Gleedah Scrooge

Here is a very important word to know: gleedah. Say it with me now: gleedah.
It means ice cream. More specifically "Shtai Gleedot" means two ice creams which you can get from the McDonalds for 6 shekels.

I love ice cream and could eat it daily, but lately James has been saying no to my ice cream urges and been quoting euphemisms like "A shekel saved is a shekel earned" and other nonsense that usually comes from my lips. But I make exceptions in my frugal nature for important things. Like ice cream in thirty degree heat.

When anyone is more frugal than me, you know they are seriously cheap. I am now calling James the Gleedah Scrooge.

But this is besides the point of this post, which is to tell you a funny story that can go amongst the ranks of "Gandaf the deer" pulling Santa's sleigh and Martin Luther King leading a protestant revolution three hundred years before he was born.

I was describing my lamentable gleedah situation to a labmate today. But after they gave me a bit of a blank stare, I asked them if they knew what a scrooge was.

"Yes, Yes," they said. "Scrooge, is like Scrooge McDuck."

Well sort of, but less ducky.

My Hero

Of late late I have been "digestively unstable" and I finally asked the ol'doc-in-law about it. Turns out, I have probably picked up a bug and the ol' doc suggested a 24 hour liquids-only fast to starve the little jerks hanging out in my intestine into submission.

To most people, this wouldn't be much trouble, but I can hear the groan of sympathy coming from my Sister's Husband now. Dominic knows all too well that a Macdonald woman without food is a scary beast indeed. We can lash out without warning both with vicious words and any limb that is within striking distance.

Throughout the day, I avoided letting my inner beast randomly attack those around me with a strict policy of avoidance. Poor James lives with me and had to take the brunt of it, and did so with a level of bravery and stoicism usually only seen in romance novels involving pirates or white steeds. He even bypassed the free pastries at a chemistry talk in the afternoon just to share in my misery. (I would not have been so nobel as to pass on free pastries, especially those yummy croissant shaped poppyseed ones. Mmmmm. Hungry...)

By 9 pm last night, all I could do was lay on the couch, watch TED talks and plaintively ask what time it was every fifteen minutes. When my fast was over, I ate a bowl of cous cous since not eating ironically causes nausea. There I was listlessly shoveling food in my mouth on a stool in the kitchen as James fussed around me like a mother hen, handing me apricots and glasses of water. Once my tummy felt less empty, I promptly shuffled to the next room and went to sleep. James tucked me in.

Then he went back to the kitchen and washed my cous cous bowl for me. My Hero.

Dumpster Cats and the Odd Duck

I have been doing my best not to nit pick at the hubby too much, but he hit a whole new level of Odd Duckiness this weekend.

The Chicken has an odd obsession with the numerous Dumpster Cats of Jerusalem (his Calendar will be out in time for X-mas). We will be walking to work and then all of a sudden he will disappear. I know now to look behind me and I will see him talking yet another picture of some mangy cat. Admittedly, some strays are an amusing part of our daily lives and consequently, Theo-cat-tra, Cat-tom and Prego-cat will get their own post in the future.

In our photo album, interspersed with great pics of our adventures, are many, many photos of dumpster cats. James went out for a walk today and came back all excited about his latest photo-shoot with the urban wildlife. He takes photos of all aspects of their being: sunning themselves, fighting, eating chicken scraps from the garbage, but today he photographed in a brutally honest close-up and in perfect focus, two cats making kittens.

I am l little disturbed to say the least. He swears it is for educational purposes only and then giggles. I have decided NOT to put the offending photos in this post but if any of you want a biology lesson or know a good shrink, please send an email to James.

Guest Post: Omlette de Fraise

The Chicken’s family has been noticing how often he gets roasted on this blog but I promise, it is all true. So this time when he did something spectacularly chickenish, I decided to let him tell the story. I should also mention that the night before, I served for shabbas dinner: hallah bread, white wine, homemade french onion soup, potatoes, carrots and a whole roasted chicken with rosemary, thyme and sage. The whole thing looked like a painting by Christopher Flodberg. I will admit the gravy was a complete failure: I accidentally grabbed the ground cloves instead of pepper. Perfect I am not, but James takes culinary imperfection to a whole new level. Coming straight from The Chicken's beak:

A common reaction from people who don’t understand something is to belittle it, and my wife Janet is no exception when it comes to my cooking technique. Case in point: my ongoing study of omelettes. For the past month or so on Saturday mornings, it’s been my appointed task to cook omelettes for the two of us. Not coincidentally, this means that Janet gets to spend some extra time sleeping in while I slave away in front of the stove. I actually don’t mind too much because I get to indulge my whims and curiosity without The Wife looking over my shoulder at every turn and bossing me around.

A lot of people have compared a kitchen to a laboratory, and I’m inclined to agree. In my laboratory there’s all these neat bottles of reagents, catalysts, and solvents and the mark of any chemist worth his NaCl is the burning question: “what happens when I add these things together?”. A kitchen is no different. When you consider all the meat, fruits, veggies, and spices we have available in our well-stocked kitchen (a far cry from my bachelor pad in Cambridge, I’ll admit) what self-respecting chemist wouldn’t get excited about all the culinary possibilities?
About a month ago I was charged with the task of making my first omelette. My advice from Janet was the following: “Beat some eggs, add milk, cheese and veggies”. Then she went back to sleep. After I beat the four eggs, chopped up the necessary veggies, and prepared a small pile of yummy salty Bulgarian cheese, I was faced with a question: How much milk to add? I wasn’t sure. I settled on a nice even number: one cup. As was described here earlier, the result was a very pouffy culinary masterpiece, albeit admittedly somewhat difficult to flip. “Wow!” I thought. “Look at the effect of adding all that milk! I made a soufflé! That’s really cool!” Excitedly, I roused Janet from her slumber.

