Another One about Various Other Nasty Phobias.

Do you ever know in advance just exactly what Complexes (Complices?) you are going to give your children? Like, are you a neat freak and you just know you are going to breed children who cannot go to sleep if their stuffed animals are out of place? Or maybe you are super stranger-danger-phobic, and you have instilled in your children a deep fear of all people, and they will assume that every person they pass is going to accost and torture and murder them? Perhaps you are afraid of sheep and your children scream every time they hear "Mary Had a Little Lamb." You get my point.

Well, I already know what my kids' neuroses will be. HAH! You think I'm going to say germs! Well that goes without saying. I plan to raise tiny tiny robots who use Clorox Wipes as toilet paper and who take bleach baths and who drink shots of Purell thrice daily. Bygones.

However, my other deepest darkest secret is that I am a choke-phobe. I am terrified that my kids will choke. And I know I'm instilling this fear in them. I must say at least 40 times a day, "Stop talking while you eat you'll choke." "Do not laugh and eat, you'll choke." "Please take super little careful bites, I don't want you to choke." "Tiny bites! I SAID TINY BITES!" "Stop doing weird inhaley things while you eat your sandwich, you'll choke." "We do not sing whilst we eat." "QUIT LAUGHING." "STOP FUCKING AROUND WHILE YOU'RE HAVING LUNCH, YOU'LL CHOKE GODDAMMIT." (That's only on a bad day.)

I just know my children are going to grow up thinking that they'll die of sandwich-asphyxiation or carrot-hack. I am just waiting for the day when I walk in on Maya playing with her dolls, and hearing her admonish them, "Take tiny bites of cake, Runchel,* I don't want you to gruesomely die right before my very eyes. RUNCHEL YOU COULD CHOKE!!111122!@"

*Runchel is the name she invented for her very favorite dollbaby.

Anyway. I don't know how to fix this situation. I don't know how to find a happy medium. As it is with so many other things in my life.

How do you ever let your kid gnaw on a raw carrot? How do you ever give them a whole apple without slicing it tissue-thin? How do you let them eat the shit out of a hotdog without dicing it into microscopic pieces? Godsakes how do you let them eat innocuous things like cereal and not tell them, "Fucking quit fucking laughing with your baby sister right fucking now, you'll both fucking DIE!!"

Above all else, how do you let them eat OMG whole grapes?! When is the day you decide, "OK, now my child is ready to shovel perfectly sized choking hazards down her gullet"?

When I was 19, I choked on a bite of salad. CHOKED-choked, not just sort of got it halfway down the wrong pipe. I was with a friend and I was just about to laugh, and I inhaled, and *thwap* a piece of lettuce completely sealed off my airway. With an audible thunk. I stood up, flailing, unable to even cough. Eventually I managed to push out the last remaining air I had in my lungs and barely dislodge the lettuce, enough to gasp and wheeze and let air whistle & screech through my windpipe. I coughed and coughed for like an hour, trying to fix things. Through the grace of God I am here to tell you this tale.

Yesterday I choked on a minuscule piece of ground beef. A crumb, really. Like, choked quite badly. Thought, "What if I sit here and die right in front of my two children because I can't get any air in or out?" Finally managed to get my lungs to cooperate and un-seize so I could cough.

So I know that choking can happen at any age, with any food. It's a lifelong hazard. But I am just terrified it will happen to my kids.

How do you get over something like this? Or, how do you just accept the fact that you are creating mini-paranoiacs?

How to Bastardize Ratatouille. Bum-Bum Germs Stylee.

How to Cook Rattatoooeypie.

First, find an online ratatouille recipe that looks good. I found this here one. 2,000,000 reviews can't be wrong. Or 521. Bygones.

Shit, I messed up already. FIRST, be sure to watch Walt Disney's Ratatouille. So as 2 get in the mood. Find a chef's cap and a small disgusting rodent to place therein. THEN, find a good ratatouille recipe online. Like I says, I found this one.

Step one: Print it out. Step two: Tape it near your cooking area. Step three: Make sure not to follow any of it.

Then, coat a lovely glass pan with a fine fine garlic olive oil. Next, you wash all the vegetables. I said wash all the vegetables. WITH DISH SOAP.

Lather up that eggplant. Lather up those zucchinis. Yes, lather up that onion, even though you are going to take its skin off. You do not want to slice bum-bum germs straight into the sweet, firm white succulent sexy young flesh of an onion.

If you want to make sure you are on good terms with me, you will even wash the garlic. Then you peel that shit, mince that shit, and toss it in a pan of garlic olive oil. Then add in your clean, clean, fresh clean white onion. Sauté for a goodly bit. Then toss in some salt, pepper, parsley flakes, and oregano to taste. Sauté a bit more until that nonsense is translucent and delightfully rank.

Then, take your freshly scrubbed eggplant and peel. Cut, de-seed, scrape that shit out, do whatever you want to prepare your eggplant. Chop it into cubes, slices, trapezoids, I don't give a fuck. Toss with a bit more garlic olive oil.

