And Here I Thought I was Famous!

Recently, I learned that I was nominated (by the lovely and talented Megan) for the Canadian Blog Awards and I have to say, I was, and remain, nothing short of floored by this.  My ego grew even bigger when I found out that I took second place in the second annual "Being David Hasselhoff" Contest and won the coveted glow-in-the-dark Star Wars storm trooper helmut.  The icing on the cake was when I looked at my Site Meter stats (which I tend to ignore most of the time) and saw that I was getting all kinds of hits from all kinds of places I had not seen before.  There were hits from Germany, Tennessee, Australia, the UK, Washington state, Virginia, Cornwall Ontario and New Hampshire.  

At first, I reveled in the glory of it all.  I was becoming the famous columnist I had always wanted to be.  While blogging about the Hoff might be viewed as whoring for readers to some (sorry, Megan), I now had a following and that was all that mattered.  I could always wean the readers off of the Hoff and other such topics, and on to more cerebral ones, like my kids' Christmas concerts or why I hate mullets.

Then I scrolled down and read the "referring URL" lines on a few of the hits, and I was stunned. While a few of them were, in fact, readers referred through the Canadian Blog Awards website, most of them were referred by Google searches for that prairie and funeral reception favourite, tomato aspic.  

I should have figured it out.  After all, American Thanksgiving and Christmas are just on the horizon and so taste-bud-challenged and decidedly cruel mothers-in-law everywhere are trolling the internet looking for new and improved recipes for this most despicable of congealed concoctions.  Perhaps there is some new vegetable or mystery meat (Soylent Green, perhaps?) that has yet to be suspended amid lemon Jell-O and tomato juice with a big glob of mayonnaise on the side.  Mmmmmmmmmm.

One has to wonder how this ever came about.  I looked up "aspic" in the sacred bible of food, Larousse Gastronomique:  The World's Greatest Cookery Encyclopedia (1988, The Hamlyn Publishing Group) and, while I did not come across any recipe for Prairie-style tomato aspic, I found this, at page 43:

aspic

A way of presenting cold cooked food . . . by setting it in a moulded and decorated aspic jelly.  Many authors believe that this name comes from the asp, a serpent whose icy coldness recalls that of the jelly . . . It was, in fact, in this form that the first moulds were made; others were made in the shape of a coiled snake, doubtless to justify the name aspic.

Come to think of it, whole garter snakes would likely go unnoticed in a good tomato aspic.

The authors of The Joy of Cooking (1996, Plume) begin their discussion of "molded" salads at page 95, with the following:

Any clever person can take a few desolate-looking refrigerator leftovers and glorify them into a tempting molded aspic salad or mousse.   .   . Well-combined scraps result in a dish that is sometimes as good as one composed of delicacies and with a further advantage to the busy housewife as it can be prepared a day in advance . . .

"Scraps," you say?  That sounds just so appealing.  (Oh to be a housewife in the 1960s . . .tomato aspic and valium.)

Finally, I took a gander through my grandmother's old cookbooks.  (Incidentally, they also contain recipes for laundry soap, nail polish remover and homemade hand lotion.)  Tomato aspic is, I found out, part of a family of congealed dishes that included another one of my favourite food items to smear around my plate for the sake of being polite:  the "Perfection Salad" (jellied coleslaw).  They grew up in the kitchens of North American housewives looking for something to do with excess cabbage, canned shrimp and left-over beef tongue.  And any trendy woman of the day just had to have it on her table when guests came for dinner.

I continue to wonder and, frankly, I am more than a little disturbed, that people search the internet for recipes for tomato aspic.  This can only mean that they are serving to their friends, their loved ones and their children.  Nevertheless, I can't bear the thought of disappointing potential readers, even if they have questionable palates.  So,  I have decided to publish a recipe for tomato aspic.  It was the most benign one I could find, and I can only hope that I save some poor daughter-in-law from having to ingest canned shrimp or shredded tongue and tomato-lemon gelatin. It was contributed to the Co-op Cookbook (1952) by Ms. C.R. Smith of Milestone:

2 cups tomato juice,

2 tbsp. vinegar

1 tsp. salt

onion, 

1 package of lemon Jell-O

1/2 c. chopped celery

Boil tomato juice, vinegar, salt and onion.

Let cool a little and then pour over Jell-O powder to dissolve it.

When partly set, add chopped celery.

Serve on lettuce leaf with mayonnaise on top.

Enjoy . . .

Mother of the Year, Part II

It's 11:30 p.m. on a Sunday and I have just decided to award myself another (Failed) Mother of the Year prize.  

I have a long history of well-deserved accolades like this one.  One Saturday when he was four, Daniel was exceedingly tired and had a terribly high fever.  Coincidentally, his father and I had signed up to do some volunteer work at a local carnival that day and had planned on taking the kids with us.  Driven by my desire to please and impress virtual strangers, I opted to feed Daniel children's Tylenol and off we went.  For a few hours, it kept his 104 degree temperature at bay whilst we all stood outside doing various meaningless and irrelevant things at the carnival.

It turned out that Daniel had pneumonia.  Thinking back, it suddenly made sense that he had complained that he couldn't breathe and had a sore chest.  

But wait, there's more . . . 

A few months later, just after his fifth birthday, Daniel woke up on a Monday with a fairly healthy fever and announced that he didn't feel well.  

