Category: latent childhood

A Theme Thursday You Can Use

So I’m about five days late getting around to this week’s Theme Thursday.

It was a long week before the long weekend. Today, as with my astounding piles of work email, I’m finally getting caught up.

This week’s theme is: Simple

And so we have the word simple. We have the hot, hot month of July. We have a need for refreshment.

Time for an easy yet useful recipe.

Simple syrup. If you are sweetening your iced tea, mojios, or other cold beverages without it, well then…where have you been?

Get on board!

Here you go:

Simple syrup is 1 part sugar to 1 part water. I usually do one cup to one cup.

Combine in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring, until sugar has dissolved. Allow to cool.

Dispense into something tasty.

That’s it.

Now, go getcher drink on! Whatever that beautifully sweetened beverage might be.





Photo by Pam Roth and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


A Bobby Pin and a Bout of Curiosity

The Boss of my Boss, we’ll call him Big Boss, sits right next door to me at work. I get along great with him and respect him immensely. I’ve been at this gig for a year now, and as you spend time in close quarters with someone, you begin to take note of some things.

A few weeks back, someone stopped by my office, asking “hey, have you seen Big Boss this afternoon?”

I replied “Yeah, I saw him walk by about a half hour ago. He was carrying his briefcase, so I suspect he’s gone for the day.”

The guy said thanks and walked on.

But I paused for a bit, pondering the question: “Wait, who carries a briefcase these days?”

The answer is: Big Boss. He carries a briefcase.

Big Boss is a bit of an old fashioned guy. He’s very professional and I get the sense he would have fit in nicely in the 1980’s era IBM culture. Remember those days? Everyone in my business school talked in quiet and earnest tones about IBM’s required dress code. As quoted from Wikipedia: “A dark (or gray) suit, white shirt, and a ‘sincere’ tie.”

That would be Big Boss. Sincere. Ok, he doesn’t wear a suit every day, but he does often enough. Most days are dark slacks, and a crisp pressed white shirt. His clothes are nice but not fancy. His taste is conservative, but cost conscious.

He wears no sideburns, preferring to keep his hair nice and short, cut to the ears.

He drives a Volvo. It’s a top of the line model but with bare bones features. The base model of the best model. See? Cost conscious, yet nice.

He and his wife and two kids (a boy and a girl, naturally) live in a modest home in a decent neighborhood. It’s a really nice middle class place, but nothing too fancy.

He can make a PowerPoint presentation deck of slides like no body’s business. He can get his point across with an economy of words. He’s an excellent negotiator and never gets rattled. He always knows what he needs to achieve and then he achieves it.

He has the utmost and complete respect of his upper management. When I interviewed, the Vice President of the group told me she considers him to be indispensible. She could not go on enough about what a great leader and person he is.

His office is decorated mostly with awards and trophies from his upwardly mobile career. He has one bit of whimsy, a ballpark giveaway from when the Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series in 2001. He’s from Arizona, Phoenix to be exact. Not Scottsdale. Not Tempe. Phoenix. Just plain Phoenix.

The guy is, by most accounts, unremarkable. And yet, he’s utterly remarkable as a manager of our team.

And he carries that damn briefcase. What’s in that briefcase!?!? It’s not his laptop, that would be too heavy. Plus, he has a separate roller bag for his laptop and computer gear.

It’s not files, we’re a “green” company and thus required to rarely print things out. If I need his approval, I’m to attach the document to an email and he’ll give me approval back electronically. So he’s not pouring over contract files or spreadsheets tucked into his briefcase.

He has been trying to diet lately and he brings in a few cans of Slimfast each day. Maybe those go in the solid old fashioned leather briefcase with the handle and the closer tabs that go “plick!” when you slide the button over.

Ok. So Slimfast. And what else? He keeps his mobile phone in a holster on his belt. His wallet in his back pocket. His files on his computer and his pens in his shirt pocket.

WHAT IS IN THAT BRIEFCASE?

I have to know. Now I’m obsessed about it.





Photo by user name Mattox and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


Just Like Evil Large Corporation Used To Make

While in the course of every adult’s life, whether male or female, there inevitably comes a time when you simply think to yourself, “I want my mommy.”

As we’ve become a mobile society, moving around to where opportunity is best, we often find ourselves in a geographical location far removed from mommy. Or for some unfortunate few, mommy has passed along and so there is no mommy to be had.

So in the absence of mommy, we must turn to the food that mommy used to make to help us feel comfort. By eating something familiar, there is a molecular “there, there” and a pet on the fevered head to make it all seem not so bad.

For many of us raised through the seventies, “food like mom used to make” may not have been the fabulous made from scratch homemade stuff of the Pleasantville moms of the fifties.

No, our moms had jobs and so they put on a blouse with the floppy bow at the neck and went to work to earn not only a paycheck but self respect.

And so our moms served us food no less comforting but bit more pre-processed.

As adults we find ourselves craving “mom’s” food that comes from a conglomeration like, say, KRAFT.

Which is not to say that KRAFT equals mom, but sometimes something that KRAFT makes does equal comfort.

I fell into such a KRAFT hole recently when I found myself lost and confused. I became overworked and overtired, low on a variety of essential nutrients and, most concerning, rather dehydrated. I found, in that moment, that all I wanted, needed, craved like the dickens was cheese slices. Good old-fashioned KRAFT cheese food that is neither cheese nor food, and wrapped in thin pieces of plastic.

This is frankenfood, to be sure. But damn it…KRAFT cheese slices make a darn nice grilled cheese sammich. Those fake orange plastic slices melt so nice under the heat of my toaster oven. Pair this with tomato soup and I feel, for a moment, mom’s hug and everything is just simply going to be all right.

Like Pavlov’s dog, I salivate at the sound of the crinkling wrapper, ready to take the first one out of the covering and shove the perfect square whole and intact into my waiting maw. While the toaster oven warms up, another slice goes down the hatch and my comfort-o-meter begins to register that something good is happening.

I feel a moment’s regret. A slight remorse. What IS this crap I’m eating? Then the plastic wrapper rustles again and I’m loading slices up on bread in gleeful anticipation.

My dearest mom would likely shake her head to think that I could possibly equate this crap food with her comfort. It’s a complicated association, and one I’m not proud of. But there is no denying the simple addictive magic of the sugar/fat/salt combination of ingredients that KRAFT loves to peddle to us unsuspecting rubes.

Look, the only KRAFT item I love more than American cheese slices is a nice big brick of Velveeta. Oh yes. Oh so very yes.

There’s a sucker born every minute and I’m standing in that line.





Even Gourmet Magazine understands.


Photo from user name Lazarus-long, used under a Creative Commons license, and found on Wikipedia.

Today’s Theme Thursday is: brick. See how I slipped that one in there? I’m a sly dog.


Oh Fair New Mexico At The County Fair

Look! Look! Look!!

My biscochitos (the New Mexico State cookie) won a blue ribbon at the county fair!

Yeah, baby!!





The recipe I use is from the PNM sponsored Cocinas de New Mexico cookbook. It’s the cookbook my mom used for years and now I have my own copy. Order yours here.

Upon seeing my blue ribbon, The Good Man, a city boy through and through said, “hunh….as a kid back in Brooklyn, I never could have imagined I’d be married to girl who won a blue ribbon at the county fair.” Then I reminded him that I was also in a sorority.

He actually had to wander off by himself for a bit to ponder the meaning of his life.