Take your green pepper, yellow squash, and zucchini. If they have not been scrubbed to almost their very demise, throw everything away and start the fuck over: you obviously cannot follow directions. Begin again by WASHING THAT SHIT WITH SOAP. When you have reached this point again, with clean NON-  E.-coli vegetables this time, slice the green pepper, yellow squash, and zucchini into...slices. Mandolin stylee. All up in here.

If you happen to drop any stray vegetables on the floor, or God forbid the nasty nasty sink, DO NOT USE THAT PIECE REPEAT DO NOT USE THAT PIECE. This one went straight in the garbage:

DO NOT LET FILTHY VEG HAPPEN TO YOU.

Speaking of mushrooms....Now. Now comes the mushrooms. If you're like me, you'll go buy mushrooms, and then throw them promptly away, because mushrooms do not belong in food dishes. Ever. Except when you're feeling saucy. And today, I was feeling saucy. So you can either take your mushroom and do like Tenacious D and shove two of them up your ass, or throw them down the incinerator, or never buy them to begin with....or you can be bold and decide, "Mushrooms? Well why the fuck not. Even though they're groce."

But now comes the dilemma. Do you wash them, or not?

Now, if you google this issue, you'll get wildly varying opinions. Some swear you should never, ever, EVER wash fresh mushrooms, as it removes their delicious (???) flavor. Some say you should take a small firm brush and merely dust off the dirt, even if served raw.

Others say to perhaps take a cursory swipe of the shrooms with a damp cloth, and discard any gnarly stems. Other people? Other people in their right mind? Como yo? remind you that mushrooms are grown right in the motherfucking manure, yo. WASH THAT FUCKING SHIT WITH WATER. WASH IT. WASH IT.

So after you have washed your mushrooms to within an inch of their filthy lives, and possibly even swirled them about in soapy water, slice them. Do it.

Then glance at your recipe again, realize you've forgotten to sauté your eggplant first, scream "SCREW IT!" take a swig of any nearby wine, and go ahead and layer all your veggies. Extremely haphazardly. We're talking, ugly style. Throw that crap all about. No rhyme, no reason.

Stick a few chunks of eggplant here, three slices of green pepper there, and a handful of mushroom all in betwixt. Make sure it is as ugly as poss.

Then, drizzle about 400 calories of olive oil on top, add enough salt and pepper to raise your blood pressure to 160/100, and top with fairly thickly-sliced tomato. Which you surely have washed with dish soap. For to wash off all the hand germs, semen, fecal matter, dust, duck shit, salmonella, and sneeze.

Another "GOTCHA" to one of my favorite people, the Not So Special Mother Janice. :)

Once you have added those divine slices of tomato, add even more S&P. Because you only live once.

Then, top with your onion/garlic sauté mixture. ADD MORE S&P GODDAMMIT. I'm telling you.

Them top with great vast handfuls of shredded parmesan cheese.

(Make sure you have Clorox wipes directly visible in the background at all times.)

Finally, give another cursory glance at your recipe; realize you have done things completely fucking wrong, possibly due to the large amounts of Shiraz you've drunk; say a prayer to the Patron Saint of Pixar movies; and throw that motherfucker in the oven at 350 for 45 minutes. Result:

Tasty, toasty, melty, ugly, random, delicious, cheesy vegetable goodness.

For that Extra Wow Factor, add birthday candles.

Just kidding, don't.

I hope you enjoy your Ratatouille a la Bum-Bum Germs. Mine was spectacular.

Love,
Jo

Make New Food, and Trash the Old. One Is Silver and the Other's Mold.

Scratch that. Toss the new as well.

I'm sure there's no way in hell this will surprise you, but I also have a...a Thing about old food.

• If I don't know how long something has been sitting in my fridge, I toss it. No matter what. No exceptions. It could look and smell fresh, and it could be something that's not particularly dangerous to eat if it's old, but if I do not know how long it's been opened, I toss it.
• If something with no listed expiration date has been sitting in my fridge for over about four days, I toss it.
• If something with a best-by date has been sitting in my fridge past the best-by date, I toss if, even though that's not a use-by date, merely a best-by date.
• If it's got beans or rice in it, I toss it with a Quickness. Both beans and rice go dangerously bad, quickly.
• If cheese gets white spots or moldy spots, oh honey, that shit is GONE. I know a lot of people just cut off the mold, but eff that in the goat ass. I do not cut mold off of food.
• If it's milk and it has even the barest hint of being sour, down the sink it goes. My husband will drink milk that's moments away from curdling, but I have a fierce sense of smell, and I always sniff milk before using it, and I can smell when it's one hour off.

• Same with bread. Before using any bread or feeding it to my young, I first sniff it. I can smell bread mold like nobody's bidness. As mentioned, I have a keen olfactory system and am particularly sensitive to that sour, moldy smell of bread that's gone off. If it smells OK, I then check every inch of every slice, looking for furry white spots. I inspect every inch of it, front and back, corner to corner, then give it a pass or fail grade. If anything seems remotely wrong, it's in the trash and mommy can't make toast that day.

PASS!!

FAIL!!

