Susan hates Facebook (exception FB Marketplace), there's no convincing her that anyone's ever said anything worthwhile on FB. She likes Instagram because it's pictures and all the words are easily ignored. She regularly weeds out Instagram accounts for which she's lost enthusiasm. It's not that she stopped liking them, our Susan only has so much attention to spare and has to draw the line. 

Often folks will be charming in their posts but allow politics to peek out in their stories, probably because stories disappear after 24 hours. Susan never cared if you liked a president or hated him, if you were one of the Star Belly Sneetches or the Plain Belly Sneetches, but then 2016 happened. Now if she sees a clip from Fox News on your Instagram that's it. You're out. Even if she likes you. She can't trust you and knows you'd turn her in to the nazi leadership just like Lisel's boyfriend in The Sound of Music. Plus, if you get your news from that cesspool of lies...don't make her say it. OK, you're stoopid.

Let's change the topic to today's anxiety baking; zucchini cake with orange glaze. If you want to feel good immediately, pound some cardamom and anise seeds with a mortar and pestle. You can make a cake with it if you want, although you don't have to, just smelling it is enough.

Oh, look at the time. See you tomorrow.

Susan has loved Rigatoni Bolognese for years. She even tried to make it herself the real way with red wine and letting it simmer on the stove for four hours. Susan personally finds it unnecessary to let anything cook on the stove for more than 40 minutes. And four hours? Didn't help. Another issue may be that Susan doesn't like to cook with red wine. She loves Cabernet, but not in her food.

Susan tried a few more times before giving up. It never tasted the way it was supposed to. She assumed the universe was keeping the secrets of the delicious Italian Bolognese out of her Irish-Polish outsider's grasp.

Earlier this week Susan brought together her work pals & her friend who talks to dead people for a spiritualist session. She did not accompany them opting to meet up afterward to find out how things went. Once all together, they talked, drank, ate, and some tried to pick up the check (Disclaimer: not Susan).

Susan ordered an appetizer version of the Pappardelle Bolognese and marvelled at the creamy wonderfulness, with a hint of fennel, that clung to the delicate wide noodles.

Jesus. She had to figure out how to make this sh*t!

Susan ate half the dish & took the other half home to scrutinize, and finish for lunch.

Two days later, she heated up the remaining portion of her obsession, searched for clues in the sauce, and wondered why it was so different from the versions she's made at home. When she was done she sat at her desk messing around on the computer. Scrolling through Instagram she saw something on @nytfood and read the accompanying recipe for White Bolognese.

WHITE Bolognese?
Gasp!
No tomatoes and no red wine!

She was back in business with the universe.

Susan was invited to her pal Sharon's house for homemade broccoli cheese soup in bread bowls which Susan regards as the perfect coupling of two marvelous things to eat.

After dinner Susan made Hasselback baked apples, also very well received and a total cinch.

Day six is in the books.

Susan's never met a pasta salad that she really liked. It should be something that's easy to like; macaroni, chopped up stuff and sauce, but the proper combination has always been elusive.

Cousin Caroline hosted a little get together at her house a few weeks ago and when Susan saw the pasta salad she thought ho-hum but dumped some on a plate and ate it anyway.
Strangely, she liked it.
When Susan replicated it at home fifty percent of her kids liked it too. She can further report that leaving it in the fridge for almost a week had no ill effect on either the flavor or consistency.

For day four Susan is presenting COUSIN CAROLINE'S PESTO PASTA SALAD:

6 ounces jarred pesto + 1 cup mayo whisked together
pasta of your choosing
14 ounces drained & quartered artichoke hearts, in water or marinated, whatever
8 or 9 sundried tomatoes, chopped
1 cup frozen peas, not frozen is also an option
sliced black olives
chicken, cubed or shredded

Dance this mess around then buon appetito.

Susan spent a lovely Saturday trapped in her house.
In an effort to reduce their expenses she and the husband have been a one car family for well over a year.
Even though it's been a successful experiment, it's been miserably inconvenient. Susan's husband is self employed (don't get her started on that) and the reliability of his schedule isn't guaranteed.
Judge Judy: he gets the car.

Susan spent part of the morning with her formerly absent brother in law. His absence was precipitated by a job offer eight hours away after two years of unemployment. When his job ceased to exist this spring he moved back home. He's kept himself occupied most recently by putting his mom on speakerphone and recreating her recipes. Yesterday he received the best news an unemployed brother in law could get; orientation for his new job starts Monday.
He left Susan a year's worth of Cooking Light magazines from which she tore out two quick dinner recipes, a breakfast, three appetizers, two soups, and a stuffing with fennel, sausage and caramelized apple. The magazines go next to the magazine recycling bin at Susan's library, one of her fave neighborhood stops.

