by Helio

Food Manifesto 3: Starting Out In The Kitchen

It is my firm belief that, with a few exceptions, everyone can learn to cook decent food, for not too much money, without going insane. This is not the same as believing that everyone can cook – in fact, I believe that many people who think they can cook, can’t, and maybe people who think they can’t cook, probably could, if they just relaxed and gave it a whirl, starting with something simple.*

Because really good food doesn’t have to take five hours, doesn’t have to drive you crazy, doesn’t have to dirty every dish in the kitchen and leave you too exhausted to eat. It takes a few pieces of equipment, a certain amount of forethought, and a willingness to get back in the saddle after you fuck it up. Because you’re going to fuck it up, throw it away, and order pizza (or eat ramen) at least once. No matter how disheartening this is (and it’s brought me to the verge of tears before), learn from your mistakes and try again, or you will never get anywhere. So, general tenants:

  1. Recipes are your friend, not your enemy or your master. Find recipes you like and buy the ingredients listed if you want to cook them. READ THE WHOLE RECIPE BEFORE YOU START COOKING. Follow it, but switch things up a bit if you like – change out a vegetable, add some cheese or a different spice. You’ll get the hang of it later. But DON’T think that if you use a recipe you’re not really cooking, and don’t think that if you stray from the recipe a bit everything will go horribly awry. Have fun.
  2. READ THE WHOLE RECIPE BEFORE YOU START COOKING. I’m putting this in twice, because while some recipes will work if you carry-out each instruction before you read the next one, a lot are not that well written. You must read the recipe to know what equipment you have to have ready, and all the things that need to be chopped before hand. If you want to have dinner ready in a hour, and you discover when everything’s already started that you need to marinate your steak over night, you’re S.O.L. It’s really good to have an idea of everything you’re going to need to do before you get started. So if you’re not cooking from a recipe, take a second to think the whole thing through. And if you are, read the whole recipe before you start cooking.
  3. If you’re going to keep to a budget, you need to plan. This one could actually be re-written as “read the whole recipe before you go shopping.” I plan in two ways: I have some staples I always keep around, and I plan a few meals (or a week’s worth) before I do my shopping, so that I can be sure to get all the ingredients. If you do not have a plan, you will not be able to create meals, or you will go over budget, or both. And it’s fun! The internet is full of recipes; pick ones that look easy and appealing, get the stuff and try them out.
  4. If you’re trying to learn to cook, stick around and look at what’s happening!** Observe what you do, how you do it, what happens to different ingredients under different conditions. If you walk away, not only will things burn or overcook or boil-over, but you won’t know why.
  5. Anyone can cook. You can cook. You will make mistakes. You will burn things, or discover that food is underdone and in an attempt to fix it wind up with something that is either soggy (vegetables) or dry (meat) and definitely overcooked. When this happens, pay attention. That’s where you learn. What did you do? What can you do differently? Food is just chemistry. Was it the heat? Too high or too low? Too much liquid or too little? Too much spice/acid/sweet? If you pay attention to your mistakes, you’ll get better and better. But don’t give up on cooking because it hasn’t always gone well for you, and also don’t give up on the specific dish. Try again next time and it will be better. Messing up is how you learn, both generally and in specific.***
  6. Pay attention to what you like. Do you love mint and lemon as a combination? Ginger and garlic? Cumin and cardamom? You have as much a right to eat what you like as anybody you’re cooking for, and it’s good to be able to develop a style and know what sorts of recipes will be not only within your taste preferences but within your abilities.

Here are some things that you might need to watch out for:

