How to Impress

Sundays have become my favorite day of the week. This transformation started and finished this summer. There is just something about Sunday, especially Sunday morning. No one and nothing is in a hurry, the streets are still and tranquil, and the days are usually bright and warm. There is no better feeling than waking up early on a Sunday morning, baking some delicious bread or english muffins, and reading the Sunday paper. Well, at least the comic strips.

On Sundays, my family and I usually like to do a special dinner. These dinners are usually planned and cooked by my dad, since he is really into bbqing and grilling. I am more of a bread person, so I hardly come into contact with meat. That is until yesterday. For years I avoided eating ribs, I just did not find the meat appetizing. The meat always seemed chewy and hard to bite off the bone. I am not cool with bones in my meat, therein lies the dilemma. But, I was watching Paula Deen's "Best Dishes" on the food network and she made these ribs that literally fell off the bone with a single poke of the fork. I was a girl hooked. I made it my mission to cook these fantastical looking ribs. So, naturally, I did.

This recipe is sure to impress anyone, especially your family. Since when did you become a wonderful chef? Since when did you know how to handle meat, let alone spare ribs? Since when did you know what spare ribs are? The questions will roll out endlessly.

How-to-Impress-Your-Family-Ribs


[source]

1 rack spare ribs

Dry Rub:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup fajita seasoning
1 Tbsp paprika

Sauce:
1/2 cup beer
2 cloves garlic
1.5 Tbsp honey
1.5 Tbsp worchestire sauce
1 Tbsp brown mustard

To start, trim the ribs of any excess fat. In a small bow, mix in the ingredients of the dry rub. Use half the rub for one side of the ribs, the other half for the other side of the ribs. With your hands, rub the dry rub all over the ribs. Super fun. Wrap ribs in plastic wrap really well, this helps lock in the flavor. Refrigerate overnight.

Heat oven to 250 degrees F

Next, in a large bowl, mix the ingredients for the sauce in a medium size bowl. Set aside.Tear off two sheets of heavy duty foil. Unwrap the ribs from the plastic wrap and place meat side up on the shiny side of the foil. Place the other sheet of foil, shiny side up, on top of the ribs. Begin to seal the foil up by double folding the sides, leaving one side open. Carefully, pour sauce into hole, and finish sealing the sides of the foil.

Place on a cookie sheet and put in the oven. Roast for 4 hours at 250 degrees F.

After four hours, carefully open the tin foil and pour the sauce into a saucepan. Bring to a boil for about 5-7 minutes. Brush sauce over the ribs.

Heat broiler and broil ribs for 5-7 minutes. Remove and serve!

(this picture does not do these ribs justice)

Voila! Delicious ribs that are sure to impress!

Along with the ribs, we had grilled veggie skewers, texas toast, coleslaw, and homemade arnold palmers!

Arnold Palmer, served in a mason jar with a lemon wedge. I was more excited for the drink than the ribs!

We all enjoyed the dinner. My brother even baked the bread and then used it for the texas toast. Can you say authentic?

Baby jean jean (as Regine is now known) loves to swim. Not.

an ode to cleaning

inspired by the real life situations that went down this afternoon.

never mind the monsters in the closet, those beasts are child's play. the real enemy lacks a sinister guffaw and ugly scar. the real enemy is not a shadowy creature looming around the graffitied corners of long abandoned ally ways. the real enemy, the one that your parents always warned you about, is the mess of your own room. or life. crack open the door to your once easy living boudair and fall into a pit of chaos, disaster, and worst of all the fact that you have let your inner sanctum become so unkempt. tsk tsk. you tumble over laundry baskets filled with half dirty clothes and half clean clothes, but at this point even you cannot find the distinction. those piles might as well be cain and abel. 

after pivoting and gyrating your hips to avoid the leftover microwave from your college days, all the while deftly avoiding to step on the sewing scissors that have become buried under the latest project, you feel the uneasiness of the walls. suddenly you are in the middle of a vast land. a land of your own trash. clothes, sheets, dirty dishes, and fifth grade year books as far as the eye can see. finding it difficult to pry your feet out of the hackneyed first position of the art of ballet, because after all that is the only amount of room that you have dedicated to your once dancer's feet, to stand. standing in the middle of the room, your room, is odd, strange, and eccentric. but making it to the bed is even more of an unfamiliar entity. 

