LOVE:

The Wendy Williams Show:

I don’t know what I’ve been doing not watching this show all my life — it’s phenomenal! Wendy is my new obsession, and I can’t wait to get home to watch the latest episode. I’m all about sitting around and listening to Wendy throw shade and gossip and chitchat. It’s my life now. All my daytime fantasies revolve around becoming Wendy’s best friend. We’ll go to lunch at the Four Seasons and say, “HOW YOU DOIN?” to the waiter and to the staff and to everybody we meet. What fun we we’ll have! Sadly, there are no tickets to her show available for the time I’m in New York next month — why didn’t I start loving her earlier? — but there are standby tickets and I’m seriously considering waiting in line early in the morning just for the chance to get in the audience and gasp and clap with everybody when she’s dishing out the latest news. It’s going to be the best.

Oeufs en Cocotte:

I had forgotten how much passion and deep love I have for oueufs en cocotte, otherwise known as shirred eggs or coddled eggs. There are many phrases for this delicious triumph of eggy goodness. I think they should be called, “SWEET JESUS EGGS.” They are ridiculously good. Make some tonight. Follow my easy recipe! Slice a tomato into 1/4 inch rounds (preferably a good heirloom one), cover with salt, pepper, brush with oil and roast until dried in a 350-degree oven. Line the bottom of a shallow dish with a few rounds of roasted tomato. Top with any cheeses of your liking. Top this with three or four eggs. Top this with a splash of cream. Top this with salt, pepper, and a bit more cheese. Bake until eggs are puffed like a souffle. Serve with good bread and gorge. When I get around to creating my online cooking show that I was so excited about doing last year, this might be one of my first episodes. You’ll die, you’ll just drop dead. They’re so good.

Baked Eggs:

This is different from the earlier post about eggs. I’m all about eggs this week it seems. I love boiled eggs, but I’m not a fan of boiling them. It’s not that it takes an unreasonable amount of effort to make them, but it’s time consuming. Instead, I’ve discovered a wondrous method of cooking them with the same deliciousness, but tons more ease. Instead of boiling them, the eggs are baked! Put the eggs in a muffin tin and bake for a half hour at 325-degrees. Pull them out and chill. Peel and gorge. I was amazed at how good they were! The eggs even peeled more easily than usual, but this might have just been this carton of eggs. I wanted to make an egg salad sandwich immediately, but I didn’t have the right ingredients and was emotionally devastated. I saw a recipe the other day that called for a mashed avocado instead of mayonnaise in egg salad and I was deeply intrigued. I need to look in to this more. I’m starving.

Stuff You Missed in History Class:

I love podcasts, but I’m always forgetting to keep up with them. All of a sudden, I have thirty unheard episodes and never enough time. When I was painting my new gym (I call it a gym, but that’s only a nickname since it will have a treadmill and a yoga mat in there — the rest of the room will be devoted to my extensive clothing collection. I’m going to get a mannequin and everything.) I started listening to the episodes I had missed of Stuff You Missed in History Class, of which there are many many many many episodes I haven’t heard. I started off with an episode on ancient Egyptian mummification. I thought I knew everything there was to know about it, but I was surprised and delighted to discover many things that I never knew about the embalming techniques used on poorer Egyptians. They don’t take out the organs; instead the stuff the insides of the body with cedar oil and plug the body. After a while, the oil dissolves everything inside and it is then flushed out through the back. Amazing! I love this show, give it a listen.

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6:

You all know how much I love this perfect show. I have been talking about it for years. I still recall fondly the first episode I watched. I began at season two, never having heard about it. There was a little snippet in Entertainment Weekly about Kathy Griffin being a guest host, so I made sure I tuned in. My life was forever changed. I was delighted and inspired by those gorgeous creations that paraded down the main stage to the catchiest music ever written. I fell madly in love with Ru and then later on with Michelle and the majority of the contestants. It’s like America’s Next Top Model with a heart and a sense of humor — which is what a drag queen is, incidentally. I adore them. I don’t think there’s anything better in the world than a drag queen. I would eagerly support RuPaul for president, for senator, for Pope, for anything in the world. The latest season just started this week and it’s just as good as ever. Ridiculously over the top and stuffed to bursting with camp! And still, through all the shade and all the tea, it’s still the most heartwarming show on television and each week I feel a little better about the world we live in. Just this week, when Ru tugged on her ear in a Carol Burnett fashion, I choked on a happy sob. It was perfect. She’s perfect. The show is perfect. Watch it, dear reader!

HATE:

Pecorino Romano:

I, like a fool, mistook Pecorino Romano for Grana Padana. The names sound nothing similar and I don’t even know why I made this disastrous error, but I have not stopped regretting it once. I opened up the expensive cheese and broke off a sliver, hoping for crunchy, salty cheese, but was instead presented with a crumbly, pungent, unpleasantly scented cheese. I WAS DISPLEASED. I put it with some eggs the other day and that was fine, still not alarmingly good like GRANA PADANA. I haven’t much to say other than:  I HOPE I NEVER MAKE THIS ALARMING MISTAKE AGAIN! Now, I have to think of some use for the rest of the cheese. Maybe it’ll be all right with pasta?

