Welcome to me...

Well, my, my, my. Here I am blogging. I must say this is probably a better idea than driving my friends nuts with my endless beer-fueled emails.

I'm damned if I'm going to go through all of this profile stuff. I figure you'll probably learn much more than you actually want to know about me from what I write, although a small bit of background is probably necessary. So here it is.

I'm female, live in NYC (Manhattan, guys, not the boroughs), am an actress who temps as a legal secretary, and I'm not young. The rest you can figure out for yourselves. So there.

The blog is merely because I feel like ranting madly every now and then, and isn't it nice to have a place you can do that without fear of reprisals? I have found that when I begin to rant my friends tend to pour two or three more beers down my throat and hope to God I'll get blitzed enough to go home and burble to myself instead of them. This is curiously unsatisfying. One so wishes to feel that one's deep personal concerns are shared...my fingers got fucked up in there and shared came out as shredded. Hmmm.

My current point of irritation (trust me...I got a million of 'em) is this whole organic food thing. These locavores and mad proselytizers on the benefits of organic food are driving me into a distinct decline. It isn't that I disagree with them, you understand. The problem is (as with so much in this country) is the elitism of it.

It is absolutely and incontrovertibly true that organic food is better for you (of course, when I was a kid, back in 1789, we just called it food). Because I was born quite some time back, I remember my grandmother going to the kosher butcher in Chicago (see? I told you you'd learn about me by internal evidence), picking out a chicken, having it killed and bringing it home to be plucked and gutted and finally cooked. And it tasted WONDERFUL (and every now and then we found an unborn egg inside, which was EXTREMELY weird...they're kind of rubbery). Actually everything my grandmother made tasted wonderful, because she was a superb cook - all the women in my family are/were, including me. We seem to kind of absorb it, which is the way to learn to cook. (I am about to digress. I do this. Live with it. Digression is the spice of life.) Nobody whose parents do takeout or frozen and microwaved every night will ever learn to cook well, unless they REALLY hate the food at home - and since most people in this country live on this shit with the occasional McDonald's, they won't hate it. Bleccch.

Anyway, the point I was trying to get to is that organic food is wildly, insanely, expensive. Nobody except people who live in four bedrooms in Tribeca can afford it. So all the food articles and so forth drool madly over it, and insist that it'll be the saving of our country's health.

Well, I'm sorry, but it seems to me that what they seem to be talking about (as usual) is that it will be the saving of the health of the rich. No food that is available only to the upper class can save anything. Meanwhile, the farmers who would have been absolutely delighted to supply us with this wonderful stuff have all been forced out of existence and made (if they've been able to hang onto the farm at all) to make food for processing...which is unhealthy as hell.

No, I can't afford organics (except the organs I was born with...and frankly, the older you get, the more expensive THEY are to keep together). I do the best I can with the cheapest food from the cheapest supermarket I can find (currently the Associated on 14th and 8th, since Western Beef moved over to 10th Avenue and 16th - and now you know I live in the West Village).

I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that I object to any system that announces what is good and then puts it out of reach of the people who most desperately need the good. I am very firmly what I refer to as an ideal Socialist; I believe from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. We have people with the ability to grow and produce wonderful food. Let's make it possible to get it to those who need it.

Oh, and if you happen to be one of those who toss something into the microwave or order out for dinner? Listen up. Put two pots of water on to boil and grab a package of nice wide egg noodles. When that water boils, throw a package of say, frozen peas (I don't object to frozen vegetables because our lives are so random these days and unless you know you'll cook them in a day or so, fresh vegetables spoil fast) in one of the pots and the noodles in the other one. Then take some chicken breast halves. Dunk them in some beaten egg. Roll them around in some bread crumbs with a little Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper added. Melt a little butter and a little olive oil (adding oil to the butter prevents it from burning - you can use all oil if you want) in a frying pan and throw the chicken in. Cook it. There you are, guys. The entire process takes about 20-25 minutes and can be done while you annoy the kids about doing their homework "NOW, damn it!" And it takes exactly as much time as it would take to get the pizza delivered. Oh, and it tastes good. So there.

Love, Wendy