Laura-ism #1 - That's how I roll...

I told my wife I was going to chronicle all the great sage advice or words of wisdom she gives me.

On Monday, I was off of work, which I am the whole week. The night before, Laura said to me about the coming morning.

"Oh by the way," she said. "I normally sleep in on Monday mornings (she goes in after lunch on Mondays), so don't wake me up."

She said this last sentence with a flair of her hand.

"That's how I roll..."

I puke all over myself: A touching holiday story...

When I was in college, I worked for Pizza Hut as a delivery driver. I first started there as a cook, but after a few years of toiling in minimum wage hell while my brother, Bill, lavished in tip heaven, I was finally allowed to deliver pizzas (once I had gone two years without an accident).

Delivering pizzas was a pretty sweet gig. We drivers would stand around, fold boxes and wait for deliveries to come up. All you had to worry about as a driver was knowing which way to go, bringing everything the customer asked for and getting there in a timely manner. This is pretty simple, but not as easy as it sounds. Often, you are so swamped with deliveries that you have to decide the best multi-stop route and hope that you didn't forget anything at the store that the customer wanted. Then there are the things that the customer asked for, but didn't make it on the ticket, getting lost, getting stuck behind a train, wrong address given, wrong address typed in by the phone person, slow traffic, the weather, losing your first born, or any other problem.

In the winter, not only did you have to deal with all of that, but you often had to do your job while you were sick.

This brings me to my story for today. It was a very cold December, kind of like this one, in which I had been struggling with a bad cold. I was coughing a lot, but trying not to do that in front of the customer. Usually, I would try and hack up some stuff prior to getting out of my car and delivering the pizza to the door. Or I'd suck on a cough drop while driving.

I was working all day, as I usually did on a Sunday, and I grabbed some lunch at Taco Johns. Since it was Christmas, I thought I would try the Nachos Navidad, which is Taco Johns' annual Christmas special. It's basically just the same old nachos they always serve, but with red and green nacho chips. After all, those are the official colors of Christmas, so it's only natural that you'd want to stuff your face with things of that color.

I ate them at the little break table and coughed a bit while I was doing so. I had a little tickle at the back of my throat, and it was driving me crazy.

I started delivering again. It was cold and windy. I had three deliveries to take. The last one was several miles away and near the edge of our delivery area. I looked at my car's clock and noticed that it was overdue by about 15 minutes. I sped up a little. I finally got to the driveway of the townhouse that wanted the pizza. I stopped the car in the driveway. I coughed. I felt that tickle in my throat again. I coughed again. It was a quick rasp followed by a BLECH! Regurgitated Nachos Navidad streamed all over my jacket, all over my shirt, all over my pants, all over my seat and all over my console.

I had just vomited in the driveway of a customer, and I hadn't even delivered the pizza yet. I looked at how late it was on the clock again. I surveyed the mess all over me. It reeked of nachos covered with bile.

What in the hell was I going to do??

It was already pretty late delivering the pizza. I momentarily thought about turning around, which is what I should have done, and changing clothes at the store. I'd be clean, but the pizza would really be late by then. Also, I was afraid that I'd walk in and have to explain why I had puke all over myself, why I was suddenly wearing a clean uniform, or why I had to go back out to deliver something that I should have dropped off a while ago.

Panicking, I looked around for a stash of napkins that I kept in the car. I had them because there were many times when people would ask for them. Having them on hand almost guaranteed a tip. But on this day, I only had a handful. I grabbed whatever I could find and started wiping off my shirt and jacket. I looked down at myself. I didn't look cleaned up. I looked like a guy that had just vomited all over myself. Now I was starting to get paranoid that the person inside the house had noticed that I was there and was wondering why I had been just sitting there when I should have been delivering the pizza.

I decided to get out of the car. I zipped up my hooded windbreaker to cover up the stained shirt, but the jacket had its share of unsavory stains. I examined it trying to think of a strategy. Then a really dumb idea hit me. The left side of my jacket was clean because I had puked all over the right side. Why didn't I just ring the doorbell and stand there with my left side toward the customer? That way, I could get the money and hand off the pizza without the customer knowing the wiser.

It seemed to make perfect sense to my panicked brain, but the execution was not that smooth.

I rang the doorbell and turned with my left side towards the customer.

A lady answered the door. She took one look at me and got a shocked look on her face. I'm no reader of faces, but it seemed to say, "What in the hell did this guy just roll in to look like that."

Getting paranoid, I decided that I had to get out of there as fast as I could.

I handed the pizza to her. She reluctantly handed me her check (Thank God!), which I'd normally tuck into my waist pouch, but seeing as how I'd have to turn to do that, I just clutched the check in my hand and took off for the car. I jumped in the car and drove back to Pizza Hut.

I obsessed on the way there about how stupid that was, but now I had another problem. What was I going to do with my uniform?

Pizza Hut came into view and I resolved to avoid coming back if other drivers were back. No way in hell did they not notice that I had something all over my front.

