Posts Tagged → female
seeing is…tasting?
I like to cook. In fact, about 42 years ago I was trained by Andy Zangrilli as a cook and chef, at his Highway Pizza and The Deli restaurants in State College. I am proud of this experience, because Andy took a doofus 18 year old kid and gave him (me) a valuable skill. To this very day, you can put me in a kitchen heretofore unknown to me, with a wide variety of ingredients, spices, herbs, whatever, and, assuming the kitchen has the necessary pots, pans, utensils, gas stove, etc, I will make you a meal that you will at the very least greatly enjoy, if not go crazy for. Spices are a big part of being able to impart certain flavors and nuances to anything we cook, boil, broil, simmer, etc., and thus an essential part of my cooking.
Thank you, Andy.
So as I still greatly enjoy cooking, spices are still my thing, and I use them liberally in almost every dish I make, sweet or savory. Several days ago I made an applesauce from our backyard’s sweet crabapples and granny smith apples. With very little sugar added, it needed something to keep its tartness from making people cry. And so some nutmeg and cinnamon were added, which made it “perfect” according to one shnarfling admirer. She could not stop eating it. Dad added a dollop of real maple syrup. Mom ate it straight.
Somehow over the past year or so, our home’s spice drawer has become ever more populated by bottles with odd, capricious, whimsical names. These names contrast like the Himalayas to the Appalachians, with the staid old “Paprika,” “Garlic Powder,” “Thyme,” “Rosemary,” “Basil” and so on. I do not recognize these things. Other than ketchup and pickle flavored spices, few of these newcomer spice bottle labels describe or even hint at what taste or flavor is expected from their contents.
Green Goddess? Is this a new superheroine? Everything but the Elote stumped me, because despite an A+ English vocabulary, I have no idea what an elote is. Which pisses me off and makes me think I don’t want to know. It must be useless. Aglio Olio? A spiced dry oil in a bottle…not OK, but rather weird and trying too hard to be different.
Multipurpose Umami sounds like a versatile American Indian tribe. And in my friend’s spice drawer in Denver last month, I encountered a huge number of similarly named mystery spices and flavorings that all emoted colors and activities, which in my 100% male brain do not connect to anything related to flavor or aroma. And in fact, it is his wife who has amassed this enormous collection of verbal creativity in a bottle.
I don’t think my friend uses anything but salt and pepper in his foods.
Most or even all of these appear to come from Trader Joe’s, that famous venue for posing, posturing, preening shoppers in tight yoga pants. And I think that is the ticket to understanding what is going on here with these weirdly mis-named bottles of flavorings: Girls/ women/ ladies/ female humans apparently are willing to have a fling with flavor. They are willing to just try something new and unexpected in their food experiences, because apparently the lack of rote routine meeting known expectations is stimulating.
Men, think about this.
Think hard.
If women are sprinkling a bottle called “Green Goddess” on their food, then what does that tell us about these women’s food experience? About how it makes them feel, like a goddess…
I am going to sign off here, stumped as I am. I confess, I am just a man; I can change, I suppose; if I have to (thank you to the Red Green Show).
Gotta go add some more of my home grown basil to the home grown tomato sauce I have simmering away on the stove right now. I know it will end up tasting delicious, because there is a nice linear straight-ass line from the basil to the flavor outcome. No mystery involved here, and I like it that way.
Mystery flavors in a bottle appeal to someone I am not, but I remain intrigued
Life and Love of the Knife
Since God created us humans, either in one quick master stroke or through a series of evolutionary steps (I don’t know which one and I don’t really care, because God is all powerful and can do anything He wants, and all we puny humans can try to do is figure it out as we muddle along), we have had a love affair with sharp edges. Blades, that is, which give our amazing but soft and weak hands the ability to cut, slice, stab, and pierce dangerous foes and animals, and render them into delicious roasted brontosaurus steaks. As Mogli says in “A Jungle Story,” his antagonist, the massive male tiger Shere Khan, may have his big teeth, but “I have my own tooth,” a sizeable steel knife blade affixed to a sturdy and dependable handle, with which Mogli is indeed a significant foe to all who would eat him.
To humans, the knife in all its forms – skinning blade, meat slicing blade, spearing blade, or stabbing sword blade – is our tooth, claw, and fang. It is our defense, a lifeline, and third arm in a world where most of the critters we have hunted, eaten, and clothed ourselves with often have a mouth full of knives as well as heads and hooves adorned with sharp and pointy edges, any one of which is instant doom to us. As a brief visit to the dinosaur and modern reptile exhibits in any respectable museum will show, we humans inhabit a world where history has had most of our battles and warfare with men and beasts alike determined by who had the bigger, faster, longer, sharper knife blade.
The Pleistocene is where modern humanity and our knives and spear blades came into Yin and Yang fusion, resulting in the extermination of even the largest and most dangerous of wild animals. And well into the 20th century, men everywhere across the planet daily adorned themselves with blades both practical and beautiful. In a world that is still always dangerous, blades have always represented us humans, and men in particular, as both useful and dangerous.