“You added HOW much milk?”, she growled.

“One cup”, I said.

Several minutes later, after she picked her jaw from off the floor and wiped away the tears of laughter, she went and wrote a blog post about how dumb I was in the kitchen. Welcome to my life, dear reader.

The next week I was excited about another omelette adventure. OK, I thought. One cup was too much. What if I add about a quarter of that. The result was similar: quite pouffy, albeit a bit more easily handled. Janet ate the omelette, but added plenty of ketchup.
In the kitchen this Saturday morning I decided to go the full monty (figuratively, not literally – don’t worry) and add no milk at all. If I was really doing careful kitchen science I would have kept all the variables the same. But life is short, and you don’t get to cook multiple omelettes in the kitchen the way you can set up multiple reactions in the lab. So I changed two variables at once. After adding the chopped up peppers, I decided to go out on a limb and add another component: strawberries. Strawberries are pretty yummy after all.

My strawberry omelette went rather well in fact. I noticed that it wasn’t pouffy at all, and it flipped very nicely. When it was done, I gave Janet an excited high-five. “Wow chicken!” she exclaimed. But as she looked past the stove to the countertop, her smile quickly faded.

“Did you add strawberries?”.
“Yep”, I said.
She was silent, her eyes wide open, staring at the omelette.
“Is that bad?” I asked.

The result, as usual, was peals of laughter and having to endure about fifteen minutes of wife-ly haranguing about what a bad cook I am. Apparently adding strawberries to omelettes is a big faux pas. Well how was I supposed to know about that dumb rule? Since she refused to eat her portion, I had to eat the whole strawberry omelette, OK, I’ll it wasn’t the best omelette I’d ever had, but whatever. What’s the point of having all these ingredients if you don’t experiment and add new ingredients together? If you ask me, I think she is trapped in her little world of strict by-the-book cooking, while I am exploring bold new realms of gastronomic adventure. I am already excitedly planning my next omelette experiment.

Omlette de James

We have discovered that The Chicken, if he is going to cook, has to be in the kitchen alone. I have to leave and do something else while he “experiments”. I will admit, the turkey soup he made was pretty yummy, but there have been some cooking mishaps. The key problem is the “experimenting”. Experimenting is good if you already know the basics. Unfortunately, The Chicken does not.

Experiment 1 : Omelette de James

Introduction: It is lunch time and an omelet sounds tasty. An omelet in it’s simplest manifestation is a hybrid structure of eggs and milk.

Hypothesis: A four egg omelet needs one cup of milk

Experimental: Omlette du James was prepared by vigorously stirring four eggs, and one cup of milk to yield a yellow cloudy mixture. Diced onion, red pepper, salt and pepper were introduced. The heterogeneous mixture was heated neat in a wide and shallow reaction-pan under ambient conditions for 10 minutes. Steam was observed as the mixture became pooffy and gelatinous. A phase separation occurred where a clear liquid separated from the yellow gel. Attempts to flip the omelet were met with failure and only chunks resulted. The heat was removed and the mixture served to the wife.

Results and discussion: The desired omelet structure was not obtained. Although the product was edible, the wife was observed to be adding large quantities of ketchup to her meal. It is likely the milk was in excess and caused side reactions which prevented the synthesis of the desired omelet structure.

Conclusion: One cup of milk is too much.

Tales of Domesticity

My husband is so cheap he wants us to be trailer trash. We went blanket shopping on friday, and instead of the nice duvets, he was drawn to these fuzzy blankets whose patterns tended towards safari. Even the plain purple one made me think of the Trailer Park Boys. I convinced him to spend the extra 30 skeck on a duvet. Then looking for a shower curtain, we finally found some cheap ones. But instead of looking through the stack to find a half decent one, James, in his impatience to end the torture of shopping as soon as possible, grabs the one on top that would have only been appropriate if we had pulled up to the shop in a DeLorean. Again, veto power was employed and we agreed on a different pattern (but as a compromise, it was blue).

We have inherited a rather old microwave belonging to the apartment that has been encrusted with years of goo. In fact, the guy we are subletting from hasn’t used it at all; it is the previous tenant's shame. James felt we should clean it and use it. Actually, after a little Chicken elbow grease, it didn’t look too bad. All hail the house-husband!
Unfortunately, the dampness from cleaning made the number pad stop working so we were still up the creek for warming up last night’s leftovers. Blast. An hour later of drying, the top two rows of numbers work. By morning, it should work like a charm.

The Poulet has landed

Just so you know, The Chicken made it here safe and sound tonight. Dorks that we are, we happened to be wearing our matching McGill chemistry hoodies. I think we are well on our way to becoming an old couple wearing matching tracksuits and orthodic shoes.

As of this morning, husband training has commenced; I made him go back to the bathroom and hang his towel up on the hook where it belongs. He just giggled and complied. I wonder how long the novelty will wear off?