Finger lickin' good

Tonight for dinner we stopped by the grocery store and picked up a rotisserie chicken. From the moment Ian heard what was on the menu, he whined "I don't want chicken!" We told him he was perfectly free to eat only broccoli and beets for dinner, but he thought he could get what he wanted - pasta, apparently - if he complained enough. So naive.

Ian kept up this refrain all the way until his plate was being set in front of him, despite our assurances that he'd had it many times before and scarfed it down. When he touched it, he found a new objection.

"It's wet!"

I think he meant that it was simply moist, as chicken should be. As opposed to the chicken I grew up with, which was cooked so thoroughly Julia Child suddenly needed a drink of water even from afar.

Ian finally relented and tried a single thin strand of meat.

"Mmmmmmm! You didn't tell me this was the good chicken!"

A steady diet of fauna

I'm in a listy kind of mood this week. Today I present:

Animals I ate yesterday

1) Cow

2) Chicken

3) Pig

4) Tuna

5) Salmon

6) Lamb

7) Squid

8) Shrimp

Also waffles.

Items I swept from under the couch last night

> Dust and cat fur, naturally

> Two socks

> Two slippers

> One pencil

> One Duplo-size Lego

> One seed pod that looks like this

> One toy car from McDonald's

> Two Thomas & Friends steam engines (Percy and Duck)

> Two Thomas & Friends cars (magnetic flatbed and circus cage)

> One stegosaurus from Dinosaur Checkers game

> Cardboard tube from roll of paper towels

> Four valentines

> One relatively fresh, medium-size yellow onion

I swear I just swept there a month ago.

What the devil?

A couple of months ago I was browsing BoingBoing and stumbled across the Egg Cuber, a device that can only be described as entirely pointless but immediately infatuating. With this amazing tool, a perfectly normal hardboiled egg can be turned into the most freakish of foodstuffs - something that once upon a time might have gotten you tossed into a pond in Salem.



Now cubic eggs are cool and all, but what good are they if you're not showing them off? And there's only one way eggs ever dress to impress: devilled eggs. When the thought of square devilled eggs occurred to me, I realized it addressed a couple of my (admittedly lesser) frustrations. On a normal dish, devilled eggs slide around and are hard to manage. You can get a special dish for devilled eggs, but that requires extra cupboard space, and I tend to dislike single-function dishes. Because really, what else can you do with a devilled egg plate, except maybe serve up some tasty Rocky Mountain oysters? A flat-bottomed devilled egg would stay in place while packing closer together on a standard dish - it's the best of both worlds. I'm ignoring, of course, the fact that the egg cuber still takes up cupboard space.

Especially if you buy three.


Why, you ask? Well, the egg needs to be put into the cuber while it's still warm, and it retains its shape best if it's chilled in the refrigerator. Making even a dozen devilled eggs would take all day with only one cuber, but three at a time is doable. Three can chill while three more cook, and they'll all be ready to switch around the same time. I found mine at thegadgetsource.com, but they can apparently be found in Asian markets for even cheaper.

For best results, place next to quality beer (or just enjoy one between batches):


Extracting the cubed eggs looks like so:




Try to gauge where the yolk has ended up, and cut in half accordingly. Odd shapes can always be masked with the filling, though, so no biggie.


The yolks in a cubed egg need a bit more coaxing than usual to extract, so I found that a fork was helpful.


For the filling, anything goes. I'm a minimalist when it comes to devilled eggs, so I just blend the yolks with mayonnaise, kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, and cayenne. I might throw in a dash of horseradish for kicks. Pickle relish? Not a fan.

If you want to turn the geek level up to eleven, as I do, make a nifty little stencil for the paprika with two L-shaped pieces of paper taped together. When going with the square theme, it's best to overdo it a bit.



The resulting appetizer is a surefire conversation starter. The conversation might start with "What the hell?" But for me, that's par for the course.


There are a few more photos in this Flickr set.

Must be going around

I knew it was a bad sign that Ben only wanted one slice of pizza.

He ate a banana after that, so he wasn't full, but he declined to finish even what he had. Now Ben refusing pizza is like Paris Hilton turning away from the camera, so you can imagine my concern. Ian got sick at school last Friday, so I feared the worst. Sure enough, a couple of hours after he went to bed, Ben could be heard making sounds you don't make willingly, and we found him wallowing in the remains of his dinner. And Ian's, and mine, and Sarah's from the looks of it. Barf was everywhere: on his pajamas, his pillow, his sheets, his blanket, the floor, the walls, the cats, the toys downstairs, you name it. It's a testament to how far I've come with respect to disgusting parent duty that I didn't add to the carnage myself.

We replaced the sheets, changed him into fresh pajamas, and tucked him back in. Not an hour later he was awake again suffering round two. Fortunately we had yet another spare set of sheets and pajamas (a miracle in our house), so we got him clean and comfortable a second time. Poor Ben was exhausted by that point, and he kept lamenting that he didn't like throwing up. I hear ya, buddy. I'll take any sort of gastroinstestinal distress over vomiting; so long as the digestive process doesn't go into reverse, I can live with it.

The saddest part was when he became concerned that he wouldn't get better by Saturday morning.

"But I won't be able to eat waffles!" he sobbed.

He likes our Saturday-morning waffles. More than pizza, apparently.

So far I've managed to avoid the stomach bug this season, but last week I came down with something even more fun. It all started last week when what appeared to be a zit appeared between the knuckles of my right pinkie finger. Strange location for a zit - usually they pop up on the tip of my nose like an evil junior high flashback - but whatever. Within a day, though, it had decided to wage war, first incapacitating the entire finger, then most of my right hand. When I began to feel searing, burning pain all the way up to my elbow, I caved and went to urgent care. They were concerned enough to put me on IV antibiotics, so I felt validated in bucking my habit of avoiding doctors at all cost.

For reference, you can see a picture of my finger here. It was initially diagnosed as cellulitis, but a culture revealed it to be an antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus. Which explained why the entry-level antibiotics I had been taking were having little effect. They upgraded me to Cipro, the antibiotic that became a household name during the anthrax scare a few years ago. So if you're planning to launch another anthrax attack on DC, please do it this week - it'll save me a lot of hassle.

I'm apparently one of the lucky few among the general population falling victim to the latest evolution of infectious bacteria. They're not just for hospitals anymore, nosirreebob! Ever the trendsetter, I am. By the time everyone else catches up, I'll be all like staph infections were so much cooler back when it was just me.