The Tell-Tale Tapping Toe

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I will post the frittata recipe, but for the love of all that is decent, stop the hideous tapping of that foot"

Ahem. There is really no "recipe" for this dish ( the frittata, not the heart ) but here's how I made the one whose portrait(which strangely never ages...wait, that's Wilde , not Poe) appears in the blog below.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9 inch pie pan.
Heat about one tablespoon of good olive oil in a skillet. Saute one chopped leek, one large clove of garlic, minced, a couple of diced sweet peppers and some steamed spinach, until tender. In a separate bowl, beat 4 eggs, a half teaspoon salt, a bit of pepper and basil. Stir in about half a cup of crumbled feta and the veg. Spread in the pie pan and bake for about 25 minutes. Viola!

Today's listening pleasure: Etta James, "Matriarch of the Blues" four stars.

Reduced Guilt Cheesecake Tart

I was craving cheesecake today but did not want to consume three or four packages of cream cheese in the next couple of days. So I adapted a recipe I found on Food Network and called it:

Reduced Guilt Cheesecake

8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 large egg
3/8 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ cup blueberry or other fruit preserves
Hot shortbread base (see below)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a bowl whisk cream cheese until smooth and whisk in eggs, sugar and vanilla. Evenly spread preserves over hot shortbread and pour cream-cheese mixture over it. Swirl a couple of teaspoons of preserves into the mixture if you like. Bake in middle of oven until slightly puffed, about 30 minutes. Cool completely in pan . Will keep, covered and chilled, for 3 days.
Shortbread base
3/8 cup butter
1cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup packed light brown sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cut butter into 1/2-inch pieces. In a food processor, process all ingredients until mixture begins to form small lumps. Sprinkle mixture into a 9 inch round baking pan, pressing evenly onto bottom. Bake shortbread in middle of oven until golden, about 20 minutes.

Beezer Navel Gazing

Will it never end? (N.B. beezer is my new word for boomer+geezer. I coulda said boozer but out of deference to Clapton's sobriety, I chose not.)

The Chicago Trib recently ran an interview with Clapton, guitarist, devoted supporter of Giorgio Armani and champion of the Chicago blues. I don't mind Clapton as a musician, in fact I own several of his albums. He never lived up to Cream but then neither did Bruce or Baker. Anyway I should take my own advice and enough with the looking inward and backward.
In this interview he bemoans the possible demise of "hand-made music" and complains you can't get vinyl anymore. Eric, do ya get out much, out of the superstar stratosphere?? Hand made music is thriving in countless regional festivals and tiny backwater burgs.Carefully tended vinyl is sold out of basements, all over the internet and in small and medium storefronts in any city I visit anyway.
I'm exasperated with the whole "death of music" hand-wringing and lip quivering. Music is just fine. New artists may have to be content with an artist lifestyle instead of an Armani lifestyle, but just maybe it was the Armani lifestyle that supported the rise of music as industry.
Today's listening pleasure- The Best of Cream (bought for a couple of bucks at Walmart) 4 and a half stars.

Whatsamatta with a Frittata?

In my opinion, nothing!! We are now into the boating season at Casa Mirrorball, which means lotsa campfire food for the guys...dogs, burgers, smokies, you get the picture. Myself, I live on frittata, or I could if need be.

I think this is a very pretty food and a great way to clean out the veggie crisper!

Today's listening pleasure- Heartland, 5 stars.

Who Invented Sex Anyway?

Since blogging is all about mouthing off about stuff one knows little-to-nothing about, I’ve decided to go along with a friend’s suggestion that I write about sex.

As a child of the sixties and seventies, my sexual history was shaped by articulate and persuasive works like this:

"A sexual revolution would require, perhaps first of all, an end of traditional sexual inhibitions and taboos, particularly those that most threaten patriarchal monogamous marriage: homosexuality, "illegitimacy," adolescent, pre- and extra- marital sexuality. The negative aura with which sexual activity has generally been surrounded would necessarily be eliminated, together with the double standard and prostitution. The goal of the revolution would be a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances." (Kate Millet. Sexual Politics, p.62)

I was raised by a strict Italian mother with whom I had a deeply adversarial and difficult relationship. I wanted and needed to believe in Kate Millet. Forty years later I have to admit that through all my determined wantonness it was my mother’s and grandmother’s credo of self-protection and mistrust of men that colored my sexual experience and that the sexual revolution came too soon and too fast ( innuendo intended) to do me or many of my generation any real good.

Who invented sex anyway? According to a Prehistoric Sex Quiz at the Live Science website, Ice Age cave drawings and artifacts (the nature of which I will leave to your imagination) indicate that the female of our species enjoyed sexual activity on par with the male? Was it really the patriarchal system that wrecked it for succeeding generations?
The same quiz states that early human sexual habits resemble most those of the promiscuous chimp-like bonobo. Maybe that’s where we went wrong. Maybe free sex without guilt is the only way to free ourselves from the bondage of sexual inequality?
Who knows? I certainly don’t. All I do know is that whenever I an unfortunate enough to watch a few minutes of panting, gyrating, semi-clad music video (or mainstream commercial) what I see is a whole lot of sex and not much joy.

Ha! Seems like I now know even less about sex than when I began writing this blog. I rest my case.

Today’s listening pleasure- Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced? 5 stars 