Box Wine Taste-Off: The Results!

Twelve pretty red wines, all in a row

As many of your know, this past weekend I hosted a box wine taste-off.  15 box wines, eighteen tasters.  Four to six of those people really know wine.  When I planned this, I imagined a funny write-up, kind of like the Rants from Mommyland version, but when I looked at the tasting notes the next day, I realized that we have some good and valuable information here! 

Tasting notes?  Yes.  That happened.  Here was the suggested rating scale I developed:

1 – I’d rather drink mouthwash. 

2 – I guess it’s better than licking hand sanitizer. Well, better than scented hand sanitizer, anyway.

3 – I’d cook with it, but not for anyone I actually like.

4 – Hmmm, not for my first glass of the night.  Maybe glass 4 or 5.

5 – Yeah, I’d drink this for free.

6 – I totally don’t hate it!

7 – Quaffable.

8 – This could be my new go-to.

9 – I would defend this wine without even a teeny bit of shame.

10 – I would proudly bring a box of this wine to a dinner party.

I also asked people to rate their level of wine snobbery on a 0-10 scale, and left a field for notes and comments on each wine.  Sure, the writing gets illegible by the end of the evening, and the notes on the first 5 or 6 wines are more detailed and sophisticated than on the last few.  But major kudos to the few of you who tasted all or almost all of the wines and had detailed notes on all of them.  You rock.

Sadly, though I rated myself a 7.5-level wine snob, I did not have sophisticated tasting notes on most of the wines.  This is perhaps explained by the fact that I started “tasting” an hour or two before the rest of the guests arrived to quell my omnipresent social anxiety.  Seriously, what kind of socially anxious person loves to throw parties?  I don’t know, but that’s me.  I panic and worry, but once the party is going, I always have so much fun that I forget about the anxiety when I get excited about the next party.  So yeah, I was already significantly softened up by the time people arrived, and then I did far more cooking than eating.  So… yeah.  I did taste all of the wines.  But my notes include some of the following gems later in the evening:  “I forget,” “Yummy,” and “Yeah, OK Eve, you win.”  (Eve is my very close friend, and she and I have different go-to box wines, but I now acknowledge, after side-by-side tasting, that her favorite is better than mine.  Eve, you win.)

In all seriousness, this was one of the more fabulous parties I’ve thrown in my day.  It was the perfect mix of theme/activity and boozy silliness.  The tasting task lent structure and provided stuff to talk about, even among people who didn’t know each other and who have almost nothing in common.  There was even a crafty component.  People made their own wine charms with paper clips and pipe cleaners.  Here are the ones I was still able to find the next morning (sadly, the fantastically jaunty moustache had already been disassembled, but happily, the pipe cleaner… um… “junk” was still available for photographing.)

OK, on to the results!  There are a lot of wines here.  If you know what you like (jammy, earthy, etc.) and are looking for recommendations based on your palette, I’m giving you all of the information to make an informed box wine choice.  But if you just want to know which wines are yummiest, you can skip to the summary at the end.  It was supposed to be a bar chart, but with 15 wines, the bar chart looked too messy.  For some things, words are better.

Before I go wine-by-wine, I need to define my terms. (This blog entry really needs a Methods section. And maybe an Appendix.) Guests were divided into “wine snobs” and “non-snobs” according to their response to the wine snobbery question.  People who rated themselves as 7 or higher were considered snobs.  The sophisticated science behind that distinction was that I asked myself, “Who are the wine snobs?” and then looked, and all of them rated themselves as 7 or higher.  Everyone else was 5 or below.  One person answered the snobbery question as follows: “Is a zero when you drink warm boxed chardonnay with ice cubes at 3PM at a kids’ playdate?  If so, I think I am a zero.”  She’s not a zero, but it’s fair to say she’s not a snob either.  Of note, snobs tasted 13 of the 15 wines on average.  Non-snobs tasted an average of 8 wines.  Three of the four snobs slept at my house after the party, and the fourth had a designated driver.  Also, obviously "snob" is relative.  We're drinking box wine and loving it.  The main difference is that we're swirling and sniffing it first and then naming fruits and random household objects after we taste it.

