Manolo for the Big Girl

The last few days have been revoltingly hot around here. No, I’m not going to get into a discussion about how much hotter it is where you are or ‘well at least you’re not freezing your nipples off, Twistie.’ I am hot. This bothers me. It’s nine in the damn morning and I’m already doing everything in my power to cool myself off. This is Not Okay.

My cat is particularly unhappy with the situation because he wants to be cuddled and he’s wearing a fur coat…and determined to give back all the heat he sucked from my body in the winter when I was freezing my damn ass off.

In case you couldn’t tell, hot weather makes Twistie grumpy, and I ain’t talking Snow White’s army of little people, either!

And so it is that I turn with longing to the refreshing, cool drink.

Today’s recipe comes from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. Trust me, even if you’re not vegetarian (and I’m not) Deborah Madison’s books are well worth every penny, being full of delicious, easy to follow, fabulously imaginative recipes for vegetables. Whether or not you serve them with meat, you’ll definitely find some great stand bys to serve you well for years to come.

Anyway. There’s a small section in this book devoted to breakfast drinks, but many of them are also perfect for cooling down on a hot afternoon. Being fond of nectarines, I’m particularly enamoured of the Nectarine-Mango Frappe. Mmm…nectarines.

2 Nectarines or Peaches

1 Large Mango

1 1/2 Cup Buttermilk or Yogurt

A few drops Vanilla

6 Ice Cubes

Fresh Lemon or Lime juice to taste.

Peel and slice the fruit, then puree in a blender or food processor with the yogurt, vanilla, and ice until smooth. Add lemon or lime juice to taste and serve. Serves 2 - 3.

That’s it. It’s easy enough for me to do even with my brain melting like a clock in a Salvadore Dali painting.

And if I might recommend, these glasses would be superfantastic to serve this in!

Francesca simply adores the relatable, homespun, theologically honest works of Anne Bradstreet, who moved to the Massachusetts colony from England as a newly-married teenager and vented her frustrations and faith into wonderful verse.

Here is  a collection of Bradstreet’s complete works.

And here are  two  biographies of Mistress Bradstreet. Francesca has not read them yet but looks forward to it!

Happy reading!

xoxo, Francesca

When my mother was a new mom, my father started a tradition: breakfast in bed. Scrambled eggs, toast, crisp bacon, her inevitable strong fresh-brewed coffee, and a bowl of sliced strawberries dusted with sugar and doused in half and half.

As the years went on and my brothers and I got bigger, the tradition continued. Of course, it grew to involve three young children bouncing around on the bed with her arguing over who got the sunday comics first. The menu, however, remained the same. Scrambled eggs, toast, crisp bacon, strong fresh-brewed coffee, and a bowl of sliced strawberries dusted with sugar and doused in half and half.

Even when the children all grew into responsible adults and began leading lives away from Mom and Dad, the tradition continued. Those of us in town continued to perch on the bed with Mom and eat that same breakfast. I took over brewing the coffee since I turned out to be the one who followed in Mom’s footsteps while my brothers grew up to be tea drinkers like Dad.
Then Mom told me a secret one Mother’s Day - her very last, as it turned out. Every year she looked forward to and dreaded Mother’s Day. She loved the presents, she loved the breakfast menu…but she detested beyond expression trying to eat it in bed! She just never had the heart to tell Dad because he was so proud to have come up with something that romantic on his own.

So who out there has a Mother’s Day tradition that involves food? I’d love to hear about it!

Once upon a time in San Francisco, city of fog and whimsy, there was a restaurant - nay, a Mecca for burger lovers and fans of a now-obscure puppeteer and children’s book illustrator known as Wolo - that showed how a humble foodstuff, when done with love, care and a touch of ingenuity could be an amazing thing. That place was known as The Hippo.

