Buy

As much as we all love the Food Channel and the revolution that followed its populatiry, their recipes can be a tad over the top. I do not cook with peanut oil, most of my herbs are dried, and although I do have a pepper grinder- my peppercorns are your garden variety black, not pink or green (did you know there was such a thing as a PINK peppercorn!?!).

I can get sucked in by Giada, Bobby Flay, and Paula Dean as quick as the next person, but their cooking has more entertainment value than practicality. For good tasting meals to make at home I turn to America's Test Kitchen.

It is not hard to make a satisfactory meal. I can boil pasta, open a can, and through a bag of vegetables in the microwave as good as the next person. The true sign of a good cook though is one whose meals you can describe as being flavorful. Where the first bite and every one thereafter has taste. Some of you may not know exactly what I mean because a true good cook is not easy to come by.

Every Monday my childhood friend and I, along with my children descend on my fathers house for dinner. We drive to his house on these busy weeknights, not just because of the lour of a free meal, but because these are by far the best meals of my week. My father is a flavorful cook. Every meal he makes is packed with taste. He has a passion for making good food, and like any great cook he likes to cook.

I am not on par with my father, but the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook (which my father gave me) allows me to invite friends over to dinner with the knowledge that I will receive a few appreciative groans of pleasure. I have grilled, baked, sauted, simmered, chopped, ground, fried, and minced with this book without experiencing one tragedy.

The Test Kitchen understands what it is to be an average cook, without succumbing to mediocrity. The cookbook explains technique simply and uses ingredients you do not have to run to a special market for.

The best part of the book is that they not only test a recipe over a dozen times to get it just right before making you do it, but they test the tools and brand of ingredients as well. If you have ever wondered what size, shape and name brand of cake pan or coffee maker work best, this is the book for you. If you want to know what brand of bread crumbs or canned tomatoes cook best, this is the book for you.

The Family Cookbook is a the Test Kitchen's introductory cookbook. If you feel they are too simple and that PBS sponsored programming is not quite on par with their Cable TV celebrity chef counterparts, the Best Recipes books will change your mind. I have two and they scare the heck out of me.

In a knock down drag out Kitchen Stadium food fight, I would bet on the Test Kitchen any day.

The Family Cookbook would be a perfect gift for a wedding, hew home, or even a graduate going off to college.

Product: The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Heavy-duty Revised Edition

Price: $34.95 (cheaper on Amazon.com)

Place: Amazon.com, and any book store

Listen

I was not feeling very verbose tonight, but I did want to commit to making a post.

There are a couple of recent female artists from England that have great music: Duffy, Lilly Allen and Amy Winehouse specifically.

However, Lilly Allen is my favorite by far because she is a great talent, I love her music, and most of all because she is little (or very) snarky at times. I almost fell over when I heard her rendition of 50 Cent's 'Window Shopper'. Allen's father is a famous comic in England, so I guess that particular talent runs in the family.

I found this video when trying to find a suitable Lily Allen original, but this really was to perfect to pass up.

View

February 15th posting update. This is the painting from the Louvre.

Artist: Paul Delaroche

Painting: Le Jeune Martyre

Buy

Philosophy brand products are a bit yuppie with their holistic messaging. Each product offers nuggets of information on how to live your life that are just about as valid as a fortune cookie. Their packaging is more reminiscent of a self-help book than a list of active ingredients and drug facts, but that is their shtick.

All holistic lifestyle messaging aside, they do make some really nice products. The Microdelivery Exfoliating Wash is one of those nice products. It is a simple everyday wash, the exfoliating beads are smaller than St. Ives Apricot scrub (which I used to use as a teen and it feels more like it could have doubled as a foot scrub) and the Proactiv cleansers whose beads I used to think were very small and gentle, but by comparison the Philosophy wash wins hands down.

Unfortunately, I may as well buy stock in Proactive because at 29, the words Salycic Acid, Retinol, and Benzoyl Peroxide are looking to be permanent members of my facial routine. But, occasionally I do like to feel as if I am an adult and have options other than a product tied to an infomercial by the Guthy Renker company. For those times I turn to Philosophy.

A friend actually bought this wash recently and loved it. She suggested I put it on the blog, and coincidently I already had it on my list from purchasing it a few months ago. If the $25 price tag does not agree with you, she bought her wash on e-bay. If you do not have any qualms with that method it may be worth checking out.

