I have a new column on Serious Eats! It’s called DIY vs. Buy, and in it I will take a fun drink ingredient and compare buying it with making it yourself. Then I will give you fun recipes! For my first post, I explored orgeat — a sexy almond syrup made with flower water. SEXY!
Cocktail geeks have been going nuts for orgeat (pronounced “or-zsa,” like Zsa Zsa Gabor) for ages, but there’s a reason you don’t see it in many home bars: the good stuff is hard to find. But making your own high-quality orgeat with all-natural ingredients takes 15 minutes work and costs about $6.
Check it out: DIY vs. Buy, Orgeat Edition at Serious Eats
Also, now there is an internet place about my book. You should look there a lot: DIY Cocktails, the sexy online version that is sexy!
I love Thanksgiving. I’m practically obsessed with it. I call it at night and hang up on it just to hear its juicy, fattening voice before bed.
People who are particular about Thanksgiving food seem to have a weird attachment to canned and boxed ingredients. My mom is adamant that I not make cranberry sauce from scratch ever … even if she is not going to be there to eat it. Under the guise of wanting to save me time, she keeps insisting that I just use the canned stuff. After I say it’s no trouble (all you have to do to make cranberry sauce is boil some stuff), she usually drops it or goes and buys a can anyway if it’s for a meal at her house. It came up again and she finally said that the canned stuff was THE ONLY KIND that anyone should eat ever and would I stop talking about making it. I think I saw a tear. Lots of people have told me that eating a cranberry-flavored sculpture of a can is part of what makes Thanksgiving great.
I’ve almost convinced my mom to let me make gravy from scratch, but I’m pretty sure this was a compromise. (“If I say it’s OK to make gravy, maybe Marcia will stop with that homemade cranberry sauce nonsense.”) But she really would like me to just give up and go with some good old Franco American gravy in a can, from the makers of Spaghetti-Os. As far as I can tell, she is alone in this. But maybe not! People hate for Thanksgiving food to be homemade, apparently. She thinks I am a great cook, so this isn’t some passive-aggressive way to avoid eating my food. (I mean, she asks me to cook for her all the time, even at holidays when several other relatives have already volunteered to be chef.) In every non-Thanksgiving meal, she opts for fresh ingredients and home-cooked food. But Thanksgiving just brings out her desire for things in a can!
Stove Top boxed stuffing seems to engender similar devotion. I’ve heard people get ANGRY when there is homemade stuffing at a Thanksgiving meal. And I’m talking good stuffing and not some mushy bread or dry, crumbly mess. On TV and in movies about Thanksgiving, urban blue-collar, Midwestern and New England families have arguments about elaborate stuffing recipes passed down from generation to generation. Shenanigans, I say! The only stuffing-related kerfuffles I’ve witnessed have been someone complaining about not getting Stove Top stuffing. Maybe this is a West Coast thing, as for some reason TV Thanksgivings never take place in California.
Read more ›
After three weeks of trying Chemistry.com (the online dating site that specializes in Fremont, California from what I can tell), I have quit without going on any dates and before my three-month membership ended. The only nice thing I can say about Chemistry is that they gave me my money back without a hassle even though it is their policy not to give refunds for unused memberships. If you’re not familiar with the service, Chemistry is an eHarmony copycat owned by Match.com. So you take a quiz and they supposedly match you based on personality. However, they are cheaper, less controlling and more casual than eHarmony.
Here is why I quit that shit:
Most of my matches were outside my specified geographic area of no more than 50 miles away.
Ladies, if you’re looking to score with men ages 35-40, look no further than Fremont, California. Though it is about 70 miles away from me, a majority of my matches were from this large Silicon Valley suburb. Oh, and I wasn’t matched with people from there because we had anything in common. Fremont is the place for ladies looking for men whose hobbies include working out, fitness, going to the gym and physical activity. What they were not into was having hair or interests outside of exercise. For the record, I find all of these hobbies sexier than exercise: playing with model trains, collecting stamps, reading about milk and then drawing pictures of it, taking black-and-white photos of bridges, re-enacting the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and whittling.
Out of about 90 people Chemistry “chose” for me over three weeks, only two were actually appealing to me both in personality and appearance if I was relaxed about my criteria. (They were both from San Francisco and were not interested in me, for whatever reason.) If I take appearance out of the equation, that number goes up to three. I am not including the nice man from Oregon. So I suppose one of us could have driven 8 hours to meet for coffee or we could have met half way in a forest.
The ones I was completely uninterested in (aka most of what they sent me) included two severely disabled men (“I have a traumatic brain injury and speech problems, and I live with my parents.”), four who barely knew English well enough to write a profile (“Look for love femily”) and a whole bunch whose only interests were working out and being employed. In fact, the only thing Chemistry seemed to get right was the ages. (I put 31-40, in case you’re curious, and mostly they were 36-40.)
The geographic spread:
- 55% from Fremont, which is 70 miles away
- 25% from other Bay Area cities that are 60 or more miles away
- 15% from cities outside the Bay Area, 100 or more miles away (like Chico)
- 2% from San Francisco, which is 40 miles away
- 1% from Sonoma County, the county I live in
- 1% from Marin County, the neighboring county
- 1% from Oregon, which is 350 miles away
When I complained about the geography, the customer service rep said that was my fault for choosing “very important” on some of my match criteria and “not important at all” on some. Somehow this broke their ability to filter geography properly.
What I had to do to make their algorithm work, she said, was to have more preferences in the middle at “moderately important.” She adjusted all my preferences to the middle and promised that this would boost the importance of geography while still taking into account things that were important to me. You’ll just have to take my word that I was being reasonable. I don’t do well with algorithms. They are always wrong about me, and this was no exception.
What resulted were still mostly matches from Fremont and yet another from Oregon. The adjustment did add a handful of matches between 5-20 miles away. (Still no San Francisco, most likely because city people may not have cars and/or be willing to date people more than 5 miles away.) But almost 70% of these new matches in the right geography indeed had dealbreakers (aka the things I originally said were very important to me that my match NOT have, such as children who are still infants!). There was one guy who seemed promising and lived nearby. However, he mentioned at least four times how he doesn’t like reading or books. I don’t expect a bookworm, but that is just weird. Also, he probably would hate that I am a professional writer and editor. (I am not trying to date professional athletes, because I think what they do for a living is annoying.)
FAQ:
Why did you go with Chemistry instead of Match.com or e-Harmony?
I know it is my own neuroses, but to me Match.com feels like a giant bin of people who get picked through like a pile of sweaters on sale. (I deleted an extension of this sweater metaphor, so all you get to know is that I am a bright red cashmere cardigan.) I know several great people in happy marriages who met on Match, so this isn’t a dis about the quality of the people on there. It’s more about how being put in a searchable database makes me feel, which in a word is “bad.”
E-Harmony sounded appealing. I did their bazillion-hours-long test and got sent match previews. However, I didn’t check how much the cost was first. It’s expensive! Not only am I uncomfortable spending more than a negligible amount of money to meet people, but I also found that the price seemed to lead to an overwhelming number of users who were materialistic and too interested in money, based on the sample matches they provided me as a tease.
I will probably do Match now. Perhaps my profile headline should be: I hate money and exercise.
