Contest!

We've all been there. We've all arrived home, realizing that it was probably a bad idea to have driven after x amount of drinks that ended in 'tini' but didn't start with 'mar'.

And now all we want is melted cheese.

It doesn't matter what it's on. Toast? Bun? Smushed between some 'dillas? Spoon? If only. One thing remains certain, though: wondrous greasy, melty orange will medicate us.

Given the stark contents of the fridge, how do we improvise?


Share your worst/best/worst drunk gooey inventions.

Mine? Render bacon fat. Fry a cheese & natch peanut butta sandwich all up in that mess. Remove. Add bacon. Devour while watching some VH1 reality show rerun. Pass out.

odd.

Has anyone out there ever encountered a book with pages that are mismatched (page 174 comes before page 186, which in turn comes before page 154) with no seeming rhyme or reason? I'm trying to read Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, but it's awfully hard when the pages are out of order.

Straight from the Vermont Maple Pipeline

I was in Vermont two weeks ago for work. I have a love hate relationship with Vermont - I wasn't particularly happy to move there two weeks before I started high school. But when I go back I'm struck by how much I enjoy my time there. While I'm not usually one to go in for regional stereotypes it does feel different there - more laid back, more friendly. More Birkenstocks.

Anyway, before I moved to Vermont I didn't like real maple syrup. I'd grown up on the Aunt Jemima crap and liked my pancakes with no more than 3% real maple, please. I figured out soon enough that I'd be ostracized from just about every social circle if I refused the real stuff so I learned to like it.

And now I can't get enough of it. I stay at a lot of Hampton Inns when I'm traveling (for work - when I'm traveling for myself it's usually a tent or a Motel 6, which seem, surprisingly, to have much the same in the way of clean amenities) and they have this thing called "Breakfast Syrup" which is an absolute abomination that contains all corn syrup and absolutely no maple at all. I threw my pancakes away after the first bite. It was the worst thing I'd ever eaten. I thought wistfully of pancakes at the Denny's in my hometown - even the Denny's uses real maple syrup. I never thought it would come to this: I'm a syrup snob.

My point is, one of my favorite syrup recipes. Easy, simple, great in the fall.

1 delicata squash
butter and maple syrup to taste

Cut open the squash, take out the seeds. Place face down in a baking dish filled with about two inches of water. Bake at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes. Remove from oven, dump water out of pan, place squash back in pan face up. Fill squash with butter and syrup, place back in the oven. Cook for another ten minutes at the same temperature.

Voila. Fast, easy, really frigging good.


(And if you're ever in Vermont - check out maple seltzer. So. good.)