Bash, Ram and Destroy

Oh, you thought we were cheering for That Other Football Game?

Sorry. I'm digging further down in the pile of fame by reading H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, Texas, following the fortunes of the Permian Panthers, a team that grips the passion of its hometown so thoroughly that one fan, who had to miss a game because of his heart bypass surgery, refused his post-operation painkillers. After frequent phoned-in updates from his son-in-law, he finally consented to the drugs once he knew the game was secure.

A few of you may be far ahead of me in your Friday Night Lights fandom. Maybe you've watched the TV show. I hope to catch up with you (thank you Netflix).

But anyway, the hero boys of Permian High School all hope to be the boys in That Other Football Game. But first they need to round up scholarship offers from some big state college. And before that, there is the Friday night pressure to perform, which makes some of them vomit, or tape up that broken ankle and play anyway. There is the psyching up, the readiness to bash, ram and destroy the opponents, especially if they happen to come from Midland's Lee High School. Oh, yeah, and there's something about keeping grades up too. The author catches the team's biggest star in one of his classes, hard at it over a worksheet on the 95 uses for a microwave.

The Permian Panthers attracted 20,000 fans to their weekly games. Odessians lived for Friday nights, sadly because there was nothing else to live for. Odessa sits far out on a sandy plain. There is absolutely nothing to look at. There is oil to drill but, at the time Bissinger wrote his book (1988), Odessa's high times were over. Yards full of oil rigs sat idle. Bankruptcy and foreclosure ran high. If I were stuck in all that bleakness, I too would show up at the stadium every Friday night and stuff myself with nachos.

An especially poignant chapter checked in with Permian's yesteryear stars. "So, what was it like to be a prince all senior year and then adjust to real life?" Hint: It's a sad thing to peak early in life.
A few cow patties. Football boys ready to bash, ram and destroy don't talk like ministers.

And as for your recipe, how about what I call the Sunday Nap Meal? Throw it together, then crawl under the electric blanket and snooze. Wake up, slide the enchiladas in the oven, and catch up on Facebook while they bake.

Cheddar Beef Enchiladas

Creamy Corn

Long Time 'Til You Kiss a Girl

At Benjamin Nugent's 13th birthday party, he invited all the friends with whom he had bonded over sci-fi, Dungeons & Dragons, and computers. They sang the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme as the cake appeared, and told each other nerdy jokes.

What must his parents have thought? Perhaps they were simply glad that he had friends. But still . . .

"Do you tell him to ditch his friends because as long as he's one of them, he may not kiss a girl for a very long time? Or do you tell him to stick with them? Do you let him figure it out on his own even though you feel pretty certain he understands neither the nature of the dilemma nor what is at stake?"

Nugent, now a recovering nerd (if such a thing is possible), combs through literature and looks up a few of his old buddies to form a once-and-for-all definition of what a nerd is. In American Nerd: A Story of My People, he finds them in books as disparate as Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice. He hangs out at their weekend events, where they gather to discuss frames-per-second in their favorite sci-fi flick, or where they dress up in tights and chain mail and play out the heroic fantasies in their heads.

Even the Mormons show up when one of his skinny grade-school friend's mother finds the missionaries. Thank you, former-hippie mom, for making us all look like nutters.

After reading Nugent, you will definitely be able to spot a nerd. But then, you probably already can.

Frequent cow patties.

As for your recipe, maybe we should pay tribute to what nerds eat. But here at Bye-Bye Nesquik, it is beneath our standards to instruct you to order pizza, or to stuff yourself with Coke and Doritos. If you're going to eat the junky stuff, at least put some effort into it. The recipe below shouldn't overtax you:

Cocoa Munch Mix

Oh, la la! Your pipes are broken!

I bought a bottle of sparkling grape juice just before the election, just in case there was something to celebrate. Since there was not, it lay chilling the fridge until New Year's Eve, when it went well with (as they say in the world of slightly harder drinks) a bit of stromboli and a stout bowl of chocolate Chex mix.

I would be no good in the world of slightly harder drinks, where one is expected to know that wine in a box is a social faux pas. If you wish to keep your dignity, you must be willing to pay as much as a week's groceries for one bottle.

