The New England Society for Tea Fetishism

It makes you feel drunk for about five minutes afterward, which might sound like a good thing, but not at 8:30 in the morning after you just ate a bran muffin. (I was rooting around in my bag for my wallet, if you must know)

Well, I'm still at Old Mutual. I did three days last week and it looks like I'll be here until next week. Meg just called and said the hospital job wanted someone with more experience, which is fine because it sounded like a lot of stuff to handle and I really just wanted to apply to get the interview experience. She's going to try and get me an interview for an executive assistant position in a small venture capital company in downtown Boston. She says there's a lot of money in venture capital and the offices at these places are usually really nice. Staying here wouldn't be a problem - the people are really nice and the view is fucking fantastic - but I really want something a little more challenging that doesn't have me chained to a desk all day.

I had the worst meal I have ever had in a restaurant last Friday. It even tops the nasty scallops I had at Bocaccini in Hampton Bays. I went to the Edgewater Cafe with my mom and Brian. It's a few doors down from A Passage to India (I love that place - we should have gone there instead). Underneath the Edgewater Cafe it says "Authentic Mexican Cuisine." Which makes it even more confusing because not only was the meal the worst I've ever been served, it's also the worst Chinese food I've ever had. Let me explain: Mom and Brian's food was okay. "It's not bad, it's just okay," Brian said a few times. I ordered the vegetable fajitas. I thought, "Fajitas: sizzling platters of peppers and onions and, in this case, probably some mushrooms." What I got was a huge plate of broccoli, chunks of green pepper, and limp onions all smothered to within an inch of their lives in some watery brown sauce (here I will mention that there was not one square millimeter left on the plate for fajita construction). I had a few bites and quit. It was so salty it was making my stomach burn. My mom took a bite and made a positive identification. Soy sauce. All over my "Authentic Mexican" fajitas. I should have refused to pay because, seriously, any head chef who would serve that plate of nastiness in his restaurant has no respect for his customers. But I just wanted to leave because we'd gone right after work and was tired, so when I got home I posted a bad review on Yahoo!. It just completely boggles my mind that someone came up with that dish and decided it was fit for human consumption. It wasn't just bad Chinese food, it was like bad homemade Chinese food. In a Mexican restaurant! I swear, this will haunt me until the day I die.

Labels: I Like Food, Workin' for a livin'

PANCAKES?

I think I'll pass, thanks.

Yesterday, after I proctored a test at Salem State, Mom, Brian and I went to A Taste of Asia for lunch. Brian, as usual, ordered way too much sushi. I think there's a part of your brain that, after every time you eat sushi, makes you forget how filling it is so you always order six or seven hand rolls when four will do. For my part I also ordered a vegetable tempura appetizer. We like the maki, so for us it was a California roll, a Philadelphia roll (possibly the best I've ever had), a caterpillar roll, volcano maki, goldfish maki, and a godzilla roll. I expected it to come on a boat, but I don't think they make one big enough. And we ate it all. (Actually, we took about five pieces home, but Brian and I finished it off around 3pm.) I did not eat dinner last night. I call yesterday a taste of things to come because my mom is on vacation this week, which means that it's basically going to be non-stop eating straight through Thanksgiving. Here comes the intestinal woe.
(Although, there's no appetite supressant like having an inch worm tumble out of your brand new package of raisins and into your bowl first thing in the morning. I wish I didn't know that.)

I need to buy a Regina Spektor cd. I don't think I can wait until Christmas.

Has anyone else seen Last Night? I'd been meaning to for a while, mostly because of my crush on Callum Keith Rennie (damn you, Due South) and my love for pre-Sideways Sandra Oh. I finally caught it on IFC on Friday. Canadians make a great end-of-the-world movie. The dvd is completely bare-bones, but it's definitely going on my "to buy" list.

I'll be babysitting with Tracy tonight. I need one of those plastic face shields that my dental hygienist wears when she's cleaning my teeth. Last Wednesday I got a fleck of Sammy-Spit right in my eye. He had a cough and a fever at the time, so my prognosis is not good.

Labels: Amatuer Film Critic Corner, I Like Food

We ordered so much sushi at Gourmet Garden last night that they brought it to the table on a wooden boat. With a little detachable rudder. The sushi was so much better than last week when I went with Tracy after she was kind enough to drive me to my yearly two-minute torture session. We had the usual suspects, California and Philadelphia rolls (and this time the salmon in the Philly roll was smoked, Tracy) Brian's sashimi that he always gets, tuna and scallion roll, and a shrimp tempura roll. Two new things - some kind of deep fried sushi that was very tasty and another thing that was possibly an abomination unto god. I'm used to sushi that I can shove in my mouth and eat all at once (like the last piece of Philly roll in the fridge that will be in my belly come lunchtime) but this thing was at least two inches across and stuffed with rice, two types of unidentifiable pickled vegetable, spinach, egg, carrot, cucumber, avocado, and a piece of crabstick rolled in a substance I can only describe as pink margarita sugar. I could not get past the sugar. Just . . . no. But we did have a delicious (and incredibly fattening, I'm sure) avocado salad made with some kind of seasoned mayonnaise, crabstick, big old chunks of avocado, and topped with a dollop of flying fish roe. And I dropped some of it on myself while eating it with the chopsticks. I always get performance anxiety when the waitstaff is watching me.

