I (don't care about) girls who boycott Abercombie & Fitch

Flickr: Six Steps

Dear Mike Jeffries:


I feel sorry for you.  I really do. I feel as sorry as I can for anyone who owns an incredibly successful fashion company and who is sixty-one years old and says "dude" a lot.  I mean, you gave an interview to Salon in 2006 and now your words are totally blowing up over all of social media.  I mean, I'm much younger than you (although older than your target demographic group) and I don't even remember 2006.

So, this is the quote that has been getting you all the hate:

"Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”

Again, this was said in 2006. This is news?  That fashion companies favor thin people over fat people? That your company isn't warm and fuzzy? Abercrombie has had lawsuits dogging it for YEARS about its racist and exclusionary hiring policies. Its sizing chart isn't a secret.

And now there is this manufactured 'love your body' rage against Abercrombie? I'd be tempted to say that it was all orchestrated by Lane Bryant, but you know what?  Even Lane Bryant, just like Abercrombie, uses aspirational marketing--that's why 'plus size' models are size 6s and 8s, so women who are size 16 and 18 can aspire to look like them, just like theoretically size 2s and 4s can aspire to fill the 00 jeans at Abercrombie & Fitch.

I also feel sorry for you because, as a decidedly uncool and overweight teen back in the day, I totally get your awkwardness when talking with the press. Because being really cool is like Fight Club.  No one who is cool needs to say they are cool.  I knew the cool kids in my school: everyone did. The cheerleaders and the football players wearing the latest clothes from the Gap and Express (back in the late 80s and early 90s, those were cool brands). They had perfect fake tans and nails and their lip liner was never smeared.  They had nice cars and their families went on vacations together to the Caribbean. They were in honors classes but never seemed to study or worry about grades.  And although they could be incredibly bitchy behind people's backs, they rarely openly mocked or targeted the most vulnerable members of the student body.  They didn't need to, unlike the desperate, sweaty, socially aspiring types with funny noses and no-name brand jeans.   In other words, the uncool kids like you, Mike (can I call you Mike), who thought that making fun of fat people was 'in.' Because you were secretly afraid that if you didn't pick on the fat kids, you were 'next.'

All of the really cool thin kids knew that the right attitude to take to fat people was a slightly patronizing attitude of tolerance: of course, we support your right to be yourself, but our natural skinniness is so powerful your fatness cannot possibly touch us.   That is why, more so than anything YOU said, this response from a supposedly ordinary mom that went viral really annoyed me:

Dear Mr. Jeffries:
Thank you for clarifying the reason you do not carry sizes larger than a 10 at Abercrombie. Your customer is an "attractive, all-American kid with a great attitude and lots of friends." I am a mom of 3 daughters, ages 17, 13, and 10. They are all thin, attractive, all-American kids with great attitudes and lots of friends. They shop at Abercrombie. I believe they are your target audience.
Please find the enclosed clothing, purchased at our local Abercrombie/Abercrombie and Fitch stores. My thin, popular, cool kids will not need them anymore.
Not only will I not let my kids shop at Abercrombie again, I will not let them wear what they already have in their closets. Normally I donate our unwanted clothes, but in this case, I wouldn't want any unsuspecting thin, cool person to send the message that being exclusionary is OK.
Sincerely,
Andrea Neusner


'Kay, Andrea--could you say how cute and skinny your kids are ANY MORE?  In fact, I secretly think that you wrote this letter just to proclaim to the world how skinny and perfect your kids are--you know that is the ultimate standard of coolness, to perfectly embody the American ideal and then say that you do so without even trying very hard, that you can throw it all away like last year's jeans.

It's far harder and riskier to say that you hate Abercrombie & Fitch if you're too black, too poor, and too overweight to hope to embody that ideal.

And don't even get me started on the people handing out Abercrombie the homeless as a way of 'tainting' the brand image.  That's unbelievably offensive, to suggest that if a homeless person is seen wearing a particular item of clothing that it will 'hurt sales.' 

I hate to say it but the real problem isn't Abercrombie--it is the idea that somehow if we can find an item of clothing in a particular size that means we have to be that size. And that cuts both ways--truthfully, although I am certainly against self-flagellation, I can't agree with the idea that making larger clothing somehow makes the health consequences of America's obesity epidemic less troubling or the consequences of obesity less life-destroying.  It's just as bad as thinking that there is something wrong with you because you can't get into the smallest size of skinny jeans.  It's like deciding on what you should eat based upon the fact you just saw an advertisement for a brownie or a Lean Cuisine.