But how about a bottle that costs as much as a college education? No, seriously. We're talking an Ivy-league law school education. That's what a member of the Forbes family bid on a bottle that supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson. As told in The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace, rare wines whet the competitive pride of the set that own multiple homes, small jets, banking empires, etc.

That is, until they suspect that the wine on the auction block might not be so rare after all. For those of you interested in crossing over to the dark side, the chapter on wine counterfeiting proves interesting. Where do they come up with these tricks? Spraying bottles with aerosolized dust? Staining labels with orange juice and tea? Filing off corks and branding them the year of prized vintages? One fellow sprayed bottles with a shotgun to give them that weathered-by-the-centuries look.

Otherwise, Vinegar was a lot like reading baseball stats, with a good many unpronounceable names thrown in.

Far more delightful to read A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. Mayle, a British journalist, and his wife visited the south of France often. They loved it so much they decided to buy a house there. It was a charming house, not like those boxy things springing up in suburbs everywhere.

Their first winter taught them the price of charm. The house had no central heating and yes, the south of France is warm, but not in January when the "mistral," a wind that starts in Siberia, howls across the continent. By the time the mistral reaches Provence, it can "blow the ears off a goat." It tends to foul the mood of Provencale folk.

It also tends to cause a lot of October babies.

But anyway, when Mayle engaged the local craftsmen and bumped up against their cultural quirks, their delays, their opinions of the British, he made it into a most amusing read. Somehow, having a Frenchman standing in one's kitchen exclaiming, "Oh, la la! Your pipes are broken" sounds more romantic than any household emergency I've actually lived through.

And the French are drop-the-tools serious about their lunch breaks. Actually, they're serious about any kind of eating at all. In honor of their love of food, I share with you:

Cider Beef Stew  (OK, it's not French, but wow does it smell good!)

The Nobleman's Hobby

The picture on the cover has all the dark tones of a portrait of royalty, the kind hanging along the main hallway of the palace. The man on the cover wears a coat that drapes to the floor. And a bonnet with a ruffled edge. And he's pregnant.

Oh, oh, wait, that's not a man? It's a woman, the mistress of a Russian nobleman? Well, clearly beauty standards have changed since the 1780s.

The Pearl by Douglas Smith attempts a biography of Praskovia, the daughter of a blacksmith, given away to serfdom at the estate of the rich playboy Nicholas Sheremetev. Sheremetev just couldn't seem to fall in love with anybody of his own class, because that pretty little servant girl in his house captivated him so.

She became the nobleman's hobby.

Not only was she considered a great beauty in her day. She also sang like an angel. Nicholas built theaters for her to perform in. He had his friends order the latest plays from Paris, complete with costumes and intricate stage drawings.

Which became the nobleman's other hobby. I can't tell which he loved better. But he managed to fit them together nicely.

The love story failed to draw me in. But I really liked the chapter on serf theater. Theater as I know it always suffers from high competition (in the professional ranks) and absenteeism from rehearsals (in the amateur ranks). Pharmacists and school teachers can't seem to find the time to be dancing dandies. And this is not to mention funding, in both ranks. Wouldn't it be nice if a nobleman took it on himself to build the house, underwrite the costumes, invite his friends (the tsar, the empress, etc) to watch the show? Wouldn't it be wonderful if he pulled you out of your parlor duties and sent you to the singing and dancing lessons that readied you for the stage?

Well, maybe not. The serfs still had to serve dinner to The tsar, the empress and the rest of the company, before donning their costumes and make-up. And sometimes the master sat out in the audience, heckling you. Can't you hit the high notes? Look at the clumsy way you dance! And you couldn't slap him, couldn't walk off to the next town, couldn't do anything but throw in a couple ad-lib lines with veiled but pointed meaning, for which you would probably be punished later.

It was a pretty good chapter. It just didn't redeem the whole biography. And Smith had pretty vague information to go on anyway.

I tried hard, but never finished his opus.

But here is something we did finish around here:

BLACK FOREST BROWNIE TORTE

1 pkg (19.8 oz.) brownie mix plus ingredients to prepare cake-like verson of mix
1 can (21 oz.) cherry pie filling, divided
2 1/2 c. Cool Whip, thawed, divided
1/4 c. sliced almonds, toasted @ 325' for 6-8 min.