The Hippopotamus Hamburger Restaurant awed me when I first walked through its doors at the tender age of ten. The walls were covered in glorious murals of cartoon hippos doing decidedly non-hippo-like things. The girl hippos wore polka-dotted hairbows. The ones viewed from the rear were seen to wear matching bows on their tails and little heart-shaped tattoos on their rumps. The boy hippos looked smitten at the girl hippos. Some of the boy hippos wore spotted neckerchiefs and tall chef’s toques. They looked proud of their work, and well they should have. What was done in the Hippo kitchen was positively magical.

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A warning to Harry Potter fans: if you are a sensitive soul with deep emotional ties to everybody’s favorite gay and aged wizard, Albus Dumbledore, you might do well to avoid Peter Greenaway’s seriously twisted 1989 black comedy The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover starring Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon because it is entirely likely your world view vis the aforementioned magical headmaster will be changed entirely until the last, or at least next to last, trumpet.

For the rest of you, seriously consider renting this flick. The costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier are (not unlike Gaultier himself) sick and magnificent, and the rest of the film follows, er, suit. Witness Helen Mirren’s red dress, perfectly matching the oppressive red dining room of Le Hollandais, lose all as she enters the stark white restroom, and of course the birdcage corset dress that made such a scandal on the theatrical release photos.

Chock full of obscene food, fashion and sex, The Cook also holds the dubious honor of being the only movie I had to watch over the course of two nights because the damn thing disturbed me so much.

Watch the trailer here.

I know it’s not my usual day, but I just had to butt in and remind everyone that today is International No Diet Day. In honor of the day ignore diets, which foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Unless, of course, we’re talking a serious medical question like diabetes or a potentially lethal peanut allergy. After all, the idea is for people to enjoy life through enjoying foods they love without guilt, not to kill anyone.), or what effect one freaking donut will have on your waistline.

Me? I had some yummy pumpkin granola for breakfast, sundried tomato ravioli in pesto sauce for lunch with a devil’s food cupcake chaser, and I’m looking forward to a tasty dinner of turkey burgers, brown rice, spinach salad, and fresh strawberries for dessert. Why? Because I love eating every single thing on that list. I was having a craving for cottage cheese, but I don’t have any. Hmmm…maybe I’ll head to the store and have some as a mid-afternood snack.

Whatever you eat today, though, remember to savor it.

That’s Georgia the Baltic state, rather than Georgia the deep southern state.

This recipe comes from Please To the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman, a fabulous collection of recipes from all over the Russian states. This is something I’ve made for my family and friends much to their delight. In the summer, it’s great for the grill at a backyard dinner, and in winter it’s easy to make in the oven or with a grill pan.

This cookbook has some amazing recipes and is very easy to follow. It definitely gets the Twistie Stamp of Approval.

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For the merry month of May, I’ve decided to use my weekend slot here at Manolo for the Big Girl to celebrate good food. Some of my posts will contain recipes, some recommendations for cookbooks or cooking equipment, or I might meander into tales of meals I have known and loved. Some of my posts may revolve around meat, while others will be vegetarian - and even vegan - friendly. I am an omnivore, but I absolutely respect that not everyone is. The one thing I will not promote here is diet food. If something I make is low in calories, it’s because the things I’m using are naturally low in calories. There will be no discussion of low-fat or low-calorie alternatives. After all, if you wish that information goodness knows there are enough sources to help you find them. If you need to watch cholesterol, carbs or fat for health reasons (like my diabetic husband with high cholesterol and a tendancy to high blood pressure), then some of these recipes and recommendations may need some tweaking for your needs while others are simply best avoided. The goal here is to celebrate food in all its glory. That goal does not include a side order of guilt. There will, however, be talk of pie.
All of that said, my first recipe is more of a thumbnail sketch of a family favorite at Chez Twistie. It’s vegan-friendly (though it can also be done with meat, if you prefer), and can be made without breaking - or even bending - Mr. Twistie’s carb and fat restrictions. What’s more, it makes an equally delicious main course or side dish, depending on precisely what you put in it and what else you choose to serve with it. It’s no fuss, seat-of-the-pants cooking for a steamy hot day, and everyone I’ve served it to has loved it. It’s also a great way of using up those tag-ends of unrelated veggies it’s so easy to accumulate in a fridge.