Every person had to decide what state of being is right for him or her (not just weight but activity and other aspects of physical health).  People can't rely upon companies trying to sell stuff to justify their weight or their diet.

So I get you, Mike, you're just a guy trying to sell stuff. Overpriced stuff in stinky mall stores, but if that is what works for you, go for it.  Just like L.L. Bean sells stuff to a target audience of slightly podgy, middle-aged outdoorsy and WASP-y baby boomers and Forever 21 targets teenage girls who watched Pretty Woman a few too many times (although weirdly enough, the company is owned by devout Christians).

So go ahead, continuing to promote images of skinny kids once this controversy blows over (as I am sure it will) and people go back to posting pictures of Grumpy Cat on Facebook.  Between you and me, we both know that the fat, rich chicks will just buy a men's XXL sweatshirt that says Abercrombie.  The main people excluded from Abercrombie are poor people, even if they are skinny. But then again, the obesity epidemic disproportionately affects the poor and non-white, so I guess that all jives with your company image, eh?

Well, also according to the 2006 article, your 'branding' has very little to do with chicks at all, fat or otherwise:

A&F aged the masculine ideal downward, celebrating young men in their teens and early 20s with smooth, gym-toned bodies and perfectly coifed hair... (A&F has had less of a cultural impact on women’s fashion. Its girls’ line is preppy, sexy and popular, but the company has mostly remained focused on pleasing the all-American college boy.)For many young men, to wear Abercrombie is to broadcast masculinity, athleticism and inclusion,,, (that may be why the brand is so popular among some gay men who want desperately to announce their non-effeminacy). But because A&F’s vision is so constructed and commodified (and because what A&F sells is not so much manhood but perennial boyhood), there is also something oddly emasculating about it.


I think this is kind of Salon magazine-speak for saying Abercrombie & Fitch uses gay soft porn to sell its clothing, but in a way that doesn't make the moms and dads who pay for the clothing uncomfortable, so perhaps there is some 'social good' in your company's image, however unintentional...

But for me, the ultimate takeaway is that regardless of what your boycotters say, the larger problem won't go away, that people expect fashion companies to define themselves and their bodies rather than the other way around. 

But I guess that is what 'fashion' is--letting society rather than your internal voice tell you what is correct?

Sincerely,

The least coolest girl in high school

Mom versus food

Flickr: lePhotography

My first food memory--and one of my first memories, period--is of my mother feeding me scrambled eggs from a china bowl that was illustrated with pictures of nursery rhymes on the bottom, designed to encourage kids to clean their plates. I remember consuming the eggs passively, willingly and also how my mother would say, many years afterward "you always loved eggs when you were a baby," when I would eat buttered toast and bacon, but refuse eggs.

She said I was picky.  She'd serve me pasta with butter, which I said was yucky, then she'd put some of the red sauce on it that I refused before and I'd say I wanted it with butter. I really just hated pasta and I'm a grown-up now so I don't eat it.

Some of the things my mother served me seem really weird in retrospect. She made me creamed spinach for an after-school snack. When she made pancakes (always from a mix), she'd pour the whole bowl of batter into a big skillet and make a really big, thick, eggy pancake because it was too much trouble to make small pancakes. With butter in the center (always real butter) and pancake syrup (which we had no idea was not real maple syrup), I'd eat it but once I had those skinny, fluffy pancakes at McDonald's I was ruined for my mom's uni-pancake.  Ditto with eating her hot dogs and hamburgers once I ate them at the Windmill (a local gourmet food joint in Jersey).

My mom claimed to not care about food, and truthfully, it did kind of show in her cooking.  She'd throw a piece of meat under the broiler with salt (or garlic salt, depending on her mood); teriyaki  or paprika on chicken breasts. The foods she was good at cooking were things that most 'real' cooks can't cook because they over-think them.  For example, meatloaf--my mother would slather in Italian breadcrumbs, ketchup, garlic salt, egg, ample lashings of Worcestershire sauce and the results would be fantastic.  Good cooks say their meatloaf is nothing special because they try to put fancy cheeses and herbs and such in them.  My mother would throw together Russian dressing with mayo and ketchup, toss it with spinach leaves, tomato, and leftover grilled steak...I liked steak salad better than regular steak, of which I was always a pretty unenthusiastic consumer.

