And Now For Something Completely Dessert

Okay, this one is a winner. I haven't made this in a very long time, and you'll see why. My desserts are, as has been mentioned, legendary. This is one of the easier ones, but it still packs a wallop.

This is a variation on what has been called Cool Whip Mincemeat Pie, but it's more of a simple French Silk Pie without the raw eggs. The original faux mince pie is basically Cool Whip, canned vanilla frosting, and chopped jellybeans or gumdrops. The chocolate variation is chocolate Cool Whip, canned chocolate frosting, I like to use a cream cheese chocolate but your mileage may vary, and you can throw in chocolate chips or not to taste. I've got a chocolate ready-made crumb crust, you can get these in the aisle with the pudding mixes.

My advice is to go with semi-sweet chocolate chips if you plan to use them at all. You'll understand why in a minute, and people who have made this tell me they have added a flavored liqueur or a flavoring extract successfully, but that experiments with Italian soda flavorings were not repeated, which you will again understand shortly.

Put the thawed Cool Whip into a bowl, add the can of frosting, and you can use a whisk or a wooden spoon to mix them together, you can even use a mixer if you want but I don't because I sort of like the marbled look. Fold in your chocolate chips, and spoon it into a pie shell. You may have extra, and that's fine. Don't pile it too high, because it oozes.

I cannot strongly enough urge you to taste some of this stuff. Seriously. Lick the beaters, lick the spoon, lick the bowl, I don't care. But this stuff is rich, slip-into-a-coma-rich, especially if you use the chocolate cream cheese frosting, and you should know exactly how rich before you start cutting big pieces for your guests. A little goes a very long way.

Freeze it for a few hours, and serve. If you'd like to serve it chilled rather than frozen, skip the pie and just spoon it into small dessert cups.

If you make any of my recipes, it should probably be a dessert recipe. This one's easy enough to start with, and people will actually eat it.

Other Good Things You Can Do With A Toothpick

Arts and crafts Monday brings you this wooden treasure chest courtesy of Paper Make It. The PDF contains the appropriate pieces to turn the chest into Terry Pratchett's The Luggage. It's got a few tiny fussy corners, so you'll need a hobby knife, a bottle cap full of glue, and a bunch of toothpicks to do it right. Why, what did you think I was referring to?

It's a free download, check out their other free downloads while you're at it. The dice tower absolutely rocks.

I made The Luggage for my friend who introduced me to Pratchett in the first place, and it now sits on her shelf next to the plush sloth and the Playmobil airport screening playset I gave her. You may be amazed to find she's still willing to be my friend after this sort of gift-giving.

Other Good Things You Can Do In An Apron

Have I got a side dish for you...

Okay, you need a can of Pringles. You can pick the flavors, my preferences are for the Sour Cream and Chives and the regular, though the Pizza isn't too bad. The bacon and ranch flavor prompted pizza orders, but that may be an idiosyncratic thing, and personally I haven't had the guts to try the cheesy stuff. Low fat Pringles are bad. They don't rehydrate very well.

You also need margarine, and you can use some milk if you like, but basically the object is to put Pringles and water together and get mashed potatoes. Too much milk makes it weird, and we rarely have anything but the canned stuff on hand anyway, so we don't bother here.

Immediately I must caution you not to save the leftovers. Potato flake leftovers can be saved for a couple of days if you refrigerate them immediately in a tightly sealed container. But they do breed a nasty bacteria at room temperature, so it's really best if you don't do it too often. I don't know if the same holds true for Pringles, since they are cooked in the factory rather than just dehydrated, but really, why risk it, and they get way too weird when you reheat them anyway.

So, boil some water, and crush your Pringles. I've got one of those jar-and-blade chopping things that are designed for nuts and the like. You don't want them powdered, so I'd probably avoid the coffee mill. Really, you could put them in a cake pan and put another cake pan in on top of them and crush them that way, it gets you a decent size to work with, or you could go over them lightly with a rolling pin, which is what I do if I've got an audience because there's apparently just something inherently humorous about a rolling pin.