I had a meeting.  It was with people I barely knew and concerned something that is now completely irrelevant (and, in the grand scheme of things, it was probably pretty irrelevant then, too).  It must have been important at the time, however, because I opted to give him children's ibuprofen (it lasts six to eight hours, instead of just four, like Tylenol) and I sent him off to day care so that I could go to my oh so important meeting.  When we picked him up that afternoon, his teacher said he had been coughing a lot and Daniel was barely able to speak.  He wound up hospitalized with pneumonia for four days.

Since then, I have been pretty cautious, but I totally messed up today.  

Daniel has been fighting a cold.  He was lethargic all day, complained of pain in his stomach, threw up and said he couldn't breathe.  I thought he was just fighting a chest cold, as he did not have a fever.  When he said he couldn't breathe,  I thought maybe he just meant that his nose was plugged.  Arnold took him up to the hospital earlier in the day, but en route, he threw up and then said he could breathe again.  So, we left it at that.  I gave him a Gravol and some ibuprofen and let him rest for the day.  I finally took him up to the hospital tonight, though, because the pain in his abdomen was growing more intense.  I was pretty sure that I would just get a lecture on how viruses must run their course, etc., etc.  but at least my mind would be put at ease.

It turns out that Daniel was having an asthma attack and it was so bad, that he has been admitted to the hospital and may be there for a few days.  I let my poor little guy suffer all day, thinking that he just had a cold.  Granted, Daniel has never been diagnosed with asthma, so it may be reasonable for me to try and justify my negligence on the basis that I wouldn't recognize it.  That said, the nurse did ask how long his lips and nail beds had been "bluish".  Three Ventolin treatments and two steroid drugs later, Daniel is stable and resting.  His dad has taken the overnight shift.  

I suck as a mom. 

Imagine: An Essay on the Untapped Potential of David Hasselhoff, the Common Man

Megan is running another "Being David Hasselhoff" contest.  The entries to date are outstanding, and I dare say that the battle for first place will be hard-fought.  That said, I note that there is a shared assumption - a common thread, if you will - that permeates each of the entries so far.  It is David's celebrity status.  Indeed, one entry even suggests he could use that celebrity status to run for President of the United States.

My approach is different.  I ask a simple, but as yet, unarticulated, question:  What if we strip away the celebrity. In other words, what if David was just an ordinary guy, working in the wage economy and living life like the rest of us in Name-of-Town-Withheld? Would he still have that sort of  je ne sais quoi that gets him on the "A" lists everywhere from New York to Berlin if he was just plain old "Dave"? Or would he be one of those middle-aged guys, wondering whether he should join both the bowling and dart league, or maybe just one? More to the point, how would I, an middle-aged female, react?   As with many things in life, much would depend on the particular circumstances and accordingly, I propose to examine the question within various contexts.

Dave, the Guy in the Next Cubicle:  I expect that in this context, he would be laid back, perhaps a little too laid back, and would just go by "Dave".    Although I may appear uncharitable, I do not think he's the sharpest tack in the box, and he strikes me as the kind of guy who, even well into middle age, would still be liberally applying "Brute" in a vain attempt to impress female co-workers and his boss with his discriminating taste.  I also cannot help thinking that he would still have hanging in his closet the baby-blue tuxedo he wore to his high school graduation, which he would pull out for those formal occasions, like the office Christmas party or a friend's funeral, or your wedding.  I would likely dread the days that my boss asked me to work on projects with him.  He would be endearing enough to not get fired, but I doubt he would ever be holding the key to the executive washroom.

Dave the Mechanic:  Let's face it - most men look good covered in grease and wearing overalls that have their name embroidered on them and, having been Kit's playmate in the early 80s, Hasselhoff has got to feel a bit of comfort in this role.  Again, I think we would just call him "Dave" and like most warm-blooded, middle-aged females, I would react exceedingly well to a mechanic with chiseled features and finely feathered hair who gave me that "I'll fix your car, pretty little lady" smile.  He would do just as well as my plumber, especially if it was summertime and he wasn't wearing a shirt with his overalls.  Oh, and he would also be captain of his bowling team - I would expect nothing less.

Dr. Hasselhoff, Gynecologist:  Getting a pap smear is not sexy.   There is a huge difference between a man exploring your anatomy in bed after a steak dinner and a bottle of wine, and a guy wearing rubber gloves and scraping cells off of your cervix while you're laying on a table under glaring lights with your feet in stirrups.   I don't think we could face each other on the street after that, and Name-of-Town-Withheld is pretty small.  Actually, I'm starting to freak myself out.  Come to think of it, I don't think that David is smart enough to get into medical school anyway.   

Dave, the Recently Separated, but Hot Guy in the Bar:  Who knows?  After  two or three glasses of Chardonnay, it might be hard or a middle-aged cougar to resist a guy with a broken heart and a tight butt, even if he is just one step away from a mullet and wearing black bikini underwear.  You wouldn't want to wind up actually dating him, though. It might be career-limiting, especially if you had to take him to the office Christmas party and he came dressed like this.

Perhaps I have answered my question.  Perhaps I have simply raised more.  I'm sure that being plain old "Dave Hasselhoff" wouldn't be much fun for David.   There would be no "A" list parties, no limos and very few hot chicks.  Certainly, no one would film him eating a hamburger while drunk and post it on YouTube, and I wouldn't be writing this right now.  Instead, there would be only the Legion, the Elks, the bowling alley and, if he could afford a computer, Facebook.  Life would be, at best, ordinary, but more likely hard and mundane, full of ex-wives, estranged children and AA meetings.  Maybe there would be darts.  So long as he has his celebrity, though, he is an enigma who captures our attention.  He is David Hasselhoff, the man so many want to be.