The Long Weekend!

Is anybody else unreasonably excited that there's a long weekend stretching out ahead of us? I AM!!! I'm going to try to see Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Eclipse this weekend. Eclipse is one of those movies I need to see with lots of people in the theater because part of the experience is that 14 year old girls lose their minds when werewolves take their shirts off, and that is just about as entertaining as the film itself. This movie sounds like it will be a whole lot better than the first one, and probably better than New Moon too. Yay! But really I'm just waiting to see how the heck they're going to handle the 4th book. Boy does the plot thicken in that one, and it should make for a really good movie. (Or movies, rather.)

I added some new stuff to the old reading list over to your right. One blog is about the frustrations of living with diabetes, with a little condo renovation and life on the side. Another is by a guy who just finished his dissertation in philosophy and I think he really misses all that writing and needed an outlet. Then there is the Nashville guy who talks about sports. And he has a real problem with people going to a sporting event wearing a jersey that has nothing to do with said sporting event which I am finding pretty funny. One of my employees has to make sure that the stitching on her shoes matches the stitching on her jeans. They might get along really well.

And then there is my current favorite blog called Copy Cat Chic where they take a really expensive awesome piece of furniture and find something similar (sometimes exactly the same) for way cheaper. Yes, I am a home design whore.

Tonight I made a salad from Ellie Kreiger's book The Food You Crave that basically has oranges, radishes, red onion, and mint. And yes, I know that sounds really odd but the mint and the oranges really balanced the radishes and the onions. I would never have thought of that combination in a trillion years.

The other night I made pickled red onions because they were so good in Northampton on top of nachos. And they were actually surprisingly easy to make. I dumped about 4 cups of white vinegar in a pan with 1/4c. of sugar, a few bay leaves, a crushed cinnamon stick, some whole cloves, and some salt and pepper. And then I threw some grill seasoning in there too because oh why not? I brought that to just simmering and let all of the flavors work while I chopped up 4 red onions (OMG that was a never-ending task). Then I realized that my brilliant plan of putting them in a Tupperware container was never going to work (#1 the plastic might melt and #2 it wouldn't get the onions really submerged in the vinegar briny stuff) so I had to get creative really fast. I dumped a HUGE new jar of applesauce into the Tupperware instead and washed the jar out. I let it sit full of scalding hot water from the tap for a while so that when I put the boiling vinegar mix in there it wouldn't crack or something... okay I don't know if that really could have happened but I wasn't about to take any chances. I packed the jar full of onions, as many as I could smash in there. Then, using a funnel, I carefully poured my simmering vinegar spice mix into the jar and slapped the lid on it. It looked like this:

Look! You can see cloves and a little bay leaf in there!

Then I left the jar on the counter for hours to cool off and when I checked it the pop top on the lid was down- it had actually sealed itself. I did some Little House on the Prairie style canning!

But it wasn't like I was going to store them in a root cellar for winter. I dug into those things a day later and they are soooooo good! They've turned uniformly pink now. They're sweet and tart and don't have that strong raw onion kick anymore. I made a grilled cheese sandwich with pickled red onions in the middle, and it might be the only way to make grilled cheese.

I will absolutely be making them again. The hardest part was the tedious onion cutting. And trying to not inhale vinegar fumes.