Guests
by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, March 14, 2008 10:41 AM
Heather and I were talking about Top Chef ? the Bravo show about aspiring professional chefs ? earlier today, and she told me that she can't watch it without a snack, because it just makes her too hungry. I didn't think I was similarly affected until I began to watch the season premiere on my TiVo just now, and I suddenly want a pizza in the worst way. The Taste of Country CookingI enjoy cooking, though I wouldn't say I'm particularly adept at it. But I really love cookbooks, and read them like novels as much as cook from them. Right now, I'm reading Edna Lewis's classic The Taste of Country Cooking. My goal for this summer has been to master fried chicken, and considering that her recipe calls for both lard and butter, I suspect it will be a hit. Lewis's book is truly a good read. She talks a great deal about growing up in Virginia and goes into beautiful detail about the role each of the recipes in the book played in her life or its historical background, as well as giving the reader the great gift of talking about what many of the recipes are supposed to taste like, which is surprisingly rare in cookbooks, I find. I plan to contrast Lewis's fried chicken recipe to the one in another Southern cookbook I've just finished, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. The Lees are brothers from Charleston who, in part, run The Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalogue, which is, as the book jacket tells me, "a mail-order source for Southern pantry staples." Their fried chicken recipe calls for oil, butter, or lard but not a combination thereof, and they also recommend brining the chicken in advance. This will be my virgin brining experience. The final chicken in my trifecta of birds comes, of course, from the master: Martha Stewart. While I love my southern cookbooks (they remind me of my great-grandmother, who grew up in Arkansas), I admit that I tend to think of Martha as the expert on everything. If I can't figure out how to make something, or need a recipe for something basic, The Martha Stewart Cookbook is my first stop. Sure, half the time I read her instructions for whatever it is I'm looking for and decide they're too hard and give up, but I always check in with her first, like she's my mother. She has two fried chicken recipes, both of which demand that I use oil only. Okay, Martha, I promise. I will not sully your chicken with lard. The fried-chicken-apalooza kicks off in my kitchen this summer. It's going to be oily ? apparently ? and hopefully delicious. I also fully expect it to require me to go up a size in pants, but that's the price a girl pays when she can't stop buying cookbooks. ? Jessica
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Guests
by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, March 13, 2008 10:36 AM
I don't know about you, but I am someone who whiles away her down time by having a lot of imaginary conversations (read: arguments) with people ? in which I, naturally, am possessed of a rapier-sharp wit and unassailable intellect, and am also wearing something seriously fabulous that I don't actually own in real life. These conversations sometimes involve a person I actually know and with whom I am irritated (a boss, a relative, a man), but more often than not, they are with Matt Lauer. Let me be clear: I have never met Matt Lauer. I doubt that I will ever meet Matt Lauer. I don't even DISLIKE Matt Lauer. In fact, I find him charming and cute. And yet, for whatever reason, my imaginary, bored-in-the-car, daydreaming-in-the-elevator arguments are always with Matt Lauer. While I am appearing on the Today show, obviously. You'd think this could all be traced to some bizarre imagining stemming from nerves or even just musings about the PR Heather and I have been doing for our book ? you know, a sort of fevered, "What if we somehow ended up on the Today show?!"-type neurosis ? but I have actually been having imaginary arguments with Matt Lauer since well before the book even existed. It seems I am bizarrely fixated on him. And the bad news is that I do not get the better of Matt Lauer in these imaginary scenarios. When I have a fictional argument with my landlord, I totally serve him. But when I have an imaginary set-to with Matt Lauer, I turn into Tom Cruise. I cannot best him. My subconscious gives Matt Lauer ALL THE BEST LINES. It's very unfair. I take some small comfort in the fact that I am not alone in this. Heather tells me that her Imaginary and Involuntary Conversations With Morning Chat Show Personalities generally involve Joy Behar. I guess we should both just be grateful that Star Jones hasn't made an appearance yet. ? Jessica
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Guests
by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, March 12, 2008 12:10 PM