Product: The Microdelivery Exfoliaitng Wash by Philosophy

Price: $25 for an 8 oz. bottle

Place: QVC, Ulta, Sephora, E-Bay

Do

I enjoy using prodigious words. Not in an ostentatious way, I hope. But there are times when sentiments cannot be expressed in austere ways.

I have a few favorite ‘prodigious’ words that I use probably more often that I should. But they are my favorites and therefore they circulate in my conversations more than others, because….

Sometimes a mess is not simply a mess, it is a DEBACLE!

Sometimes the way things look are their aesthetics.

Someone who lives in their own little world lives in a microcosm. (that one is REALLY hard to fit into a conversation, but I do try!)

I should give some forewarning that there are some words a person should never attempt to enter into a conversation. I heard one such example for the first time recently and twice within a months’ time, from separate people in fact, it was: doppelganger. I warn you, do not use this word. If you see someone who looked like your friends double then you tell them you saw someone that looked like them, never, I warn you never, tell your friend that they have a doppelganger. If you are female, I would imagine you just lost your best friend, if you are a male I would imagine you are in for a world of hurt.

Also, you should really know what your words mean before you say them, I was using the word ‘masochistic’ wrong for a very long time, which I assure you was embarrassing.

In all seriousness, ‘big’ or ‘prodigious’ words are great. Communication is key to the human experience and the better we communicate the richer our experience will be. Synonyms are not really synonyms at all. Different forms of the same word convey varying degrees of emotion and meaning that we need. Sometimes we do not hate we DESPISE. We may not be in love, but we are enamored.

I would like to use myself in as an example when trying to expel the misnomer that the ability to spout off a big word in conversation conveys some measure of intelligence. Almost every big work I know, I admittedly cannot spell correctly! Most of them I learned from period movies and historical romance novels. I’ve never taken an IQ test, but I assure you my scores would be merely average. And surprise of all surprises I scored better on my GRE’s in math than verbal.

There is no good reason we could not all use a bit of expanding in our vocabulary. I recommend signing up to receive a new word into your e-mail every day for a year. You can do so by subscribing to A.Word. A. Day which is endorsed by the New York Times. You can use this link:

http://wordsmith.org/awad/sub.html

Another option is visiting Save The Words at SaveTheWords.org where I learned that an Agonyclite is "a member of a heretical sect that stood rather than kneeled" and Ficulnean is "worthless information regarding fig-tree wood".

Read

Minor Essentials is on Spring Break. Enjoy the weather, and I'll see you back here on Monday!

Eat

I am a super sweets person and cherry cordials are probably my most sugar packed indulgence. They are almost too much and would probably put most diabetics into some form of shock.

There are a lot of brands of these out there, but the Gertrude Hawk ones are the best. The chocolate is smooth and melts away in your mouth to reveal the creamy, sugary inside and then the cherry treasure in the middle breaks with a snap to unleash a flavor explosion.

Most of the brands in larger chain stores have a shell that tastes and feels more like wax than anything edible. I cannot even get past the supposed ‘chocolate’ part to enjoy the middle, but if and when I do the cherry is mush- they are all wrong.

I am a bit of a binge eater when it comes to sweets (two boxes of Girl Scout cookies in 2.5 days, may not be a world record, but I think we can all agree that it does not resemble the behavior of a normal rational human-being). I have been known to polish off a box of the above brand of chocolate covered cherries in a day and a half. To add insult to injury I have done so while sitting in bed reading a trashy romance novel until the very early hours of the morning.

I am just as surprised as the rest of civilization that after a night of romance novels and the sweets that I arise to an in-tact social life and jean sizes in the single digits. (Did I mention that sometimes the filling leaks onto my hands, therefore as I am turning the pages of my smut I am also licking every last bit of fat and calories of my fingers and into my mouth? Beautiful picture, that isn't it?) But, as luck would have it, my close friends are loyal and the rest are oblivious and my metabolism has not quite caught on to the fact that we are approaching 30 together.

Product: Milk Chocolate Cherry Cordials

Place: Gertrude Hawk

Price: $11.79 for a box of 20 (Yes, I can eat 20 in a day and a half)

Watch

There are some obvious reasons that I like this film:

1. The female lead is named Jenny (same as me)
2. She works in a library during college (as did I)
3. She is musical (I used to play the piano and sing in chorus)
4. She is known for her witty remarks (I’d like to think I am as well)
5. She is super trendy and thin (ok, so we may be getting further and further away from our mark)

But the first two are indisputably true.

