No more bread

So i'm going through a break up right now. Well, the break up itself is over now i'm just going through the mourning period. I went to bed one night believing my life was set with this woman and i woke up the next day to find her plan was different. This was a woman who promised me love, babies and of course homemade bread. While she blamed the separation on me i know that something else happened in her life to make her change her mind. I may not ever really know who or what. I've never had this feeling of constant nausea before and i've been to festivals with thousands of smelly "hippies". At least I have Price Chopper to provide me with babies and bread or breadbabies rather.


Thanks Price Chopper for pasting this creeptastic picture on the back of a delivery truck. I would have loved to be a part of this crackpot team of marketers. Dbag #1" ok so i'm thinking we have to make people want to love our bread" Dbag #2 " Yeah yeah well people love babies" Dbag#3 " What about a woman walking through the store with a loaf of our delicious bread in a baby carrier" dbag #1 " no no that doesn't get to the hear of our customers" silence.................................................................................................................................................................
Dbag #2 " I got it lets have a woman snuggling a loaf of bread like it is a baby"
YES!!! I'm just glad they didn't show this woman and her family enjoying this bread baby warmed up with some melting butter. This makes me want to never shop and the chop again.

It's like Cheers with Caramel Drizzle

When i first began working at Starbucks a little under a year ago i never thought that it would be so difficult to punch out for the last time. I just finished my last shift and i am genuinely sad. Not sad like last campfire sad. Not sad like the last summer drive through the back woods of Chenango county sad. Just sad. The goal of the Starbucks corporation is to create a third home environment. Our customers have home (1st home) work (2nd home) and of course our cafe (third home). Starbucks has been 2 of home homes for the majority of the last year. Working with different people and interacting with customers helped me to learn about myself and the kind of woman i am evolving to be. My knowledge of Starbucks when i first started working was very little. It was the place where I spent many hours avoiding my crazy housemate (not Sarah I enjoyed living with Sarah) when i lived in Seattle. I would scrounge together enough change to order an iced tea in the morning and sit there to read for hours and hours. Over the past year i have learned:
1) Don't take money from a customer if it is brown, greasy or smells. It's probably covered in poop.
2) There is always more that can be recycled. Thus making me a great homeless person.
3) Opening shifts are a great time to sip coffee and have heart to heart talks
4) Knock Knock jokes are funny at any age
5) Some people are just assholes plain and simple the benefit of the doubt will only be more frustrating.
6) The sanitizer is not a dishwasher. It does not use soap!!!
The most important thing that i learned however is that I matter. It is hard to be 28, well 29 now and be in college still. It is a challenge to be stuck in between midnight pizza runs and finding a career. Many of my friends are getting married and having children and i'm filling out FASFA forms. We get wrapped up in whats going on in our immediate lives and it's hard to connect or reconnect with the people in our periphery.I know that i sometimes go months without talking to the people that really matter to me, just because. Once it has been a while it can be challenging to find the courage to just call someone up, or email or for fucks sake facebook. Sometimes the people that needed me the most the last year never once asked me for anything, not even a splash stick. While I am making sure her triple grande non fat extra dry cappuccino is just right one of my closest friends was diagnosed with MS and i didn't even know it. While i made countless samples of gingerbread lattes my aunt died of cancer. Because of my job at Starbucks i have missed weddings, funerals, births and just some relaxing time with friends and family. When i think about all that i have missed over the last year I feel bitter. The sweetness comes in when i think about the people who rely on me to start their day each and every day. I am about to embark on a life changing journey across the world with the woman i like and love most. This summer I felt completely neglected because I wasn't able to steal as much of her attention as I had grown used to. What i failed to recognize until this moment however is that the girls at her camp and the other staff needed her. They relied on her each and every day. I get to spend the rest of my life relying on her. I can't tell you the amount of time I have spent feeling so lonely i could puke yet even the most obnoxious customers needed me or made me feel that way anyway. I mean what would cracky green tea latte do without her extra 5 scoops of Matcha, well she might have a regular heartbeat for one, but you know what i mean. Starbucks taught me that there is a delicate balance between knowing what you need from the people around ( and sometimes thousands of miles from you) you and what they need from you. The people who need you the most aren't always the ones jumping around in front of you singing "i need more chai, less foam, more soy, less ice..........." it might be the friend you've lost touch with. The relative who just lost a loved one. It could be me spending my first Christmas away from mom, dad and nick. The moral of my Starbucks experience is don't take things at face value. Look deeper, explore and find what it is that you really like and love about people, the world and of course your coffee.

my 29th er 30th er.....