So is it any surprise that even today, in our sickly society filled with Toxic Femininity, men, particularly men, still have a love affair and deep personal connection with knives and blades of all sorts? It’s almost spiritual. Knives and sharp blades have been our constant companions since our species gained consciousness, and knives have been all that stood between us and death for over a hundred thousand years. Often in a hunter-gatherer society, a good knife is all a man needed to live a comfortable life. Nowadays, we habitually carry small pocket knives by Case so that we can accomplish small home chores easily. Serious blade length reduction! How far we have fallen! Are we still men, armed only with our tiny folding pocket knives?
I say yes, we are.
Because like so many millions of others, I am a masculine man and a not a Low T feminized and pathetic freak of self-loathing nature, and because I am an outdoorsman, and because I am against being or feeling helpless and defenseless, I use sharp blades all the time. A sharp edge is always on me or near me, so that a threatening saber toothed cardboard box can be quickly broken down and put into the recycling bin. That always makes my woman feel like the tipi is properly sorted out. Like thousands of generations of men (M-E-N of nose, ear, and back hair variety) before me, my appreciation and love of the knife has resulted in a life of the knife, and I celebrate that. It keeps me thoroughly human.
If you are a guy (born a man with a penis) or a practical woman (a human born with a vagina and female reproductive parts), or even someone caught in between both genders and yet nonetheless afflicted with a strong streak of self preservation and practical ability, I strongly suggest carrying the largest and most robust blade you can legally and practically use every day. Or just get some CutCo knives for your kitchen. It will make you feel like a million bucks, at night your hands will naturally paint beautiful primitive cave art on the walls of your basement, and you won’t ask yourself where that innate skill suddenly came from….because you will be acting organically like a natural and properly kitted out human being. These things naturally flow from one to the next.
Just be careful not to get too carried away with this knife thing. Buying knives easily becomes a habit or even an addiction. All for the right reasons, of course. It is hardwired in us.
My buddy Irv has a knife problem. As an electrician, he has many opportunities to seriously test all kinds of pocket knives and knife steels. But he yearns to strap a dozen sheath knives on and prowl the woods. He has significant back hair, too, because he is a man.
Two original Stone Age tools. A flint hide scraper (top) and a chert butchering knife from Upstate New York
A very small slice of the hunting knives we have at our reach here, including a matched ivory micarta handled pair of Randall copies for my son and I by Perry County maker John Johnson each complete with over-the-shoulder baldrics and belt sheaths.
Pronged spears and sharp arrows (sharp blades on flying sticks) from about twenty thousand years ago. Still the best hunt around.
Super cheap WalMart special faux Damascus steel Japanese style kitchen knife is still very sharp and an an incredible tool
USA-made CutCo, definitely not a cheap kitchen knife, with excellent blade steel and bombproof handle material. Highly recommended.
Most of the knives in our kitchen. All CutCos except for two Old Hickory high carbon blades at either end. Old Hickory is an excellent USA-made kitchen knife at a very low cost that can easily be an outdoor knife
Back in 2009…
Back in 2009, after only six months of the Obama agenda, steam started involuntarily pouring out of my ears. So much was wrong that I couldn’t put my finger on any one issue, and I ended up running for US Congress later that Fall in an attempt to contribute toward the nation’s healing process. In 2010, driven by the Tea Party, the Republicans took back the US House and stemmed the tide.
Today we see the awesome power wielded by the executive branch. Almost like a dictator or a monarch, the president can engage in all sorts of decision making that fails to enforce laws, or which create rules and regulations that have the force of law. All without any input from the Congress.
Now, the military force tasked with protecting America is being told to train to the lowest physical capability of its volunteers. Women make excellent pilots and can function at the highest level in combat roles that do not involve sleeping among men or peeing next to men or bleeding next to men in close-combat situations.
Nonetheless, the Obama administration now says that all combat roles will be open to women. Women are obviously far weaker than men, and pregnancy is a force management challenge any time women and men serve closely together. Unless the administration is going to support women-only combat units, like Israel has, then this is just one more move aimed at undermining America. Because by deeply eroding America’s ability to fight wars, America is weaker.
Our military is not a social experiment or a social statement. Black men (and Asian et al) can kill American enemies just as well as Caucasian men, and when all-male combat units head out into combat together, the issues facing unit cohesion are straight forward and tough enough. Now, unit cohesion is under attack in a way that it may never recover from, once again by our very own anti-American Obama administration. Women and men are fundamentally different from one another, and millennia of social mores have developed to respect those differences. The Obama administration is now telling us that those differences do not matter, no matter what Mother Nature says.
If you are happy with this, if you are willing to sacrifice combat readiness and effectiveness, and place America at a grave disadvantage, then you really do hate the original America, and you want something else in its stead. You might be a traitor.