The way you folks like to grab a tangent and run with it, I’m surprised no one galloped off with Nigella, after I mentioned her yesterday. (Yes, you’re thinking; of course it might have helped if you hadn’t embedded it in such an extra-boring passage.) We watched more Nigella than was absolutely good for us yesterday — a long lull when 2/3 of our family was capable of little else — and I thought the same thing I did the first time I saw her: This woman is sexy. She’s sexy not in the Victoria’s Secret mold, but in the real-woman kind of way. She can bring home the bacon, and fry it up in the pan, and unlike the Victoria’s Secret girls, she won’t stick her finger down her throat and barf it all up later.
She does like to stick her fingers in her mouth, though. She’s always sucking ecstatically on her fingers, rolling her eyes and — I believe this is the point where Alan’s eyes glaze over with lust — separating eggs with her hands, because she so enjoys the feeling of egg white slipping through her long, slender fingers.
While I can appreciate her looks, what I really appreciate is her kitchen. The gas range, the fabulous accessories…the one-handed pepper mill! I want one! Her kitchen is so clean, but she slops food everywhere, wipes it up with her finger and licks it off.
I bet she likes to do it on the butcher block.
Not much to report today. Monday, bleah. I go to work so damn early they don’t even have a word for it. For a while there, we had a string of mild mornings, and I rolled to work with the jazz station on and the sunroof open. I’m very susceptible to music at certain times, and the moments between 4:45 and 5 a.m. are some of them. The DJ on whatever satellite feed our jazz station uses went through about a 10-day period when he was always playing something with vibes at that hour, and I switched to hip-hop. It got my mind perked up for eight hours of shoveling copy down the sluice, but then the station went through a stretch of playing some god-awful R&B power ballads, so I switched back to jazz. Thankfully, the programmer had regained some semblance of sanity for the pre-dawn hours, and we were back to trumpet, sax and piano.
Vibes. What are they thinking?
Speaking of hip-hop. ODB died Saturday. I remember these acts mainly for the headaches they caused my husband, the entertainment editor who had to try to ramrod these names through the copy desk. ODB was, of course, Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He was 35. He had a heart attack. At 35.
Too much rich food, maybe. Someone tell Nigella.
ashley said on November 15, 2004 at 9:07 pm
Ok, I always thought Nigella was a Euro version of Lynne Russell, except Nigella coudn’t kick my ass as much as Lynne, and Lynne probably couldn’t cook as well as Nigella.
And you be dissin’ da vibes? Or maybe, it’s just vibes in the morning. That, I understand. They aren’t suited for “wake up” music, but hey, don’t dis Milt, Bobby, Lionel, and me with one fell swoop.
I’ll miss ODB, if for no other reason than wondering what outlandish thing he would do next.
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Mary said on November 15, 2004 at 11:54 pm
ODB died leaving 13 kids. I go into a sweat thinking about my two. Thirteen? Shudder. I wonder what kind of father he was?
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brian stouder said on November 16, 2004 at 9:33 am
I thought Nigella’s website producer – “Pabulum Productions” was ‘deliciously’ ironic, especially given Dictionary.com’s definition:
>>A substance that gives nourishment; food.
Insipid intellectual nourishment: �TV… gobbled up comedy material and spat it out as pabulum” (Richard Corliss).
Anyway – keep Nigella and gimme Rachel Ray any day!
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juan said on November 16, 2004 at 12:46 pm
WOW! I’ve never heard of her, but looking at her gallery pictures… Grr-r-r-r-owl! I love hippy women.
I like the way she offers up her tomatoes.
*Sigh*
I think the eggwhites schtick may just be a bit too much for me. I’d feel compelled to smoke after watching Food TV… and I don’t smoke.
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juan said on November 16, 2004 at 1:01 pm
RUSSELL JONES, STANDING IN FRONT OF ST. PETERS AT THE PEARLY GATES:
“Nothing under Jones??? There must be a mistake. Look under ‘Big Baby Jesus.’ No? How about [looks around. whispers.] ‘Ol Dirty Bastard?’ No? Wassupwitdat, Whitey?”
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Mary said on November 16, 2004 at 2:15 pm
A store which opened recently here, The Container Store, has Nigella kitchen accessories. They are pale blue or white ceramic and are outrageously expensive. Then again, it looked like most of the folks in The Container Store were not chekcing prices.
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ashley said on November 16, 2004 at 7:01 pm
Mary: I concur about the prices of her stuff at “the container store”…in fact, the prices of just about everything at the container store. I bought this elfa closet organizer stuff, and it costs about what pure cedar would. Ouch.
Brian: Rachel Ray? She’s perkier than Katie Couric! They ought to put her on Iron Chef — if she can do that much damage with a thirty minute meal, imagine if they gave her a full hour! EVOO! EVOO! EVOO!!!
It’s amazing to see how the Food Network is trying to constantly broaden its audience by offering new shows, then seems to come back to the ratings reality that people only seem to care about “Iron Chef” and Emeril (and, to a lesser degree, Alton Brown).
Dweezil and Lisa? Come on. Also, Lisa is a vegetarian, so they immediately alienate either half the audience, or her. Once, they went to a butcher shop…I thought we’d get to see her puke right there on camera.
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deb said on November 16, 2004 at 7:07 pm
my 10-year-old son would watch the food channel all day if i let him. last year, in third grade, he was asked to write an essay about what he wanted to do when he grew up; he said he wanted to be the next bobby flay. (i didn’t even know who bobby flay was.) “i want to make a difference with my cooking,” he wrote. now there’s a concept.
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ashley said on November 16, 2004 at 11:28 pm
Deb: Bobby Flay? I’m so very disappointed…Morimoto, yes; Flay, no.
The food channel is absolutely hypnotic. When I was in grad school and had that pesky dissertation thingy hanging over me, I could watch it for hours upon hours. Anything to avoid all that writing and research stuff.
At a certain point, I thought about dropping out (as ABD) and becoming a chef. After all, I lived in New Orleans, home of the best food in the cosmos (IMHO), and I had several friends working in the finest restaurants in town.
A friend jolted me into reality 2 ways. 1) he reminded me of my student loans. 2) he said (of becoming a chef) “Wow, that would be a blast…for about 6 months”.
Mulling that over kind of did it for me…Professor Ashley it would be!
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