You'll need about a quarter cup of water for every ten Pringles, more or less depending on how crunchy you want them. A can of Pringles is about ninety chips or crisps or whatever they call them, and to be honest half of that is a good size side dish for three people. So, about two and a half cups of boiling water for the whole can, you can do the rest of the math on your own.

And the water must be boiling. Because it's going to take a while for the chips to rehydrate, usually about fifteen to twenty minutes with some stirring. I like to make them in a thermos to keep them hot. I suppose if you'd rather you could just pop them in the microwave to reheat them once they're the right consistency.

Add a little margarine to taste. Proper Pringles Mashed Potatoes should still be a bit crunchy. You can sprinkle chives on top, or parsley flakes, or you can add sour cream or whatever, it's entirely up to you. I like to add parsley and pimentos on top for a little color, it's very festive.

The first time you do this with new victims, you don't want an audience. Because this is an opportunity that will not be repeated: Your diners will surely ask you what's up with the mashed potatoes. This is your chance to admit, somewhat hesitantly, that you were afraid they might come out a little salty/crunchy, and you're sorry about that, but "Well, I forgot to get the potatoes."

This is a fabulous comedic moment, not to be missed. If you can time it right, you want to give a little space between the "thought it might be salty" and the "forgot the potatoes" for your diners to all thoughtfully take another bite so they can agree with your verdict. I promise you, you will enjoy the reaction. At least if you've had the foresight to lean back a bit.

They'll probably get used to it, eventually. In my home, Pringles Mashed Potatoes counts as a good solid side, often served with meatloaf. I don't have a horrifying meatloaf recipe, so you're off the hook. But next time, dessert!

Monday Arts and Crafts

Canon has a bald eagle paper model up. My partner wants me to build it and mail it to Stephen Colbert, because my partner has a crush. I'm not getting involved.

Meanwhile, there's this extraordinarily cute and easy little guy over here at Marshall Alexander's site, you may need flash player to see it. It's a little guy in a hazmat suit looking quite alarmed at the test tube of pink stuff that's just exploded all over him. I painted the pinky-haz-goo stuff over with a couple of coats of clear glow in the dark nail polish when I was done building.

Wednesday Blood Test Results Blogging

I've spoken to the vet. He says Cypress' liver enzymes are a bit elevated, but not too bad, it's consistent with her just not eating very much. He says her white blood cell counts are normal, which probably rules out cancer and various infections. He points out that the results basically tell us what's probably not wrong, but not what is wrong, and obviously not why, and suggests we take her to the cat clinic for fuller diagnostics including a liver biopsy.

So when I note that Cypress hates you? It's nothing compared to the white hot rage she will cherish in her seething heart for all of humanity for the next, oh, call it eternity. And I'm not prepared to blame her for that.

We have Veterinary Pet Insurance on the cats. We've had it for years, and have never made a claim. Basically the reason we have it is so that when the cats wind up with something horribly expensive wrong with them, I don't have to decide between bankrupting my partner and letting the furmonsters die. But since it's mostly for extreme emergencies like that, we haven't used it yet, admittedly mostly because paperwork makes me break out in hives, so I'll be looking into how to file a claim in the upcoming days. I have a feeling the cat clinic is not cheap. I'll report back on how useful VPI is, if anyone here has used it, feel free to let me know what you thought.

The vet says, essentially, that it's quite likely that Cypress is just bored with the food she gets, as they get older their tastebuds die off (So do yours, you hairless primate. Don't look so smug.). This wouldn't especially surprise me, since the reason we took her off the prescription food is that she just had no interest in eating it. And while you might be able to say "You're going to sit there and not get anything else to eat, young man, until those lima beans are gone", this is not a tactic that works on the cat. Not Cypress, anyway. She's perfectly capable of holding her breath till she turns blue. And I'm a soft touch, and my partner spent two hours going to a half dozen grocery stores and pet food stores last night collecting a variety of food brands and flavors.

My theory continues to be that years ago we fed her something that she was okay with at the time but didn't know enough to know was the best she would ever get out of us, so she sort of turned up her nose at it in feigned disinterest to see what else we'd offer. But it never got any better than that, and she's still waiting for us to get a clue and try it again.

