I’m the worst friend ever

 

Parisian Fruit Tarts – The Modern Baker: Time-Saving Techniques for Breads, Tarts, Pies, Cakes, and Cookies (Nick Malgieri)

 

1.  Buy awesome cookbook from your friend who works at awesome local bookstore. 

2.  Exchange approving nods & fist-bumps while you pay for the book, in acknowledgement and celebration of mutual love for baking. 

3.  Wait until your friend quits her job at the bookstore to work down the street in the local delightful florist/home accent/gourmet food/awesome stuff store. 

4.  Realize you need individual tart pans in order to do the recipe justice.

5.  Text your friend to see if they have tart pans in stock at aforementioend awesome-stuff-store.

6.  Show up at the store to buy aforementioned tart pans when your friend is not working.  Press her mother (store owner) and co-workers into helping you find the pans after they’ve rearranged the whole store and forgotten where they are. 

7.  Frantically text your friend that nobody in the store knows where the tart pans are.  HALP!

8.  Find the tart pans beside you on a table that you’ve looked at four times already.

9.  Text your friend too late that it’s ok, we found them.  Observe her grumpily sleepwalking into the store from the back door.

10.  Successfully make the tarts!  HURRAY!

11.  Post this picture to facebook, asking your friend if she’d like one, because they were not a failure!

12.  Forget to provide your friend with one for several days.

13.  Open the container to put the last one in a package to give to your friend, as promised.  Discover that it is covered in blue mould. 

14.  Slide the tart into the garbage, never speaking of the tarts or the tart pans again.

So…it’s like a hermaphrodite?

 

Yup, I made pork tacos, and then I made an off-colour joke about euphemisms for genitalia.  It’s that kind of night.  You’re welcome.  Or, I’m sorry…as the case may be.

So…I decided to try a new recipe that I found at this website:

http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/quick-weeknight-meals-2009/bretts-cool-and-spicy-avocado-pork-tacos-quick-weeknight-meals-recipe-contest-2009—096859

Begin with a pork tenderloin. 

Decide on pork, not because the website calls them pork tacos, but because the local butcher has pork on sale.  Cha-ching. 

Toss the pork in cumin, salt and pepper. 

Giggle about how you secretly wish your boyfriend would douse himself in cumin instead of expensive cologne.  Lament your weirdness.  Huff the fumes from the cumin container.

Pickle the onions.

 

Be skeptical of the advisedness of the quick-pickled onions, even if the ARE vidalias, because you hate that raw onion taste that lingers in your mouth after you eat and sticks to your toothbrush so that when you go to brush you teeth before work so your mouth doesn’t smell like sleep and breakfast, you get an instant shot of minty-fresh ONION mouth.  And if the quick-pickled onions do that, you’re gonna be annoyed.

 

Make an avocado, cilantro and jalapeno pepper smoothie.  Seriously, that’s basically what you end up with.

Undercook the pork.  Because that’s how you like it.  Trichinosis be damned!

  

Place undercooked pork, tasty onions with potentially dangerous long-term breath-effects, and avocado smoothie that looks like baby poop but is surprisingly delicious atop a soft corn tortilla.  Take a picture.  Then try to fold the taco.  Break the taco in the process.  Drop all the contents on your lap.

The end.

How to Ruin Your Perfectly Good Things

 

Start with these perfectly good, if slightly dusty, sunglasses.  I think they’re even polarised lenses.

Buy expensive gold seed beads.  Extra tiny ones so your cat can get indigestion when he consumes them. 

Warm up your hot-glue gun.  Make sure it’s extra hot. 

Follow the instructions at this website TO THE LETTER. 

Realize when you’re done, that this is what you’ve made:

And that you’ve ruined a perfectly good pair of sunglasses, possibly ones with polarised lenses.  Shit.