My mother hated the way I ate. And told me so. Again and again. As I kid, I mainlined birthday cake icing, M&Ms, and sugary Chicken McNugget sauce and fries they were going out of style. When I dieted, I counted calories and I subsided on Lean Cuisine pizza and low fat ice cream while she begged me to eat meat and vegetables.   I never lost a single pound eating that crap.  Then I went vegetarian and loved Chinese food; the only foods she was openly passionate about were steak and pizza.

However, even when she opposed what I ate, she always provided it for me. 

She said that I ate the way I did out of rebellion against her abstemiousness, and oddly enough, after her death, I find that I do feel much better when I eat more like my mother--not shying away from a little bit of fat, eggs, or even red meat and avoiding sugar--but plenty of green vegetables. Some of her obsessions--like drinking a big glass of orange juice every morning, her fear of spicy food, and her belief in the powers of Special K cereal and rye bread--I haven't adopted. She hated whole wheat and white bread, so maybe she was a bit ahead of her time food-wise that way as well. 

I used to be afraid I'd become my mother, but now I realize that is impossible for a childless person.

Anyway, my mother wasn't a stereotype--she cared too much about health to be one of those 'convenience food' moms, despite her hatred of cooking, and although she liked to be thin (and I like to be thin as well, so I can't complain about that) she was never one of those crazy 'diet moms' who encouraged her kid to live on Tic Tacs and Diet Coke (again, the hatred of processed food).

My mother doesn't have a 'food legacy' of any sort--no historic cookie recipe, no famed celebration meal--although after all of those years of fighting I guess we did have the same goal: for my body to be healthy.  And really, other than your mother and yourself, who cares about that? 

Yoga: Raw and uncooked

Flickr: Indiana Public Media

People in my yoga classes sometimes talk about 'going raw.'  I never met a person who aspired to rawdom before I did yoga, but many years before I walked into a yoga class, I remember reading this article on raw food in the New York Times and this one paragraph always stood out in my mind:

"Although he does a two-hour ashtanga yoga workout each morning, he subsists on about 800 calories a day, which most nutritionists would consider starvation level. (The recommended daily allowance for an active adult male is 2,900 calories.) Raw-foodists claim, however, that uncooked calories metabolize more efficiently -- although there is no evidence for this. When I suggest that vegans I've met often look sickly, he shrugs. ''What we perceive as healthy may to a certain extent be socially determined,'' he says. ''They may have been very healthy and just looked weird to you.''

 Now, I don't mean to go all Hungry Girl, but my immediate reaction was: 800 calories a day while working out for two hours a day?  And he's a dude maintaining his weight, even a very low weight?

Of course, when I started doing yoga, I began to meet more raw people. Well, I guess we are all raw, except for maybe people who tan an awful lot.

Now I like a good sun salutation every now and then, but I have no desire to try to get most of my nutrition from the heat of the sun through photosynthesis.

I still recall one guy who had just come back from some sort of yoga conference gushing about how he had practiced with a particular teacher and she was "73 percent raw, except for dark chocolate and the occasional glass of red wine," versus another of his friends who was about "57 percent raw."  Kind of like the crappy juice boxes I begged my mom to buy me were 70 percent fruit juice or whatever.  I never really drank those Capri Suns, though, I just liked to squirt them at things.

When the guy mentioned that several of the 'pure raw' foodists he met struggled with their weight, I grew even less enthusiastic about a way of eating that seemed designed to bring your energy levels and metabolism into a state of sluggish torpor. True, I know some raw foodies who are quite thin (and often have a pile of other self-imposed health taboos such as dairy/wheat/soy and of course meat). But whenever I eat too much raw food (living off of raw nuts and veggies, usually because of a lack of time to prepare anything elaborate), I feel draggy rather than 'glowing and full of energy' like you're supposed to feel.

Plus, being able to cook and eat meat, according to scientists, is why our brains got so big, in  evolutionary terms.  Of course, me being me, I tried to point this out in my argument with Yoga Man, when he insisted that "raw was how people ate in a state of nature" but he pooh-poohed my objections, strapped on a loincloth and bounded into his truck (which had a bumper sticker in Sanskrit on the back) before I could bring up Prometheus and stuff like that.

