This is a picture story about ‘keeping it real.’

It started when I was reading a foodie blog, and was thinking, “Aw, hell, even I could do that.”

So I thought I’d test that theory and create a picture tutorial for you about making fresh lemonade with nothing but My Captain’s Android Phone’s Camera, my scarred kitchen counter, and a few tools I’ve had forever….

…including my plastic juicing cup, a decade old, from The Dollar Tree.

I even decided to be ‘real’ and show how I put my homemade lemonade concentrate in an old pickle jar.  At least I think it used to hold pickles.  To be honest, I have no idea what its origin was.  Let’s just hope it wasn’t pig knuckles or something….

I started to zest my citrus, when I scraped my hand on the dagnab zester.   I was trying to take the photos one-handed because I don’t have a tripod for My Captain’s phone, and I clearly have no idea what I’m doing.

Panicking, I  checked myself for abrasions, contusions, lacerations, or warts.  Because I realized that this was going on the INTERNET where I wouldn’t want something to come back and haunt me.  …like that OTHER thing ….

And then I was distracted with the fact that the human thumb is really such an amazing tool for communicating.  “A-Okay,” says this little guy!  And then I realized that my ‘naturalistic french manicure’ is about as completely natural as the very chemicals they used to create it and vowed never to spend money on it again.  Until my Varmint asks me to.  And then I’ll immediately cave in because she has me wrapped around her finger.

But I finally zested all of my citrus and thought the bowl of zest sure was pretty.

And since I’d finished zesting, I thought I’d better prove that truly the only thing in the zest bowl WAS zest…see?  All the skin on my highly communicative digit is still intact and free of hemorrhage.  Though it is strangely pink.  Why do they call Caucasians ‘white?’  We’re not white.  We’re more often pink…and in my case, freakishly carnation colored.

Moving on, I began to slice the fruit…again, very hard to do with one hand.  I’m lucky my freaky carnation-colored fingers are all still intact.

And then my scary vulture-like claw came into view and began doing rather violent things to the poor lemon halves.  It scared me, and I’m ATTACHED to the dingdang thing.

I surveyed the corpses, and wondered if I should show evidence of the sheer force and magnitude of my Carnation Claw.

And the entrails were caught in my dollar-valued juicing cup.  MmmMmmMM.

But baby, look at this.  PURE GOLD.  Lemon and Lime juice, fresh from it’s origin.

And the carcasses?  I wasn’t done with them.  Their scent in the sink’s disposal sure covered up the smell of canned cat food beautifully.

I took a picture of my sugar substitute of choice: Xylitol.  A naturally occurring sugar alcohol…it has the look, the texture, the taste of sugar.  I use it often.  It’s only downfall?  It’s a natural sugar alcohol, which means it is digested in the small intestine, and too much of it can cause explosive diarrhea.  Please don’t ask me how I know this.

So I mixed Xylitol in with the zest.

And thought it looked awfully purty.

And added my freshly squeezed juice.

And made a beautiful slurry.

But then, I tasted it.  It needed some of the real deal.  I have to be honest.  I don’t want to lie to you.  Once our trust is broken, how could you ever read anything else from me with a straight face?  (Ahem.)

So I added a little bit of naughty sugar.  Forgive me.  If I really truly could, I would behave gastronomically.  But if you’ve ever seen my figure, you’ll know I can’t.  Don’t judge.

Here we add our lucky pickle jar to the photographs.  It’s handy to keep your pickle jars, you know.  They are truly the unsung workhorses to any real woman’s kitchen.  Unless it’s a pig’s knuckle jar, in which case THEY are truly the unsung…oh never mind.

In the concentrate went.

And I thought this shot of the concentrate looking down from above was lovely….until Critter informed me that it made him think of something he’d hacked up once…which made me wonder exactly where that thing he may have hacked up is now….

And I grabbed a completely clean and sterile bottle from the recycling bin.

And, after washing the bejeezus out of it, I filled it with Ice, Filtered Water, and about an eighth of a cup of my concentrate.   And I shook it, and I shook it, and I shook it.  My entire body was jiggling, which is how I know I was doing it right.

And then I gave it to my Beloved, who had just happened to come upstairs from working on the project in the basement.  He had his work hat on.  How do I know it’s specifically his work hat?

Because it has a flashlight on its bill.  Very handy, eh?  I wish I had a camera like that.  If I did, I could take pictures constantly, no matter what I was doing.  Think of the tutorials I could do with that!  Think of the volume of posts!  Think of the shock value of true reality blogging!  Think of the lawsuits!