OK, now results for real.

Big House White (blend): average rating 5.1
Big House White is a fruit-forward blend.  It was rated almost a full point higher by non-snobs than by snobs, indicating that it might be a good introduction to wine for people who don’t like wine that much.  You know, in a Pinot Grigio-y kind of way.  Notes include:

“Pretty good for a white.”

“Eh. Not memorable.  At all.”

“Fruit forward. Pear. Awkward sharp twinge on palate.”

“Fruity, tropical”

“Clear, crisp, largely forgettable”

“Light acid, smooth, pear”

Big House “Unchained” Chardonnay (unoaked): average rating 5.8

Unchained is my go-to white.  I love it.  It’s great to cook with and great to drink on a summer day, or with seafood.  I don’t like traditional oaky chardonnays, but this unoaked one is tasty and easy to drink.  Snobs liked it better than non-snobs.   Here’s the buzz:

“Light, refreshing”

“No oak. Mild tartness. Medium body. Doesn't taste like Chardonnay.”

“Not oaky enough”

“Easy, clean”

“Sweet, wet, smooth, a little bitter acid.  Eat cheese!” [Wet? –p]

“Nutty, slightly metallic”

Black Box Riesling: average rating 5.3
Not everyone tasted this one, and I blame myself.  I think of Riesling as sweet enough for dessert, so I put it in the wrong place in the tasting order, at the end.  People were deep into the cabernets by then, and I think the subtlety was lost.  Totally my fault.  Bad wine snob.  No cookie.  I should have made samosas.  It would have gone awesome with those.  Notes at that point in the night were scarce and barely legible.  Suffice it to say that it was too sweet for most of my tasters, but at a 5, they would still drink it for free.  Because they are all boozy freaks like me.

Bota Box Malbec: average rating 6.1
I had written this wine off, but it was better than I remembered.  Or maybe I was just drunk.  But it got two “yums” from my highly sophisticated tasting panel, so I think it really is pretty good.

“Yum. Full body.  Good.”

“Nice. Sweet.”

“Dried fruit (dark) plum, black cherry. Subtle leather, smoke.”

“Simple dark fruit, light mouthfeel, mild finish with a little alcohol taste”

“Gets better as you drink more.” [Words to live by. –p]

“Yum. I would totally buy this.”

“Red fruit nose. Bold.  Cherry.”

Black Box Malbec: average rating 6.4
Wine snobs loved this one, giving it an average rating of 7.6.  It wasn’t the favorite of the group, but it was the favorite wine among snobs (tied with the Black Box Shiraz). 

“A little dusty/smoky, a little watery”

“Smooth, almost buttery”

“Dark purple.  Drier, heavier body”

“Leather and plum on nose.  Taste of dark cherry quickly fade to intense tart finish”

“Super easy drinking.  Earthy.”

“More woodsy, dry, plum, bigger body”

“Plum, black pepper”

Fish Eye Merlot: average rating 5.7
One of the lowest-rated reds, I think my brother summed this one up with the following phrase: “Forgettable chugging wine.”  A friend also gets bonus points for describing the nose as “diesel and leather and plum and balls.” 

“Awesome”

“Fairly inoffensive”

“Easy drinking. No finish. Forgettable chugging wine. Red fruit.”

“Coffee smooth mocha chocolate”

“Nose: diesel and leather and plum and balls. Taste: Smoke, tart raspberry.”

“OK. A little bit sharp for me.”

“Plum nose. Raspberry.  Light bodied.”

“Cherry cola”

Bota Box Merlot: average rating 6.2
For some reason, two of my snobs didn’t taste this one, so the tasting notes are a bit more philosophical rather than descriptive.  Mixed reviews, but one taster, a snob, would “drink the shit out of this.”  OK, I admit, that was me.  No notes about the nose or fruit.  Some snob I am.  But apparently I would drink the shit out of it.

“Something is at the end.  Mild for a merlot.”

“I would drink the shit out of this.”

“Stiff.  A bit rigid.  A question.”

“Don't think I like it.  Or was it my douchey kid's meltdown?”