Labels: I Like Food

I gotta come up with another blog title. I'm sick of getting mutliple google searches for ways to kill things. Kinda oogy, if you ask me.

I just got back from a lovely week in Bar Harbor where I ate until I was sick of food and got no real writing accomplished because I was too busy walking the rocks on the beach until my calves ached. All in all, a very good week. After a year-and-a-half, Amy was still her same wonderful self (and debt-free to boot). It's amazing how you don't realize just how much you've missed a person until you're in the same room with her. It was just like being in college again, what with all the laughing and poking and eating and generally acting like fools. And the British television. Last night when I got home I had to recalibrate my behavior and remember that perhaps my mother might not appreciate being slapped on the ass as a sign of affection.

Oh, the food. There was fish chowder and baked ziti and whoopi pies and cookies (all homemade at the Maison du Thompson). In town I had burritos and smoothies and scones and lattes and some really great and surprisingly affordable Tex-Mex. I'm so used to prices on Long Island that I almost went into shock when I saw that three tacos, two sides, and dessert was only going to cost $9.95. There was a bottle of Stoli, too. Amy knows what I like. We never did use the Godiva liqueur for anything, though, which is an oversight that must be fixed next time I visit. And I must mention the kitty who, while not part of a meal, was so cute I wanted to gobble her up.

Mount Desert Island is beautiful. I know that Downeast Maine can be a harsh mistress, but a couple times when were in the car I wanted to grab Amy and yell, "Look at where you live!" Not because Amy doesn't genuinely appreciate the beauty of MDI and the surrounding areas (I know for a fact that she does), but because . . . well, damn, woman, look at where you live! I love the convenience of having loads and loads of civilization very near by me all year round, but the North Shore is butt-ugly compared Bar Harbor. It tends to make a girl a little jealous.

Labels: I Like Food, Out and About With Amy

. . . although sometimes it feels that way. I get up at five, go to work at seven, leave at five (last night it was 6:40) go home, eat dinner and pretty much become semi-comatose before walking upstairs sometime around nine for bed. Receiving at a nursery and landscape operation just before spring starts is kicking my ass. But, I have to tell you, the overtime is making me very happy. Almost everything inside and outside has been re-SKU'ed, which also makes me happy. Last week Paula and I did the pottery outside. Some of it is huge. It reminds of those chase scenes in the movies that take place in Arabian market places, the ones where someone inevitably hides in a giant clay pot. Or is that a basket? Anyway, we put a sticker on it and write the SKU and the price on the inside with permanent marker. Picture me bent over the rim of a huge terra cotta pot with my ass in the air and my head down somewhere near the bottom, the inside of the pot filling with permanent marker fumes and me unable to remember a string of numbers longer than three digits. At that point I couldn't tell if my memory lapses were because it was three o'clock and I'd been tagging stuff outside since nine or if I was actually killing brain cells.

The other day we went to The Edgewater for dinner, where I inhaled my shrimp oreganata. I ate the whole thing, which included a heaping pile of rissotto (I don't care if I spelled that wrong, I'm too lazy to check it). And I had a very nice cosmopolitan which Shawn refused to pay for since he has moral issues with purchasing and serving alcohol. He did, however, buy my dinner as a thank you for cleaning the bathroom every week since we moved in (except last week - I was just too frickin' tired to put any effort into anything around the house) which I thought was really sweet.

My dad's actually doing better. He had some tests done and some weird thing done with novacaine and a very big needle, and for the first time in a long time, his back pain is actually improving. I really should call him tonight after nine (free minutes with T Mobile - him, not me) and catch up.

Labels: I Like Food, Workin' for a livin'

"Sorry it's such short notice but we're actually not going to need you for January or February." So I'm laid off for two months starting this Saturday. I can collect unemployment for a little less than what I'm making now, which is fine with me. As long as I can pay the bills. I'll have a whole lotta time to catch up with my shamefully far behind thesis work. I can go home for Christmas and take my sweet time getting back to Long Island. It's really not a big deal except for the fact that they waited until almost the last possible minute to make the decision, which is a shitty thing to do. But I've got a nice leisurely two month vacation coming up. so I don't particularly care much anymore.

So I'll be home on Saturday afternoon with a suitcase full of presents that have to wrapped and hankerin' for some Bob's Fried Clams and some Honga and some Vinnie T's and some Gourmet Garden, and possibly a Friendly's sundae, because god damn my meals are pretty freakin' monotonous around here. Although I did make some salmon the other day that was positively divine, although it might have had something to do with the fact that it had been around a month since I had some good animal protein. I'm a hungry bitch. And maybe this time Madame Tracy and I will actually have the time to go boozing around town.

Labels: I Like Food, Workin' for a livin'