Thankfully, no one was there. To my great luck, no one was at the front as they were at the back making a pizza. I sprinted inside and downstairs. I looked in the uniform stash and found a new uniform shirt. I ran into the bathroom and changed.

I came outside to cash in my orders. The shift manager came over. She took a look at my new uniform and asked, "What happened to the shirt you were wearing?"

I shrugged.

"I had to change it because it got dirty."

I try to make salsa...

A Friday night in August was Julia's birthday, so we invited my brothers that live nearby and my Mom, who couldn't come. I didn't want to make a big deal about it, but seeing as how my brothers are within 40 minutes of driving from me, I thought I might as well invite them.

On Independence Day, our Hispanic neighbors brought over soft tacos served traditional style, which entailed shredded pork, corn tortillas, cilantro, onions, red salsa and limes squeezed over the taco meat. It was a big hit. Laura wanted to find out how to make it, so I asked. Turns out the pork was from Famous Dave's (where the husband works), but the salsa was homemade.

The salsa recipe was to get several roma tomatoes, a hot pepper and a clove of garlic.

For the pork, I decided to try it myself using my brother Paul's famous (among our family) seasoning, some mesquite powder and sea salt. At Famous Dave's, they smoke their pork for eight hours, but I didn't have access to a smoker. So I put the pork with the seasonings in the slow cooker and let it go for about seven hours.

I then started the salsa. The recipe called for me to roast the tomatoes and pepper under the broiler until the skins can be peeled off, which I did. I then took my head of garlic and peeled the whole thing. The garlic I stuck in a blender with the pepper and blended. Then I added the tomatoes to the blender.

What was produced was very strong in the garlic department. It was good, but it was like garlic took over the flavor brigade. I think if you look closely in the above paragraph, you can easily tell where I went wrong with the salsa recipe.

I made the same mistake when I made chili one time. I had recently come up with a chili recipe that I modified from one in a cookbook. The recipe called for real garlic, but for the first two times I made it, I used dry garlic from a jar. At work, we were having a chili cook-off for charity so I decided to one up myself by entering my recipe. Then I got cocky and thought about using real garlic. The recipe called for two or three cloves of garlic, so I bought two whole heads of garlic, peeled them, cut up all the pieces and cooked them with the ground beef, as per the instructions. I was immediately done over by the intense garlic smell that smothered the room. I finished the recipe and took a taste. I was met with the most intense garlic tasting chili I've ever tasted.

I thought, "Is this right?"

I added more tomato sauce to try and dilute the taste, but it wasn't helping much. I put the chili in the freezer anyway and decided to test my luck at the cook off. That day came and karma dealt me a huge hand by allowing me to completely forget to bring my chili that day. By the time I remembered, it was two hours until the competition started. Seeing as how I lived 30 minutes away and the chili had been frozen when I made it a few days before. I knew there wouldn't be enough time to retrieve the chili, defrost it and warm it up again. So I gave up my chili table at the cook-off, which as you read later, was a very good thing. Unfortunately, I had made two large pots of it and had to finish it myself.

The problem was, every time I ate the chili, Laura would kick me out of the bedroom. She's very sensitive to garlic and can always tell when I've eaten it. Normally, she just groans and says, "You've been eating garlic haven't you?"

This time, she said as I neared her, "Jesus! What in the hell have you been eating? A garlic patch?"

I assured her that I was not.

"Well whatever you've been doing, you REEK of garlic! It's like it's oozing out of every pore and orifice!"

I would try to kiss her and she'd shy away with a "Aaaggghhh!"

I hate to waste things, so I tried to doctor the chili up some by draining out the juice and replacing it with plain tomato juice, but even that didn't help.

Each time I ate it, Laura would groan and kick me to the other bedroom. One time I managed to talk her into let me sleep in the bed after a bowl of chili, but I was jettisoned in the middle of the night when I turned over and breathed on her. That was too much for her to take.

"Out!" she exclaimed.

As I was walking out the door with my pillow, she grumbled, "And throw out that damn chili!"

So I did...

Back to the near past...

So my twin brother, my two older brothers and their wives came over.

Being a little paranoid about the salsa, I put out two different store bought salsas for the pork taco meat I had made, but if they had any qualms about the salsa, they didn't say anything as they ate it heartily. I barely had any left.

The next day, I was talking to my neighbor who had given me the recipe and I asked her if one clove of garlic meant the whole thing or just one piece of the garlic.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed. "Just one of those pieces."

So instead of putting in one of those pieces, I had put something like 10 cloves of garlic into the salsa, which obviously accounted for the major garlic taste.

I called my brother, Bill, the next day to tell him about my mistake. He told me that when he got home and when he got within smelling distance of his wife, she took one whiff of him and exclaimed, "I don't know what you ate, but I want you to get away from me! It smells like you took a job at garlic factory."

She also said, "In fact, if this was our first date, there would be no chance I'd call you back with you smelling like that."

So it took me 37 years to learn that a clove of garlic means just one piece of the garlic and not the whole head. Now I just need to learn what in the hell oleo is and I'll be set.