-- Heat oven to 350'. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans. Prepare brownie mix, cake-like version.
-- Divide batter evenly between pans. Bake 18-20 min. Do not overbake. Cool 10 minutes. Remove from pans to wire rack to cool completely.
-- Place one brownie layer on serving plate. Top with 1 1/2 c. Cool Whip to within 1/2 inch of edge. Spread 1 cup pie filling over Cool Whip.
-- Top with second brownie layer. Spread remaining pie filling to within 1/2 inch of edge. Dollop or pipe remaining 1 cup Cool Whip around edge of torte. Sprinkle toasted almonds over top. Serve by cutting into wedges with large serrated knife. 12 servings @ 385 cals. each.

My family wouldn't have had a chance to eat this had not fate intervened.
I made this beauty for the ward Christmas party. Not even the fact that one of the brownie layers fell slightly apart defeated me. That was an easy repair.

But those finishing touches, oh my! I had nothing to pipe with, so we went with the dollops. And they simply could not wait to droop over the sides of the cake. They did not care that they had to appear in public, passing under the noses of a couple dessert snobs, whose own tortes always look like poufy party dresses.

I snuck it in to the church and opened the cake carrier to have a look (things sounded kind of slide-y on the car ride). Oh dear. I snuck it back out again.

Emma says I shouldn't have had such pride. "It's probably perfectly good eating."

Uh-huh. And what was she complaining about? Now we had this wounded but tasty confection all to ourselves. So sad, heh-heh.

Locatopia

I keep picking up books about local eating. Don't think I've gone all farmer's-market-&-organic or anything. I still love me some food straight out of plastic-y wrappings, and the sweeter the better.

But I also must have a soft spot for dipping into the world of people who get all misty over pastoral scenery, who love to dig in the deep black dirt and make tasty dinners from the carrots and kohlrabi that they grew themselves. Yep, kids who grew up in the suburbs are spending their summers out on the farm, and loving it. As for me, I'm sitting safely in the suburbs, reading about it, via Jonah Raskin's Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California.

Raskin's memoir covers a year in Sonoma County, California, where he hunts down the top organic farmers and visits the San Francisco restaurants that buy the farmers' boutique produce.

And you understand, don't you, that we aren't talking about the sunburnt sort of farm folks who are missing fingers from a long-ago accident with the combine? No, Raskin's farmers wear scruffy beards. Or long skirts, as the case may be. They discuss literature and wine. They smoke pot. And they occupy one of the most beautiful valleys on this planet.

Also one of the most expensive. Yeah, Raskin glossed very lightly over that part. I know somebody who considered moving to Santa Rosa, California, not too far from Sonoma. When she mentioned house prices, all of us in the room gasped in sympathy. And these were ladies accustomed to Chicago prices.

Raskin's farm world sounds so utopian. Does it really work as perfectly as Raskin tells it? Are the market days on the community square truly the bliss-fests that he describes? Do these anti-private-property, green-pepper-growers really have all the answers? Is this life within the grasp of the Wal-Mart set?

If these questions tire out your brain, maybe you need to eat something tastier than an organic tomato and far less naughty than Sonoma-grown pot. So let's talk about EASY FUDGE This is for people too lazy to make real fudge. I say, own your laziness and mix in a large bowl:

1 7-oz. Hershey bar, broken up
18 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 14-oz. Jar marshmallow creme
1 TB. vanilla
Set aside.

Mix in a sauce pan:
1 12-oz. can evaporated milk
four and a half cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup margarine

Bring to a boil; cook 6-8 minutes. Add to ingredients in bowl. Mix until blended. Pour into buttered 15x10-in. jelly roll pan.

Try not to eat too much of it yourself.(This will be hard.)

King, Commoners and English Majors

It seems like easy pickin's.

You want to write a good book? One with tried and true drama? Steal your story from somebody else, somebody who won't care. Say, Homer, who wrote that Iliad thing a few years back.