  1. Pay attention to how high your flame/electric-burner heat is. This is MUCH harder on electric stoves than gas. If things look like they’re cooking too fast, don’t hesitate to turn down the heat a bit, and if you’re cooking with electric, just pick the pan right up and move it. You can always cook things longer without too many ill effects. It’s impossible to go back once things are burned or overcooked.
  2. Taste-as-you-go. Once things are cooked to the point where they aren’t dangerous (do not, for instance, taste chicken before it’s cooked all the way through), taste as you go. Especially as you add spices and other strong flavorings. As usual, it’s always easier to add more than to take away.
  3. Pay attention to measurements! Especially starting out, keep a close eye on those Big T’s (tablespoons), Little t’s (teaspoons) and the like.  When you are just starting, measure everything. Once you know what a tablespoon of oil in the pan looks like, then you can forgo this step, but you need that mental guideline before you start guessing. Remember: there are THREE teaspoons in a tablespoon. If you get that one wrong on something intense, you will seriously change the flavor of a dish. That said, if you add your teaspoon of ginger and you find you just want more, go ahead and add some more. But slowly – careful not to overshoot the mark.
  4. Onions will make you cry. Be careful with you knife.
  5. Cook things of similar size and density. For stove top cooking (which is most of what I do, being a control-freak who likes to be able to keep fussing with things the whole way through) these are the two main factors in how quickly things cook. Garlic will cook MUCH more quickly than anything else, because it’s usually chopped very small and is also not very dense. Carrots are very dense, and so will cook slowly. Try to make sure you put things of about the same density in pieces about the same size into the pan at the same time, because they will have similar cooking times.
  6. When you buy too much stuff, cook it anyway. If you are in danger of letting produce or meat go to waste, there are three answers: esoteric salad combinations, pantry pastas, and oddball stir fries.  Cozy up to one or all of these, and you’ll throw out a lot less stuff.

* I MEAN IT. You will not succeed if you start out with creme brulee, or with hollaindaise sauce, or with guinea hens stuffed with skinned green grapes and sage leaves, wrapped in bacon and roasted in a slow oven. EASY FOOD IS GOOD FOOD. If you get ahead of yourself, you will be discouraged and miserable. I know this from exprience, and it sucks BALLS to look at a ruined amalgamation of incredibly expensive ingredients and know you’re gonna spend even more money on the take-out you’ll be eating instead.

** Unless you’re waiting for a  big ole pot of water to boil, and don’t have anything else to prep. Then don’t watch. Really.

***A handy hint – especially with tricky stuff, try it out on yourself (or somebody you trust to keep loving you even if things go awry) before you try it out on a fancy dinner part of Very Important People you desperately want to impress.

by Helio

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-31

by Helio

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-24

  • @LoLoLolaWants Sounds delicious! What's going into your meat sauce? in reply to LoLoLolaWants #
  • Tidied, finally, a bit. Caught up with family. Sweating potato slices for tortilla de patatas-or atortilla espanola, potato frittata, etc. #
  • @MollyRen I could NOT agree with you more! Definitely my favorite bodily fluid. Amazing. in reply to MollyRen #
  • My plans for youth workshop re: #education sound more and more like "#Fight the #System!" and "Break It Before It Breaks You!" #WTF #STPP #
  • I have trouble grappling with #education. So many #amazing things are happening, so many good #changes – but only because it's been so #bad. #
  • @maymaym #Dolphins? We haven't granted personhood to #humans under the age of #18. Which is scarier? in reply to maymaym #
  • What is #KinkOnTap worth to you? To @maymaym and I it's a labor of love, but here's why we need your support: http://bit.ly/4sWh8y #
by Helio

Simple Food: Pasta with Egg and Cheese

This deserves to be the first recipe posted on this blog. I started cooking it in Freshman year of college. I did not have a kitchen, but my friend who was a year ahead of me did. I would get together with her and the boy who would become my partner, and we would try to put together something dinner. The trouble was, she was a vegetarian, and he was obsessed with making sure he was getting enough protein, and none of us had much money.  This dish, which is like an absurdly simple, vegetarian variation on Pasta Carbonara, served us well then, and has served me well ever since. Like many things of equal simplicity, it gets better with better ingredients.

For 4

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb long pasta (spaghetti, linguine, etc)
  • 3 whole eggs
  • 3 oz or so hard cheese (this will be grated, about 1.5 or 2 cups by volume of Asiago, Pecorino Romano, Parmigiano Reggiano, or the like)
  • Olive oil
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • Kosher Salt

Equipment:

