Monthly Archives: September 2024

Paul’s Awesome English Dictionary – Today’s Word: Cwont

Posted on September 10, 2024 by pauldelancey

Buying a major appliance, while expensive, can be exciting. You’re tired of washing clothes by hand. You look forward to reading a good book while the washer works its magic. You anticipate hitting the open road with your spiffy new car. The list goes on and on. So do your calls with customer service. You find yourself believing the person on the other end of the phone will be imprisoned if you’re helped. But this experience pales in comparison to the soul-sucking horror of trying to get service at the place where you made your major purchase, a dealership for example. You go round and round with the service people. At every turn, you discover they can’t fix your car. And if they can fix your vehicle, you find out that they won’t.

If only there were a word to describe this implaccable lack of help. And now there is:

TODAY’S AWESOME PHRASE

Cwont

Awesome entry #46

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Essential Spanish Phrases – Lesson 1

Posted on September 9, 2024 by pauldelancey

The world is getting more cosmopolitan everyday as travel gets ever easier. You might find yourself in Mexico, Spain, Peru, or even Argentina. You meet a native. Perhaps you wish to order a sandwich or a coffee. You might want directions to your hotel. What happens then? Nothing. You freeze. You know no local words because you daydreamed in Spanish class. Instead, you drew pictures of your current heartthrob, didn’t you? Well, you’re stuck. How will you survive?

Fear not. You don’t need to know what every noun is in Spanish. You especially don’t need the ability to conjugate every Spanish verb.

No! But you will need to remember translations for key phrases if you hope to survive in the lands of the Spanish.

And De Lancey’s Essential Spanish Phrases Course is here to help. Just subscribe and soon every Spanish city will be your oyster.

And now, Lesson 1:

 

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Tostada Shells

Posted on September 8, 2024 by pauldelancey

Mexican Appetizer

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TOSTADA SHELLS

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INGREDIENTS
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6 corn tortillas
1½ tablespoon olive oil (½ teaspoon on each tortilla side)
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SPECIAL UTENSILS
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baking sheet
aluminum foil or parchment paper
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Serves 6. Takes 20 minutes.
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PREPARATION
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Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line baking sheet with foil Place tortillas on foil so that they don’t touch each other. Use brush to spread ½ teaspoon olive oil on each tortilla side. Bake for 7 minutes at 400 degrees. Flip tortillas. (Be careful.) Bake for another 7 minutes or until tortillas become crispy like a tortilla chip.
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Remove from heat and cool on plate cover with paper towel.
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TIDBITS
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1) Tostada is an anagram for DA toast. Because district attorneys everywhere have loved tostadas, as who does not? However, DAs have an especially deep and abiding love for tostadas that transcends national boundaries and the centuries. If you wish, I can direct you to volumes of research by culinary lawyers.
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2) The tostada craze first infected jurisprudence when in 1920 Pablo Erickson bribed a Manhattan DA to mount a particularly feeble prosecution. Of course, Mr. Erickson was as a guilty as sin, but he was a great chef. (All Mexican-Swedish chefs are. It’s in their blood.) Anyway Chef Erickson served a tostada to the DA each and every day of the trial. Of course, the jury acquitted Pablo. However, this decision astounded the nation. Newspaper headlines screamed, PABLO ACQUITTED IN ERICKSON v GOODNESS.
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3) Hardened criminals took note and bribed DAs everywhere. Our streets teemed with ruffians and bad eggs. The height of our judicial system illness occurred from 1920 to 1933. How do we not know this? Because the Great Tostada Corruption (GTC) coincided rather closely with Prohibition. Sure, GTC and Prohibition spawned corruption, but the bootleggers also emphasized violence. Illegal tostadas simply could not compete with hooch for newspapers headlines. Now you know why DA never let people take their pictures while they are eating a tostada.
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– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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When I Sang and Danced on Stage

Posted on September 7, 2024 by pauldelancey

The play, You’re a Big Man, Charlie Brown sold out so many performaces in 1967. It did so well that my fifth-grade teacher felt inspired to produce the play for Santa Anita Elementary. There were two shows. Each show had a completely different cast. The teacher, Mr. Schneider, cast me for the role of Snoopy.

Playing Snoopy required the actor to sing and dance.

1) I could not sing. I still cannot sing. I am tone deaf, well mostly.

2) I could not dance. I still have enormous problems moving my feet in time to the beat.

3) However, I could memorize lines and could be counted on to deliver them in front of an audience of parents and school kids.

But that was enough then to garner the coveted role of Snoopy.

Since, musical parts have been distressingly few and far between.

Life is hard. I flamed out early.

Even so, I still get dreams where I find myself on stage without ever being given my lines.