Anyway, I took a picture of My Captain’s happy thirst-quenched face, when he decided I had had his phone long enough.

Which, of course, ended my tutorial.

I hope you all got everything you needed from it.  I hope my efforts are not in vain, and my teachings have somehow helped you achieve a higher form of enlightenment.

Otherwise you’ve just wasted several minutes of your life you can never have back…and that is very, very sad.

Let’s be frank for a minute.   I’m not seeking pity or more attention than any other deeply insecure and needy woman my age. (Ahem).   But let’s look at just the facts.  Just the logical, in-arguable facts:

1) I am at least fifty pounds overweight, and am not particularly motivated to change that fact.  I’ve lost it at least tens times in my life, and I’ve just come to terms with myself that it’s here to stay.  I console myself that my lap is more comfortable than anyone else’s, according to my beloved Critter and Varmint.

2) I have swarthy, rather scarred skin from years of kayaking, sunbathing, and zit-picking.  But those scars are well camouflaged by a ton of sun-damage created moles.  And they ain’t in strategically sexy places, a la Marilyn Monroe or Marie Antoinette.  Most of them are in lines or crevices on my face that make someone looking at me wonder whether they are seeing a mole or a booger.   (Adds to my mystery.)

3) My hair is thinning, grey when it’s not colored, and rarely brushed.

4) My teeth are pretty good.  At least the ones I still have.

5) I flatulate.  If that isn’t a word, it ought to be, because every one of you knows what I mean.  And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown less and less embarrassed about it, and snicker more and more when it happens.  Oh, I still say “Excuse me” when I crop-dust a room, but I don’t REALLY mean it anymore.  I’ve gone from being charmingly appropriate with my bodily expulsions, to purely juvenile.

6) I’m married to a catch.  A REAL catch.  A hottie, a hero, a genius, and a genuine nice guy.

Considering facts 1 through 5, how is # 6 even possible, you wonder?  I will share my secret with you because we’re friends and all….

See this?

No, I mean really look at it.

Ok….this is not Prego or Ragu.  This isn’t Emeril’s.  It ain’t Rachel Ray’s.

It’s Mama Boe’s.

Fresh, and I do mean FRESH onions, peppers, carrots, celery, garlic, italian sausage, Not-fresh-but-at-least-it’s-organic canned tomatos, and assorted/sundry spices all happy in a big enameled cast iron pot.  And then, because I’m sassy, I add my grapes:

There may be some cooks who scoff at cheap wine in any entrée, to which I snort a big ol’ condescending “Whatever.”   No one should be able to tell the difference if you’re making your sauce right.  The WINE does not make the sauce.  It’s the BLEND of flavors that makes it.

Then, because I don’t like to make my eaters work so hard,  I pull out my old, cracked palm blender….

And make the most beautiful music with it…

Now, remember the first five facts above.

See this?

No, wait, move the dirty spoons.

See?

I’m gorgeous.

He can’t resist me.

My Captain had a brutal day today…more than usual, because the Medic unit he was officer of during his 10 hour stint of overtime was slammed.  In other words, after his normal 24 hour shift as officer of the Engine (that’s fire truck, to you and me), he went straight into his overtime shift by responding to 911 calls non-stop. From the moment his feet hit the floor in the bunkroom, he was on the move until he could pause at 3pm to choke down three pieces of cold pizza. Then he was off and running more non-stop emergency calls until his relief came and saved him!  (Thank you Mr. Hrenko!)

Oh, believe me, most medics are delighted as all get out to hear a Captain suffer like that.  Many of them have this misconception that Captains’ lives are cushier than their own.  And there is no doubt about it, Medics have one of the most challenging, punishing jobs out there.  They’re tough, these men and women.  Emotionally and physically.  They have to be.

But the ones that snicker maliciously as My Captain stretches his tired muscles and rubs his tired eyes, they forget, you see.  They forget that he was once where they are.  He paid his dues.  He lived that horrendously punishing schedule.  But they don’t understand what his challenges are now.  Different, but still very challenging and tiring, and stressful.  All those things.  He has walked in their shoes, but they have not yet walked in his.  It’s important to remember that.

So when my beat-up beloved came home, it was all he could do to greet our munchkins before he promptly flopped into the recliner.  He didn’t even take a minute to change out of his uniform. (ew.)

I felt so bad for him.  He works so hard to provide for all of us.  I wanted to somehow soothe him.