  • 1 large pot, preferably tall and narrow rather than short and wide – an 8 to 10 quart stock pot does well here
  • 1 large bowl, big enough to fit a pound of cooked pasta, with room for stirring
  • A large sieve or colander
  • A box grater or microplane
  • Tongs
  • A ladle, or a mug, or other water-moving device
  1. Fill your pot to about 3 inches from the top with water and bring to a rolling boil. Ladle about 2 cups of water into the bowl – this will warm it up, which will be useful later on. Add salt generously – I go with a small handful, maybe 1/4 cup.  This will help to season the pasta, inside and out.
  2. Add the pasta all at once, and stir it around with your tongs a bit to keep from sticking. Cook till al dente (the point when it no longer feels sticky in the back of your teeth). I take general guidance from the package instructions, but generally start checking the pasta pretty frequently after about 6 minutes. It’s done when it feels done.
  3. While the pasta is cooking, grate the cheese (if you’ve not already done so).
  4. When the pasta is almost done (but still sticks just a bit in the back of the teeth) dump the water out of the bowl and crack in the eggs. Whisk them around, together with the cheese, until they are combined and the eggs show now large striations of yoke and white.
  5. Place the colander in your sink (empty of dirty dishes, please!) and drain the pasta.
  6. Place the drained pasta in the bowl with the eggs and stir vigorously and immediately with your tongs – the heat of the pasta will cook the eggs into a sauce, but if you don’t move quickly they will be less sauce and more “clumps of cooked eggs in among the pasta.”
  7. Add olive oil – a good glug (about a tablespoon and a half to begin with, perhaps 2 tablespoons) and grind on LOTS of pepper. This is to taste, but I’ve seldom felt there was too much. Stir vigorously once more, and serve immediately.

This goes nicely with a simple salad. For the simplest of all, place some pre-washed baby spinach or spring-mix salad leaves into a bowl. Season with a pinch of kosher salt and a grind or two of pepper. Take a lemon and roll it on the table to get the juice flowing, slice it in half and juice 1/2 of it into a funnel placed over a small jar (a jam jar, perhaps, or a leftover caper or anchovy jar). Pick out any seeds with a fork, and add olive oil till there is just under twice as much olive oil as there is lemon juice. Screw the cap on tightly and shake vigorously to combine. Dress your salad and enjoy your meal with a glass of wine if you like that sort of thing, beer if you like that sort of thing, or water if you’ve got neither around or happen to be a teetotaler.

by Helio

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-17

by Helio

Food Manifesto 2: Kitchen Stuff

It is probably possible to cook with no utensils at all. Really good vegetables, for instance, are often stupefyingly delicious with nothing but a quick wash in cold water. The rest of the time, however, you’re going to need some tools.

So, to start out, your Batterie de Cuisine*- the stuff you need to cook. Lots of people many gadgettes to improve their food. There are breadmakers and pasta machines and standing mixers, and they are all very well, but they’re not needed for every day cooking, nor are egg poachers  or even rolling pins – use a wine bottle. I have had limited pocket money as long as I’ve been cooking, so I use a few things, over and over again. With the exception of a few suggestions (the 10×17 inch rack and the springform pan) I own everything listed below, and use it all with relative frequency. I have a few other things, but if it’s not listed here than I probably hardly ever lay a hand on it. And there are some common and useful items that are not listed at all: an electric mixer, for instance. I haven’t had the cash, recently, and besides, I feel kind of good and earth-mother-y when I’m beating eggs or whipping cream by hand.

Most of the stuff I use is of pretty good quality. Some things, especially baking things and big pots, can and should be bought used, at yard sales. Most of this stuff I have because I’ve been asking for a pot or a pan or a knife every birthday and Christmas for years – I could never have afforded it all myself. You don’t need all these things to cook every dish. Get started with what you have, and if you want to make something but don’t have the equipment (or anything that can reasonably be put to use) then get it, just like you’d get any other ingredient. Don’t look at the list and panic. The things accumulate. Start with what you have, and as you slowly accrue more kitchen implements, keep some very useful items in mind. They are**:

The Bare Essentials

  1. A big chef’s knife. Mine is a 10 inch Forschner.  It costs about 30 dollars, and I use it every time I cook, without exception. It slices, it dices, it smashes cloves of garlic. I feel lonely without it. It’s a European style knife, unlike the now famous Shun knives, which are Japanese. I don’t know that one style is better, but I do know they require slightly different usage.
  2. A  6 quart pot, preferably of a heavy dutch-oven style.
  3. a 12 inch skillet, with a heavy bottom and a tight fitting cover. This can be nonstick (which helps immensely with eggs) but does not need to be.
  4. Mixing bowls. A few will do, but this is a more-the-merrier item. Some of them should be glass or metal, the rest can be plastic. I like deeper bowls with narrower mouths, but this is a matter of preference.
  5. A cutting board or boards – I use color coded ones to prevent cross-contamination from chicken to beef to veggies, and although I have a wooden butcher board I always use a platic board on top.  I have no use for a small cutting board – you can cut a small thing on a big board, but you can’t cut a big thing on a small one.
  6. Scallop-edged tongs. After one summer cooking in a restaurant in Brooklyn, I relied on these so heavily I thought I was turning into a lobster. They turn food, they pick it up, they move it around. If you pay more than 10 dollars for a pair you are a fool.
  7. Measuring cups and spoons – I use liquid and dry measure interchangeably, so you could get by with one set of spoons and a single graduated measuring cup. But more are handy.