Heather and I had a conversation recently about the things people choose to collect. When I was a kid, my family moved and I started a new school and fell in with a group of girls, each of whom collected items featuring a specific animal. Nyasha collected Scottie-dog-related items, which made sense because she owned an actual Scottie dog. Nancy collected items with cats on them. Jennifer collected pigs, and pig-related paraphernalia. "What do you collect?" they asked me on my first day of school. I collected nothing. Well, I had a lot of books, but books didn't really sound like a collection, per se ? certainly not in comparison to three years worth of ceramic pigs. "Ducks," I answered. I don't even know why. I hate birds and all things remotely bird-adjacent. Their feet gross me out. I guess I just wanted to fit in with my new friends' Kountry-Korner collection aesthetic and didn't think "a smattering of English children's books about ballet dancers and the complete adventures of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield" was going to cut it. Thus, I opened myself up for years of duck-printed notepads, duck-covered coffee mugs, and duck-embroidered seersucker shorts. In truth, though I felt no affection for the duck, it was nice to be so quickly embraced, especially by a group of middle school girls. But I quickly learned the danger of being seen as A Collector of anything ? people will never buy you anything else. Which is why I now tell people that I collect diamonds and Christian Louboutin shoes. Actually, now that I am an adult, I have managed to shake free from the tyranny of the duck and continue to collect books. New books, used books, and especially old, random cookbooks and etiquette books, which I've loved reading since the days when I was faking an enthusiasm for waterfowl. I'm not entirely sure why I loved old etiquette books when I was a kid, or why I still enjoy them so much today, but maybe it was because they created a world for my imagination ? in which, say, I spent a lot of time at a 1940s-era country club, or going to football weekends at Harvard in the 30s ? but let me fill in the dramatic details myself. I clearly remember spending hours as a child reading my mother's early seventies edition of Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Guide to Etiquette and wondering what kind of dinner parties Amy Vanderbilt was going to at which people were smoking between courses (apparently, this is a no-no) and abusing the help (also not okay). They certainly sounded more adult and decadent than anything that was happening in my house. And essentially my feeling is that you never know when you're going to be at a formal ball with the Pope (just for example), or when you'll find yourself in a situation where you need to know how to cook a turtle. A sub-section of my etiquette/entertaining books ? those devoted to teens, like my current favorite, 1967's The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining ? also tends to offer helpful, hilarious and extensive advice on how to politely avoid putting out. Generally, it seems, you should be regretful, but firm. (Which, interestingly, is also how you're supposed to approach cooking a turtle.) This same book also warns against the dangers of wearing high heels with leotards, and suggests you purchase something called a "knee-clapper" for bowling. As far as I am concerned, these are helpful hints for a girl of any age or era. So thank goodness I finally managed to stick to my book-collecting guns ? god knows I'd never have gotten any of that out of a duck. ?Jessica
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Guests
by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, March 11, 2008 10:56 AM
Now that some TV shows are back into production after the writers' strike, we're in a weird nether period where the filler programming is still on but some of the old favorites are going to return with new episodes. Because I am apparently the only person in the world who hasn't read Eat, Pray, Love, I'm just now cracking into that book (juggling it with Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine), but I still maintain a relatively steady TV diet because I'm addicted to background noise while I'm working. The prospect of my favorites returning is thrilling ? How I Met Your Mother is a particular gem, one of the very few comedies I watch these days, and Lost has been spectacular ? but the strike hasn't been a complete wasteland. Here are a few bits and pieces that got me through the recent drought: 1) The Wire. Sunday night was the last episode ever of this amazing HBO drama (no spoilers here, I promise), and in anticipation of this final season, my husband and I rented the previous four seasons on Netflix and more or less devoured them. The cast is huge, sprawling, and impeccable, full of faces you might recognize from a Law & Order episode, or Oz, or Homicide: Life on the Streets, but who mostly exist for me solely in this universe. Each season deals with the Baltimore drug culture and the institutions that revolve around it, ranging from the cops to schools to politicians to the newspaper. It's at once heartbreaking, hard to watch, and deeply witty, and is one of the best examples of why renting TV shows on DVD is actually a really effective way to catch something you missed the first time. Sometimes we'd watch one, and other evenings we'd get so sucked in that we couldn't stop after three or four episodes. 