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The Cuisine of Comfort
As the nights turn brisk and the wind more penetrating, the home cooking has hunkered down with heavy carbohydrates. The menu around the Skelton dinner table this week reads like a heavyweight fighter’s dietary training schedule. We shield ourselves from cold temperatures with fortresses built from blocks of cheese and mortar made from starch.

The beginning of the week saw a return to midwestern roots and family values as I prepared a traditional tuna hot dish garnished with crushed potato chips for extra love. Tuesday was a ten hour slow cooked chili with mountains of Tillamook cheddar and double dollops of sour cream. Wednesday night, the chili returned for round two, complimented by a sun dried tomato dip that caused such a sever food coma that I actually drooled on one of the cats while watching the season finale of America’s Next Top Model.

Tonight I will show the kitchen (and my stomach) no mercy as I prepare a scalloped potato recipe that will border on gastronomic lunacy.

If you’ve got a staple comfort food recipe in your winter culinary arsenal (remember the Skeltons are pescatarians) I want to know about it. Send it to me and I’ll rate it on a scale from one to five, where ‘one’ is Iggy Pop and ‘five’ is John Candy.

Yuletide Technicolor Champions
I gave into neighborhood holiday peer-pressure last night and went out and bought some holiday lighting ‘flair’ to give the Ranch a more festive appeal. After this last weekend we were the only house on our side of the street that wasn’t representing some kind of holiday cheer. We were the one dark house – the lightening display scrooge of the community.

Lately we’ve been having some epic fog up here on the hill. The effect of the erie supernatural fog and the holiday lights combine to make a blurry translucent yuletide scene that’s more reminiscent of a Hollywood Christmas slasher movie then a Bing Cosby ‘White Christmas’. This is a new experience for someone who hails from the land of ice and snow.

To procure the lighting display, I had to brave a Target Store last night that was brimming with freakish masses of screaming little urchins. Every aisle was another gauntlet run through childhood discontentment. It was as if they were all in cahoots with another. Like they had organized a plan before hand with one little kid running around giving secret hand signals that indicated to the other kids specifically what level of tantrum they should throw and the sonic pitch that their screaming should attain. Exhausted parents were seen crumpled in the aisles crying softly to themselves. Others, with more energy, grabbed whatever shiny objects were nearest and attempted to hypnotize their baby with furiously spastic promenades. It was altogether surrealistic and borderline magical.

Looking for some good Christmas music to throw on the Hi-Fi? I highly recommend Christmas with the Rat Pack (Sammy Davis kills on this one), Esquivel’s Merry Xmas From the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and John Fahey’s Christmas Record.

The Kitten of Alcatraz
A patient darkness, filled with cold biting rain, has filled this mornings skies. It looks and feels more like midnight then it does early morning. Yesterday, the Portland weather personalities were prognosticating that significant amounts of snow would blanket our area but their forecasting rubric was a bit off and we didn’t see anything white upon the ground when we awoke. But the weather was ugly. It was a mix of icy rain and heavy wind gusts. To make matters worse, I completely lunched locking the front door at night and in the morning, when I pattered from the bed to the coffee making machine in the kitchen, I was shocked to see that the front door had been blown ajar sometime during the night. A quick head count revealed that one of the cats had seized the opportunity that the open door provided to do a little exploring. Crap.

Our cats are not outdoor cats, we keep them locked inside the safety our own personal al(cat)raz – safe from the wheels of cars, the tendencies of children and the hunger of dogs. However, our cats were born in a barn. Hence, I believe, they gravitate to the curiosities of the wilderness whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Of all the days for a kitten escape…yesterday was not a good one. We spent a good half-hour combing the Alfred Street neighborhood looking for our little runaway to no avail. The truth was she could have been anywhere. But the weather was so bad outside that we thought she wouldn’t have wanted to go very far. During our search the trash men came through our block and emptied all the vessels of their purchase. Lightened of their loads all the cans at the top of the hill quickly blew over and began rolling down the street towards our house. Everything was just too weird outside.

We retreated to the house, locked the other cat away in the downstairs and then opened up the garage and the rest of the house hoping that the delinquent cat would get fed up with the nasty weather and return to the warmth of its proper home. Sure enough, ten minutes later, a soggy and vocal cat ended its truancy when it came in through the garage. Crisis averted. It did however take the remainder of the day for me to get over the heavy guilt of allowing for this to happen.

In other news: I’ve had the ‘Greasy, Grimy, Gopher Guts’ song stuck in my head all morning. It is slowely. driving. me. INSANE.

Black Friday
Are you digging this hip new modern holiday tradition called ‘Black Friday‘ as much as I am? A quick scan of Wikipedia shows that the term Black Friday in other distant lands marks either; ‘a riot in Glasgow stemming from industrial unrest’, ‘the day on which British Dockers and railwaymen’s union leaders announced their decision not to call for strike action against wage reductions’, and/or ‘a crackdown on a peaceful protest in the capital city of Maldives, Male’. But here in the good old US of A, Black Friday marks the day after Thanksgiving, whereby, a population of thousands if not millions of folks, bellies still full from gluttony, wake up at the crack of dawn for the opportunity to beat, shove and stomp one another for the chance to buy a $300 lap-top from the electronics department at Wall Mart. And then there’s folks like me who sit and wait in anticipation for the evening news, waiting for the chance to see a 30ish year old man beat a squat elderly women over the head with a Jade ‘Rock Angelz’ Bratz doll. Good Lord! My only criticism is that this happens only once a year. Come on. There’s like seven days in a week people. Step up to the plate.