So the vet backed off on the prescription food suggestion and said, in essence, feed her freaking Meow Mix if you have to, but she has to eat, and she has to eat a certain amount, or the fat will start migrating into her liver. As nearly as I can tell, neither of my cats has ever eaten the amount, volume-wise, of food they're supposed to, they just don't get much exercise so it's allowed them to get pretty hefty. (This is my problem, too, for the record.)

So I'm not sure that she's ever going to eat the right number of calories or the right amount of food by weight, but right now she's pretty much just licking the sauce off the food we're giving her, and that's not enough. Today I got sneaky and started mashing the food together so she can't get the sauce without eating at least some of the food.

The vet has also offered vitamins in liquid form, and something called a "pilling gun", which I'm looking forward to attempting to use. I hope it comes with a self-suturing attachment.

Because she can't actually talk, I have a feeling we're going to end up getting a bunch of plastic plates, putting a forkful of each of a dozen or so foods on each one and labeling them, and then ignoring her to see what she finishes. That should be loads of fun, as well.

Bottom line: we still don't know, but it's probably nothing life-threatening, and we'll more than likely actually be able to afford to find out what's wrong with her. And for right now, that's pretty good.

I, meanwhile, thank you for your kind wishes. She won't, but again this is nothing personal, but the next person I send cranes to will get some Pre-Chewed for Your Convenience, and that's a kind of thanks, sort of.

You are invited to leave in the comments your advice on foods for finicky cats (The vet advised us to go lightly on the fish flavors, and beef seems to make her barf, which is understandable because I would guess it's been thirty thousand years or so since a cat was last capable of hunting and eating anything like a cow.), your own personal love for the Spot Bot or the Dyson pet-specific vacuum cleaner, stories of vet bills and pet insurance and a lack thereof, cat-related stories of any sort, dog-related stories because you are not a cat person, or pretty much anything else except the recipe for Pringles Mashed Potatoes because I plan to do that here in the next couple days and hate people stepping on my lines.

Tuesday Catblogging

This is Cypress. Cypress hates you. Don't take it personally; Cypress hates everyone. Cypress marginally accepts my right to exist, most of the time anyway. Beyond that, she hates everyone, regardless of species or personality or generosity in their dealings with her.

Cypress is fourteen or fifteen years old, I'm lousy with dates, and has spent nearly all of it scheming to open cans of cat food. She almost had the can opener sorted out, I'm convinced another year would have had it, when they started putting pop-tops on the cans, and now she's back to square one, a little older, a little wiser, a little more pissed off at an often capricious humanity in general. But if she could figure out the pop-tops and how to extract ice cubes from the freezer, she'd quite contentedly do away with every moving thing on the planet bigger than a toad. This includes me, and I do not take offense. She's entitled to her fantasies; so are we all.

There's no particularly good reason the cat lives her entire life at a point just below the Rage Threshold, that I can see anyway. There's the usual stuff: vets, tooth-brushing, fur-combing, vacuum cleaners, and the presence of the Emergency Backup Cat Iala, but on the whole Iala contends with all of this with unfailing good nature so I'm inclined to assume Cypress is just neurotic. Some people are, after all.

This isn't something I take personally and I encourage you not to either. She's an extremely beautiful cat, and she's good at spotting when I really need her to purr at me or smack me in the face with her tail. If she could tolerate you, I'm sure she'd extend the same empathy.

Today, though, Cypress hates my guts, even more than normal which again is a considerable amount. Yesterday morning, she and Iala seemed to decide it was the perfect day for a Biggest Hairball Ever competition, which in the morning had me exasperated but by the end of the day had me concerned.

A year and a half ago, Cypress stopped eating, we never did figure out why. This caused bad things to happen to her liver, but she got pills and blood tests and more blood tests and prescription food she hated and more pills to make her want to eat the prescription food she hated and more blood tests to see how that was going and after a while the vet delivered himself of the opinion that she was probably okay now.