I love yoga, and am grateful every day for how it has transformed my life, but the extreme 'anti-consumption' side of it has always disturbed me.  There is intense hostility to, well--food--in some quarters because food is consumption and consumption is bad. Yoga people are supposed to be nonjudgmental, but if you subscribe to any yoga Facebook feed or read yoga blogs, you know that  there is plenty of judgment going on about how people eat.

The only way not to be judged it seems is to eat foodlike substances that are not like real, dirty, bloody nasty food itself: juice and raw protein bars from approved companies with little halos on the wrapper. The possible cooked exception is rice and beans from a very expensive vegan restaurant. It seems so primitive--like ancient peoples thought that eating a bull's heart would make you strong, some yogis think if you eat something raw, you are like freebasing the sun's energy or something.

The uncomfortable thing that no one wishes to acknowledge is that even if you are eating raw those organic veggie packed smoothies require quite a bit of tilling of farmland and you are causing some sort of 'destruction' of some kind. To say nothing of all the packaging. Of course, there is also a very positive element in yoga which suggests that some destruction and consumption is necessary for growth but that can be drowned out by the guilt of well, consuming when it comes to food.

So I guess for some people, the solution is to eat next to nothing and living off the heat of the sun as a source of infinitely renewable energy.

There has always been something odd about calling yourself anything, according to yogic terms.  Isn't the whole point of yoga to listen to your body and to do what seems to serve the moment?  It's hard to believe that an 800 calorie raw diet will serve a seventeen-year-old athlete any more than a fancy 2,000 calorie restaurant meal is really good for a sedentary office worker. Or even me, who feels much better eating some cooked salmon and broccoli rather than buying some dusty box of raw health food cereal with lots of health claims on the back. Who knows how you will need to eat from one day to the next if you really listen to your body?

Boston: A love letter

I'm not a drinker, but every Cambridge grad student hung out at Grendel's den. Photo by abbyladybug.

I lived in Boston for two years, from the ages of 21 to 23. I guess you could say I spent my Girls years in Boston, only instead of trying to sponge money from my fabulously wealthy parents and having unprotected sex with strangers, I went to graduate school and spent a lot of time in libraries and quirky bookstores, performed briefly with a bargain basement improv comedy troupe, and listened to classical music, show tunes, and Irish folk songs at Tower Records, which I passed through every day on my way home from classes. Some days I would sit in the drama library and watch BBC Shakespeare and fantasize about moving to England.  There is a reason they didn't make a television series about my life, I guess.

Boston was very good for me and it was exactly what I needed at the time.  I was unhappy, of course, because all graduate students are unhappy and all young twentysomethings are ungrateful about their opportunities. I missed out on a lot of things during those years, feeling sorry for myself, but Boston took care of me.  Whenever I felt blue, I could wander around the quaint brick buildings of Harvard or meander up to Kendall Square to gawk at the pristine, space station-like beauty of MIT.  I loved the student-friendly prices at many of the cafes. I loved going shopping at Filene's Basement. I loved the user-friendly T (underground/subway system).  I loved the fact that I could wear crappy boots and jeans and no one looked at me funny, like they did in Manhattan.  I looked like a morose graduate student, and for all of my angst, I did feel like I belonged somewhere.  I didn't like Good Will Hunting that much but I loved that line in the film, something to the effect: "Let's go to Harvard Yaad and beat up on some smaat kids."  Even though I wasn't so dumb that I thought my Harvard Divinity School degree made me smart.

There is something about being in Boston--I don't know if it is the cobblestone streets that are all one-way and are designed to confuse drivers rather than lead them to their destination or the many pristine, austere white churches--that makes me feel as if I am connected to history, in a way that I've never felt in another American city.

I know that people who live in New Jersey or New York are supposed to hate Boston: its stubborn lack of fashion (I admit I rather like the fact that I don't see women in flip-flops in the winter, trying to air their freshly manicured toenails on the streets, carrying bags that cost as much as I make in a year like I do in New York); its stubborn Irishness (I'm part Irish, so what do you want); and the Red Sox (I came late to baseball fandom, and without great sports rivalries, what's the point).  It doesn't have Broadway, but it does have lots of nice little theaters and the American Repertory Theater and I'm more of a classic drama kind of girl.

