Friday night, Josh made spaghetti squash with red clam sauce. Back in 2003 when I was diagnosed with diabetes for the first time, he set about discovering different meals that would be tasty, filling, and healthy for me. In his search, he discovered spaghetti squash. It’s a miracle melon - in the winter, we eat it all the time. This time, he made a red clam sauce, with sauteed green bell peppers (which was marvelous). Other times we make it, I brown some hot italian sausage in with some tomato sauce or crushed red tomatoes. Yummy, yummy.

Saturday for lunch, we visited Tank Noodle, our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Their menu is wide and varied, and what we like the most, cheap. We got an appetizer, two drinks, huge entrees, and spent $20. Rock on. I got pho with all of the fixings Josh is squeamish about - tripe, tendon - and Josh got a fried noodle with eggroll and shrimp dish. Yum.

Later on for dinner, in a fit of mediocre experimentation, I browned about a pound of beef with taco seasoning (well, as much of it as we could find - we bought a packet at the grocery but can’t find it anymore so I improvised with a 1/4 packet we had left over and some extra seasoning from our spice shelf) and stuffed them into hollowed out green bell peppers, and sprinkled with cheese. The results were tasty, but awkward and the tastes were just there - they didn’t seem to compliment each other, nor were they hideous. So, mediocre.

Today, our lunch was at the movies, where we watched the Chronicles of Narnia movie. I had nachos and gross cheese; Josh popcorn. So healthy. Dinner was black bean soup - with quadruple the recommended garlic and dried red chili pepper. What’s great is that it’ll be even tastier tomorrow. I can’t wait.

I love to eat, in case you didn’t notice. When we plan our vacations, we plan a sensible order of dining establishments, as much as possible, so we can make sure we satisfy every tastebud in a reasonable order. When we planned our honeymoon, we marked in our guidebook the restaurants we wanted to hit, and carefully orchestrated our digestive vacation. Yummy.

I have another major hatred brewing. It snowed here, about 4-5 inches - standard for a Chicago winter. You think in the 2 days since the snowfall, the city sidewalks would be shoveled. Oh, you would be wrong. Our poor shopping cart is busted now from navigating asstastic snowbanks and stupid shovel jobs.

Chicago landlords who don’t shovel can kiss my ass. Feh.

Also, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses for peanut butter blossoms/nipple cookies cost $6 a bag. No way. So we got Peppermint Patty bites instead and I think those will do just fine as well.

What I love about Chicago:
- Lake Michigan
- Public transportation
- Our neighborhood and its ten places to get good, cheap pho on demand
- Our dogsitter (whom Ava loves)
- The dog park down the street
- Two airports in the region
- Friends in the area
- Chorizo as served by this fabulous little Mexican restaurant down the street

What I hate about Chicago:
- WINTER. But I hate that about every northern clime I’ve ever lived in. Fucking winter.
- SUMMER. I can do without another sticky and humid summer in my life.
- Public transportation is sucky compared to NYC.
- The size of our apartment

Wow, my hatred list is a lot shorter than I thought it would be.

Cookie making list for the holidays (to be done either this weekend or next):
- stained glass trees
- nipple cookies
- Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies from the Moosewood cookbook I bought a few years ago
- double chocolate chip cookies

Shopping List For Christmas Gifts to Purchase
- For Mom & Grandma - a cheesecake or dessert sent (maybe the Cheesecake Factory?)
- Uncles? Aunts?
- Cousins? Lord, it’s getting late.

Random To-Do
- Drop off 3 bags of donated clothes to appropriate place
- Vacuum
- Call carpet cleaner and get them over here to clean before Chinese New Year
- January 1 - buy Chinese New Year plane tickets
- Get Ava groomed, the dirty dog
- Get tins/bags from Dollar Tree for cookie packing
- Fix seams in pants
- Finish holiday cards and buy stupid stamps!

Things I Eventually Want to Write About:
- The Hon Kee Restaurant in my ‘hood
- Annoying commuters
- Being called a sir
- Being called a ma’am
- Being an East Coast Girl in a Midwest World
- Food!

***

Speaking of food - this is the beef & black bean chili recipe adapted from a cookbook we’ve got here (courtesy of the Josh Husband Person):

2 cups black beans (or pinto, kidney)
2 tsp dried epazote (optional)
4 tsp cumin seeds (or ground cumin)
2 tsp dried oregano leaves (preferably Mexican)
3 onions, finely chopped
3 tbsp vegetable oil
4 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped (or if you’re like us, 8 or 9)
1 lb lean ground beef
2-3 tbsp ground red chili
salt to taste
4 tsp sweet paprika
2 c peeled, seeded, and chopped tomato, juice reserved
1-2 tsp pureed chipotle chili
1/4 c chopped fresh cilantro
dash of red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar (optional)

garnish:
sour cream
1 poblano or long green chili, roasted and peeled and sliced
cilantro sprigs

If you want to use dried beans and whole cumin seeds, follow steps 1-3. Otherwise, skip to step 4.