After that Cypress, who had always had the same sort of appetite you see on the Discovery Channel in late July, suddenly became ultra-finicky and stopped eating nearly all treats she was offered along with pretty much everything else until we settled on the new line of Fancy Feast, which she will eat as long as she doesn't get the same flavor twice in a day and as long as I replace the plate with a new one as soon as she indicates she's bored with it.

I'm unemployed and rarely go anywhere and don't sleep much, so this has worked out reasonably okay until yesterday, when she picked at her food a little, and kept barfing. She's always been a hair-trigger regurgitator, mostly because she would eat fast and then throw it up when it made her stomach hurt. We've learned to live with this, and we don't own any heirloom rugs nor do we keep electronics equipment or books on the floor. We do a lot of laundry and we own a Spot-Bot.

But yesterday she wasn't eating much, and sometime around four AM with me worried since about noon, she went into the bathroom and managed to throw up what was essentially just bile. (I'd warn you guys about this sort of thing but after the recipes there's probably no chance people with delicate constitutions read here anyway.)

So at seven thirty when the vet opened, I called, and we took her in at eight thirty after I wheedled a bit. They know I'm paranoid, and they mostly assume it's probably nothing when I call, because it usually is, but they do try to humor me presumably because they have kids in college.

I'm not the sort of person who digs suspense in real-life situations, to be honest even when writing fiction I like to warn people that X bad thing will happen but that nobody will die as a result of it. So if the vet had laughed me out of the office and told me it was nothing, you may safely assume I'd have told you that to start.

What he did say--after taking her temperature twice and deciding she'd lost some more weight and taking her blood and giving her an injection of something to keep her from barfing and giving her some IV fluids, and telling me she was drooling in my hair (by which time I was definitely less than calm about demanding to be told what was the problem)--was that he didn't think it was intestinal cancer, which was something that hadn't even occurred to me and therefore I was not overjoyed to have it mostly ruled out, but that it might be her liver again and they won't know till they get blood tests and here's an appetite stimulant.

As an aside, the appetite stimulant my cat is getting is one of the drugs that my neurologist has me on to mitigate the effects of the Inderal zombies, and I would possibly argue that giving someone at my weight an appetite stimulant borders on the insane. It's manufactured by Cypress Pharmaceuticals, though, which is entirely irrelevant but has led to some confusion over bottles the last time she was taking it.

So, if you see me restlessly haunting your comments sections, clicking on your blog twice in an hour, or commenting in an even more incoherent fashion than usual, it's because I have a cat fitfully asleep on my foot and I can't pace, which is what I really want to be doing.

If you can, and it's the sort of thing you do, please spare a few good thoughts for her to whoever or whatever it is you may find yourself praying to. Because she's my baby, and I don't want her to be sick or to hurt, and I really don't know what I'll do without her when she eventually dies and I'd like to put that off for a while.

And though she does indeed hate you, it really is nothing personal.

Arts and Crafts Monday

Ah, it's allergy season again. I can't help with that. But I can offer you this cute little Japanese paper toy. It's a kleenex dispenser shaped like a bus. You get little flat anthropomorphic animal characters to cut out and glue together and you can stick them into slots in the various windows so they're riding in your bus! Yay, a toy and it's kinda useful. Or it would be if Americans still sold small tissue dispensers anymore. Instead we get tiny packets where you open one end and slide them out like they were a stack of notebook paper. Still. You'll probably figure something out, and it'll give you something to do that's not work.

Various other paper toys from the same site ("KidsGoo", apparently) found here, and there's some accessories and stuff for the Paper Museum dollhouses here, scroll all the way down and click on the floating characters. If you want the houses they go with, get them at Paper Museum, it has additional ones not found on the other site, and is easier to navigate.

And if none of that catches your fancy at all, here's the Custom Paper Toys site, with Gnarley, paper gargoyle.

Unless otherwise noted, all I've mentioned here are free downloadable pdf files. (If you click around a lot on the Paper Museum site, you may eventually get to pages that will lead you to pages that will try to sell you, in Japanese, pre-printed versions of stuff. I assume you know how not to enter your credit card numbers though. You'll be fine.)