“Stewed fruit”

Bota Box Zinfandel: average rating 5.9
This divisive wine was beloved by some, and disliked by others.  (Bimodal, for the three statistics geeks reading this, but I just calculated a mean anyway because I’m a rebel like that.)  The person who said “good” below gave it a 4, so the average rating may be artificially lower than it should be.  Hey, we’re not sommeliers here.  We may be snobs, but we were pretty drunk snobs by this point in the evening. 

“Sharp, a little effervescent, lots of berries, tart/sour”

“More character and finish.  Ripened red fruit.”

“Very palatable”

“Good, chocolate, mild for a zin”

“Dried cherry, pepper”

Fish Eye Shiraz: average rating 6.5
This was the best-liked of the Fish Eye boxes, which makes sense, because it’s Shiraz and Fish eye is Australian.  FYI, for locals, Fish Eye wines are on sale for about $13/box at Kings Contrivance Liquor and Smoke Shop in Columbia, MD (the liquor store near Harris Teeter, where I grocery shop, so it gets all of my business out of pure convenience).  On sale through the end of the month… Just over $3/bottle.  Get it while it’s cheap!

“Medium tartness. Earthy.”

“Appealing nose.  Ephemeral.”

“Pretty good. I'd say ‘quaffable.’”

“I'm already a little loaded.” [A little? –p]

“Smooth.  Medium-heavy body. Dry to tart.  Taste some earth.”

“Jammy, herbs”

Black Box Shiraz: average rating 6.5
Beloved by snobs in particular, this wine was rated a point and a half higher by snobs than non-snobs, and was tied with the Black Box Malbec as the favorite wine of snobs.  If you know and like wine and appreciate plenty of jammy fruit, this would be a good one to try.

“Fruity, good, drinkable”

“Funky nose. Much more fruit on the palate.  Balanced. Surprised.”

“Slight interesting ending”

“Why did I think this tasted like warm spit? It's good.” [Better than warm spit.  Now there’s a ringing endorsement. –p]

“More fruit on nose. Smoother/less dry. Round on the mouth.”

“Plum”

Target Wine Cube Cab, a.k.a. the red “T-box”: average rating 5.5
The reason to buy this wine is that it is from Target, and Target is convenient and awesome.  If you like wine, though, not so much.  This was our lowest-rated red wine and was recognized by snobs and non-snobs alike as not having much cabernet character.  As one pleasingly descriptive taster suggested, it lacked body and balls.

“Mild for a cab”

“Intense nose, little flavor”

 “Doesn't taste like a cab. Fruit, but lacks body and balls.”

“Ugh.”

“Reserved small cab”

“Do I just like it because it's from Target?  Good.  Not complex at all.”

“Drinkable.  Not like a cab.”

“Herbs, dark cherry”

Fish Eye Cab: average rating 5.9
Again, another cab that wasn’t cabby enough for my discerning tasting panel.  At $13 a box (on sale, see Fish Eye Shiraz), it might still be worth a go, but only if you don’t like Shiraz.

“Full body, drinkable, goes well with food”

“Not full enough. Sour tartness.  Not dry enough.”

“Subdued low notes, shy, sneaky, if you drink it long enough it gets bright”

“They call this a cab?  Why are all my comments rhetorical questions?”

“Not dry”

“Licorice, plum”

Bota Box Cab: average rating 7.2
Now we’re talking.  One of the three top-rated wines of the night.  Scored 7 or higher on average among snobs and non-snobs alike.  All agree, eminently quaffable!

“Bland but drinkable”

“Floral fruitiness.  Not bad.”

“Subdued but delicious”

“Quaffing away”

“Cola, spice, dark cherry”

Big House “Usual Suspect” Cab: average rating 7.3
This has been my go-to red this year.  It never disappoints, and it didn’t disappoint my expert(ish) panel either.  I drink a glass or two(ish) of this wine almost every night, and somehow I never noticed that it smells like vegetables.  Some snob I am.  OK, I just went and got a glass even though it is only 1:30pm.  Yeah, they’re right.  Definite green herb smell.  I might need to turn in my wine snob membership card. 