I am certainly not a New Englander, but like the many students at the nine bazillion schools in the area, it was my home.  It is, at least in part, a student's city, which made it feel welcoming to me, and why the recent attacks feel so bruising to read about.  Another great Boston joke:

Student comes to the 'Seven items or less' aisle of the grocery store with fifteen items.  Clerk says: "What?  Do you come from MIT and can't read, or Harvard and can't add?"

Let me tell you--if you haven't lived there, you have no idea how true this is...

I think the comparisons of the Boston Marathon bombings to 9/11 are rather pointless--if you're the person maimed, or your loved one is dead, than it doesn't really matter what the eventual death total was.  Unlike 9/11, instead of the cinematic glory of a plane, it seems like the humble instrument of a pressure cooker was used to construct the crude devices.  There is a ghoul in me that wonders: will this help or hurt sales of pressure cookers and what does Google say about people searching for pressure cooker recipes?

Instead of ordinary people going to work on an ordinary day, people were coming back on the very special Boston holiday of Patriot's Day, either flushed with a recent Red Sox win, or running in an elite marathon that requires all runners to have completed a marathon below a specific time.  There is a big difference between being a runner, even a marathoner, and being a Boston Qualifying (BQ) marathon runner. This should have been a glorious day for so many people.

I didn't eat particularly well in Boston. I reveled in the greasy pizza at Pinocchio's and although the bagels were kinda crappy, I mainly used the bread as a cream cheese delivery vehicle to eat Brugger's awesome spreads.  I lived on carbohydrates and coffee while studying.  I did run around the Charles back then, but my current body could easily 'lap' my older, out-of-shape self. I think I maybe ate one or two nectarines as fruit and veggies go, unless you could the strawberry jelly in doughnuts.

I'm glad I'm no longer a graduate student, living that life, but sometimes I miss Boston, and I miss it particularly, acutely now, all the more so because I know that something has likely changed irrevocably, and I am no longer there even to mourn it.

Macadamia nut cookies with chopped white chocolate

Every now and then, I'll have 'that conversation.'  This weekend, when I went to yoga, one of the women came in with a rock on her finger--literally a rock (well, okay, not literally, since  a diamond is a mineral)--and announced that at age twenty-six she was engaged to be married to a man with his own jewelery business.  Of course, as everyone oh-ed and ah-ed the question came up: "why aren't you married, Mary?  Don't you want kids?"

I tried to explain that by nature I am a loner, and don't like any activity that requires me to talk to people the first two hours of the morning, which are part of the job requirements of being a wife and mother.  You can imagine the reaction--now, the funny thing is, if I was gay/ a fifty-year-old woman having a child on her own through artificial insemination/ had survived a horrific abusive relationship with a guy that I was now 'healing' from--then they would totally understand the fact I was not married.  I've found that just not finding marriage appealing is a transgressive opinion for a straight woman of a certain age.

When I was still caring for my mother, one of my aunts would come over quite often, and while she was very nice and well-meaning, she DID have the tendency to constantly, gently give her opinion on the things in my life that were wrong.  Like the fact that I bought the wrong kind of yogurt and I didn't I know that a Pillsbury pie crust stuffed with Kraft cheese and frozen vegetables makes a nice, cheap meal? After my mother passed away, my aunt called me to suggest renting out the house, and I knew that one of the reasons for her 'suggestions' was that she regarded it as inconceivable that a single woman could live alone--perhaps even, at the bottom of her heart, didn't think that a single woman deserved to live alone, that it was somehow wrong.

I know she was worried about me, which was very sweet, but anyone who really knows me would be far more worried for my sanity if I was living in an apartment, like I did in the UK, where EVERY NIGHT the guy in the flat beneath me would set off the smoke alarm for the ENTIRE BUILDING frying bangers and mash.  My aunt would also call me before 8am 'just to talk' (i.e., check up on me to make sure I am still alive) saying "I know you get up early," which I do, but to do things, not chat.  Fortunately, my cousin now has two small children so my aunt has other things to occupy her attention and doesn't do that anymore and I can stop feeling guilty.

I guess I still feel guilty, because I feel I am being judgmental about my aunt.  How could she think differently, given her generation, and the fact that her entire existence has been defined by her family?
 
I guess there are some things around the house that are hard for me to do, and would be easier if I had someone else around (preferably a small toddler who enjoys pulling weeds for hours, which I hate) but I rationalize that if worse comes to worse, I can always hire someone to do what I can't do myself, and however expensive that may be, it is probably cheaper than getting married. I throw down some weed killer and look the other way, most days.

