‘WTF?’ Archives

On the bright side, hey – free shipping!

Last week, I got an email from Old Orchard Juice, introducing their newest juice, a Montmorency tart cherry juice they’re calling Very Cherre.

This 100% cherry juice has almost double the antioxidants of 100% pomegranate juice, and oddly enough, about 3mg of natural melatonin (which makes me wonder if that wouldn’t just make you nod off at your desk but whatever).

Well, so far, so good. I mean, who doesn’t love cherries and antioxidants are good, right?

Shall we buy some?

(more…)

Category WTF? |

R.I.P. Tomato Plant, May 2009 – August 2009.

Remember the lovely wee seedling I brought home and how I fussed over it? And how it turned into a great big beautiful plant?

But then… the blossom end rot came.

Now this:

And so now, I say this with all due sincerity…

UP YOURS, YOU STUPID PIECE OF CRAP PLANT. I’D COME OUT THERE AND KICK YOUR DEAD ASS IF I WASN’T ALREADY AFRAID OF FALLING OFF THE FRIGGING FIRE ESCAPE AS IT IS.

I honestly have no idea what went wrong, but I can only assume something, somehow, went horribly wrong when I added eggshells to the soil to try and stave off further blossom end rot — which totally did not work, because that reddening tomato there STILL has a rotten end. (Oh, and the bean plant? Still merrily chugging along, putting out new blossoms and yielding a handful of beans here and there, happy as can be.)

So. What the hell happened?

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Category Urban Gardening, WTF? |

What the hell happened?

Runty, stunted bean plant:

Compared to massively huge with no signs of slowing down tomato plant:

And! It’s hard to tell in these photos, but the bean plant is already starting to flower. Am I right in guessing it’s not going to get much bigger now? These two plants got identical growing conditions. In fact, I assumed quite the opposite would happen here — I’d have a huge bean plant and maybe a few tomatoes — because it’s rather shady here.

So, what the hell happened?

Tags: plants, tomatoes beans
Category Urban Gardening, WTF? |

Never believe food bloggers are all successful in the kitchen…

I think I jinxed myself with that last post about the fantastic black beans. Since then, I’ve had a week of… not disasters, per se, but a string of foods that were eh at best.

Case #1: the blandest salsa ever

Based on this recipe from Epicurious, I added extra cilantro and some chili-garlic paste, and it was okay… for about 3 minutes. Most salsas gets better when the flavors can meld together for an hour or two or even longer, right? Ugh, not this one. Almost immediately, the cucumber started leeching out water and within 30 minutes, it was watered down to completely blandness. There’s a “this is what I get for following a recipe from Mariah Carey’s chef” joke to be made in here somewhere, but this stuff really isn’t even worth the effort.

Case #2: if there’s no basil, is it really pesto?

Basically pesto made with spinach instead of basil leaveszzzzzzz… whoa, hey, what happened? Oh, that’s right. I was talking about the most boring pesto ever. Without the spicy-anisey-clovey goodness that is basil, the pesto was a snore. A garlicky snore.

Case #3: coffee first THEN cooking

Friday afternoon, I was just completely knackered. While my husband went out to get me an iced coffee that would hopefully revive me for the afternoon, I decided to make a couscous salad, like the one pictured above… except my tired brain was so addled, I cooked at least twice as much couscous as I really needed, and in an effort to balance out all the other components, I ended up with EIGHT POUNDS OF SALAD. Seriously. The bowl weighed more than an average newborn. Even if it was the best salad ever (which, in case you didn’t pick up on the pattern by now, it assuredly was not), there was no way we would ever finish that much food.

So… yeah. Send some good cooking mojo my way, guys, because I could really use it.

Category WTF? |

Wow. Grandma’s kind of a bitch, huh?

There’s a food-wine-travel piece by Florence Fabricant in today’s NYTimes about her recent trip with her two granddaughters to Disney World.

Now, I am not especially a Disney enthusiast. In fact, the last time I went (long before I had a kid), I had to be physically removed from what was then The Monsanto Hall of GMO Awesomeness, dragged away by my husband as I shouted that it was lies, all lies!

Still, this Fabricant piece really takes the mouse ears. The premise of the piece seems to be that Fabricant, as the benevolent self-sacrificing grandparent, agrees to take two young granddaughters to Disney World. And, aside from her disdain at finding children in the swimming pool, it turns out Disney World isn’t the complete sucking hell-hole of despair she thought it would be! You can get thousand-dollar-bottles of wine! And prix fixe dinners for $185!

But then again, what did I really expect from the grandmother of children who “know what capers are and who eat foie gras” — while the rest of us plebes need to “show children that there is more to dinner than chicken fingers and hot dogs.”

Well, congratulations, Florence. You’ve now made Disney World less appealing than ever, knowing it’ll now be filled with assholes like you.

Category Not Gezellig!, WTF? |