“Chocolate, very good”

“Green vegetable nose.  Not big enough.”

“Nice bouquet, spicy”

“Smells like celery”

“Herbs and cherry”

Black Box Cab: average rating 7.2
This wine has been my friend Eve’s go-to.  The Big House Cab was mine.  After tasting them side-by-side, she wins.  This was my favorite of the night.  Of note, this is the wine that won the Rants from Mommyland taste test linked above. 

“Perfect.  Tobacco.”

“More tannin than others.  Subtly tart.”

“Blah. Not bad, just nondescript.”

“Delicious”

“Winner! Far superior!”

“Graphite, herbs, plum”

Now for the grand conclusion!  Box red wines were more beloved than box white wines.  If you want a box white, get the Big House “Unchained” Chardonnay.  It’s unoaked, so don’t expect it to taste like traditional chardonnay.  If you don’t really like wine, get the Big House White instead.  But if you don’t like wine, why are you still reading?  If you would consider yourself a wine snob, Black Box Malbec and Black Box Shiraz are likely to please you.  If you want the cheapest box of wine that is still good, Fish Eye Shiraz is on super-sale through the end of May in Columbia (see above), and the regular price is still lower than Black Box and others.  Cabernet Sauvignon in a box seems to be the easiest to do well or maybe my people just like Cabs.  Bota Box, Black Box, and Big House all made delicious crowd-pleasing cabs that won the night. 

And now for the other conclusion, the sneaky secret conclusion.  If you throw a box wine party and ask people to bring a box of wine, you will spend a lot of money on food, but guess what?  People leave the wine with you.  Total score.  You get to have more fun with your friends than should be allowed, and after the party, you have more wine in the house than when you started.  How effing cool is that?


*Edited to add that all wines are 2010 wines with the following exceptions:  Black Box Shiraz 2009, Bota Box Malbec 2011, Fish Eye Merlot 2011, and Bota Box Cab 2011.  Yes, it matters.  My go-to changes every year.  So perhaps this is the start of the Annual Box Wine Taste-Off!

The goddess of inebriated crafting

Bow down to me, for I am the goddess of inebriated crafting.  Sure, I guess you have to have a pretty deep pantheon to have a goddess devoted to this.  But indeed, if I may pray to the parking gods (multiple gods devoted solely to finding me a parking space), is it so unlikely that there might be a goddess to call on when you find yourself inspired (by soul or by necessity) to create things when you (accidentally or on purpose) find yourself a little too deep into the box wine?  I say nay.  I say there is such a goddess, and she is me.  Um, I, she is I.  I can also be a goddess of dumb grammar that sounds wrong but is actually right.  I think there are a lot of us.  We’re kind of like harpies, only with red pens where our claws should be.

But I digress.

Back to inebriated crafting.  My creation myth involves Burning Man and a tiger print faux fur slipcover for a friend’s bicycle seat.  It involves sewing and altering clothing for friends during the heat of the day on the playa.  It involves a hat that incorporates a disco ball.  The disco ball turns using a small battery-operated mechanism and three battery-operated LEDs shine up on the spinning ball to create a disco effect.  On a hat.  The goddess of inebriated crafting was clearly born at Burning Man. 

Yesterday, I was called upon to modify a cummerbund.  My kiddos’ preschool Ballet/Tap class photo shoot is today.  I will once again be putting makeup on my child, and this year I will also be slicking back my son’s dreamy Beatles-esque mop of hair with gel à la Blaine on Glee.  Maybe I should draw on some sideburns, like I did when he dressed as tiny Elvis for Halloween when he was a year old.  Because what’s cuter than sideburns on a child?  They are dancing a tap routine to music from Happy Feet, and are dressing in tuxedo-inspired costumes to simulate tuxedoed penguins.  My son has an actual tuxedo.  With tails.  Kill me, he is so cute.  But the tux came with a classic black tie and cummerbund.  The teacher ordered a red one to swap in so he would match the girls better, whose costumes are tuxedo-inspired with red accents and adorable jaunty miniature top hats.  It’s like the teeny tiny prom, only he has nine dates instead of one.

