I wasn't supposed to put beef in the trifle!

I don't cook often mostly because I'm lazy and pretty easily satisfied with the non-cooking of avocado and tomato on a piece of toast. In the last month the extent of using fire for my eats was boiling water twice. Once for eggs and once for spaghetti. So. Cooking barely intersects with my interests. The sliver of that Venn diagram is two important websites.

1. Pinterest

Pinterest is basically an online bulletin board where you pin all kinds of goodies found about ye olde internets. Among the pages and pages of awesome things you'll fin inside Pinterest is hundreds of recipes that nearly inspire me to get in the kitchen.

Crispy Fried Goat Cheese



These h’ors d’oeuvres are really easy to throw together on the fly. Basically, you take slices of goat cheese, dip them in beaten egg, then coat them in seasoned panko breadcrumbs, then fry in a little olive oil until crispy.

Campfire Cones




Stuff an ice cream cone with chocolate chips, nuts, toffee pieces, mini marshmallows, banana pieces, butterscotch bits, etc., etc. Wrap in foil, place on campfire to melt all together.

Apple Sandwiches


Chicken Avocado Salad


Ingredients:
1 cup chicken breast, cooked and shredded
¼ cup corn
¼ cup black beans, rinsed and drained
¼ cup green onions, chopped
¼ cup tomatoes, diced
¼ cup cilantro, chopped
¼ cup corn chips, crushed
2 tablespoons white vinegar
4 tablespoons mayonnaise
Salt to taste
2-4 avocados, sliced in half with pits discarded


Many more delicious finds at www.pinterest.com/schilbo/food/.

2. My Drunk Kitchen

THIS is how to make cookies:

Bridget Jones with Sit Up Britain, looking for the tuna

The first time I went to a cooking class, the instructor said, "Cooking requires keen attention to detail, nuance, and the ability to be present with your food at all times." And I was like, "Er, I'm just gonna go ..." Right? Because those are not three things you're ever going to find on my resume.

Excepting the part where humans need to food to stay alive, I never even really understood the allure of cooking — until I saw Kat work her way around a kitchen. It's not just that her food is The Most Delicious; it's that she's a magic-maker, the way she moves around with such confidence and ease and skill. Every time I reread Half-Blood Prince, I think about how Kat would have been the best potions make in the history of Hogwarts. Even Snape would have been forced to concede her superiority.

One day I hope she'll let me be her sous-chef again, and so I've hammered away at the cooking thing, trying to make delicious stuffs that are also not poisonous.

Here are the five most important things I've learned about cooking:

1) Cheese is the cure. For serious. If you fuck up something, just cover it in cheese. If the recipe calls for 1/2 a cup of cheese, use six hundred cups of cheese. Cheese is the most delicious thing, and therefore: more of it.

2) The other cure is lemon. The acid from lemons calms down soups that are too beefy or desserts that are too sweet. And they perk up most meats and vegetables after you're done cooking!

3) Get yourself a good knife. Yes, it's true that sometimes you will chop at your fingers in such a way that you're going to need stitches, but that's a risk you've got to take. You can do lots of things with a good knife, but you can't do shit with bad knife.

4) The other best cooking tool is your hands! You can actually learn to feel when stuff is done, and also it's a fun time to mix up things with your hands like a little kid making mud pies.

5) Sometimes your beagle might eat several raw steaks or a whole pound cake or an entire bowl of gravy. But guess what? It won't kill her. Probably.

back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I'm not a fool

  The other day, Joe and I were talking about career paths and whatnot and I asked if he'd ever considered becoming a teacher. Don't you think he'd be a great Kindergarten or first grade teacher? Wouldn't you have loved it if your Kindergarten teacher was a super-tall, bearded BFG with the most boisterous laugh in all the land?

I think I'm trying to bully him into becoming a teacher because although I enjoy the career I've stumbled into, when I was younger, I always wondered if I'd end up a teacher. I definitively decided against it once I started volunteering and realized how difficult it is to corral only four six-year-olds, let alone a class of like 25 of them. And for the whole day! Not just a couple of hours. That's a lot of time to not say any curse words.

