Thought for Food

noraleah nora leah sherman

Cookin' and jivin' and writin' it down.

2050 A.D. / The Great American Cooking Project ffffood / Twitter / Facebook / Flickr / Vimeo

nora(at)shermanhome(dot)com

Aug 19
Funeral Home Style: Not Just For The Dead Anymore! Kristen Smith is the reigning Strawberry Queen of Plant City, Florida. Her royal obligations keep her on her toes, and her hair — long, lustrous, and requiring hours of maintenance — became just one more duty lending to her sleep deprivation.So she called on her friend Nancy Rupp, a cosmetologist that works at the local funeral home “fixing the hair of loved ones.”  That inspired Nany to style Kristen’s hair in her sleep.Nancy lets herself in when it’s still dark out, has a cup of coffee, and plugs in her curling iron.  Kristen sleeps with her head at the foot of the bed, her hair streaming down the end.  By the time Nancy has brushed and secured it in curlers, Kristen is yawning and waking up. No word on whether Kristen trusts Nancy with her make-up.  Big hair we can all agree on, but the signature eery plastic look is not particularly popular with the living. Abstract of The New Yorker story & more photos here.

Funeral Home Style: Not Just For The Dead Anymore!

Kristen Smith is the reigning Strawberry Queen of Plant City, Florida.

Her royal obligations keep her on her toes, and her hair — long, lustrous, and requiring hours of maintenance — became just one more duty lending to her sleep deprivation.

So she called on her friend Nancy Rupp, a cosmetologist that works at the local funeral home “fixing the hair of loved ones.”  That inspired Nany to style Kristen’s hair in her sleep.

Nancy lets herself in when it’s still dark out, has a cup of coffee, and plugs in her curling iron.  Kristen sleeps with her head at the foot of the bed, her hair streaming down the end.  By the time Nancy has brushed and secured it in curlers, Kristen is yawning and waking up.

No word on whether Kristen trusts Nancy with her make-up.  Big hair we can all agree on, but the signature eery plastic look is not particularly popular with the living.

Abstract of The New Yorker story & more photos here.
Posted at 1:41pm

Dear Nora,

Thanks for getting back to me.

Excerpted from an email I just sent.  To a man named Doug.

The bricks are getting heavy….

Posted at 11:48am

Woah, that was fast. Woah, that was fast.
Posted at 10:46am

“It’s like cooking a stew in your kitchen.”

Vahid Majidi, assistant director of the FBI’s weapons of mass destruction directorate, on producing the anthrax spores used in the 2001 attacks.

When I finished all the recipes in American Food Writing, thus meeting my food blogging mandate, I thought about starting a blog that focused on zany food challenges.  Anthrax soup is not exactly what I had in mind.  (I started 2050 A.D. instead.)

* Majidi also compares the spores’ mixed DNA to different colored M&Ms.  Dude is weird.
Posted at 10:38am

How did I miss this?!

Remember the hostage that moved her murderous captor to surrender to law enforcement with readings from A Purpose-Driven Life?  I didn’t know she later admitted she also plied him with crystal meth!  WTF.

(I realize now why I never heard that twist: it was revealed on Sept. 28, 2005, when something bigger was on our minds.)

Posted at 10:06am

When friends and family forward me emails featuring such laffs as a snapshot of the “Haircut of the Year,” “Spanish For Nannies” viral videos, and a long report titled “Cat Gets Head Caught in Garbage Disposal,” it is all I can do not to hit “Report Spam.”
Posted at 9:47am

Cesspool

I have finally turned off the laptop & submitted to my bed (though I haven’t given up my mobile device just yet), and what do I have on my eyebrow - then my arm - now inches from my nose? A FUCKING FLY, THAT’S WHAT.
Posted at 2:53am

Inspired by this meme, a mosaic of my trip home. (Herein: babies! Gena! and more babies!) By the way, I keep thinking that the meme must be a marketing scheme for Big Huge Labs, and if it is, hats off.

Inspired by this meme, a mosaic of my trip home. (Herein: babies! Gena! and more babies!)

By the way, I keep thinking that the meme must be a marketing scheme for Big Huge Labs, and if it is, hats off.
Posted at 2:24am

This line-up from Mardi Gras past makes me wet. This line-up from Mardi Gras past makes me wet.
Posted at 1:43am

Complaints Department

  1. Why can’t I go to sleep before 2 am anymore?  Why do I always get a second wind at midnight?  NOTHING GOOD HAPPENS AFTER MIDNIGHT.  Not work-wise, anyway.  Blog-wise?  No, not that either.
  2. FLIES.  Someone has left the window open while I was away* and it is a FLY FIASCO in here.  They are landing on my bare shoulders as I try to type.  They are swooping in front of my face.  I am not only agitated but disgusted.  I’m thinking about flies and shit — not fly shit

* In fairness, Jane says no one left the window open without the screen.  Her theory is that they are being born inside our apartment.  You see, we foolishly let about 6 house flies in awhile back.  Over several days, I lured and killed them with a shallow bowl of agave nectar.  But Jane’s theory (I guess) is that they laid eggs before their demise.  This is theoretically possible, however, utterly unlikely:

Adult flies […] lay eggs in moist, decaying organic material, such as manure. Each female fly can lay up to five hundred eggs in her three to four week lifespan.

Admittedly, our apartment is a bit of a mess after the tyranny of the bedbugs, but we do not have mounds of manure anywhere, even in the recesses of Andrea’s walk-in closet.

And for your final gross-out, I give you this mental image:

[House flies] belong to a group of flies known as filth flies, due to their preference to breed in either manure or garbage. House flies feed by regurgitating saliva into food, which dissolves it, and then sucking the material back into the stomach.

Posted at 1:34am