREAUX’S BUTT PASTE.

I’m not making this name up, and I can imagine your incredulous reaction, because I saw it on the face of the TSA agent who took it out of my Ziploc bag at airport security. He stared in disbelief at the tube, probably trying to decide if it was a joke, then said: “Miss, this exceeds four ounces. You can’t take it on board.”