Also, I'm afraid to go back to school as a teacher because I loved school so much as a student. Because, you guys. I LOVED SCHOOL. I was totally that kid you hated, the one who got 100% on every test (or, like, cried if she got a 97% WTF) and always volunteered to write things on the chalkboard and got to grade all of your papers with the ANSWER KEY (!) and who was basically a know-it-all-smarty-pants. I don't know what happened to that kid. I mean, I'm still a know-it-all-smarty-pants but I have even less to back it up now since I think my brain reached Learning Saturation a long time ago. But I digress. AS PER ALWAYS.

My favorite part about going back to school was finding out who my new teacher was going to be and who else was in my class. They'd always put the lists out a week or so before school started and I'd bug the shit out of my mom until she took me to look at it. I'm not sure why, exactly, I was so excited because it's not like I ever knew anything about many of the teachers. I think I was just always hoping for someone with a last name that started with an A to be in my class so I wouldn't always have to go first on presentations. 

My second favorite part about going back to school was SCHOOL SUPPLIES. Glorious school supplies. Pens and rulers and new folders and notebooks and YOU GUYS MAYBE EVEN A TRAPPER KEEPER. I don't wanna wait for my trapper keeper to be over! Ooh! And best yet! NEW CRAYONS. I remember this one year, they'd just come out with (I think) the 64 count crayon box with A CRAYON SHARPENER ATTACHED TO THE BOX. So you could sharpen your crayons and they'd be like new all the time! WHAT KIND OF AWESOME SORCERY IS THAT?! I somehow convinced my mom to get it for me, probably because I told her I needed it to live or something. Also, probably because my dad wasn't there.

Did your dad ever used to give you the Want vs. Need speech? Like, whenever my sister or I said we needed something, he'd be all, "do you want it or do you need it?" and I'd be like, "yes, dad, I need this penicillin to live," JK it was more like, "yes, dad, I need this Saved by the Bell game TO LIVE." My point is, do they still make Trapper Keepers? Because I need one. No, I don't want one, DAD. I need one.

Triple Lindy

The transition from green to yellow is surprisingly quick, the light dimmed so suddenly that one day it just happens, every hour of sun is squandered on the inside, leaving life solely illuminated by fluorescence and cathode rays. The rain rolls in one night on a rush of wind and in my stubbornness I refuse to unpack the umbrella, preferring for the moment the shock of cool water against my face. The rainy season has arrived.

Back in college it used to rain so much this one time Pete picked me up in a canoe; we spent the entire day drinking beers while he paddled me about. Sometimes we just drifted where the streets would take us, but mostly we just laughed and laughed. He ran Hood to Coast this year so thoroughly he's taken to Portland, It reminds me of New Orleans he told me a few weeks ago, and that's as good a reason to take to a place as any I suppose.

After the storm my best friend and I compared notes and succeeded only in making us both horribly wistful for days spent commiserating over lunch trays at Bruff. I lost 15 freshman year--I always have to be different it seems--but gained more than I can count. My friends, yeah, and myself. So now, at the start of yet another school year, I'm planning my own return to campus. Flights and hotel are booked, football tickets are in hand. But this time my companions will be rooting for the other team. You can go back, but it's never quite the same.

Especially when your cat has smothered the entire damn city.

A life not void of pure intent

This time of year means a lot of things to me. First of all, I work in higher education so I've been obsessively tracking enrollment data for the last four weeks because students = money = paycheck. Second of all, I'm supposed to be in school right now getting a degree in Business Cats but I once again have to take a leave of absence from school cause the rest of my life is... in disarray.

But what I observe most is that fall marks my anniversary of moving to California. I came here for school and I've never left. I was lost and now found. And I'm back again, running hard, one foot in front of the other, chin up, clear-eyed, straight into my tenth year.











This is home.