Inability to Grow a Beard:

[This is about as much of a beard as I will ever grow. This is sad for me. Maybe I will continue to develop a bit of facial hair? PLEASE, BEYSUS??!??!?]

I was never bothered much about my lackluster hair follicles. I’m no fan of shaving. It’s the absolute worst. You cut yourself. It dries out your skin. You look twelve. You’re guaranteed to miss a section that is obvious under the fluorescent lights at work. I’ve taken to just using a trimmer to whack off the growth to a respectable level. Over the past week, though, I grew quite lazy and didn’t do anything and let my rugged masculine looks take over. [Giggle.] I grew the world’s finest beard on my neck and had a decent mustache. Sadly, though, as always, very little grew on my cheeks. I was rather distraught. I’d make a pathetic hipster, which doesn’t bother me any. I do admire their beards and their acetate glasses and their expensive jeans and their flannel, but I don’t care much for their painstakingly hip lives. Too much work to find a shop that roasts their own coffee beans from a small organic farm in some tiny South American country that still has a bit of the rainforest on the property. I’m off topic as always. I want a beard. A scruffy, handsome, ridiculously attractive beard. There are kids I work with that can grow a better one than me. WHERE IS JUSTICE? Can you get hair transplants to your face? Is that a thing. Oh, I hope so. It will be one of my future cosmetic surgeries: follicle transplants, brow bone shaving, and butt injections. Hooray for artificial beauty! By his own admission, though, David Gandy can’t grow a beard either, so I don’t feel half as bad as I did before mainly because David Gandy is perfect. Google him. You’ll never get off Google. Sorry about that.

Wanderlust:

Wanderlust is one of the most awful things in all the world. For me, it ranks up there with depression. I don’t understand people who don’t want to travel or are completely happy staying at home for the rest of their lives. I’d much rather be an adventurer, going from country to country, exploring the sights, learning about the language and culture, and then writing about my new experiences for an audience of readers. This has long been a serious dream of mine. I can try to be humble, but I know for a fact that I would make a remarkable travel writer. All day long, every day, the majority of my mind’s activity is focused on travel. I think about cruising the Nile, exploring the Temple of Edfu, going to fancy hotels, staying in castles, finally visiting Asia and seeing the cherry blossom festival in Kyoto, attending Eurovision, taking picnics in Transylvania, and so much more. So much more. Traveling is what I am good at. I need to make it more a part of my life so that I’m not miserable every day wishing that it were. Somehow it will happen.

Unnecessary Space Heaters:

The lower level of my home is heated, but the upstairs isn’t. Up there, I have a space heater in each room — a tasteful space heater that fits the ambiance of the chamber, of course. Downstairs, there has never been a need for this, but for reasons that are too long and too annoying to list, my father has decided to heat the entire level with a silly infrared heater, you know the ones that are always advertised on the television late at night? It’s the absolute worst. The entire house is frigid, so now there is that monster and an additional space heater in each room to keep it livable. Ridiculous! They’re ugly ones, too that don’t match the ambiance of the chambers! I just want the regular furnace back that works just fine, but he’s so insistent on these dumb things. Oh well. Winter can’t be  much longer can it? LOL, we’ve been in the arctic for about a half month now. I can’t bear it!

Waiting For Europe!:

It’s just a little under four months now until I’m jetting off for Europe again. I’m so excited that I can hardly focus on anything else. Europe is perfection and I love being there more than anything else in the world (aside from my cats, of course, but they’re above comparison). I spend all my time thinking about what I will do, where I’ll go, who I’ll see, what I’ll see, all the things I will eat, all the places I’ll stay, and more and more and more. This morning, I booked tickets to see Dawn French in Brighton. I’m just going to pass out from delight. She’s wonderful, an integral part of my favorite comedic duo: FRENCH & SAUNDERS. I’ve little doubt that I won’t pass out when I finally see her face to face; it’ll be like coming face to face with a deity. A GODDESS OF COMEDY! If I saw Jennifer Saunders or Joanna Lumley, too, I would just collapse into a happy heap of death. DEATH. (What if I see Miranda Hart??? WHAT WILL I DO, READER? I WILL DIE.) It’s going to be a great day. Jessica and I will catch the train to Brighton — only an hour away — and then spend some time at the beach and shops. We’ll go to lunch and dinner and have a few snacks in between. We’ll buy some gorgeous little things. We’ll have a snack on the beach. We will dip our toes into the water. We will sigh contentedly. We will see Dawn and laugh and laugh and laugh. Then, overjoyed with life, we will catch the train back to London where we will surely pop by the pub and then back to our abode. Such fun!