2) The Biggest Loser. My adoration of this show is proof that I'm not a totally heartless cow. Reality TV gets a bad rap, largely because it's so inaptly named: Back when The Real World was the first of its ilk, nobody else knew what to call it when you threw a bunch of people into a situation, filmed them all the time, and then parsed the footage down to bite-sized half-hour or hour-long morsels. Thus "reality TV" was coined as a term, and the genre has spent the intervening years essentially apologizing for not living up to a label that was coined carelessly in the early nineties before anyone knew it would catch fire. Some so-called "reality shows" are more planned, like the soapy The Hills; others are just sort of icky, like the disgusting dating buffet The Bachelor. But some of them are engrossing because you get to watch people working to achieve something, or change their lives in a way they otherwise might never be able to do: become a model, get a clothing line funded, open a restaurant, and yes, lose 100 pounds. It's impossible not to watch The Biggest Loser's contestants wrestle with finding the strength to push forward, then revel in muscles they never knew they could develop. They sweat, they scream, they cry, they hug, they weep. And yes, there is a difference between weeping and crying. To cry is to let tears escape gently down your face. Weeping is what the Blue Team does whenever one of its own is dispatched home. For weeks it's been an all-male group, and the last two times anyone left, grown men have sobbed salt rivers, shoulders shaking, extolling the love and respect they feel for each other and generally acting like their arms have been sawn off with wooden spoons. All while dropping seven to ten pounds at a time. It's amazing. 3) Mad Men. The inaugural season of this period drama is in reruns on AMC right now, so I've been slowly digesting all the hours I missed the first time. If nothing else appeals to you, check it out for the costumes and the lush period accuracy ? it's set in the 1960s, and revolves around Madison Avenue's ad execs, their secretaries, their wives, and their lovers. But the miracle of the show is how it espouses all the outdated attitudes of the time without ever making any of its characters into caricatures. They're all interesting, layered people, even the jerks. And did I mention the clothes? 4) The Pussycat Dolls Presents: Girlicious. This might be the funniest show on television. Okay, so trying to be in a girl group thrown together by Robin Antin, founder of The Pussycat Dolls burlesque troupe and pop ensemble, is not quite the same as trying to lose the equivalent of a supermodel from your body mass. But it's chock full of amazing insights like, "She's just not girlicious enough," and, "It's not called TOMBOYlicious; it's GIRLicious." Meanwhile, each week the girls learn some kind of lesson about confidence, charisma, their inner sexiness, their hidden charismatic confidence, or their sexy self-confident charisma. (Translation: They perform in a series of increasingly tiny costumes.) Watching the contestants try to infuse this with gravitas is one of my not-so-secret ? and deeply shallow ? joys in life. 5) Top Chef. This Bravo hit starts up again on Wednesday ? a new season set in Chicago ? and I can't wait. Not being one of those people who can face off with my kitchen cupboards, pull out a random assortment of ingredients, and turn them into culinary magic, I'm always fascinated to watch people who can. Or at least, who try. If I watch when I'm hungry, I'm in trouble, but apparently this season they're going to start posting recipes on the Web site. Maybe this will finally help me understand how a person can turn solid food into foam. And a quick note pursuant to yesterday's bit about the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament: It seems I'm not the only one excited for this excuse to work a butt-shaped groove into my couch. A radio ad by an Oregon clinic is encouraging vasectomy patients to book them for the day before March Madness starts, figuring that if you're going to sit down and do nothing but watch sports all day for four days in a row, you might as well do it with a pack of frozen peas clutched to your junk. The best part?