Aaaanyway, wow, I’m so not the goddess of inebriated concise writing, am I?  That will have to be someone else.  Sorry.

As I was saying, anyway, the new red bow tie and cummerbund arrived one day before the photo shoot.  And they fit me.  I’m all for body love, but y’all have seen me.  You’ve seen, like, almost all of me.  A cummerbund for my four-year-old, skinny string bean son should not fit around my waist.  But it did.  It was not only too long, but also too wide.  It could cover his whole torso like a misguided satin tube top.  I could see the teacher panicking as she tried to fold it into something that could work, you know, with duct tape and safety pins, and maybe some WD-40 and a bamboo skewer. 

I stepped in.  “I can fix it.”  Palpable relief.  “Really,” she asked.  “Yes.  I can sew.  I can fix it.”  “You shouldn’t have told me that.  We’re going to call you all the time.”  It’s OK, Miss Dana.  I adore you and the way you teach my kids.  I adore the fact that you teach them the correct names for dance terms and expect perfection while also making sure they enjoy every moment of class.  You are a paragon of dance teachers.  You can ask me for anything you want.

Love fest.

Except I had a glass of wine with dinner.  And it was so good that I had a second.  And then after dinner, you know… whatever, shut up, don’t judge me.  But then I remembered I had to modify a cummerbund.  Oops.

So here is the status update I should have written instead of writing this blog entry:  I successfully modified a 5-pleat adult-sized cummerbund into a 3-pleat child-sized cummerbund in 10 minutes.  Perfectly.  Drunk.

Wow, that’s a tweet.  That’s less than 140 characters.  Why did I think this was a blog entry?  In my head, I heard the phrase “goddess of inebriated crafting,” and pretty much the rest is history.  So yeah, I had one day to do this.  I accidentally got tipsy.  And I seriously rocked this cummerbund alteration.  The end.

So bow down.  Leave high temperature glue sticks and spare Singer bobbins on my altar.  Adorn yourselves in hot pink faux fur, beaded fringe, and jewelry made of pipe cleaners and cowrie shells on November 21^st, my birthday.  And if you ever need a dance costume on short notice and accidentally get drunk, you know who to call.

Open hate letter to hand sanitizer

Dear hand sanitizer,

Lots of people love you, so you don’t need my love.  Well, good.  Because I think you suck.  Why are you everywhere?  I hated you long before I had kids, but with only a mild loathing.   You were easy to avoid back then.  Just bypass those little canisters on the wall and go actually wash my hands.  Like, with soap and hot water.  You know, so that they get clean.  Unlike what you do, which is make a new film on top of the dirt that for some reason, people have agreed to call clean.

You have your place.  Like at the petting zoo when I run out of the sanitizing wipes I keep in my purse instead of you, and one of my friends has a handy bottle of you to squirt on my kids’ hands after they feed goats.  But you know what? Even after my friend squirts my kids’ hands with you, I STILL don’t want them putting their hands in their mouths, because I don’t trust you, f**ker.  I think you are a big fat lie perpetrated on society.  So basically your purpose in that situation is to make it socially acceptable for my children to eat and rub their eyes and stuff, even though they still have goat saliva on their hands covered in a layer of stinky goo.  (That stinky goo is you, hand sanitizer, in case you are as dumb as you seem.)

We’ll start simple.  Why do you smell so bad?  You are, as I understand it, rubbing alcohol in goo form.  Rubbing alcohol smells like alcohol, but it doesn’t smell gross like you do.  Why do you smell like weeds mixed with cheap candles?  You give me a headache. 

But the bigger issue is this: Why do people think that you make them clean?  You do not remove particles of anything.  OK, let me give you an example.  If, say, my child wiped their own butt after dropping a deuce, and accidentally wound up with crap all over their hand.  And then they rubbed you on there and mixed you with the crap to make a crap-goo paste that now covered both of their hands, would you say their hands were clean?  NO!  They have just created a crap emulsion and rubbed it into every crevice on their hands.  That is gross!  That is what you do, hand sanitizer.  You do not remove the goat saliva, or fecal matter, or whatever gross thing we are skeeved enough by to squirt you onto our children.  You just move it around and make it smell like the back room at Yankee Candle.