I often think of the women of indeterminate age in 19th century novels who called themselves 'Mrs.' but who had likely never married and used the screen of being a 'Missus' as a kind of protective explanation for the lack of a man in their lives.  There is an assumption that if you're not married and you're a woman that you're 'on the hunt' always searching, forever incomplete...I guess the negative male stereotype is that of the confirmed bachelor, eating take-out on the sofa with beer in the refrigerator.

The fact is, I like living alone and I am set in my ways.  I like people but I like them in their place, which is not in my house on a permanent basis, as far as I'm concerned.  And I'm okay with that.  I guess I am missing out on some things, not being married and having kids.  But then again, I've always felt that people who are married with children are missing out on some things that I can experience.

Just as I go my own way with so many things, I decided to 'go my own way' with these macadamia nut cookies. Now salted macadamia nuts is something that I can never get enough of (unlike prolonged social contact before 7am in the morning). Macadamia nut cookies are usually very buttery, but  I got the idea to try a version with dark brown sugar and cinnamon, for a more 'homey' flavor profile. I love cinnamon and white chocolate together (even though I wouldn't eat a bar of white chocolate by itself, I love it with salty nuts and savory flavors) but if you're really opposed to white chocolate, you could use chopped up Heath Bars or toffee bits.

Macadamia nut cookies with chopped white chocolate

Ingredients

--yields 30-26 cookies--

adapted freely from Kitchen Treaty

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 large, beaten eggs

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt

8 ounces coarsely-chopped 'good' white chocolate
6 ounces coarsely-chopped dry roasted, salted macadamia nuts

Directions

1. Cream butter and both sugars, add eggs
2. Sift dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, spices)
3. Incorporate dry and wet, add nuts and chocolate
4. Refrigerate batter overnight
5. Bake in a preheated 350F oven on two parchment-lined baking sheets for approximately 10 minutes, until the cookies begin to brown slightly at the edges
6.  Cool for 5-10 minutes on the baking sheets, remove to fully cool

Note: You can also use white chocolate chips, of course, but I like the appearance and texture of the chunks with the nuts and think the Ghirardelli 'bar' white chocolate tends to taste better than the chips, no matter what Cook's Illustrated says.

I'm still here!

Sorry for my lack of posting recently.  I am cooking (and eating) but mostly pretty basic chicken, salmon, Greek yogurt, nuts, and various assorted veggies I can prepare quickly. Things I have already posted on this blog.  I've taken a few new additional work projects on (to pay for said food) plus I've been trying to fit in my mid-life crisis hobbies.  Oh yeah, and I should clean up the house and my yard at some point.

I mention this, not because I want to do the obligatory "oooh, I am soo busy, can't post entry," but because this is a tiny milestone for me.  Five years ago--ten years ago for certain--having a busy, compressed schedule left me living on frozen TV dinners, frozen yogurt, and fat-free prepackaged chocolate muffins.  Heck, even when I wasn't busy I often I ate like that.

One of the nice things about learning how to cook is that when you are busy, making food isn't an *event.*   There is always a debate as to whether cooking is a craft or an art, but for the average person like myself I would say it is a 'habit'--a healthy habit. Like exercising every day and flossing.  I love flossing!

Flickr: Brent

I've had many unhealthy habits in my life, including morose brooding, self-pity, and wasting time feeling sorry for myself, as well as eating store-bought cake for dinner.  I guess I shouldn't give myself 'grown-up' points for roasting chicken thighs and broccoli when I'm busy.  But I do, anyway.   I now go shopping at a grocery store, rather than at Store 24, like I did in graduate school.

But not my shopping list, than heavens.  Original source here.

Roast lemon pepper chicken with ginger

I hate it when someone says: "there is something I have to tell you..." and then says they'll relate what they have to say...later...

Not only is it annoying, but the nature of my brain is such that it takes about five minutes for me to construct every possible doomsday scenario.   I really don't understand why I have never been able to write a crime or a horror novel, because as soon as someone says "there is something I have to tell you," I automatically fill in the words: HORRIBLE AND NOT GOOD THING! IMPENDING DEATH! NEVER SPEAKING TO ME AGAIN!