Extra Stuff To Make Things Easier

  1. One or two small, sharp knives. I like victorinox utility knives. They are very sharp – use then till they aren’t and toss ’em. They cost around 5 dollars a pop.
  2. A sharpening steel. So far as I know, any type will do. Steels, unlike whetstones, don’t actually sharpen your kife – they keep it from getting dull. As you use your knife, the fine edge of the blade will bend over. Running a steel along it at a 20 degree angle before every use undoes this, and keeps your knife sharper, longer. It will still get dull, and must then be sharpened by grinding some metal off the blade. Have somebody who knows how to do this teach you, carefully, or leave it to the pros.
  3. 2 more pots – a 10 quart stockpot (mostly for long pasta, sometimes stocks) and little sauce pan (for a bit of pasta, peas, rice, ramen), say, 2 quarts. These are very good things to pick up at a garage sale – with the exception of the stockpot, which will only ever be used for things that involve a lot of liquid, you’ll want to look for heavy bottoms.
  4. Another pan or two –  a 6 quart saute pan, for instance, and perhaps something smaller (again, heavy bottom and tight fitting lid), or a cast iron skillet. These will add to the variety of omelets, stir fries, sauces, and braises you can make.
  5. Wooden spoons and a flat edged wooden spatula, some plastic spatulas, slotted spoons, whisks – this stuff will accumlate. It is the Stuff You Like To Cook With. Buy ’em cheap, use ’em till they season. If they break, toss ’em out.
  6. A 13×9 inch rectangular pan and a 8×8 inch square pan. My are pyrex. These are for roasting vegetables or meat, or making brownies or square cakes. A few pie dishes and perhaps a spring form pan are also helpful in baking.
  7. A half-sheet pan or two. These function as cookie sheets, but are used for a lot more than making cookies. If you can find a pan with a fitting rack (you’ll want an 11×17 inch rack), get it.
  8. A box grater. For cheese, potatoes for the latkes, onion.

A Few Less-Common Things I Recommend (Optional Extras)

More or Less in Order by Frequency of Use

  1. A Microplane grater. For downy clouds of parmesan or to neatly get the zest off a citrus fruit or add a bit of nutmeg, there’s nothing like these, which are adapted from wood shops prettied up and moved into the kitchen.
  2. A small sieve. Very useful for getting the seeds out of lemon juice, the bits out of a reduction.
  3. A funnel. It’s just handy.
  4. A set up for making coffee. It’s not necessary, but I wouldn’t go a day without it. Mine is a kettle, krups coffee grinder (I buy my beans whole), a #2 Mellita cone and filters. I recently got a French Press, but I like my single-brew cups better, so I’ll reserve it for friends. The grinder can also be used for spices.
  5. A board scraper. I actually use a plastic putty knife from a hardware store for this purpose, but I would like to get a stainless steal one like this.
  6. A salad spinner. Very for drying veggies and fruits.
  7. An instant read thermometer. Really useful for meat.
  8. An immersion blender: there is nothing like it for sauces, purees, and soups. With one of these and some deep bowls, I’ll doubt I’ll ever need a standing blender.
  9. And the ultimate optional extra: a food processor. There are some jobs that take about 20 seconds with one of these and about 2 hours without, but I find they are few and far between. I decided to split the difference and got the model shown here, which does 3 cups at a time. I’ll almost certainly have to do several batches every time I use it, but it was cheapish, and easy to store, and is very portable.

* This is French. French is the Language of Cooking, except when it’s not, in which case Italian, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish is. Very seldom is English the Language of Cooking, and when it is it’s almost always dialectical. Food is a regional delight – but how you talk about it is not as important as how it tastes, when you get right down to it. So relax.

**With the exception of the two knives and the items in the “Optional Extras” section, I do not specifically endorse any of the items linked too. I tried to look for equipment that would meet my specifications or tastes were of a reasonable price, and that was similar to the items with which I actually cook, but I have not product tested any of these. The links are just for reference.

by Helio

Food Manifesto: It’s About Time

I would hazard to guess that most people who read this blog think of me primarily in terms of sexuality. A nice young lady (or some days, a nice boy) who thinks and writes and talks about sexuality, in politics, in a podcast, on the internet and with her partner.