And you. are. everywhere.  At every child’s birthday party, the guests are made to line up and rub you on their hands before they are allowed to have cake.  You know what that is, hand sanitizer?  That’s f**king extortion.  The first few times my kids went through the birthday cake shakedown line, they didn’t even know what you were.  I was so proud when they rubbed you on their hands and then looked around for a sink, assuming you were soap.  Because that’s what you should be, sanitizer.  You should be soap.  And hot water.  Because that’s how hands get clean.

OK, I understand you want to justify your own misguided existence, but think about this.  When surgeons go in to operate, do they just squirt a little of you on their hands and call it done?  NO!  They use soap and water, because that is how people get clean. 

But you have even insinuated your deceiving little ass into the medical field.  To get into the NICU to see my preemie daughter, I had to scrub my hands with a nail brush at a sink hooked up to a timer.  I had to scrub for three minutes.  It doesn’t seem that long, but let me tell you, my hands were good and clean after a minute or so.  But no, I had to clean them again and again just to get in the door.  But the nurses in there?  They change some other baby’s crap-load diaper, and then come over to my baby.  And do they do a three-minute scrub?  NO!  They effing squirt you onto their hands, make a crap-emulsion, and then use their crap-emulsified hands to adjust my not-quite-five-pound baby’s IV.  That’s bullshit right there, hand sanitizer.  Bullshit and baby shit, both.  

You know why everyone loves you so much?  You are convenient.  That’s it.  You are a convenient lie, like “ketchup and pizza are vegetables.”  They’re not vegetables.  They’re not even made of vegetables.  I mean, even if you’re talking about the tomatoes, tomatoes are a fruit.  WTF?  And just like pizza is not a vegetable, hand sanitizer, you do not make our hands clean.  You make our dirty hands smell funny and give us a false sense of security.

Except me, sanitizer.  I’m onto you.  So suck it.

Good mom, bad mom

I read this post on BlogHer today, in which a mom overhears her kids talking about what makes a good mom.  Curious, I asked my two.  Here are some of the answers:

A good mom hugs us, kisses us, snuggles us all day, does whatever we say, and lets us watch TV all day long even when we have a bad night-night time.

Sweet, no?  Hug us, kiss us, and do whatever the hell we say.  Not so far off from the mom they have, really, so awesome.  And every time I take away TV and Wii as a punishment for an insane bedtime, I regret it.  It sucks for me.  I usually give it back later in the day as a contingency for some other behavior.  Like, "eat your dinner without getting up from the table 427 times, and maybe I'll let you watch some TV before bed." Every two or three months, I make the "If I hear one more word from this bedroom, no TV or Wii tomorrow" mistake.  I hear the words coming out of my mouth, and I want to take them back.  I much prefer the "no treats or snacks" consequence.  Not that I won't give them a snack between meals—I will of course—but "snacks" in our house is a category meaning salty junk food.  The "no treats or snacks" consequence is very effective, and I have no trouble sticking to it on the very rare occasions when they continue to screw around at bedtime after that threat comes out.

When we were done discussing the ways in which I could accommodate their every whim, I asked what makes a bad mom.  Here is what they said:

A bad mom yells very loudly, punches us in the face, makes plastic food for dinner, or poo-poo for dinner.  It degenerated from there into the various unappetizing things I could make for dinner, and the conversation was clearly over.

So, I'm doing OK on the not being a bad mom front.  No feces on their plates, awesome. And I have yet to punch them in the face, so I win!  Oh, yelling.  Well, yeah, kids.  No one's perfect.

The sweetest part of this, though, is that they really believe I'm a good mom.  When I do something questionable, like let them eat nothing but Doritos for lunch at a party because I want to hang with my friends rather than police their food consumption, I sometimes jokingly say that I'm a bad mom.  And every single time they have overheard me saying that, they remind me, "No mommy, you're a good mom."

Of course, if their standard is that I don't punch them or give them poo-poo for dinner, I guess that's a pretty low bar.