So today is my 29th birthday. The start of my 29th rotation of the sun. This is the year i spend preparing to enter my thirties. Oh wait nono nono. See in Korea when one is born they are one year old. So i only get to be 29 until the end of September and when I arrive in korea bam i'm 30. So i will be in Korea through next August where i will spend my American birthday i will however turn 31 and i will be 31 for about a month and then when i leave Korea bam i'm 30 again. I'm going to be 30 for two years how wacky is that? I hope that 30 turns out to be a great age because I'm going to be spending a great deal of time there.

Julie & Julia 5 stars

I went to the movies last night and saw Julie & Julia which is a movie based on two true stories. The story of Julia Child a woman who can be credited with changing the way American women cook. The other is the story of a blogger named Julie who challenges herself to prepare each recipe in Julia Child's cookbook in a year. 365 days to complete over 500 recipes from hollandaise sauce to deboning a duck. The feel in the theater was warm and comfortable in spite of the cold chill pumpin' out of the central air. There were deep hearty laughs, audible ohhs and ahhs and of course a few sniffles and for once it wasn't just from me. Everyone in the theater was really into the movie. The movie was about food and exploration of self and love.Both Julie and Julia were luck enough to find their soul mates. They each found that one person that made their heart skip a beat. I really liked that this movie explored the hard part of love. There is something about finding one's soul mate that creates a mysticism that everything is all sunshine and rainbows. It is hard work to be love. It is a challenge to navigate the world side by side with someone no matter how perfect that person is for you. This movie showed that if you believe in love you will make it through anything. together.

signs signs everywhere are signs

Ok so i've been mildly obsessed with signs for the greater art of my life. I have always found church signs particularly humorous. Oh you know the ones like " Get on you knees... and PRAY!" or "There are some questions that can't be answered by google". Any who for years I've said i am going to start collecting pictures of said signs and compile them into book or web site other form of entertainment for the masses. Recently while on a walk with my love we noticed the sign below outside of a local church.



Now there is nothing wrong with the majority of this sign. My hatred of poop is so strong that i feel i will need a complete separate post to delve into my hatred of cats and their poop feet and people who share food with poop tongues. Is the pile of shit necessary? I what is the reality of this shot? We all know that dog would have already started going to town cleaning itself with its "cleaner than a humans" tongue ( yeah right) and where is this stick figure going to put the poop? They aren't going to carry it around on that little shovel fro the rest of the walk are they? And seriously what was the artist trying to prove by not providing us with the perfect coil that i so often see hanging out on the sidewalks, greenbelts and general walkways of my life? Is this dog actually shitting whole squirrels? I would have rather seen a sign that showed a stick figure stepping into a coiled pile of dog crap with its head exploding from being so pissed off. The caption could read "Look what you did DOUCHE BAG now I'm covered in shit! Hope your dog passes you worms the next time you share your ice cream with him and his ass licking tongue" now that would make a statement!

Ok so i realized why stop at church signs? There are so many interesting cautionary signs out there. I am about to embark on a world adventure and i can guarantee i'm going to find some very interesting pictorial warnings along the way. This for example was at a Dunkin' Donuts in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Is this to say that one can now shower at dunkin' donuts? This has got to be some sort of code right? If you can make sense of this sign for me please do because i'm baffled.
