I may have to put together a separate blogroll for my paper toy sites I like.

It Always Looks Like So Much Fun When They Do It

Please allow me to present the voice in my head that is apparently Bill "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly's biggest fan, and the Watch It Like A Wingnut movie review, crossposted at No More Mister Nice Blog, where I can't even keep my fonts straight.

Wow! We finally got to see the Transformers movie, and it just goes to prove everything I've believed all along! But first, a confession. My partner and I went to the theater in our brand new car, which is a tree-hugging hybrid, and a foreign car at that. I'm pretty sure this means my partner is a traitor to the idea of America. I'm so ashamed. And I was even more ashamed after seeing the movie because it is, quite simply, the most American movie… ever.

For starters, it's very pro-military. And even better, pro-defense spending. If we hadn't been pouring all that money into military research, we would never be able to defeat the evil alien robots, so thank God for that, and also for the NRA, which helps us all defend ourselves from evil alien robots.

The movie also makes the point that an alien invasion would establish the president's legacy as a take-charge, leadership, kicking-ass kind of guy. So I'm pretty much rooting for that now, since really, if you think about it there was very little collateral damage, so the president wouldn't even have to go to any funerals, and besides it just looked cool.

Now, there was a recruiting ad for the Marines before the movie, but that's okay because the movie itself proves what I've been saying all along: You don't have to enlist to fight in the War on Terror! The main character, some skinny nerdy guy whose name I can't remember, doesn't do that. Instead, he buys a car. A gas-guzzling, American car. Which turns out to be a cool alien robot who's both his bodyguard and a really good way to get the chick the guy wants. And with the help of the chick and the car robot and the other good robots (all of whom, I note, were good American cars and trucks, big ones, too, and none of those lame hybrids.) and a couple of military guys who were just sort of hanging around and a couple of hackers, the nerdy kid manages to save the world. How? By buying a car! And also by memorizing lines from cartoons.

Even the hackers helped save the world, so now when your mom tells you you'll never amount to anything just sitting in front of the computer eating Cheetos all day, tell her she's wrong. If alien robots come, you'll be needed to save the planet, which is way more important than sitting in a kiddy pool in the desert somewhere with all those other guys who got basically blown up when they weren't expecting it and none of their weapons helped very much, so you have to stay here and make sure you're safe, because if you enlisted and got your arms blown off, for example, the whole world would be destroyed when you couldn't type anymore. It's like that thing Spock was always saying about the good of the many. And anyway, one of the robots gets killed and another loses his leg, so it's not like we're not all on the frontlines in the War no matter where we are.

But, okay, at the beginning, in the opening credits, there's something about the movie being produced in association with Hasbro, and the whole audience started laughing, because Hasbro is a pretty funny word. And then there are the military guys in a helicopter, and one of them keeps speaking Spanish, I guess, which annoys the other guys because they don't and they know he speaks good English, so why is he doing that? He might be making fun of them, and how would they even know? So they keep yelling at him to speak English, which makes sense, and he won't, and I think he gets eaten or killed or something or maybe it was some other guy, I couldn't really tell them apart.

Anyway, at some point the military guys end up in an Iraqi village, and they yell at some kid's dad that they need a telephone, and he just points to it, so everybody in Iraq speaks English well enough, too. I think this just proves how stupid the Left is when they say things like, oh, but we should keep the Arabic translators, even if they do keep being gay. Clearly they just want to use the military as a social experiment to integrate the gays. Which is pointless because we don't need them anyway. I mean, even the robots speak English.

I won't ruin the movie for you, because you should totally go see it instead of giving your money to Michael Moore to see his stupid hypocritical movie (If he was really interested in health care, he'd lose weight!). But I want to tell you a few other really cool things about the movie. At some point the Secretary of Defense tells some weaselly guy who looks kind of Arabic to me that he should do what the military guys want because "Losing is not an option with these guys" or something like that, and the whole audience just cheered! So those polls about how Americans think we're losing in Iraq, I don't know who they're polling, maybe they're just calling up the offices of CounterPunch and The New York Times or something. Because where I was sitting in that theater, everybody thinks we have no choice but to win!

