cooking

So Gross, It Must Be Delicious

February 19, 2024February 19, 2024 JennyLeave a comment

When I was pregnant, I didn’t crave any nasty foods. That’s assuming you don’t count Arby’s French dip as nasty. For that, I once risked my life and that of my unborn child by making a futile Arby’s run during an active tornado warning even though the local Arby’s franchise was, of course, closed. Because TORNADO.

Perhaps my pregnancy cravings were relatively forgettable because I often eat like a pregnant person anyway. It’s not that I pig out. It’s that I’m happy to experiment with gross combinations. In fact, the less felicitous the matrimony of ingredients in a given dish, the more inclined I am to order it or try making it. Salsa on fried ice cream? Sure. Espresso-soaked salmon with marzipan-roasted dates? They wouldn’t offer it for $35 on the menu if it weren’t phenomenal. Champagne-fried eggs on brined fruit leather? Sign me up!

These aren’t real recipes (that I know of), but if you are at all like me, you’d give them a try if you saw them on a menu or pinned on a Pinterest recipe board. I put a lot of trust in those who claim to have any sort of culinary training, and it’s mainly because I have zero understanding about what ingredients really go well together for a great flavor. And that is how this hideous weekend concoction came to pass under my roof:

No, I am not trying to kill my family. And no, this was not something I made up on my own. It was an actual recipe on the Internet, and it had more than 10 reviews, all of which were above four stars. Some people even claimed to have made these for a work potluck. Can you even imagine?

Sweets aren’t really my thing unless they involve salt too, and I deeply love anything pickle-flavored, so I somehow couldn’t imagine these would taste bad. But they do. They taste like an emetic. However, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I am doing all the joy-seeking I can, and I quite enjoyed all the anticipation of preparing them. I kept thinking, “These look so gross, they have to be delicious.” They have bourbon! And cream cheese! And powdered sugar! And LITTLE TINY CHUNKS OF PICKLE in them. The thought is making me gag as I type.

I still would highly recommend these to anyone who suffers from the same delusion that gross combinations must be tasty. Because maybe to you, these would be. My son took one bite, shrugged in resigned half-approval, and polished off the remainder of the cupcake in three bites, describing it as okay. My husband ate two and said, “They’re not really that bad.”

Is that a win?

The sides of me only AI can see

February 13, 2024February 13, 2024 JennyLeave a comment

The brand manager at my new job recently asked if I could provide her with a current headshot to include on our company intranet. Because I work in very corporatey settings doing very corporatey things, one might reasonably expect me to have this sort of thing at the ready. Unfortunately, before quitting my last job, I forgot to send myself a copy of the headshot that I simply kept on file there.

I don’t particularly fancy having my picture taken, so I’m not inclined to run out and get a new headshot. I’m not picking on myself, as I’m generally fine with my looks in real life, but let’s just say that if Severus Snape and Laura Dern had a baby, it would grow up to look like photo-me.

If you believe our phones are always listening to us, you will not be surprised that I soon after received an ad in my social feed for remarkably authentic AI-generated headshots. The samples sincerely looked like nice headshots generated as believable composites of normal people’s photos. After paying a nominal fee, I submitted six photos of my face from various snapshots I have on file, and just over an hour later, I I was absolutely delighted to see the results. This is for sure the most entertaining $5 I’ve spent in ages:

*Look at the gourd on this young lady. She must be really smart*.

*This skirt is ideal for a 51-year-old woman because it takes me right from the board room to the junior high basketball game, where I am still captain of the cheer squad.*

*No lies detected. This is exactly how I look in real life and is also the exact way I stand when I want my ideas to be taken seriously in a strategy session at work.*

*I’m impressed AI could extrapolate from six candid snapshots of only my face that I lost my left leg in a tragic farming accident.*

*Nothing says professional like keeping a whole other woman inside my pants to help me check for chin hairs. Also, I REALLY LIKE BUTTONHOLES.*

In the interest of full disclosure, I confess I’ve witheld the few AI photos I received where, instead of missing a limb or having seven-fingered hands that look like McDonald’s French Toast sticks, I merely looked too young. And by “too young,” I mean too young for a headshot of a woman who has 30 years of work experience and the scowl-wrinkles to prove it. While I got a thorough kick out of what appears to have been the Wish version of AI photography, I’m absolutely positive–and strangely relieved–I’m still going to need a real-life photographer in the end. (Go, team human beings!)

beauty · humor · speed-posts

Beauty, Without All the Awful Chewing

February 4, 2024February 5, 2024 JennyLeave a comment

Yesterday my 20-year-old daughter wanted to show me some young woman’s go-to breakfast that is apparently breaking the Internet. It amounted to dipping chicken sausage and a variety of raw veggies into copious amounts of mustard and cottage cheese, which I can appreciate, but I was completely distracted by the ASMR technique used for the recording. I felt 99 percent sure that the popularity of said breakfast was gimmick-driven: a matter of chewing loudly for the ASMR set. ‘Cause, girl, people been dipping random foods in whatever-mom-left-in-the-fridge since at least the Kennedy Administration.

For those who’ve been hiding under a rock, ASMR stands for a variety of things:

Automatic Strangle-Me Response

Activate Someone’s Murder Reflex

All-Senses-Molested Reaction

Another Stupid Munching Replay

Assess Someone’s Monotony Resistance

Anti-Soothing Mastication Recording

Officially speaking, though, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, referring to the phenonomenon of certain sounds making a brain tingle with something approaching foreplay. I’m definitely not the best person to break down the natural mechanisms by which this phenomenon works, but I do nominate myself to explain it’s been hijacked on social media by breathy people, teething hard foods and/or employing long, fake fingernails to very loudly unbox things that seem to have been dry-aged since Jesus and then wrapped in five hundred pounds of cellophane. Shorthand explanation is that it’s neuroscience around noise, weaponized for fetish and social media.

Before you pull a hamstring running to the comments to remind me of the name of this viral breakfast sensation, rest assured, I forgot it by choice and not due to menopause memory. Sure, I’ll try dipping some chicken sausage and cukes into cottage cheese and mustard this week, but my mind wasn’t blown, and if I had a choice between listening to anyone loudly mouth food or being suspended by shaved dowels through my nipples like A Man Called Horse, you will definitely find me over here whittling wood pegs and prepping my breasts with ice packs.

As much as I love that my daughter shares anything at all with me, and as much as I know that some of my other favorite Gen Z’ers might appreciate that I’ve bothered watching the latest flash in the TikTok pan, I’ve simply hit my maximum lifetime limit on ASMR videos. Today. Officially. Enough.

Surprise: It is entirely possible to impress others with a makeup hack without the sound of acrylic fingernails being turned up to eleven. You can teach the world how to make a fine noodle salad without snapping spit-bubbles between your molars so loud, I want to reflexively jump behind the couch like a drive-by shooting scene from Colors.

As someone who has spent almost a decade now falling asleep to my husband’s beloved smooth sounds of Bob Ross stabbing a hard paintbrush into a Titanium White-drenched canvas on the Joy of Painting, I feel well within my rights to draw this line. After all, Bob was the accidental granddaddy of ASMR, and while I do find those sounds woo me into a state of Zen, I am certain in my heart Bob Himself would back me up on the idea that you can (and should) make and share something wonderful for the sake of that thing, not for going viral. You can do it, kids, and I swear there is no loud chewing required.