And I am that, I do that, that’s definitely a part of what I do and a big part of what shows up here. But when I put this blog together it was designed to contain all the parts of my life I wanted to put in it, which include not only sexuality, but also general musings on my life, personal experiences, and food.

Yep, food. I love food. I love to cook it, I love to eat it, I love to talk about it, and I have to admit that in my own strange way, I’m an unabashed snob about it: I will not eat packaged bread. I will not, if I can at all avoid it, purchase from a restaurant food I could cook better and more cheaply at home. I do not cook out of boxes or warm up packaged food.* I use decent olive oil and vinegars, and keep a pantry stocked with spices and bottled sauces and ingredients, and grow my own herbs in pots. Rather than eat bad food, I will refrain from eating or eat a meal that most people would not recognize as such – my lunch, most weekdays, is half of an olive-baguette from the local bakery, sliced lengthwise and eaten with butter. I am a pinch-penny who will keep wearing socks with holes and unravelling sweaters, but I will, once or twice a year, happily drop a hundred dollars on a REALLY good meal, and think my life deeply enriched for it.

When I lived with my ex-partner, or when May comes to stay with me, I will cook a real meal almost every night. I plan carefully and cook on the cheap – $50 per person per week is my target budget, and I am usually successful.**  I accomplish this in part by keeping a house stocked with staples – having them ready-at-hand means that I know what I’ve already got, and don’t have to buy them specifically for a dish. It means that in any new apartment there are few expensive “setting up” shopping trips, but it gets much cheaper after that.*** Also, I cook largely vegetarian or mostly-vegetarian food (otherwise the budget would be completely impossible to work with), and, of course. I try to enjoy myself.

This means a few different things:

  1. Avoid dirtying extra dishes whenever possible. Since I moved out of my parents house I have never had a dishwasher, nor, I must say, a partner who is truly of the mindset that “The Cook Does Not Clean.” Now, I live on my own, so I do all my own dishes. A meal that takes an hour to cook and leaves another half-hour’s worth of dishes just isn’t worth it.
  2. Avoid unnecessary steps. I subscribe to Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, and as anybody who does so knows, in their scientific quest to make the perfect dish, their recipes tend to double or triple the number of niggling little procedural quirks. In my quest for simplicity, I like to cook their recipes and see how many of the steps I can then remove and still create a delicious meal.
  3. Eat vegetables. I have to admit, I am not a big salad eater. May is, and when he comes to town my salad intake sky-rockets, but when he isn’t around, I find myself much more likely to get my greens if I put them in whatever I’m cooking (which is, being a girl who likes few dirty dishes and a relatively quick meal, often either pasta or stir-fry). My vegetable staples as of right now are escarole, broccoli, and frozen peas.
  4. Think about nutrition, but don’t think too hard about nutrition. For me, it basically comes down to making sure I eat a variety of things. Being a dyed-in-the-wool carbovore, I try to make sure that I’m eating enough veggies and dairy (organic yogurt is my main snack food). Since protein is not as overwhelmingly important in the diet as most people think, I don’t worry about it much – rice and peas or peas and pasta will get me what I need, or cheese or yogurt. And frankly, being young and well, I don’t worry at ALL about fat or sugar. I neatly avoid transfats by cooking for myself, and almost always cook with olive or vegetable oil. Which means that when I do bake, I go for real butter. And when I roast a chicken, I happily dip my good bread in the seasoned chicken fat, and don’t feel an ounce of guilt.
  5. Try things out and have no fear: the more I cook, the better I am at it. The less I cook, the more my skills get rusty. This year, living on my own, I knew I wasn’t going to be cooking as much as I’d like. I try to get up and cook myself at least two meals a week – having never gotten used to the idea of cooking for leftovers, these tend to be one-shot meals. The other days, I eat with friends, which could mean somebody else has cooked, or that I got food ready made (pizza, a restaurant, whatever) or I eat ramen or quesadillas. I try to get some veg and non-carb protein in there too, but it’s not such a grand thing. But I never look at a recipe and say, gee, I can’t make that. I have made pre-baked tart crusts filled with creme patisserie and blue berries, topped with red currant glaze. I have made pot roasts and duck breasts and venison. I cook what’s available to me, I apply principals I learned on one dish to other dishes, and if the result is not delicious, I make ramen or quesadillas or order pizza, and don’t make the same mistake again.