I am just basically a really, really extremely overzealous food thrower-awayer. I waste so much food it's tragic. I feel guilty about it, not to mention it's not very good for the budget, but at the same time, the last thing I want to do is ingest salsa spotty with mold or rank mayonnaise or V8 Spicy Hot past its prime or Chicken a la Staphylococcus Aureus.

As mentioned, I know that some people will take a brick of molding cheese and cut a hunk off and call it good, which I understand isn't all that uncommon, but worse yet, some will cut off the moldy hunk of bread and eat the rest, without regard to the fact that the spores have spindly, feathery, moldy, reaching fingers that spread much farther into the soft, soft, tender white flesh of bread where you cannot see yet, and this I will not stand for. I WILL NOT STAND FOR IT! 

What is terribly amusing and unexpected is that the two foods I will use quite a long time after their sell-by date are eggs and yogurt, two foods that most people would be like, "TOSS THAT SHIT LIGHTNING FAST!" Both actually last a very long time, weeks after their sell-by date, and I have no problem consuming some delicious Yoplait on October 19 if it has a sell-by date of October 1. Mmm Yoplait.

And eggs are good quite awhile past their sell-by date as well. We're talking a month or more. I am totally down with eating old eggs. But old bread? No thank you ma'am. Old juice? No way Jose Eber. Old something else? Shove it up your bum-bum.

So with only a few exceptions, basically I let so much food go to waste it's a tragedy. I'm sure most of it is still edible, but I can't deal. I can't deal with the idea that there are invisible mold spores that I might be consuming, whereas someone else might be all, "Oooh, free penicillin. Awesome."

What's your take? Are you a mold-cutter-offer? Do you eat moldy cheese or do you TOSS THAT SHIT SO FAST?

Make New Food, and Trash the Old. One Is Silver and the Other's Mold.

Scratch that. Toss the new as well.

I'm sure there's no way in hell this will surprise you, but I also have a...a Thing about old food.

• If I don't know how long something has been sitting in my fridge, I toss it. No matter what. No exceptions. It could look and smell fresh, and it could be something that's not particularly dangerous to eat if it's old, but if I do not know how long it's been opened, I toss it.
• If something with no listed expiration date has been sitting in my fridge for over about four days, I toss it.
• If something with a best-by date has been sitting in my fridge past the best-by date, I toss if, even though that's not a use-by date, merely a best-by date.
• If it's got beans or rice in it, I toss it with a Quickness. Both beans and rice go dangerously bad, quickly.
• If cheese gets white spots or moldy spots, oh honey, that shit is GONE. I know a lot of people just cut off the mold, but eff that in the goat ass. I do not cut mold off of food.
• If it's milk and it has even the barest hint of being sour, down the sink it goes. My husband will drink milk that's moments away from curdling, but I have a fierce sense of smell, and I always sniff milk before using it, and I can smell when it's one hour off.

• Same with bread. Before using any bread or feeding it to my young, I first sniff it. I can smell bread mold like nobody's bidness. As mentioned, I have a keen olfactory system and am particularly sensitive to that sour, moldy smell of bread that's gone off. If it smells OK, I then check every inch of every slice, looking for furry white spots. I inspect every inch of it, front and back, corner to corner, then give it a pass or fail grade. If anything seems remotely wrong, it's in the trash and mommy can't make toast that day.

PASS!!

FAIL!!

I am just basically a really, really extremely overzealous food thrower-awayer. I waste so much food it's tragic. I feel guilty about it, not to mention it's not very good for the budget, but at the same time, the last thing I want to do is ingest salsa spotty with mold or rank mayonnaise or V8 Spicy Hot past its prime or Chicken a la Staphylococcus Aureus.

As mentioned, I know that some people will take a brick of molding cheese and cut a hunk off and call it good, which I understand isn't all that uncommon, but worse yet, some will cut off the moldy hunk of bread and eat the rest, without regard to the fact that the spores have spindly, feathery, moldy fingers that reach much farther into the soft, soft bread where you cannot see yet, and this I will not stand for. I WILL NOT STAND FOR IT! 

What is terribly amusing and unexpected is that the two foods I will use quite a long time after their sell-by date are eggs and yogurt, two foods that most people would be like, "TOSS THAT SHIT WITH A QUICKNESS!" Both actually last a very long time, weeks after their sell-by date, and I have no problem consuming some delicious Yoplait on October 19 if it has a sell-by date of October 1. Mmm Yoplait.

And eggs are good quite awhile past their sell-by date as well. We're talking a month or more. I am totally down with eating old eggs. But old bread? No thank you ma'am. Old juice? No way Jose Eber. Old something else? Shove it up your bum-bum.

So with only a few exceptions, basically I let so much food go to waste it's a tragedy. I'm sure most of it is still edible, but I can't deal. I can't deal with the idea that there are invisible mold spores that I might be consuming, whereas someone else might be all, "Oooh, free penicillin. Awesome."

What's your take? Are you a mold-cutter-offer? Do you eat moldy cheese or do you TOSS THAT SHIT SO FAST?