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Well gang, I’m on vacation from the dead tree biz for the next two weeks and to celebrate I thought we’d have two theme weeks. This week will be all about audience participation with a full five days of Big Questions. While next week will feature Plumcake’s All Time Top Five Fashion Movies.

Incidentally, if you have an idea for a Big Question, shoot me an email. The only thing I like more than getting paid for writing is David Tennant naked in a wading pool of Ossetra caviar getting paid for other people’s writing so if you’d like to get some Big Girl feedback –plus the glorious fame and undeniable thrill of a lifetime that is being featured on the same page as yours truly, click on my name and ask away. If I am piqued by your question you might just see it in print.

Today Francesca and Plumcake want to know:

What is your deepest, darkest style secret?

I’ll tell you one of mine. I have a perfect pinched-cheek pink lip stain and whenever I wear it people ask me what it is. I always demur and say I can’t remember but in truth it’s a “Pink Ribbon” Sharpie marker. Yes, I’ll probably die of Sharpie poisoning, I don’t care. It looks amazing.

And as a bonus, I’ll be providing you with a little bit of Daily Hotness. First up, the previously mention superhot but sadly clothed David Tennant in a hilarious sketch for the BBC Red Nose Day.

The other day, msn Finance published an article about the potential savings to the US economy if nobody were fat. Never mind that the author’s math doesn’t add up on any level. After all, she assumes that a) every fat person eats lots of Big Macs and b) no thin person does. She also assumes that McDonalds would survive - nay, would continue to be profitable - if instead of selling Big Macs they sold ‘little steamed chicken snacks.’

In this Thintopia suggested by the author, diabetes and heart disease would nearly disappear. What’s more, apparently nothing else would kill us! Insurance rates would plummet and more money would go into preventative care…or:

That sounds good, but Roland Sturm, a senior economist for Rand in Santa Monica, Calif., doubts anyone would pay for preventive care. More likely, he says, some doctors would be on the street. “They could drive cabs,” he suggests.

Of course, no thin person has diabetes or heart disease or suffers a stroke, right? And nothing else would come along to kill us because if we would just stop being fat, clearly we would live forever. And people are only willing to pay for catastrophic health care over preventative or maintenance care because…well, we’re not entirely sure why, but since an economist said it, it must be true.

And of course, in this new nirvana, nobody would ever take a sick day because we all know that every time someone calls in sick at work it’s because of fat…not colds, flu, sprained ankles, or a host of other ills that befall everyone, fat or thin. Our dependance on foriegn oil would evaporate as our trim little bums would lessen the strain on our SUVs and airplanes could fly with less fuel making up for the difficulty of getting a bunch of lardly butts into the skies. Farmers could stop growing so many sugar beets which we bad fat people have been demanding and start growing lots of vegetables which fat people never, ever eat, of course. Because clothing manufacturers wouldn’t have to cover such a wide range of body sizes, they could - and of course would! - concentrate on covering a much wider range of body types. Yes, it is because I need a size larger than the average store carries on a regular basis that some deserving thin person is unable to find pants that fit both her hips and her waist properly. I stand utterly chagrined in the face of such logic.

Really, if we would all just stop being fat, everyone would ride unicorns and find true love, tra la.
The thing that worries me most, however, is not the way the math doesn’t add up, but the fact that our very individual human lives, whether fat or thin, are treated as a matter of pure economics. Our value as people does not diminish because we need health care or transportation or food. Our value depends so much more on what we bring to the people around us. So what have some fat people in history brought to our world that’s worth having? What could a fat person possible have accomplished? Well, here are a couple examples I think are worth considering.

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