Noche Buena

Tonight is our traditional Noche Buena dinner. I figured I would make a quick post about it now before I end up getting entirely too drunk to post later. Actually, that's a lie. I'll probably drunken blog later.

Pictured above is a 22 pound bone-in pork shoulder... Us Cuban folk call in lechon asado. The fat has obviously been scored and is melting beautifully into the meat and keeping it moist. The picture above was taken when it was 6 hours in. It will be in 12 hours total by the time I take it out. The entire neighborhood smells like roasted garlic and pork and I'm sorry that they can't enjoy this. I've even had a couple of neighbors comment on how the whole block smells like dinner and they asked when it would be ready.

Noche Buena is a special time for me. I get to spend this evening with my family and my closest friends and sharing my love of Cuban food with everyone. This year four of my best friends are coming and two of them bringing their parents that are like my extended family. I'm sure we will all be beyond hammered by the time we're half way done with dinner. Actually, I plan on drinking the moment I'm done frying things. Sadly, I won't be eating any fried goodies and I probably won't eat much dinner either as I plan on getting my daily caloric intake from alcohol. Hey, it's the special time of year when I can drink myself retarded and no one will care because it's what people do at these family gatherings. We drink, talk shit to each other and then drink some more.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you all spend it with the ones you love the most.

T minus 365 days until quarter life crisis.

Today is my birthday. I am 24 years old going on a fuckin' 100. I keep forgetting how old I am and when people ask me I have to stop and think about it. Either I wish I was aging backwards or I am really forgetful, or possibly a bit of both. The past couple of "how old are you?" questions I've answered with "68, I think." That would be more appropriate because I'm an old bitty or at least I act like one. I will probably be one of those old ladies with a cane and will hit everyone with it. I guess the one thing I look forward to in old age is being crazy and being able to get away with being a complete and utter bitch.

So, somehow I got voted into cooking my own dinner and baking my own damn cake. I'm not quite sure how that happened but it happened. It all started out with an e-mail from my mom saying that my grandma called and is expecting to come over for my birthday dinner, followed by suggestions on what I should make. "Vieja really likes your sweet BBQ ribs" was in that e-mail somewhere and so I guess I had no choice. My mom is like an evil dictator that's rather coy and manipulative. I hope to one day perfect her skills but for now I will sit here and grumble and be irritable. I would almost rather have butt-itch right now like my Skarepack did last night.

Dom had planned on taking me to brunch and spending the day with me then going out to a casual dinner but just spending the day together and having fun. We also planned on seeing my horse today for the first time in months because she has someone coming out to try her and we are hoping for the best, but I have to stay here and cook. Awesome, really. My all-day date with my Boo Boo has been postponed until tomorrow but I'm sour because I like spending Sundays in bed and doing absolutely nothing other than be a complete bum in my pajamas. I know some of you are thinking that I'm always a bum which is partially true but I am not always in pajamas nor am I always laying in bed.

For now, I am in my pajamas making BBQ ribs, marinating tri-tip and letting my cakes cool since I just pulled the layers out of the oven. I'm making a three layer dark chocolate cake withdark chocolate frosting. I ran out of unsweetened cocoa powder when making the cake so I should send Dom to go get some. However, I did humor myself last night. Last night at the market I bought some really odd candles for my cake. I bought barnyard animals, a gigantic question mark and the same candle at the top of the page. I also bought doggie-themed paper cups, napkins and paper plates. Again, appropriate because I'm a bitch. My mom complained about the candles and said my grandma will hate it but I say TOUGH SHIT BECAUSE I AM MAKING MY OWN DAMN CAKE THE WAY I WANT TO AND NO ONE HAS ANY DAMN SAY-SO ABOUT IT. IF YOU DO NOT LIKE MY CAKE YOU CAN SHOVE IT IN YOUR ASS.

Unfortunately, I can't really leave my house because my piece of crap "expensive" BBQ goes WHACKO all the time and it can't maintain a low level of heat and thinks that 21380912830912830912830981209 degrees is the only way to BBQ. Since I need my ribs at 225 degrees I constantly have to check on it. I chose the illustration on the right to show you how I feel about this mother fucking BBQ of mine. It is a pain in the ass and I hate it. Maybe for my birthday next year I will rent a car crusher for a day and stick both my BBQ and my truck in there, bring home my crushed pieces of metal and garbage, put it on my lawn and call it art.