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

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Tomato Rules of Thumb

Posted on September 6, 2024 by pauldelancey
No one likes an unruly tomato.  The really bad ones escape to outer space. So here are rules to keep them on Earth.
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1 pound = 2 big* tomatoes = 8 plum tomatoes = 3 Roma tomatoes = 25 cherry tomatoes
1 pound = 1¾ cups diced** tomatoes
1 cup canned tomatoes = 1¾ diced, cooked tomatoes
1 cup tomato sauce = ⅓ cup tomato paste plus ½ cup water
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* = This is an approximation. Tomatoes come in all shapes and sizes even within the same type of tomato, such as Roma. It would be nicer for chefs around the world if tomatoes displayed a greater degree of uniformity. However, the tomato world is a fractious community. Perhaps you can convince them to be the same. Then you will be the long awaited Tomato Whisperer.
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** = Again, an approximation. The number of cups you get from a pound of tomatoes depends on how finely you slice them. You can’t blame all your culinary uncertainty on the tomato.
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“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves. . .”
– Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II
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– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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A Fine Outcome

Posted on September 5, 2024 by pauldelancey
Farine du Ble sat down. She spent all day cleaning that room. What for? No one ever used it. Still she tidied. Her muscles ached. Now it was time for reading. She openned her book, Dress Patterns and the Women Who Made Them. She soon imagined herself making fancy dresses for the First Lady. Little by little she drifted from day dreaming to dreaming.
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A few hours later, bricklayers sealed off the room; apparently someone else thought the room to be useless. She noticed not. Farine’s tired muscles ensured that only the dead would wake her. Which they did as soon as she had used up the oxygen.
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And now they’ve found her; her book still open. One of her descendants has a gigantic library fine waiting for him.
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– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Treat People With Respect

Posted on September 4, 2024 by pauldelancey

 

It’s important to call people the way should be called.

Take the case  of Fernando Aloysius Bunion.

He wants his friends to call him “Fern.”

If you are almost a friend or a frequent business associate, say “Fernando, your fly is unzipped.”

If you are semi-frequent acquaintance, refer to him as “Bunion, check your fly.”

If you are engaging him in formal correspondence, address him as “Mr. Fernando Bunion.” Companies who call him “Fernando” when writing out of the blue are complete, are staffed with overfamiliar oafs.* And Fern, I am a friend of his, will toss your missive unread into the trash bin.

* = Why isn’t the plural of “oaf” not “oaves?” The plural of loaf is loaves.

 

So, it is was with some satisfaction that my close friend Brain Posterior was addressed as Mr. Brain Posterior. “You cannot believe how many people up and call me “Brain” or only slightly better, “Brain. But Imaging Healthcare treated my name and  me with the respect I deserve. If damage to my skull or brain warrants an MRI, I know where I’ll going.”

See below how Imaging Healthcare informs my friend he’s getting fossa without contrast. People, this is the gold standard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

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Things Faster Than Plate Tectonics

Posted on September 3, 2024 by pauldelancey

Watch Earth’s plates separate.

And they are:

1) The wait in an urgent care’s waiting room on a Tuesday morning after Labor Day. 2,700 people were there 15 minutes after opening. (All the people who would have gone on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday stampeded the facility today.)

2) Road repair. (The jury’s out on this one, but I suspect plate tectonics is a little slower.)

3) Watching a foreign move because your good looking date wanted to.

4) The line at the DMV.

5) Red lights. (There’s always a direction of traffic that gets massively favored and one that gets screwed.)

6) Any line when you have a bad back.

7) Reading the last 200 pages of War and Peace. (Again, another close call.)

8) Parties where you are the only introvert, don’t know anyone, and have no ride home.

9) And there are no snacks to eat and no animals to pet.

10) Recovering from Covid.

11) Watching a pot of water and waiting for it to boil.

12) Games of Risk(tm), Uno(tm), and Monopoly(tm).

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

 

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Best Book Ever – Coming Soon

Posted on September 2, 2024 by pauldelancey

Award-winning author Carl La Fong dazzles us again with his latest self-help book, Serenity Through Tacos and Meditation. After all who doesn’t love tacos? Nobody. And meditation is so easy. You don’t even need glasses.

Learn serenity through his ten easy lessons.

Soon you’ll be chanting:

“I am the taco.
“I am meditation.
“I am the Serenity Emperor.
“Ohm.”

And who doesn’t want to be the Serenity Emperor? Buy Mr. La Fong’s book and become his Most Serene Highness. You’ll be glad you did.

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

Categories: cartoon, Great Things to Think About, lifestyle, things to see and do, wise words | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

You Know You Want to Party With Me

Posted on September 1, 2024 by pauldelancey

My pantry, it’s organized

I want straight from sleeping in bed to fighting a website in order to schedule an MRI. It was much harder than it should have been.

Watched a squirrel run around outside my outside door. The therapeutic value of squirrels is immense. Also, it just so happens that the squirrels who hide in the hedges are veterans from Paul’s Flying Squirrel Squadron. They worked alongside our regular armed forces and did the jobs that are literally too small for our human service people to do. They have seen things no squirrel should have to see and performed mighty deeds for our country. I salute you, my furry warriors.

Four 8-cup Mason jars were delivered last night. So with a lilt in my heart, I further reorganized my shelves of flours, sugars, etc.

A well-earned bowl of strawberry Cheerios provided the sustenance I needed for my next project.

I completely reorganized the pantry. I know, such fun!

Now, I’m writing up my activities in the hopes that they’ll inspire you to peform your own deed of greatness. And dare  I say it, impel you to meet up with me where we will knock back great steins of cranberry grape juice and sing the songs of our people until the police shoo us outside for causing a ruckus.

I will now take a bath–with bath bombs of course–and read a book about the worst modern teams in baseball.

And then at night, I’ll view the detective series Vera and Death Valley Days hosted by the Old Ranger.

You know you want to party with me.

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

 

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