Mondrianyone

I forgot about another use for the strainer insert: blanching. My husband goes insanely overboard when fiddleheads are in season--he usually buys 25 pounds of them. And of course they have to be frozen, because who can eat 25 pounds of fresh fiddleheads? You have to blanch them first, and getting them out of the pot and into ice water is so much easier with the insert, rather than fishing them out with a spider or a slotted spoon a few at a time. So anyone else who's married to a crazy person might find this useful.

I have one as well. You can also use it to steam vegetables when there are too many to fit in a normal steamer and also boil potatoes (although I use the Instant Pot for cooking potatoes now). I think if you have a standard 8-quart stockpot, you can get an insert that will likely fit in it, even if your pot didn't come with one.

I knew it because I was the person who line-edited the first four books of the series. The ghostwriters weren't all that good, so their work mostly needed to be completely rewritten. I think I got a hot 11 bucks an hour. I was aware that the series became huge, but I never read another book after those first four. They're her characters and her plotlines, but most of the actual words on the page are mine. The more you know . . . 😎

To me it looks as if the girls in reform school who all missed their First Communion because they got knocked up decided to have it belatedly thirty years later. All they're missing are the little veils. Disclaimer: I lived in Washington Heights for years, and I loved seeing those sweet girls in their Communion dresses. It doesn't translate all that well to adulthood. And I use the word loosely. 👰

Pretty much every recap of this show could contain the phrase "but things go sour when Gizelle confronts . . ."

There's so much that's so wrong about this. The FU to Jason (and presumably the court, which . . . how is that smart? Frankel-y, my dears, I don't give a damn) and the incredibly creepy masking. But also, when the child's face is obscured, it's her body you're left to focus on, and the body shots always seem to feature her ass aimed most prominently at the camera. It almost feels like an invitation to pervs and pedophiles. And the other thing, the layer under the layers, is that we know Bryn looks so much like Jason's family, specifically his mother. So it's like putting a creepy face over the face we know Frankel hates. That's gonna be a lot for this little one to unravel when she's not so little anymore. Crazy sick that this person with every resource to get herself healed is instead choosing to ramp up the cycle of cruelty and derangement and dump it all over her child. Imagine what she'd do to a kid she professed not to love.

For sure. So many wonderful old songs, and stars who weren't really singers, like Mae West and Sophie Tucker, Rusty Warren, Mabel Mercer. The difference is, they brought a healthy dose of irony and a sense of humor about themselves to their work. And a great deal of intelligence underpinning their performances. I don't think the countess has that in her.

I dunno, HH. If they need some anonymous dork (me) to tell them about this song, they're definitely in the wrong business. And if the countess has so little curiosity about her own art, well . . . I hope they never put the song in her act. Dietrich was such a hero (literally, against the Nazis) that I can think of a million better ways to "honor" her.

Maybe we've finally stumbled on the one thing that the countess really does have in common with a truly great cabaret star.

You probably have enough time to order speck online if that's what you really want. Zingerman's, iGourmet, even do a pickup at Walmart.

LuAnn misspelled "niece." It's funny she doesn't know the "I before e" rule. I figure that in her world it's usually "I before everything."

Oh, no! Don't apologize! (Not even sarcastically!) I thought the n made it funnier, whether it was a typo or not. It's much more logical that some poor unsuspecting man would've thought she was talking about wine all night, because who's nuts enough to go on and on for hours about cabaret?

I love the taglines precisely for the reason you hate them. They're so tacky and ridiculous, they set just the right tone for the show and the "stars."

I try to pinch-hit as the class elevator whenever the countess is in the joint.

"Get offa my jock, Giacomo!" "Whadda you mean, you uppa there and I'm downa here?" "I'ma no likea you, I'ma no trusta you, and I thinka you a snake!" Oh, Anna, I never knew you, and yet I miss you! 🍕 (Pizza 'cause I couldn't find a bowl of pasta in the emojis.)

Holy ancient gadget, Batman! I was watching something on YouTube today, and one of those thumbnail videos was about testing very old kitchen gadgets that the presenter had found in a junk store. I'm also a gadget addict, so of course I watched it, and she was funny and smart, so I watched her next video, and then her next one was about the inside-the-egg scrambler, sold by Ron Popeil back in the day. And I said, "Hey, I have that exact gadget! Let's see if it still works!" So I dug it out of the back of the gadget cupboard (every cupboard in my kitchen is the gadget cupboard, who am I kidding?), and dusted it off and plugged it in. I couldn't find a switch or a button on it anywhere--it hasn't been plugged in for like a century, and I couldn't remember how to activate it. Finally I figured that the pressure of the egg itself pushing down on the needle scrambler must be what does it. So I put an egg on the needle, but I bore down too hard, and the egg cracked apart in the little bowl. Anyway, to make a long story short (too late, I know), I took toothpicks and Q-tips and picked away any old invisible residue and then figured I'd sacrifice one more egg, and what do you know, I got it working! Right now I'm hard-boiling two eggs to see how they come out. From back when I actually used this gizmo, I remember that if you spun the needle for a long time, you got a solid yellow egg, but if you managed to hit the sweet spot, you'd get this beautiful yellow-and-white marbleized little oval sculpture. Time will tell. I love it when I can bring things back to life, even if they're useless to everyone but me. I'll post photos if they're good.

All true. It was more the visual that I was going for. Bethenny should only be half as authentic.

I don't think "introvert" was the word Gizelle used. It was my word, because I couldn't remember exactly what she said. So it may be a totally moot point. I'll watch that part again sometime and see what she really did say.

I noticed that Monique mentioned once again that she was done having kids and once again Chris said quietly, "We'll see about that."

I don't know what dank memory recess I pulled Anna Magnani out of, Bkkpck. She was a little before my time, but I have mental images of her from old B&W movies on TV, seemingly always in some kind of passionate agony or rage, usually in her bathrobe, dumping bowls of pasta on men's heads, tearing at her hair, with big dark circles around her eyes. Or I could be doing her a terrible disservice. Maybe she just had a bad fish allergy.

It is odd. Usually they'll say something like, "She's off filming for whatever" or "He's a little under the weather today" when one of them is absent. Nothing like that either time.

I think you mean Candiace and her mother.

Thanks, everyone who expressed condolences about my cousin. It was a long time ago, and it's mostly scabbed over, but I was left with deeply angry feelings about the whole issue of driving drunk. On a cheerier note, you all have displayed such restraint in not using the word "pupsicle" even once in this whole thread. Kadooz for that! And I'm not making light of Tinsley's loss in any way. The only thing worse than seeing the person at the animal hospital with the dying dog is being that person, which I've been too many times. Or vice versa. Unless you're Bethenny and stand around watching your dog seize for an hour without getting in the car and racing to the vet but choose instead to do some kind of Anna Magnani impersonation on social media. I don't live in that universe, thank God. But I can absolutely envision myself doing what Tinsley did, panicking and dialing 911. So no shade from me.

It made me laugh to hear that Gizelle thinks of herself as introverted. Her kids are great, though, somehow.

I'm saying that we take drunk driving far too lightly in this country. I thought that was clear from what I posted. There's a whole industry devoted to getting people off the legal hook for doing something that's a crime. It doesn't matter whether the person driving under the influence is a full-time alcoholic or just a hobby drunk. It certainly didn't matter to my cousin, who was a young pregnant newlywed, her unborn child, and her husband when a drunk driver killed them all. What we call the person who does it is inconsequential. It's a crime that should carry a jail sentence, IMO.