So those are the 5 biggest things on my manifesto of food and eating. There will be a few more posts coming in this series, on Starting Out in the Kitchen, on Equipment, and of course, some recipes. But this is a start, and it’s about time I got it out on “paper,” and shared it with the world. I wish you good eating, friends – sans fuss.

*Except Ramen Noodles, which are always on my shopping list. Ramen is my oldest comfort food and the biggest exception to my food snobbery. I eat between two and five packages a week. It is my dinner whenever I don’t have something to cook or don’t want to cook. And I love it, sodium and all. So there.

** This gets easier the more people you have: $100 a week for two people is easier than $50 for one, and $150 for three feels positively luxurious.

*** My staples are:

  • Wet: olive and vegetable oils, balsamic and rice-wine vinegars, soy sauce and oyster sauce
  • Dry: kosher salt, whole black pepper (for grinding), red pepper flake, flour, sugar, corn starch, baking soda and powder, some short pasta and some long pasta, rice, whole coffee beans
  • Perishable (non-refrigerated): lemons, potatoes, onions, garlic, shallots, fresh ginger root
  • In the refrigerator:: Helman’s mayonnaise, capers, anchovies, scallions, unsalted butter, hard cheese (pecorino romano, asiago, parmesan – not grated. Do that yourself.), organic whole milk, local organic eggs (Rhode Island has cheap local organic milk and eggs from Rhody Fresh and Little Rhody, respectively… if they weren’t so cheap, I’d probably relax about the quality a bit, I admit)
  • Ready to eat (more or less): Wallaby organic yogurt cups, Maruchan ramen noodles, frozen sweet baby peas, flour tortillas and cheddar and/or colby-jack cheese (for quesadillas).

I do not always have every single one of these in my kitchen, but I am very likely to have most of them, and when I run out of one, it goes straight back onto the shopping list.  In this way, there are several dishes that I am always ready to make – but that’s another post.

by Helio

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-10

by Helio

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-03

  • Gearing up for a Very Merry #KinkOnTap with @Maymaym. This is good – a bit away from the family, huzzah! Come listen in, live.kinkontap.com. #
  • Super fun #kinkontap with a silly-sleepy @maymaym and a wonderful chatroom. More shows should be like this, screw the hard hitting issues. #
  • @maymaym I love those shows. They are totally good and worthwhile, and fun in their own way. But this was a nice little interlude. in reply to maymaym #
  • @lacken84 @Adisson89 I remember all these shows! This is amazing! #
by Helio

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-27

  • Awoken early by the wee neighbors noisemaking in the hallway. I think it was YaySnow, but they don't speak English so I'm not sure. #
  • Have god's own headache. please send ibuprofen, tea, cuddles. #
  • Settling in w/ steelcut oatmeal & my traditional weekend tureen of coffee. Just discovered a fever of 100.1. Hoping the ibuprofen will help. #
  • Boning up on #Social #Networking for tonight's #KinkOnTap w/ @IdentityWoman, @Nikolasco, & @viviane212. Feels a bit like pre-quiz cramming. #
  • @Adisson89 That's not such a bad thing! in reply to Adisson89 #
  • @Adisson89 I'll turn your tables…. in reply to Adisson89 #
  • @Adisson89 Awesome!! I'm deep in research for this #kinkontap. I'd love to have you around for it! in reply to Adisson89 #
  • My frustrations are different, but no less justified. This article disservices its accuracies by couching them in foolish generalities. #
  • Home and Happy. Have wrapped, helped wrap, cooked, helped cook. Parents moving about downstairs, I head to sleep-the morning will come soon. #
  • @Maymaym's laptop's dead. If you like @kinkontap, now's the time to #donate-without his computer, we can't do the show. http://bit.ly/7K3s8A #
  • If you like @kinkontap, pls keep up the giving spirit & donate; @maymaym needs a new laptop. Even a bit helps, & so does spreading the word. #
  • @maymaym praying!!! in reply to maymaym #
  • Thanks again to everybody retweeting @maymaym and my requests for donations. The little bits add up – with you help, @kinkontap will go on. #
  • Wishing I hadn't left my vibrator in Providence. Looks like if I want to have orgasms, I'll have to do it the old fashioned way. #
  • It is 6:30 pm and I have not eaten anything today. Am I hungry? Not really. Am I excited for dinner out? Yes. I get weird at home, clearly. #