Also, and I don't want to ruin this, but I don't know how they did it, they made the perfect argument for pardoning Scooter Libby—sometimes you have to defend your friends or family out of loyalty, and it's not right that you should have to have a criminal record just for being loyal. Loyalty is supposed to be a virtue, after all.

I also want to point out that the movie makes a great point that you shouldn't go around destroying dams just because the fish-huggers think you should, because they might be there for a very good reason, and it would endanger us all if the government had to explain why they needed to leave any dam where it is. We should just trust them, since they know more about this stuff than we do. And while we're at it, it's clear evidence that Hollywood has finally rejected that failed "theory" of evolution—the aliens are cars, not dinosaurs!

And, really, I think the whole thing is basically an analogy for Iraq—part of it is even in Iraq—where the Autobots are America, and the Decepticons are Al Quaeda insurgents, and Optimus Prime is Bush. Because the Decepticons want to take over the planet to get something from us—just like the oil in Iraq—and they also think humans should be killed because they don't deserve freedom. So the Autobots have to fight them because they think that Iraq, or in this analogy the humans, should have freedom. So, really, the Megatron guy just hates us for our freedoms, which is what the president has been saying all along.

Finally, I just want to encourage everybody to go see it. At last, at long last, the liberal secular progressives who control Hollywood have given us a movie that's not about hating Christ or about loving anal sex, but is instead about patriotism. I haven't been this proud to eat American theater popcorn since Independence Day came out and proved that guys with computers can defeat an alien invasion. Booyah!

Independence Day Not Exactly Random Ten

I've got rather a ton of good, lyric-based trenchantly cynical or wistfully ideological music appropriate for this Fourth of July, so let's see what the first ten that come up that seem appropriate are. And yeah, if "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" pops, you'll hear about it, as trite as that seems.


American Idiot, Green Day. I figured to mostly get folk songs out of this, but this isn't a bad place to start. Newer can be good. Random can be apt. (Though, I grant you I skipped some Weird Al to get here. If it'd been "Biggest Ball of Twine", I might have felt compelled to go with it.)
"Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alien nation/Everything isn't meant to be okay."

God Bless America Again, Bobby Bare. You might recognize this as the song at the end of Canadian Bacon. I was kind of hoping this wouldn't turn up. I'm pagan, I know a bunch of y'all are atheists. Nonetheless...
"God bless America again, you must know the trouble that she's in."

I'm A-Lookin' For a Home, Pete Seeger. Hard to believe this is current again, innit.
"If anyone should ask you why I sing so shrill, tell 'em I'm a discharged soldier a-waitin' on the housing bill."

Seatbacks and Traytables, Fountains of Wayne.
"Trade one town for another, delayed now why did we bother. X on the calendar square, new city, same stuff."

This Land Is Your Land, the Woody Guthrie classic. I was hoping this would come up, but since I have about twenty versions of the damned thing, it wasn't bad odds. You don't know the lyrics to anything but the chorus? You should. Find another set of 'em here.
"Near the relief office, I see my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there askin', is this land still made for you and me?"

To Have and Have Not, Billy Bragg.
"I've come to see in the land of the free, there's only a future for the chosen few."

Do Re Mi, Woody Guthrie. (I admit it, I skipped "We Shall Overcome" with Pete Seeger. It seemed a bit cloying for the day.)
"California's a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see, but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do-re-mi."

I'm Afraid of Americans, David Bowie. I'm laughing too hard to keep going, I think. At least this balances out the Bobby Bare:
"God is an American. God is an American."

Okay, no more. My iTunes is clearly possessed. Your ninth and final song is the Arrogant Worms, We Are The Beaver.
"You might think a rodent is a pretty lame choice for a national animal..."
Never mind. The lyrics are here, there's no way I can do it justice.

Feel free to speculate in comments on what the tenth song might have been. I was holding out for Woody Guthrie's I Got To Know, but the way things are going it's more likely to have been some punk cover of that Simon and Garfunkel song and then I'd never have respected me, which would suck 'cause I'm the only one who bothers.