1. Sort and rinse the beans, add 6 c of water into large pot, soak overnight.
2. Drain beans, add epazote and enough water to cover by 4 inches. Heat to boiling and cook for 5-10 min, removing any surface scum. Lower the heat and simmer, partially covered.
3. While beans cook, toast cumin seeds in a large dry skillet over med heat until fragrant. Add oregnao, cook 5 sec., shaking pan so seasonings don’t burn. Cool on plate, grind to powder.

4. Saute onions in oil over med heat, 7-8 min. Add garlic & saute until tender. Add ground beef, brown well, breaking into pieces with wooden spoon. Add cumin mixture, 2 tbsp ground red chili, 1 1/2 tsp salt and paprika and mix well. Lower heat and cook until onions are soft, another 5 min. Add tomatoes and juice, 1 tsp chipotle puree, and cilantro. Simmer for 15 min and add to the beans.
5. Continue to cook until beans are soft, about 30 min, adding boiling water if necessary to keep water at least an inch above beans. Taste and season with more ground red chili, chipotle and salt, add dash of vinegar if needed. Serve with garnish.

Josh added a habanero pepper somewhere in the mix; other volatile peppers would do equally as well, I think.

Because I am a fool of the fooliest sorts, I signed up for Holidailies. Happy holidays, and here’s hoping we make it all the way through this year. I tend to sign up and then for whatever reason peter out as the days go on, but I shall perservere!

I’ve updated sporadically over the last year, and so, by way of catching up (somewhat), random updates on the minutiae of my life.

The sink. I referenced the sink in an entry earlier, about how much it sucks having to do the dishes when your sink was completely and utterly clogged. It finally, FINALLY got fixed on Monday, with gnashing of teeth and locking up the poor dog in the bedroom. We immediately ran two loads of dishes and I was so happy to have running and draining water that I even did another smaller load by hand to try to speed the process along. Clean dishes! Praise jeebus!

The health. Well, for a variety of reasons that I’m sure I’ll get into later, my blood sugar, which has been peachy and on the normal side for quite awhile, has been a bit erratic to say the least. So, I’m working with my doctor to closely monitor my blood sugars (four times a day with the blood checks, in cold weather that makes skin piercing sting) to see if an eventual switch to insulin will be necessary. Ugh, and ptooie. I know that eventually if I go on insulin, things will be fine, I will feel fine, everything will be fine, but do I want to do this extra step with sharp, pointy objects? Nope. Right now my fingers on my left hand are spotted with teensy little pin pricks from my blood sugar checks, which don’t hurt all of the time, just some of the time and are annoying to do. Blah!

Ava is not a morning person. Or morning dog, rather. I had an unfortunate sleep cycle last night (mainly, I did not get much of one) and at 2:30AM got up and let her out of the kitchen, thinking at least maybe she’d come over and sit on my cold feet. She took one look at me, cricked up an eyebrow and tucked her head underneath an arm. “Too bright,” she says in dogese, “You crazy person. I’m trying to sleep here.” And now - 7AM and she trotted out here, twenty minutes after I opened up her gate for the morning, got a few requisite scritches, and decided bed was much better.

Dogs are so weird. Also, our weird dog has been with us for well over a year! Happy belated dogiversary Ava!

Food. Josh made some damn good black bean & beef chili the other night, with a habanero pepper added in for extra warmth. Warmth, indeed. It was amazing and spicy and even after I dumped a bunch of sour cream in it, I still debated calling the fire department to put the flames out in my mouth.

Josh, the spice fiend he is, said that were it not for me and my “delicate” sensibilities, he’d have tossed two more habaneros. He is crazy.

The husband. Just finished his first semester of grad school and I have decided that I won’t ask him how he thinks the semester went until after he turns in his monster paper he finished the other day. I want his brain to decompress a little. He is doing fine. The two of us just visited my family for Thanksgiving where we had…

Turkey! My cousin ran interference upon discovering the Great Ham Caper of 2005 and so his uncle and wife made turkey. Phew. Crisis averted.

The cold. It is not just cold outside, it is bitchass fucking cold. I glance up on Josh’s menu bar and see:

2 degrees. 1, 2. Today’s high is 18. And as we’ve been complaining mightily here, it’s not even winter yet!

That’s about it. I’m hoping to use my morning time this next month productively and post entries and/or pictures. It’s time for me to shower and hope I don’t catch my death taking the dog out for her morning constitution.

This is the first year I’ve ever heard of “white elephant” gift exchanges called “Chinese Gift Exchanges”. This year thus far I’ve heard it referred to as this at least three times.

World, listen. I would rather impugn the morality of a fucking white elephant than to hear the words “Chinese Gift Exchange” uttered in a tittering, giggling way. When my family exchanges gifts, we just give them to each other. “Merry Christmas!” “Happy holidays!” We don’t exchange numbers and plot to snatch a gift back from someone else. What the fuck?

While we’re at it, we also don’t do Chinese Fire Drills, either. The next time you see a bunch of people running their fool asses off around a car at a stop light, please email me with photographic evidence that they were Chinese.

Christ.