Apparently here in Portland, Best Buy, not to be outdone by Wall Mart, decided to juice up the waiting crowds and provoke their shoppers before they even entered the store. Customers waiting to get their hands on an Xbox 360 were handed a flyer stating that they needed to pay at least one hundred dollars more for their beloved machine that was advertised at $399 in the paper. The Oregon Attorney Generals Office has ‘opened a file’ on the case.

Then there’s Target Stores, who I’m sure have shady business practices akin to both Wall Mart and Best Buy. But when they have Winegard Op Art Wreaths for sale, it’s almost enough to make me turn a blind eye.

Also recklessly consuming for the holidays: the rubber type greeting cards available at vieLetter and these type shelving units from Set 26.

The New Responsibility 2.0
The misses starts her new job today. I guess in the overall big picture this is good news – but really, it’s pretty damn selfish of her don’t you think? Who is going to keep me company all day? Who is going to make my tuna fish sandwich lunch? Man, I have to do everything now. It’s so unfair. She’s even demanding that I have dinner on the table when she gets home and that’s troublesome because the cats are all paws in the kitchen.

With the starting of the new job, the Skelton family puts the last check mark on the 2005 to do list. To recap: got married, went on honeymoon, held wedding party, found and bought new house, packed up, moved to Portland, renovated bathroom (late edition to the list), bought new car, found new job for the misses. Damn. It’s nothing but cheesecake on the couch from now till the end of the year. I fear 2006 is going to seem boring in comparison.

Bonus: just in time for the holiday season ShopComposition relaunches with tons of modern goodies.

Superbonus: Like the failed petition to persuade Adidas to make the Team Zissou sneaker, sneaker activists are now trying to petition Nike to make the Marty McFly ‘Back to the Future II’ sneaker.

Tofurky & Taxes
Hope everyone had a darn good feast yesterday. The Skelton household kept their glasses as full as their bellies. There was eggplant and Dewers, broccoli and champagne, potatoes and dark ales. The gastronomic interbreed satiated every department. Time not feasting was spent playing Johnny Cash songs on the banjo, watching football, playing scrabble and enjoying the company of adults, children, and the beasts that love them.

The day after it’s all about coffee and taxes. Bring on the spreadsheets…and more coffee.

Street of Eames
Mark your calendars – a home tour like no other is coming in April of next year, “Street of Eames is a new annual city-wide cultural event to celebrate the mid-century and contemporary homes that began appearing in our city in the 1930’s…Street of Eames Modern Home Tour is a benefit for Project Return and the Chapman Educational Foundation. All proceeds will go to these two non-profit organizations”.

If you attend the event, it might be a good occasion to wear your ‘Just Say No To Faux‘ t-shirt. Although you’ll probably be preaching to the converted.

Lessons Learned

Lesson one:
When you’re at the video rental store and the misses instructs you to pick up some microwavable popcorn, do not indiscriminately grab any old bag of microwavable popcorn, because you might just grab a bag of Kettle Corn instead of normal popcorn. This is your first mistake. Then when you get home, nuke the sucker, throw it in a bowl and stuff a few kernels in your mouth, YOU WILL GAG! Second mistake. Basically it all boils down to this: microwavable Kettle Corn sucks ass. It tastes like cat hair dipped in honey. It’s a cruel popcorn impostor. And, if you’ve gone so far as to work yourself up into a heavy anticipation, in the hopes that you’ll be settling down with some really nice buttery (and salty) popcorn, then you will be crushed when that first overly sweet and sugary kernel of Kettle Corn impacts on your taste buds. If you’re like me, the disappointment might be so great that you might just cry a little bit.

Lesson two:
Jim Jarmusch is a film genius. His entire catalog should be celebrated often and completely. John Lurie is also pretty damn rad.

Lesson three:
If you have an exposed brick fireplace and you really want those bricks to look their best, spray all the bricks down with a coating of Pam, or some such cooking oil. Then dab excess oil off bricks with a hand towel. Your fireplace will look succulent. Note: Do not have a fire going while performing this beautification trick.

It’s Friday, Boss.
It’s been a fine stretch of beautiful warm and sunny days here in the Pacific Northwest. Lots of world class tennis has been played. The yard work has been crushed and there’s even been some hiking on the sun drenched trails of SW parks.

Our chimney’s got violated and swept out this week and now I’m on a rogue hunt for a cord of wood. I hope to better my last pile. The chimney sweep guy had this gnome-like apprentice kid working for him and when the kid would address the chimney sweep master he would always end every sentence with the word ‘Boss’; “Towels are in place, Boss”, “I’m just finishing up here, Boss”. Now, I’m glad I don’t have a job where I have to go house to house cleaning the popcorn creosote out of household smoke stacks (I don’t think I’d like to have permanent soot soaked skin from finger tip to elbow either), but I would very much enjoy a work environment where my minions, in a tribute to my complete mastery of craft, expressed their gratitude and respect by peppering their communications with me with the term Boss. Does that seem so hard?

Also, hotly anticipating the arrival of Sarah Silverman’s Jesus is Magic to a theater in Portland.

Relish the Jef
Joe Futschik aka Jef Designs makes some very cool and simple wall graphics from wood.
You can find his stuff here in Portland at the store Relish. Relish is run by a Trisha Guido. She’s very nice, informative and always ready to make a deal. She’s got a big sweet old dog that roams the store too. I’m saving up for some of the Cocoa bedding.