contemplating whether or not you can still nail that split that you used to be so proud of in your years of cheerleading so that you can be just a wee bit, a tad really, closer to the bed. cheerleading, oh remember those times. where is my year book? oh, yeah. hiding like a petrified dog in a thunder storm under all of the rubbish that somehow appeared overnight. there is no way, no path, no insightful idea to crack open and gently scramble over the heat of a frying pan to get you out of this mess. unless.

unless, you pick something up. anything really! just reach in there and grab something. oh, whoa ok not too far, i think that pile just barked. something floating on the surface, aha this library book which, no doubt is over due. no wonder you don't have any money. it all goes to the library. well, my dear community you are welcome. i hope this means that the library will buy more meg cabot books. i digress. with one book in your feeble hands you gain a sense of, what is the word for it? empowerment. 

then, only then, like the tazmanian devil in reverse you swirl, cha cha, bachata, and two step your way through the muck, the clutter, and the unkown. at last, the floor is visible, the designer sunglasses have been found, and most importantly, you found .75 cents. queen of the world? not quite. but you are .75 cents closer to a chai tea latte. or that stupid library find. 

Wear Sunscreen

Ok, so I got a stack of books from the library about four weeks ago. I have read one of those books. I really have not read a really really amazing book. Most of the books that I have read are generally blase to me, even though they were winners of the national book award and the pulitzer prize. Maybe my taste in literature is just not as sophisticated as I once thought. The two favorite books that I have read were "Water for Elephants" and "Push". I read "Push" in one day, it was just that amazing. It was the book that inspired the movie "Precious" and all I can say is: wow. Ah-mazing. Read it, I approve it one hundred percent.

Today it has been rainy and kind of gross outside. I know that the whole country has been going through a heat wave and it is normal to get thunderstorms because of the high temperatures. Speaking of bad rain, I never disclosed my horrifying experience with what I believe to be a tornado. It was a pretty regular day and my sister and I were watching a movie. We noticed that it was getting pretty dark outside and strangely windy. We looked on the weather channel and there was no warnings regarding thunderstorms or tornadoes. I decided to check what the skies looked like outside, so I walked over to the front door and tried to pry the door open. I thought that I was trying to push the door open while it was still locked. The wind was so intense that it was a fight to get the door open. I know I had to have looked pretty pathetic, with my wrestling with the door and all. The sky was pretty dark but nothing really bad so I went back in the house.

A second later my sister and I heard the garbage cans outside of our house blowing around. Thinking that they might become dangerous to either our house or our neighbors' houses we decided to run out, grab them, and chuck them in the garage. So we went running out of the garage and stopped midway down the drive way because there in the middle of the sky was the most odd looking clouds. It looked like a vortex, like the whole sky had opened up, revealing a portal to another universe. It took me a second to realize that this was most likely a tornado. A notion that was solidified seconds later when the sky started swirling with menacing rotations. Not the clouds, the whole sky.  I grabbed my sisters arm, pointed at the sky, and then we both latched on to each other and sprinted into the house.

We began chucking everything out of the small closet that we have downstairs, the only area of our house sans windows, so that we would have enough room to hide in the closet with both of the pups. I ran around looking for a flashlight, batteries, cans of food, and whatnot. While I did gather some essentials, I really was just running around in panic. I could no longer think straight, I just shut down for a while. I do remember screaming "Is the tornado here yet?!?!". Just as suddenly as the wind picked up, the gusts stopped and the clouds reverted from the ugly shade of green to melancholy gray. I stopped running around, stopped thinking that I was going to die, and sat down on the floor to finally catch my breath. Luckily, nothing happened. But it was horrifying. I had never seen the sky look so macabre. I mean, I have seen my fair share of bad weather but this was in its own category.

I tried to tell my parents about the tornado, but they dismissed it saying that it was probably just a whatchamacallit because rachel always tends to over exaggerate her stories. This time my sister saw it, but it did little to validate my story. My brother even saw it since he was outside at football practice, but he saw three instead of one. I'm thinking it was a tornado. So, when the weather is as torrential as it has been today I kind of flashback to that day. I always liked that one quote from the sunscreen speech that was remediated by Baz Luhrman

 "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that

Never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday"

like a tornado on a random afternoon. By the way, if you haven't heard/read the sunscreen speech it is one of my favorite inspirational song/story/speech. I don't really know what it is, spoken word or something like that? It's just good.

Oh yeah, I baked muffins today. But, I lost the recipe. I thought this story would suffice. It probably didn't because those were some spiff muffins! Cinnamon streusel (is that how you spell it?) holla!