So, I pulled out all the stops for dinner.  I didn’t just make a home-made meal….I made the ultimate comfort food and made it TURBO-home-made.

I made Chicken and noodles…and the turbo part?  I made the Noodles from scratch, baby!  Nothing says love like homemade noodles!

Here’s what I did:

First, the holy trinity:  I chopped up and sautéed carrots, celery, and onion until they sweated and began to get translucent.

Then I added minced garlic, chicken base (like bouillon, only creamy), poultry seasoning, parsley, water, and finely chopped roasted chicken.  I let it get happy for a good 30 minutes.  And in that time, the magic happened!

I cracked four eggs into in my Kitchenaid mixer, and with the bread dough hook, incorporated in 2 cups of flour.  It made the most beautiful egg noodle dough you’ve ever seen.  Then I rolled it thinly.

And I took my super-high-tech noodle cutter…

…which, by the way slices absolutely evenly,…

…unless I try to take a picture of it while I’m cutting.  Then, …not so much straight….

And when they were cut one way, I went back and did the other perpendicular slice in the size of noodles I wanted in my chicken and noodles.

Then I poured those babies in the simmering chicken and veggies…

And happiness was born.

And My Captain?

He’ll be just fine.  Trust me….

I’m a medic.

I bake home-made, from-scratch, June-Cleaver bread from time to time, using a recipe from Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day, and every now and then, I like to mix it up a little.  You know, experiment.  I make strombolis, calzones, and the like, but sometimes I just add ingredients for fun.  Chunky ingredients.  With color. And texture. And flavor.

And most of the time it works.

Most recently I decided to add chopped red, orange, and yellow peppers, garlic herb cream cheese, and grated cheddar.  It baked beautifully:

And Varmint, who’d gotten off the bus in time to smell the fabulous hot, yeasty, just-baked air wafting through the house, sang praises to her Mama.  All was right with the world.

We cut into it.  Bits of beautiful red, yellow, and orange peppers surrounded by sprinklings of green herbs, peeked out of the slices.  Oh I was sure I’d made my masterpiece.  Judging by the crust this was going to be my culinary 50 Shades of Grey.  We were both drooling in anticipation.

Still warm, we slathered salted butter on the thick, steaming slices, let it melt a minute, and eagerly took large bites.

It was awful.  Horrendous.  The salt in the herbed cream cheese, mixed with the salt in the cheddar, the salt in the butter, and the salt already in the dough itself made it the most unpalatable bread I have ever eaten.

My beloved Varmint looked at me with a disappointment that cut right through my gut.  I can take the hit pretty much anywhere else in life, but to earn the scorn of my child…especially in my favorite field of food…it’s a blow, I tell you.

So I’m chained to the kitchen until I fix what I’ve done.  I vow to come back from this!  I will not be defeated!

It is said Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times when trying to develop the light bulb.   The way I see it, I have 9,999 more attempts to go.

I’m going to need more flour.

I hate beer.  It’s true.

But My Captain LOVES it, in a manly, macho, but not rising to the level of needing an intervention sort of way.  Actually, he’s a little on the snobby side of it.  He likes the dark, tasty, rich beers….the ones that have floating bits and chunks of unknown substances on the bottom of the bottle.

He thinks of that as solid flavor, man.

I think of it as the precursor to retching.

I do, however, enjoy interesting fru-fru drinks, probably because I love food and tastes and textures.  If they could make a drink called Macaroni and Cheese Martini with some kind of mixture of flavored vodkas, I’d try it.  You’d be amazed at the flavors some bartenders can come up with.

Tonight while sharing a drink with a friend at Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant in the Kentlands,

I tried a drink that included sliced Jalapenos, crushed Habaneros, muddled Pineapple, pineapple flavored vodka, nutmeg, and not NEARLY enough ice.

Want to know what it tasted like?

It tasted like I was drinking the Sweet and Sour Sauce from a chicken dish served at the chinese restaurant next door.  I kid you not.

It was….interesting.    I didn’t NOT like it, but I’m not sure I liked it, either.

Sipping this drink, the name of which I cannot recall, I found myself wondering ‘What the hell was this bartender thinking?’

And more importantly, ‘How on God’s Green Earth did the Manager think this was menu worthy?’

I think a Macaroni and Cheese Martini would have tasted LOADS better, and not had nearly as much tongue burn.

I hate tongue burn when I’m having a cocktail.

My Captain smirks and assures me that Beer never gives tongue burn.

I’ll take his word on it.