I will now leave you with, "it's my party and I'll act like a bitch if I want to."

And what is this?

To continue where I left off, I would have to go back to Friday, February 27th. Since it’s now Sunday, March 1st and I’m on the plane to Italy, I might as well just write one long blog since I need to keep myself occupato before I land in Milan. I’m currently on an Airbus 321 via Alitalia and although I’m more of a Boeing girl, the ride has been very smooth and Alitalia did a great job installing very comfortable seats in economy. I probably wouldn’t have complained that much about the seats in AA’s 777 if the seats leaned as far back as these do. Actually, the seats lean so far back that I moved my seat forward a bit to type more comfortably. Alitalia’s blood orange juice is the best I’ve ever had that wasn’t fresh squeezed and their pound cake is so moist and delicious that I almost cried thinking plane food could be that good. I’m reminded that I’ve been eating like a fatso this entire trip which under normal circumstances that would mean I’ve been gaining weight like crazy but because my legs feel like j-e-l-l-o (it’s alive) I guess that means I’ve burned some calories. I even said to Dom this morning in our hotel room how thin I look considering I’ve been eating nothing but shit.

Let me just say that traveling with my family and Dom has been nothing but comedy and chaos. My mom and dad are seriously something else. My mom complains at everything in the world and she asks the stupidest questions known to man… Or when she’s arguing with my dad and calling him a stupid man. My dad’s a total block head and I swear his brain is made of rocks. I know I’ve called him brilliant before in past blogs but I may just take it all back now.

I am considering writing a script – the next blockbuster hit will be “Traveling with the Motta’s + 1 Cognata.” I think if produced into a movie, this London trip would have had everyone on the floor pissing on themselves. I know I covered the room in my previous blog, but I have failed to mention everything else. We had a bunk bed in the shit room – which my dad INSISTED on being on the top bunk and my mom on the bottom. Dom and I got the large bed – not because we are fatsos, but because my dad is a hairy, dirty, shitting, scruffy, giggling beast that my mom wants to kill on a daily basis and she cannot sleep with him for the life of it because of said hair, dirt, shit, scruff and giggles. So my mom’s on the bottom bunk bed bitching about the room and her life and blah blah blah and my dad purposely leans over towards the wall where he knows the bunk bed will turn a bit and freak my mom out. So, he did. She turned white as a ghost, her hair stood straight up and I think her eyes temporarily turned to the back of her head. She was screaming something about her dying and breaking her neck and how unsafe everything is and blah blah. So she fly like a flying squirrel to our bed screaming at how horrible my father is and how she was going to kill him if he got down. Dom decided to join in on the fun and jump on top of the bunk with my dad and jump up and down like a monkey to make my mom nervous. Of course anything that involves Dom getting hurt freaks me out because half of the reason I’m with Dom is because he’s incredibly good looking and if he breaks his face or loses a limb I’m not sure how much I will love him anymore. I mean sure I’ll love him but I’ll have to have a good looking boyfriend on the side or something. Then Dom and I get stuck with the bottom bunk because my mom wanted the big bed so I kicked my dad off of the top bunk although Dom didn’t care so I slept on this uncomfortable cot-like bunk for the rest of the night. It was horrible, uncomfortable, the room smelled like caca and yeah, that’s about it.

Thankfully we didn’t spend a lot of time in our room. We did, however, spend a lot of time in Colin’s cab. No, not a cab company – but actually a guy named Colin who was our cabbie. He picked us up from the Paddington Station and we took his number and called the guy for EVERYTHING. He was actually the coolest cabby ever and since I’m hoping to be in London again in August, I’ll be calling him to pick my ass up from Heathrow. We did the touristy things – we saw Big Ben, toured the Tower of London and played with weapons, saw the Crown Jewels, walked around St. Katherine’s Docks, walked around Westminster Abbey, but we didn’t go in since they wanted to charge 800 million quid to get in, walked up and down the Thames River, went to the Imperial War Museum where I think both my dad and Dom died a little bit and they had just WAY too much fun, went to Harrod’s and bought some stuff, spent a couple of hours walking Windsor castle and the town, ate both good food and shitty food and over-all had a shit ton of fun.