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Guests
by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, March 10, 2008 10:53 AM
It's been a long winter ? rainy for some, snowy for others, mercurial any which way ? but we're finally coming out of it, with two things on the horizon making our long slog toward spring worthwhile: March Madness, and of course Girl Scout cookies. Nothing warms the soul like a box of Thin Mints in the freezer; nothing, to me, tastes quite so much like the weather has broken as biting into a soft chocolate-covered Tagalong. Forget Easter candy. The stuff I used to get in baskets was only as interesting as where it was hidden around the house. Girl Scout cookies, though, those are the stuff of my youth. I remember selling them proudly, and even more I remember my first time on the other side of that transaction ? a scout sat outside my local grocery store, adorable in her uniform, spine straight as a pin and an ear-splitting smile of hopeful expectation on her face. I let her explain to me the different types as if it weren't etched on my brain, then bought ten boxes for me and for friends. What's more, I don't know any guy who doesn't turn to jelly for them. My husband ordered some from a friend's niece, and came home with such a big grin on his face, I thought he'd swung by Best Buy at precisely the right moment to find the only unsold Nintendo Wii in all of Los Angeles. Turns out that's the power of a peanut-butter cookie ? or rather, the mere promise of one. The legacy of scouting organizations in this country is a great one, from leadership and teamwork to community outreach and socialization, but at the end of the day what people really remember is that Thin Mints are in the green box and Samoas in the purple. March Madness is the other beacon at the end of the chill. For as much as I love college football, the sport's season-ending polls and byzantine web of calculations to determine a champion can't come close to the simple perfection of NCAA basketball's 65-team single-elimination bracket. Four divisions, four favorites, four teams at each spot from one to 16, laid out by the experts in an intricate collision course so that one team reigns supreme. The entire aura is frenetic, pulsing with the improbable; there's always a buzzer-beating three-pointer, or a 20-point lead that collapses. No top seed is out of reach, no underdog too pathetic. Sure, a bottom-dwelling 16 seed has yet to knock off a No. 1 team, but that's just a matter of time. The CBS March Madness theme song plays in my brain on a loop. The entire enterprise is to me what pacifiers are to babies: A deeply beloved ritual, and a way to keep me calm when I get bored and restless between football seasons. Selection Sunday is at the end of this week. First, the major conferences hold their championships, which influence the NCAA Tournament seedings. That's like an appetizer, a tiny taste of what's to come. My alma mater, Notre Dame, plays in the Big East, most likely on Thursday after a first-round bye (bless the basketball team for having better fortunes than its brethren on the gridiron); Jessica's UCLA Bruins, on pace for a No. 1 seed in the Big Dance, also get a first-day rest in the Pac-10 Championship race and are some people's favorites to win the whole thing. In some ways, it's easier when your team isn't even in the hunt at all ? that way, you don't have to do any soul-searching, making sure you're picking your winners in each bracket based on gut rather than emotions. You never find yourself faced with picking against your own, picking for them out of loyalty, or fearing that riding them all the way to the final game will somehow jinx them. I don't envy Jessica that decision. Notre Dame, while pretty darn good this season and ranked in the top 25, probably won't make it past the first weekend. And if they do, it probably means my bracket will be busted. What can I say? Irish football has taught me to be a pessimist. All of this, however, means I need to get in my reading while I can, because come March 20 it'll be nonstop college hoops around here. I will be on my couch shouting at the TV, waving a Diet Coke in one hand and a Tagalong in the other as my long-awaited supply of Girl Scout cookies diminishes along with my chances of winning a March Madness pool. Blessed as we are in Los Angeles with things like late winters and early springs, we've already hit the time of year where curling up in a warm bed with a book gets replaced by sitting out on a warm patio, and I'd better get the fresh air while it's on special. ? Heather
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