In the afternoon Susan did some standard houseworky things and made pasta with anchovies, garlic, chilies and kale. She doesn't like capers although she'll try them every ten years or so just to make sure. She'll be leaving them out from now on.

During the week she made the most divine tomato sauce with onion and butter which required almost no effort. Really, you dump the ingredients in a pot & turn it off 45 minutes later. She had another dinner time hit with skillet lasagna when she replaced mushrooms with sausage. Susan never really paid attention to sausage until maybe the last two years, but the genie's outta the bottle now. She's also about ten pounds fatter.

Susan's Weekend Project

Susan is going to combine two of her fave things this weekend and make a Sexy Nigella Guinness cake! 
Nigella describes it as magnificent in its damp blackness.
  
It will haunt Susan's dreams till then.

Snow Days

Susan went to Acme Sweatshop on Friday prepared to sleep over. Luckily, the husband was able to get her out and they took an expanded commute home dodging fishtailing cars and snowy ditches. They made it all the way to the end of their block before getting stuck.

Susan shoveled snow till she was dizzy and nauseous. She isn't used to performing manual labor beyond lifting a heavy cast iron pot to the stove. She doesn't have the stamina or the lower back of a young woman any more. She trudged home and dispatched her son to help his father while she shoveled knee deep snow from the street to the driveway.
Eventually the car made it up the driveway and her family members into the house where they've been ever since because Susan's block has not yet been plowed.

Susan has been thoroughly enjoying her snowy weekend relaxing in her PJs, making chili, catching up on her twistedsusaning, taking naps, corresponding with friends, making carrot ginger soup & Moroccan whole chickpea hummus, reorganizing her bedroom closet and doing all manner of leisurely indoor things.

Unfortunately, being snowed in also resulted in no Sunday papers and having to beg a hand me down can of Folgers from Susan's non-coffee-drinking next door neighbor who was nice enough to personally deliver the stuff in the height of the blizzard.  The Folgers can reads 'Wake Up To Rich, Pure Taste', they must be referring to any other coffee in the world because the brown water their grinds produce is foul and putrid.

Enjoy your week, guys!

One of tomorrow's projects is to make ginger syrup for a sparkling ginger pineapple punch. The punch notwithstanding, how could ginger syrup not be wonderful?

For ginger syrup

• 1.5 cups water
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup thinly sliced unpeeled fresh ginger (1/4 lb; from two 5-inch-long pieces)

Bring water, sugar, and ginger to a boil in a 1- to 1.5 quart saucepan, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes, then remove from heat and steep, uncovered, 15 minutes. Pour syrup through a sieve into a bowl, discarding ginger. Chill, covered, until cold, about 2 hours.

Susan has a tourniquet on her index finger. She cut herself removing an avocado pit in order to make avocado ice cream which was a recipe she found too ridiculous not to try. It called for 1/3 cup of tequila which she didn't think was appropriate for the demographic in her house, but she had no issue including two tablespoons of ginger liqueur which she regretted not increasing to three.

The morning started off with great excitement when Susan scored a 1930's typewriter on eBay for the daughter's birthday. Then she had a cup of coffee and read a number of juicy stories in her fave paper, the Post.
Go, Kerry Kennedy!
Then she cleared off her old, dead dog's grave and oversaw the son as he arranged a bunch of paving stones into a heart shape on top of it. Then she went inside and tried to chop off her finger.

Who wouldn't want this for their birthday?

Later on Susan was amused when the daughter pretended she didn't know how to pick up dog sh*t.

Susan came home with the most wonderful hand me down gift from the husband's daughter last week.

Susan had been admiring the impressively heavy workhorse on a shelf and the next thing she knew it was sailing through the air in a haze of fairy tale glitter right into the trunk of her car.

Susan put her f*cking awesome gift to use the morning after she got home by mixing together some softened cream cheese, cheddar cheese, bacon, cilantro, cumin, chipotle & lime, forming it into a ball then rolling it in roasted nuts and more bacon.

Heaven, thy name be cheese ball.

Susan began her day baking beer bread with a bottle of Guinness, but she's still not sure if she liked eating bread that tasted like stout. Later this week she'll throw some caraway seeds & raisins into it and see if anyone mistakes it for Irish soda bread.

She'll also make the Guinness brownies requested by her little sister. Susan's got no idea what they'll taste like, in her mind they could go either way. But, on the slim chance they're worth making she'll hip you to the recipe.

Can you wait?