One thing that kept us all laughing were our accents. Apparently it’s impossible to speak to people with accents without picking up on theirs. I spent a majority of my time pinching my mom to stop picking up on their accents because not only did she sound like an idiot, but she elongated everything so she sounded like a retarded English boy because somehow her voice got deeper. She also does this weird thing with her mouth when she makes these accents that it looks like she just sucked on a lemon or thirty. I mean, really – that can’t be comfortable and it’s so unnatural I don’t know how she doesn’t notice she’s doing it. Then when I pinch her she gets pissed off and tells me that she’s not copying the accent and yells at me in Spanish… With an English accent. I’m not sure how she accomplishes that but she does.

Let me just say that fish & chips suck in London. The one thing I wanted to eat more than anything was fish & chips. Somehow – someway, we went to the gay pub and had fish & chips. Those sucked. When we moved to the new hotel, we then went to the Paddington Fish & Chip Shoppe that Colin recommended as being “one of the better ones” and it sucked a fat donkey dick. They didn’t even fry the fish fresh and it was sitting there in a warmer tray. I also do not like that the skin was on and I felt like a dog chewing a rubber toy. There was no point to having the skin on because the meat would just fall off of the skin anyway, so you missed half the batter since it was stuck to the skin anyway. For fuck’s sake, that’s all I wanted… Just some damn good fish & chips. I wasn’t going to tell Colin that he has dog shit for a palate but that’s what it was. Lucky for me, I love all forms of potato + deep fried so I had a shitton of chips, even with breakfast. The chips were served differently everywhere I had them so I guess I’m not sure what’s traditional for chips but hey, they’re fucking fries. Can’t fuck those up too much, right? One thing I did notice was that the chips were significantly sweeter than anything I’ve ever had back home. They were slightly sweet potato like and I wish I could get them like that in the states. Combined with extra fine ground salt, they were heavenly.

For our last night in London, we moved to the Cardiff Hotel at Suffolk Square which was adorable. The buildings were probably 200 years old and everything was made for skinny midgets but lucky for me, I am not a total fatso and I am a midget. My parents got a triple room and Dom and I got a single since that’s all that was available but we were happy as Hell to no longer be at that horrible Kensington ‘hotel’ aka the torture chamber and no longer sharing a room with my parents. It’s not that sharing a room with them is difficult, it’s just that my dad snores louder than 20 bears sleeping in a cave. It makes trying to sleep impossible and there is no such thing as deep sleep. The only thing that was horrible about our hotel was that it didn’t have a lift. Not only did it not have a lift, but we were 981274912874912874198274987 floors at the top since those were the only singles with private bathrooms. It seemed as though the higher we got, the more narrow the stairs were. At one point I thought I was going to fall down an entire flight of stairs. You know, I have small feet… But apparently people in London have smaller feet because my foot barely fit on the steps and there was no guard rail, followed by a 20 foot drop to the previous floor. I am very thankful I didn’t die. This is why we left our luggage with my parents in their room. Dom and I were so exhausted that we both fell asleep around 8:00 pm and slept so soundly that we woke up at 3:30 am thinking it was almost 7 am and that we had missed our flight to Milano. It’s amazing what a combination of lack of good sleep and jetlag can do to a person.

I guess the most hilarious thing of all was in Heathrow airport, outbound to Milano. My Mom and I got separated from Dom and my Dad because we had to pull over to the side and go through our bags and fill a baggie they gave us with anything that was gel or liquid. We were going through security and my bag beeped like crazy so they pulled my bag to the side and strip searched it. I guess I had a bottle of water in there that I was unaware of. Suddenly Dom came running over to us laughing his ass off but looking semi worried and he’s like “OH MAN, YOU KNOW THAT KNIFE YOUR DAD THOUGHT HE LOST? WELL, SECURITY FOUND IT!” My poor dad put his pocketknife that he thought he lost in the hotel room in his fucking computer case, which was his carry on. Oh yes, oh yes, you can imagine they pulled him to the side, called the cops on him, detained him and gave him a good grilling. Since we weren’t allowed in the security area, we saw a woman with a box full of rubber gloves walking into a room and we all died from laughter thinking they gave him a full cavity search. After about half an hour they let him go and it’s too bad because they didn’t cavity search him. That would have probably completed the end of the London trip if they did but all that happened is they took away his pocket knife and put him on “the list.” He will forever be on a list with terrorists.