I had never heard this song before I started hunting for wedding playlist fodder, but from the opening bars, I was in love. And oh, what anyone could do with plenty of money and…whomever. This is track 16 on our playlist.
If I had an unlimited source of funds, I would hire a cook. Or, at least I would hire someone to do all the scut work for me. Someone to do the grocery shopping, and the chopping, and the cutting up of the chicken, and the washing up of the dishes after.
I want someone to cook healthy, hearty meals for me, and prepare snacks and send them to work with me. In effect, I want to be a giant toddler and hire myself a kitchen nanny. How long would it be before I wanted Kitchen Nanny to come put the food into my mouth for me?
See, I was thinking about this because I was thinking about how it is Hollywood’s job to look good. Again. I think about this frequently.
Hollywood gets paid to look good. In order to look good, Hollywood must take care with its diet, with its exercise, and with its upkeep. It must have a Kitchen Nanny. It must have a Fitness Nanny. It must have a Stylist Nanny.
I say to myself, “If I had a Kitchen Nanny, a Fitness Nanny, and a Stylist Nanny, I could look like [name redacted].” Then I think, “Oprah has all these Nannies. Oprah does not look like [name redacted].” Neither does Jessica Simpson.
Which makes me wonder if maybe what’s required is an Adderall Nanny? [Now you see why I redacted the name!]
At any rate, I’d like to have all those nannies. And maybe I could get a Foreign Language Nanny to come tutor me back into a working fluency of French, Russian, and Spanish while Fitness Nanny makes me do crunches.
I cooked chili for New Year’s Day, using a recipe my aunt posted on Facebook. I mixed it up a little to suit familial tastes, but it boils down to this:
- 1lb sausage (I used a 50/50 mix of ground lamb and pork chorizo)
- 1 cup diced onion
- 1/4 cup diced celery
- 4 cans black-eyed peas
- 1 can diced tomatoes
- 1 can diced tomatoes with green chilis
- 2 tbs chili powder (I used 3)
You brown your sausage/meat in a Dutch oven, then remove it to drain off the fat, reserving about a tbs. Cook your onions and celery in that reserve, until translucent. Add in all your canned goods without draining, put your meat back in, stir in the chili powder. Bring it to a boil, then cover, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.
Delicious.
Problematic for me because of the sausage content, but delicious.
I can rarely bring myself to eat sausage, thanks to Upton Sinclair. When I went to buy ingredients for the chili, I was only going to use the lamb (why I can eat this, but not sausage, I cannot tell you. why am I afraid of sharks in public swimming pools?) but thought that might not give it enough flavor. That’s where the chorizo came in.
I’d never worked with chorizo before. Let me tell you, it looked vile. I was really disgusted. It took forever to drain the grease and fat off the meat, and I never got the color/texture I really wanted. I was afraid to eat it.
I ate it. It was amazing. But, it makes me sad to eat it because I can’t get past what I saw when I was cooking it. I cannot enjoy this amazing chili because it looked so disgusting when the meat was raw.
The only thing keeping me from becoming a vegetarian is my ability to overcome my own disgust. If I had a Kitchen Nanny, she could just make me a vegetarian by not cooking meat for me.
The Outside Lane 