Will You Date Me?

I have one question for you. Will you date me? Will you date me even though I read far too much. Books of all shapes, sizes, and smells decorate my boudoir. The kind of reader that becomes giddy at the thought of going to a book store. Meandering down each of the lengthy aisles, gently running my fingers along the spines that creak and groan with welcoming noises. The spines that bound and endless amount of words, chapters, and happy endings. You will find me hunched over a book or a kindle, helplessly dissolved in a foreign land. You will be fiction for a while. You will be unnoticed. Then again, you will be the one to snap me out of the trance. True love's first kiss and all, or at least that's how the story goes.

Will you date me? Will you date me even though I would rather bare an au natural face than be made over? My eyelashes are blonde and dissolve in my alabaster skin tone. My freckles will pop out, like little brown smudges that dance across the bridge of my nose up to my cheek bones and then piroutte around my lips. My lips that are chapped because I can never keep track of a single tube of lip balm, let alone multiple tubes of lip balm. I will be lost if you ask me out for a night on the town and will be severely under dressed. Will it be because I am confident or will it be because I want to give you an excuse, a pass, to excuse yourself from me?

Will you date me? Will you date me even though I sometimes eat dessert before dinner? Or breakfast? Chocolate is my kryptonite. Chocolate ice cream is what melts this sometimes strictly healthy eater. I do not like cake. I sometimes smell like butter and sugar. I admit to you that I walk around with flour dusted down the front of lumpy t-shirts that I wore to bed and then spent the entire next day in. Am I proud of this facade? Perhaps. Am I proud of my culinary craft? Definitely. Dater be warned, I will be messy in the kitchen. I will cry if everything falls apart. I will mourn the loss of my muffins/pies/cakes/breads. I will swear off baking cursing it to an eternity of suffering and heartache. And like an addict, I will return for my fix. Perhaps in the form of late night cookies. Do you have any chocolate chips? Flour will cover the walls, the floors, the kitchen cabinets and doors like freshly fallen snow. We could either make snow angels or dust it up. Or ignore it because the cookies are finally done.

Will you date me? Will you date me even though my idea of classy cinema is the newest romantic comedy? I confess that I have seen "You've Got Mail" at least 125,783,754 times. When I am sick, curled up on the couch with a bowl of piping hot chicken noodles soup and an equally piping hot cup of tea, you can be certain that it is in the DVD player and that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are my closest confidants. It makes me feel better. Do I know the words to the opening scene? Every single one. Have I quoted the film? Yes. But I am getting away from the point. Be assured that I will sit silently through the movies that you like, unless they are scary then I will be squirming around with fear and anxiety, because my mother raised me to be polite. I am just entertained by the notion of love.

Will you date me? Will you date me even though I would rather receive a handful of basil sprigs than a bouquet of roses? Basil smells sweet. Roses have thorns. Basil you can eat and thus live forever in your taste bud memory. Roses are easily forgotten, they will bloom and they will die. Basil is useful. Roses are to be looked at. I don't just want to be looked at. Keep your pedestal in the closet. Or better yet, keep your pedestal besides the fridge, I can really use a step stool when reaching for flour on the tippy tops of shelves. Otherwise, I will have no use of your pedestal. I refuse to be a rose, I am basil.

Will you date me? Will you date me even though I am sensitive to caffeine? Ask me out on a coffee date and see what I order. Probably tea. Anything but coffee. I will get nervous and jittery from one sip of the black silk liquid. I will talk super fast and my skin will bloom in a soft pink only disturbed by the fresh dew of sweat. Enjoy your coffee, enjoy my company, enjoy a scone. I will enjoy my tea. If you would be so kind as to let me watch you pour the creamer into your coffee, it is my favorite part. Like billowing clouds in a noir sea.

Will you date me? Will you date me even though I fall asleep at 10pm, even on weekends? The blinking green lights of my alarm clock softly call out to my slowly dwindling attention with the soft yet so sweet promises of sleep. The dark room. The sweats that I am already in. The somewhat self induced sugar coma. They are all taunting me. I will try to resist. But 9:59 will inevitably evolve into 10:00. A transition in which my eyelids will draw close simultaneously. 

Will you date me? Will you date me even though I have already picked out my wedding gown, song, and cake flavor. I have said too much already. Go ahead and snicker. Sneer your lips. Tilt back your head and let out a haughty guffaw. See if I care. I will.

All my heart,

Rachie