While we are on the topic of coffee and coffee products many of us know someone who has recently gotten married. Perhaps the happy couple put an espresso machine on their wedding registry. now i know what you are thinking, It's so nice that the happy couple wants to wake up and steam some milk, add a flavor perhaps vanilla or cinnamon dolce if they are feeling particularly kicky that morning. Pull a couple of espresso shots and voila they have themselves two lovers lattes ready to be shared over the morning paper or sipped while the two create a shopping list. What if however this couple is not thinking about a traditional latte. What if this freaky as hell couple wants to make a baby latte. No i don't mean a small latte i mean a steamed baby latte. Thanks goodness you purchased them an espresso machine with this warning:


Do not steam your baby. Obviously with an espresso machine the size of a Prius one could easily steam a baby. But it's not acceptable. Cannibalism is unacceptable, yes even in latte form.Don't do it.
Oh yeah and if you are sick enough to think a baby latte sounds good maybe you also think it's appropriate to let children play with whippets, or anal suppositories the picture is up for debate.

I do enjoy that the little girl has no hair but rather triangle horns. Please feel to share your funny sings and warning labels with me.

What the Martha?

I'm waiting around the house before I go to babysit for a friend and i turn the television on right at the beginning of Martha Stewart. Now it's no secret that my girlfriend is a little in love with Martha so i decided i'd keep watching to see what's so great about the lady. I understand her love of Rachel maddow i mean come one she's great but marther? Really? We all know that Martha woman is known to make crafts and home furnishings out of just about anything one can imagine. She was even rumored to have crafted gifts for her cell friends in the pen. During her opening sequence she is talking to her version of Gelman about what she had for dinner last night. I'm thinking well i was pretty proud of my homemade gimbap and granola but she probably made some homemade soup stock our of old wrapping paper or something. Nope. Do you know what she ate for dinner last night? Even if Martha decided to whip up something easy like a pizza it would be made with fancy cheese, roasted tomatoes and some seasonal veggies. NOPE. Martha frickin' Stewart ate sardines. Out of a can. granted she jazzed it up with a little fresh lemon but seriously. Sardines out of a can? Isn't that the stereotypical fav. food of the homeless crazies that live on trains and talk to stray cats. Oh yeah i forgot to mention that Martha shared this "dinner" with her two cats. For fucks sake Martha can't you whip yourself up some friends? I mean even at my lowest low I've never sat around sharing sardines with my turtles.

domesticity

It's been over a month since Colleen,my Breadmaker, took a job at a camp in the Catskills. She makes all of our food from scratch from delicious bread (hence the nickname) to butter and of course yummy cookies and treats. When she left for camp she left me a list of recipes so that i could eat food that tastes good and is good for me. I of course reverted to my bachelorette days of eating only items that come out of a box or some other kitchen. I have terrible eating habits. For example i will buy a box of cereal and eat only that cereal for each meal until ti is gone. Of course there are trips to get pizza and nabbing bagels and croissants out of the donation bucket at work. I surprisingly enough have eaten very little fast food. not only is it expensive but frankly after eating such good food it is rather disappointing. Each day when i walk in the door there are her recipes stuck with magnets to the refrigerator door mocking me. They say, " hey fucko why don't you stop feeling sorry for yourself and make us", " Stop eating crap and make yourself something good" and my personal favorite," cheese should not be the staple of your diet, what would the Colleen think?"
Today i finally broke down and realized that eating Special K three meals a day won't bring Colleen home. I crave good food but have been longing for my love to return home so badly that I've been depriving myself of yummy nom noms. So i took the recipes down off of the fridge and even created one of my own.

Here goes nothin'

First task Granola:
Step one: Mixed Oats, almond slivers,pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, coconut, poppy seeds,maple syrup, canola oil, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and spread out on baking sheets.


Step Two: Bake for 10- 15 minutes until golden brown




















Next task: Gimbap or kimbap
This is a popular Korean "fast" food made from steamed white rice (bap) and various other ingredients, rolled in gim (sheets of dried seaweed) and served cold in bite-size slices. Gimbap is often eaten during picnics or outdoor events, or as a light lunch.

I chose Eggs, red pepper, carrots and cucumbers














First I lightly painted sesame oil on the sheet of dried seaweed















I then added sesame seeds and white rice















Now time to add my veggies and protein















Finished product is a roll. these didn't come out looking too amazing but they taste delicious!














Of course i had left overs so i threw in some balsamic vinegar and a lil salt and pepper and made a pretty tasty summer salad
















I'm really proud of my accomplishments in the kitchen today still i'd rather have food made with love by my sweetie!