Dick 1
My Dad described my work situation as follows: And I quote, “It’s like having your dick nailed to a burning building. I mean what do you do? Stand there? Pull away? What do you do?”

He also said that I wasn’t a corporate man, as I didn’t kid myself into thinking that the corporate world is the real world. I think that was a compliment, but I couldn’t get past the image of my burning dick with a nail in it.

Dick 2
One of my good friends went to Siam house in Quincy for dinner. He called me immediately to tell me that there were two kinds of sherry on the menu: Cockburn and Dry Sack. We’ve known each other since we were 8, and never really progressed from there.

Pie 1
Over the last week, I’ve cooked spaghetti squash, homemade chicken soup, and three(3) homemade, from scratch, puree the motherfuckin’ pumpkin, pumpkin pies. Soup is easy. Spaghetti squash is kind of fun. Trying to puree pumpkin pie will leave you finding bits of orange in weird places for a week.

Pie 2
This is the actual recipe for pumpkin pie that I cobbled together from a few sites on the net. It’s easy except for making the pumpkin puree, which sucks fat ass.

Required tools:
Spatula (A)
baking pan (B)
Blender (C)
Paper Towels (D)
colander (E)
fork (F)
spoon (G)
knife (H)
oven (I)
oven mitts (J)
measuring cup (K)
measuring spoons (L)
and a big ass bowl (M)

Ingredients
1 12″ store bought graham cracker pie crust (baking isle)
3 large eggs
2 cups of fresh pumpkin puree
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup light brown sugar (granulated easy to work with)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt

Making the Puree

1. Go to the store and buy a small sugar pumpkin (not a jack o’ lantern one) no bigger than your head. If you have no idea what this is, ask. While you’re there, make sure you have all the ingredients listed above, as going back to the store will just piss you off later. Also, try to stand behind some hot chick in line, as you won’t care how slow the checker is.
2. Go home.
3. Cut the pumpkin in half, from stem to bung with your knife
4. Scrape out all the seeds and strings with the spoon. If you want, you can save the seeds, soak them in salt water overnight, and put them on a cookie sheet at 275 for an hour to toast them, but don’t worry about that right now.
5. Put a cup of water in the roasting pan and put the pumpkin halves in it face down.
6. Turn on the oven to 350 and throw the pan in there.
7. Leave it there for about an hour or until you can easily pierce the skin with the fork.
8. Take the halves out and leave them on the stove top to cool for 20 minutes.
9. Scrape out the pumpkin into a bowl.
10. Now the shit part: Feed the pumpkin into the blender a little at a time to liquefy it. The only issue is that the pumpkin is so dry that the blades just whip through it, leaving you with a mess of pulpy crud in your blender. Not one recipe fucking tells you this, but you have to add a little water to the blender until you get a nice pumpkin tornado going in there. Then, add a little pumpkin at a time until the vortex just barely vanishes. Pour that smooth pumpkin shake into your big ass bowl and repeat this process until you have pureed all of the pumpkin. There should be no chunks, no strings, just smooth pumpkin puree.
11. The problem now is that pumpkin puree is supposed to be thick as hell. Yours is watery, so you need to get the water out before you bake it, so get out the colander and line it with a couple of paper towels.
12. Dump the pumpkin into the colander and let it drain in there for an hour or so. Shake it if you want, I don’t care. Just get the water out of there.
13. Once the puree is thick, you can refrigerate it until tomorrow if you’re sick of this already, or continue on to making the pie. All you will need in the end is 2 cups of fresh puree per pie.
14. If there is a woman of the house, now is the time to clean up the big ass mess that you have made of the kitchen before she gets home. This will also make it seem like you know what you’re doing if she walks in on the process later.

Making the Pie

1. Pre-heat your oven to 375.
2. Wash your big ass bowl and crack the eggs into it. Whisk them with the fork like you’re making scrambled eggs.
3. Add all the rest of the ingredients and mix with a spoon until it looks pretty even (no spice chunks, no milk patches).
4. Open the pie crust. Notes: (a)Don’t throw away the plastic cover: you’ll need it later. (b)If there’s graham cracker dust in there, don’t flip over the crust and try to shake the dust into the sink. The crust will break and fall down the drain, leaving you to curse more voraciously than a drunken sailor in a Bohemian hump-hump bar.
5. Pour your pie mix into the crust.
   Carefully put the pie in the oven for 55 minutes. No more, no less. If you leave the pie in any longer it cracks and burns; less and you’ll be eating pumpking soup. It’s going to look done about an inch around the edges, and the middle is going to look a little soupy. No one tells you this, but it’s normal. Also, no one tells you not to touch it, or you will have a big, fat fingerprint on your pie. So, I’m telling you: Don’t. The pie will thicken as it cools in the fridge.
6. Take it out and let it cool on the stove burner (off!) or a pie rack for an hour or two, until it’s dead cold.
7. Invert the plastic cover that I told you to save, and use it as a pie lid before putting it in the fridge.

Then, eat the motherfucker for breakfast.

Posted in Food, Work