Love Story is one of my favorite movies. I do not know where it ranks in regards to The Princess Bride in my mind, but it is up there. It takes place in the 1960’s and became very popular when it was released, nominated for seven Oscars in fact. The theme song became a well known hit.

As romantic movies go (yes, a movie named Love Story is a romance if you can believe it), Love Story ranks #9 on the American Film Institute’s list. If that is not a recommendation, Tommy Lee Jones has a small part in the film (you can tell this to you guys friends to get them to watch it).

Even though it was nominated for Oscars and has a high ranking on an AFI list, this movie is still purely fluff. It is not a ‘great’ film as far as cinematic masterpieces go, but it does absorb you. You get vested in the characters and their completely unrealistic lives and you cry buckets at the end.

It is also the reason that if you are of the generation that started grade school in the 80's, nearly every class you were in had at least one Jennifer. Luckily, my parents were avant garde enough to name me just 'Jenny'.

Do

There are some things we can only say with ink, paper, and a stamp.

Every year on both Christmas and my birthday my two great-aunts, Annabelle and Mary Lou send me a card in the mail with $20 in it. At Christmas they are one of the few who send cards and at my birthday they are one of the two who send cards.

I know we are in the electronic age. Really, I greatly appreciate that fact when I need a snippet of information from someone who I have no inclination or intention on carrying on a conversation with so: I text them! Or when I am at work and really miss talking to my old cube mate from a former job: I e-mail! When I want to briefly check in on a friend in New Hampshire: time to instant message! And when I have not seen my husband in days because of our schedules- text and e-mail and add in some sporadic phone calls!

Despite growing up in a period when the ability to communicate with each other is at its greatest zenith since the telegraph, there are some things we can only say with ink, paper, and a stamp. In a letter or a card we are forced, for better or worse, to have a one-sided conversation.

I recently turned 29 and consequently had a birthday party. Personally, no matter what message I relate on the outside, insisting that I do not want a big party or numerous acknowledgments, on the inside I want a fuss, I want all my friends and family around because it is the one day out of the year that is a celebration of just me. However, as we get older we get busy and it becomes hard to carve time out, even for a celebration.

Fortunately, my 29^th was a success story and because of this success, I decided to run out and buy thank you cards. This is not an out of character move for me, but it has been a while since the occasion moved me to write notes of thanks. In writing my cards though, I rediscovered what a good and decent thing it is to do. As I thanked each and every person for coming I had the opportunity to have that one sided conversation, telling them all in a personalized way that I really appreciated them at my party.

There are some things we can only say properly with ink, paper, and a stamp. I have told my very best friend in Arizona numerous times how much she means to me, I have told my very brave childhood friend and former neighbor how courageous she is in my eyes for entering the Air Force at the very unconventional age of 27, and I have told my new neighbor how very sorry I was when she lost her father.

The lesson here would be that after each of the instances above I received ink, paper, and a stamp in return. The markings on each page revealed a shared sentiment from Arizona that was never conveyed by phone, gratitude from a boot camp in Texas from a friend who had no other means of communication, and heartfelt thanks from a neighbor that would never have come with the usual friendly passings.

There are some things you can only say with ink, paper, and a stamp. Often times, they are the things that are most worth saying.

Eat

It is Girl Scout Cookie time and I had been patiently awaiting my boxes for some time. Co-workers had been flaunting their boxes for weeks, it seems my resident Girl Scout was not quite on the ball.

Eventually, my four boxes did show on Sunday. Today is Wednesday and the Thank you Berry Much cookies (new to 2010) and Samoas are already demolished. I have since moved on to Thin Mints which thankfully have only a minor dent in them.

I am saving my personal favorite- the Trefoils for last. For those of you who do not know what the Trefoil is, it is also known as a shortbread cookie. I know it seems an unlikely choice, unpopular at the very least- only 9% of sales went to the Trefoil in 2005.

Most pick the flamboyant Samoa or the sophisticated Thin Mint. It may be that it is only myself and the over 75 crowd who appreciate the simple design and engineering that goes into the shortbread cookie, but I stand by my choice. That and every bite tastes like I am eating flaky, crispy butter.