This is what David Malouf attempted in Ransom. Myself, I never got the Greeks. If they had a bad day, they felt honor-bound to gouge out an eye or two. So I had a hard time warming up to Ransom's formal and honor-bound Priam and Achilles and the rest. That is, until King Priam's puzzling quest brings a humble cart-driver into the story. Then the story comes alive for me as king and commoner (with an endearing habit of rubbing his nose) come together, sizing each other up. The cart-driver nudges the King into his world, inviting him to partake of pleasures as simple as cooling his toes in a stream.

It's a middling OK story, no cow patties.

Next up, we have Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison. Levison spent $40,000 getting a degree in English, and now he can't find a job. Resorting to the lowest and dirtiest work in the land, he scrapes together a living by boarding a fishing boat in Alaska and answering ads that herd the unsuspecting into multi-level marketing schemes. Meanwhile, he tells tales on his roommate, who aims to break into film-making. If Levison's book weren't so funny, it would be depressing as all get-out.

Makes me glad to be a housewife, whose hardest job is planning what to feed the crowd that came to my house Thanksgiving week. There was pumpkin pie, of course, but we had to have other pies, too, for novelty's sake. So we added Chocolate Mallow Pie to the menu. Basically, it was several kinds of candy/sweet stuff thrown together, as if the inventor couldn't decide between his/her vices.

How to Kill a Reading Habit

You would not think a reader such as I could get out of the habit. You would not think anything could come between me and that feeling of turning the next page, eager to see what might happen to the nearly-blind boy who cocks his head at the shadows standing before him. You'd think I would love an author who planted me right there in that West Virginia town where I could feel the charge in the air of the oncoming storm, where I could taste the slice of birthday cake, where I could sit in on the arguments during a slow afternoon at the town diner.

But I don't know. A lot got in the way.

Busy life, maybe? Don't tell me I'm not all that busy compared to you. I already know it. Still, life has me by the tail. Every time I turn around, the laundry/dishes/groceries that just got done have to be done again. And people must be listened to and not ignored in favor of finding out what happened in some fictional West Virginia town.

Too much excitement killed the reading, maybe? Who needs book romance when we've got the real thing going on right under our noses, and the party in question appears on Facebook, where I can check out his mission pictures, his last birthday cake, his goofball friends. Don't make me admit how much time I spend at this--oh my!

And speaking of drama, what can I care about some half-blind boy when very real drama escalates all around me? We're talking election time, people. I like my guy, but does anybody else like him? Do enough anybody elses like him? Instead of opening some library book, I'm staring at my favorite news magazines and political blogs.

And speaking of blogs, I'm addicted to them. If the choice is between the nearly-blind boy and what Mormons think of the new missionary ages, I'm over at the place where Mormon moms and dads are saying, "Wow, this changes everything."

Yep, blogs are a big culprit. They are like intravenous feeding, a constant supply of new and interesting information. Except when there are no new posts. And then it's like "Whaa? Where's my instant gratification???" When I get in this state, it's hard to remember that I already have something to read. It's called a book, remember?

So I just kept putting off the nearly-blind boy until the library wanted the book back. Not to worry though, his story was available through electronic checkout. There it was, on my phone, easy reading to take along while the pharmacy counted my pills, not to mention how handy it was when the husband wanted the bedroom lights off for the night. But somehow, electronic reading never felt as urgent as a real book that had to be driven back to the return slot.

But what finally killed it off was a long and detailed cow patty that just wouldn't let up. It circled round and round poetically, as if we couldn't get the point that the neighbor kid has been hankering for the nearly-blind boy's sister all these years. Really, just send them behind the garage, leaving out all the anatomical details thank you, and we'll get the picture, yes we will.

I think what we had on our hands here was simply a dull book. Yep, that'll kill off a reading habit.

Since discarding this lemon, I've read two more books in less than a week. One was only a middling challenge to work through and the other, I couldn't leave alone. It kept me up late last night, leaving me an addled, unproductive mess today. Oh, but it was worth it.

Now, being addled and unproductive, the only thing I could manage to cook today was Hot Spiced Cider. I had bigger ambitions, but too bad for them.

I never found orange extract or whole allspice, but it hardly mattered because a certain young fellow at my house tonight loved this stuff, and it's been hard to get him to eat anything but candy or chips for months now.

We'll talk about those two books next time. But gotta get to bed now, so tomorrow is not such a loser day like today was.