When I grow up

Sorry about that lean month there. I started 5 or 6 blog entries, but none of them quite came together. I guess I was waiting to have something more real to say.

 So here's real. I’m thirty-eight and I have no earthly clue what I want to be when I grow up. I always wanted to be a novelist. From as far back as I can remember, writing was my passion. I was an English major in college, and had grand plans of writing… no, not the great American novel… but maybe some great American smut. In college, I needed a job, and I found one working as a research assistant in a Psychology lab. It was interesting work, research on alcoholism and marriage. I mainly did grunt work, translating “a case of beer” or “half a bottle of vodka” into standard drink units (24 and 8.5 standard drinks, respectively). I did data entry. I filed questionnaires. I learned some rudimentary statistics and sat in meetings and listened and learned.

 My college boyfriend was a musician, so as things started to get serious, I started thinking about careers more practical than writing. You know, the kind of careers that come with health insurance and a paycheck. I figured one of the two of us might need those things if we were going to make a go of it. I added Psychology as a second major. My bosses in the Psychology lab assumed I would go to grad school, so I applied to a bunch of schools. I got into Stanford. There was no soul searching involved. Grad school was just the next thing you do if you’re doing Psychology research. So that’s what I did.

 A few years in, I started questioning whether Psychology research was the career for me. I was no longer dating a musician. I was living in Silicon Valley in the dot-com boom. People were dropping out of grad school to join start-ups. Google was hiring. Ebay. Friends were becoming millionaires (on paper). It was very tempting. But other friends convinced me to stay. I was 24, and three years into a five-year PhD program. “You’re almost done!” they lied. I stayed.

 Seven years it took me to get my PhD. I also left Stanford with a Masters in Statistics. Why? I don’t know. Because I am a procrastinator, and time spent in Stats classes was time I didn’t have to think about the glacial pace of my dissertation research. Because numbers were a problem I could solve, unlike the amorphous and slippery “finish your dissertation.” Because I still lacked direction, and Stats seemed practical. I was 28, armed with a PhD and two Masters degrees from one of the top universities in the world.

 No damn clue. None.

 I married my husband less than a week after turning in my dissertation, and fell into a job as a Statistics consultant in the department where he worked at Stanford. I cranked out numbers for a bunch of radiologists, and became an expert in some very specific branches of statistics used by people in that field. I helped write NIH grants and co-authored papers on important things like detecting cancer and heart disease. There wasn’t really anywhere to go in that job. But it was a good job. It had flexible hours, paid very well, and I could do it easily. I put some money into a 403b. I learned to belly dance. I did lots of TaKeTiNa and meditation. I went to Burning Man.

 No clue.

 My husband applied for a job at Johns Hopkins and got it. We moved to Maryland. I continued to telecommute and do my old job at Stanford while they looked for my replacement. I was 32. They found a replacement for me eventually, and by then, we were trying to get pregnant. I did some freelance consulting with a couple of autism researchers—statistics, writing, editing, whatever they needed—because it felt dishonest to look for a “real job” when I knew I’d be leaving to have and stay home with a baby. I wrote half a novel, and filed the paperwork for a jewelry design business. I went into a three-year training to learn to lead TaKeTiNa workshops. And then, at 34, I got pregnant with twins.

 When they were born, for the first time, I knew what I was supposed to be. I was meant to be a mom. That role clicked into a place inside me that I would never have predicted. I was never a baby person. I had thought I wanted “one or none.” But those two little people came into my life and filled in spaces in my heart I didn’t know existed. I didn’t and don’t love the mommy job every minute of every day, but overall I have loved the full-time job of caring for them, teaching them, nourishing them. Best gig ever. Shitty pay. Shitty hours. No sick leave. But still, best gig ever. I feel incredibly lucky to have had the luxury of staying home with them for these years.

 But see, they’re turning five this summer. They’re starting kindergarten in the fall. Five full days a week. It’s kind of time for that whole paycheck, retirement savings, paying down debt thing to start happening. Maybe time for me to wear something other than jeans on the bottom half of my body. And maybe, you know, time to start showering more often. And, like, start wearing actual shoes.