I recommend that you re-visit the Trefoil in 2010 because it is time to get back to basics and simplify life.

What could be more uncomplicated than waiting four weeks for home delivery of a box of shortbread cookies from a delinquent pre-teen and then writing a check for $14 to pay for them?

The following facts were taken from an article by Teresa Wu:

1. Girl Scout cookie sales began in 1917 in Muskogee, Okla., when the Mistletoe troop began baking and selling cookies in its high school cafeteria as a service project.
2. In 1942, Girl Scouts sold calendars in lieu of cookies due to sugar, flour and butter shortages during World War II.
3. Cookie variety was limited to the Sandwich, Shortbread and Chocolate Mints in 1951 (now renamed the Peanut Butter Sandwich/Do-si-dos, Shortbread/Trefoils and Thin Mints, respectively).
4. Thin Mints are the biggest seller, making up 25 percent of all sales, followed by Samoas/Caramel deLites at 19 percent.
5. As of 2005, 71.5 percent of women in the U.S. Senate and 67.1 percent of women in the House of Representatives are Girl Scouts alumnae.
6. Jennifer Sharpe, age 15, of Dearborn, Mich., holds the record for most cookies ever sold, with 17,328 boxes in 2008. Of the $21,000 her troop raised to go on a 10-day tour of Europe, $14,000 was due to Sharpe.
7. Different types of cookies are sold in different regions at varying prices set by individual Girl Scout councils. And sometimes even the same cookies have different names.
8. For example, Do-Si-Dos, formerly called Gauchos, are also called Peanut Butter Sandwiches in other areas. Confusing, right? This is because there are two licensed bakers, ABC and Little Brownie, that get to propose and name the cookies that they bake.
9. About 200 million boxes are sold every cookie season; the Girl Scout cookie program has generated about $700 million per year since 1999.
10. New cookies pop up every once in awhile and are continued based on their success. 2010's newest addition is Thank U Berry Munch, described as "hearty cookies with real premium cranberries, sweetened with creamy, white fudge chips."

Read

It is unabashedly pretentious, clearly elitist, full of ads, and lacks any advice on how to “Learn the 10 New Moves that Will Drive Him Crazy”, but I love Vogue Magazine. I do not know any of the socialites on the pages, I do not recognize any designer names but the main stream ones, and my wardrobe is full of articles of clothing that even my husband has asked me to stop wearing. Even so, with all of my frugal tendencies that will not even allow me to buy Chapstick, I am willing to slap down $3.50 for a magazine that is 60% full of ads for products I will never buy.

It is escapism, visually and mentally. The locations they shoot on; the perfectly put together outfits; the decorating in homes of the artists, the famous, and other cultural persons they highlight. It sells a picture of someone’s ideal that is somehow my ideal as well. I could piece together my perfect life from those pages.

But I do not just look at it, I read it as well. Much in the same way most men read Playboy for the articles. The writers are by no means revealing state secrets, for example: I have read articles on the supposed ‘return’ of ¾ sleeve dresses and the trend of the rich and famous cutting their hair to shoulder length. Yes, I have wasted precious moments of my life on these little gems of knowledge.

But at the same time, I found out about the play Avenue Q (Broadway’s raunchy take on Sesame Street) and a couple of really good movies. I have also read about a near extinct type of apple that has supposed superior anti-aging qualities. (Apparently they taste really bad, but people used to eat them in the pre-refrigeration periods because they would not rot).

I know the magazine is a vice. The models are too thin and too ethnocentric, the clothes are too expensive. If you totaled the sum of the cost of every item in just one issue I’m sure you could solve more than a few social problems (you know, "for just $1 a day you could feed a child in Tanzania”). It is a guilty pleasure I suppose, but one I embrace. After all, if I cannot bring myself to buy a $1.95 tube of lip balm that I can use, I might was well spend $3.50 on a magazine advertizing a $1,195 umbrella.

Listen

I used to blast this song in my 1989 Ford Probe (if you liked the car from Back-to-the-Future, than this would have been the car for you). I even drove with one hand on the wheel and a subtle 'lean' to my seat. The combination was quite bad ass on the campus of my liberal arts Jesuit college, I assure you.

Artist: De La Soul
Song: Oooh featuring Redman
Album: Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump
Year: 2000