For example, when I was trying to 'make it' as an actress, I stumbled into a three-week intensive acting training program  that I thought would kick start my acting career.  Instead, it was run by a woman who had 'been through' EST during the early 1980s, and while she had a great acting pedigree (well, she was British, which in my eyes automatically made her a great actress), the program, let's say, was not my cup of Earl Grey.  The first day I had to prepare a monologue and present it to a small group of my peers (even when  was acting, I was notoriously atrocious in audition-type settings) and the acting teacher (who had also been through EST) immediately asked me: "have you ever tried to make yourself attractive?" The critique of my performance mainly focused on the fact that I was wearing no makeup. (At the time, I was like 'dude, I am not wearing makeup because it is REALLY FUCKING EARLY IN THE MORNING and I am a student, which means my brain doesn't start working until after my second class and second cup of coffee.')

Needless to say, although the program did have some good teachers, it was 'not for me,' and although I persisted with acting for several years subsequently, I discovered that being in a profession where people with tremendous power to affect my livelihood could hurl personal insults at my face and disguise them as 'constructive criticism about art' was not for me. 

The only good thing about it all was that I made a friend.  Unlike me, he was a very talented actor and the fact that he also didn't embrace the techniques of the program made me feel better about not liking it, and not totally attributing my deficiencies to my admitted sucky-ness as a performer.  We bonded over humor.

However, one morning he DID say to me: "I have something to tell you...I'll tell you later." And for good measure. "You're not going to like it."

My mind went into overdrive, immediately fueled by the lack of sleep and self-hatred fostered by the program.  The thing is, I knew he was gay already.  And I was sure he knew that I knew that he was gay.  But other than that I couldn't think of any secrets he might have--the intensity of his expression was such that I felt like he was coming 'out' to me, even though he was 'out.'  It didn't make sense.

I died several deaths within, not on stage, but in my soul, until that evening.

"Mary...." Pause.  Sigh.  "The thing you have to know about me is...I got 900 on my SATs."
I stared at him.
"What?"
"Well, you seem so...smart...." (he probably meant over-intellectual and stuffy, but he said smart).  "I was afraid that you would find out.  The only reason I got into Bennington was because of my audition and my recommendation from acting teachers."
"Do I seem like the type of person who would care about someone's SATs?  For the record, mine weren't that great."  I remember being incredibly annoyed, thinking he had some horrible terminal illness all day, not simply an aversion to taking standardized tests.

Anyway, it is a life lesson that quite often what we think is awful is meaningless to someone else, and the ethical compromises we have taken for granted in our life can be shocking in the eyes of another.

My big revelation, blog readers, is that I haven't been baking as much recently.  When I started this blog, I had a vision of becoming some sort of an awesome amateur pastry chef.  However, I've experienced many changes in the past two years. I've gotten much more into physical fitness, specifically running, riding, and yoga.  Ever since going back to eating meat and getting more serious about being physically active, I seem to have lost my taste for sweets, and I also don't have as much time to bake every weekend.

So, you'll still see some baking recipes on the blog, but not as many as before, or as often.  I'm sure if I ran less and 'forced' myself to eat more sugar I could get my sweet tooth back I would, but learning how to cook was always about having a healthier relationship with food, and restoring it to its rightful position in my life.  Which I think I have.  A victory of sorts.  One which I am more proud of than any SAT score.

You'll be seeing more savory, healthy, and five ingredients-or-less type food in the near future.

Like this chicken.

I made this yesterday.  A very simple roast chicken once again, but enlivened by ground ginger and Meyer lemons, ingredients often used in baking, but which can be a great addition to savory dishes.  I used the Thomas Keller method of roasting the chicken.  So quick, it is practically fast food.

 Roast lemon pepper chicken with ginger

Ingredients

1 SMALL organic, free-range chicken (2-3 pounds is ideal, and offers a much better skin-to-meat ratio, as well as quicker cooking)

1 Meyer lemon
salt and pepper to taste
1-2 teaspoons of ginger

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450F.  Line the bottom of a roasting pan with a rack with foil.
2.  Pat chicken dry with paper towels; do not rinse. Squeeze juice of the Meyer lemon over the chicken, into the cavity.  Stuff lemon into the cavity of the chicken. 
3. Season with salt, pepper, and ginger.
4.  Roast until meat thermometer reads at least 165F, approximately 1 hour.
5. Let rest for 10-15 minutes before carving.  Remove lemon before serving.