Susan and her daughter made these donut holes yesterday for their dinner guests. Susan ate them till she was sick and now she can't button her pants. Make them yourself if you dare.

Susan and her daughter
made ice cream in a plastic bag
and it tasted like ice cream.

Susan made chicken salad from the dark meat no one ate at dinner. To minimize how unappealing all dark meat chicken salad is she threw in a bunch of nonsense like Craisins, walnuts and cilantro. As she was adding orange zest, she accidentally zested her knuckle.

This was to be tomorrow's lunch. She wanted to eat it with crackers, but she had none. Susan had been wanting to make crackers since she watched Mark Bittman make them, so she made some.

On their way out of the oven she dropped a pan and the crackers hit the floor. Susan slid them back into place and went to pick the pan up with her bare hand. Susan watched two of her fingers blister immediately; big puffy white blisters that took almost thirty seconds to send the message to her brain that OW, THEY HURT.

She reflexively reached for the small stash of Vicodin left over from her dental surgery. Reflexively? Immediately and without thinking she reached for the Vicodin and ate one, then she removed the dog hair from her crackers. It took another half hour for that loopy, boozy sensation to arrive but by that time she was in bed watching Celebrity Rehab.

Wild Bill's been drinking the Irish cream, in fact, it's going home with him on Tuesday because Susan finds it so completely disgusting that she can't even stand to have it in the house. Currently it's outside in the snow.

Champagne and Chambord have made Susan's Christmas weekend happy.

Starting Monday she's going to cut out the goodies and sugar and a little bit of the drinking.
Next Monday.

Susan's got so many cookies in her house that her kitchen is like a bloody mine field. She added a new biscotti to her baking repertoire and has been tapping the big tin of rainbow cookies that her little sister made.
Rainbow cookies = almond paste.

Before the snow started making the roads really hairy, Susan, her son and Wild Bill went to the BIG, new, organized, clean thrift store. Susan's son went under protest but managed to fight through his lack of enthusiasm and find stuff for his mother to buy him. Wild Bill scored another twenty pounds of books about WWII and Abraham Lincoln as well as some cold weather gear. After 45 minutes Susan started to sneeze so they left.

Susan has been poised over her keyboard for the last eight days, uninspired.

During that time she attended Acme Sweatshop's swanky holiday party, sat in an auditorium filled with mom jeans to watch her daughter play clarinet, made a fantastic smoked oyster and shrimp gumbo and read through three weeks of saved Style sections.

She also received a wonderful musical present from Patti, went Xmas shopping with her little sister, and forgot to bring her lunch to work a bunch of times.

Here's Susan's Xmas wish list, already provided to the husband;
Wish #1
Wish #2.

Susan's family was enjoying cranberry cheesecake after dinner when Susan's father asked, Did I ever tell you my favorite cranberry story?

Susan didn't have a favorite cranberry story of her own so she was intrigued.

Many years ago, back before Susan's mom stopped letting Susan's dad do anything fun, he used to fly. There was a private airfield in Cape Cod that ended in a cranberry bog. If he landed when the field was flooded he'd have to wear his rubbers.

That's not really a story, Pop.

Yes, it is.

No, it's more like a description.

Okay.

Instead of having the substantive sex talk with her son Susan made Jessica's pumpkin lasagna. Everyone liked it except Susan's niece, who's a pill about food anyway. Some went for seconds although Susan and her little sister strategized about adding a layer of vegetables or sausage next time.
After dinner Susan reorganized her closet. She needed more space so she took over half of her husband's closet, which she also reorganized. They aren't big closets so it didn't take her very long. She hemmed a few pairs of pants and ironed about five shirts in between loads of laundry. She can't iron too many shirts at one time because they'll get squished in the closet. She tries to arrange her ironed shirts so that they don't touch each other although that's not always practical. Susan went to bed knowing that she was totally prepared to get dressed for any occassion, except something fancy,
and slept soundly.

Did Susan ever give you her recipe for NaBloPoMo Black Bean Brownies?
No? Well, today's your lucky Day Two.

All you need is 1 box BROWNIE MIX and 1 can BLACK BEANS.

Open the can of black beans, drain & rinse the beans. Drain and rinse the can.

Put the beans back into the can, fill the remaining space in the can with water.

Combine the contents of the can with brownie mix & bake as directed on the box.

Susan likes to take an immersion blender & really mess up the beans & the water before she adds it to the dry ingredients, but that's completely optional.

Susan just made these for her Ohio road trip and everyone in the car ate them even though they knew what they were made of.

OMG, did anyone catch this horrible thing that Dawn made the other day?