God, it sounds awful.

 So what happens now? I have been out of the job market completely for five years, and out of it in any serious way for even longer. I (perhaps naively) think I could probably find a job of some kind. But… but this feels like a clean slate. If there’s a time to make a career change, this is it! So great, let’s do that! Except that I never did the work to figure out what I wanted to be. I just went with the flow, did the next thing, went to school a lot, found work that seemed reasonable, and made some babies. I still don’t know what I want to be, do, accomplish.

 I’m almost f**king forty. When did that happen? HOW did that happen? I was in college five minutes ago. Where did seventeen years of my life go? Well, seven in grad school plus four as a statistician plus two as a consultant plus five as a stay-at-home mama. Crap, that’s 18. Faulty math. Damn, I really AM rusty. Maybe I’m 39? No, I’m pretty sure I’m 38. Plus or minus one. Whatever. Old. Old to not know. Old to be thinking about careers that start with unpaid internships. Old to be wondering about the colors of parachutes and making lists of experiences that have made me feel competent and joyful. Old to be this clueless, this uncertain, this scared.

 I don’t know how to end this entry, which is maybe why it’s so long. I can’t wrap this up in a neat bow with a joke or a witty tie-back to the first paragraph. It’s raw, and real, and scary. I’m between trapeze bars, and I have no idea what’s next.

One mom’s trash…

I remember the look on my mom’s face the first time she saw me throw away a turkey carcass after I hosted Thanksgiving dinner. She was appalled. “You’re not going to make soup?” she asked, aghast. “Nope.” I don’t like turkey soup. I’ve always found it to be one of the least pleasant parts of the post-Thanksgiving turkey fest. The part when you take the leftover meat, throw it into the leftover gravy, and pour it onto open-face sandwiches on white bread… now you’re talking. But soup? Soup comes in a can. And you eat it when you’re camping or when you’re sick or when you’re on Weight Watchers because a can of soup is like 3 points and Weight Watchers doesn’t care if it has a two-day supply of sodium.

Fast forward.

I still hate turkey soup, but now I would totally bag up someone else’s turkey bones and bring them home if they were going to throw them out. Two reasons. One: food snobbery. Homemade stock is better than broth from a can. It’s better. It’s just… better. More flavor, more luscious mouthfeel, better. And two: money. Homemade stock is free. It’s f&$#ing free! You make it with stuff you would throw away. How cool is that? OK, not cool-cool, I know. Cool-cool is going out to eat at trendy places and being a vegetarian and not eating turkey at all. Whatever. Still. It’s free. I’m just sayin’.

OK, now I am going to talk about making chicken/turkey and vegetable stock from scratch. I’m also going to talk briefly about a couple of other ways to save money by saving and using stuff you usually throw in the trash or the compost. Wait, never mind. I can’t really talk about that stuff here. Next thing you know I’ll be making jello molds and wearing a jaunty Christmas sweater un-ironically. Oh god, kill me. I am not that mom, I promise. In my house, the clean laundry usually sits on the ottoman in my bedroom until I just pick stuff out of the clean pile to wear again. I’m just like you. Only probably drunker. This is not a “Look how great I am because I make stock from scratch and also clean under the oven while I’m at it” blog post. No. This is a “We are all trying to find every drop of money in the budget and look, here’s how you can make free stock even if you are a total lazy ass like me” post. OK? If it helps, you can picture me doing all of this stuff in my pajamas with a big glass of box wine and dirty hair. Because that’s probably true.

OK, enough disclaimers about how I am not as Susie Homemaker as I am about to seem. Homemade stock. Here’s what I do. Any time I am making a salad or cooking anything else, I save the discarded bits of things. Celery ends (including leaves), green onion and leek tops and roots, onion skins and ends, herb stems (or extra herbs after a recipe if I know I won’t use them before they go bad), carrot bases and peels, mushroom stems, artichoke stems and outer leaves, squash ends, etc. All of these scraps go in a gallon ziploc bag in the freezer. If you want to make vegetable stock, that’s all you need. You’ll want a good amount of oniony bits, celery, carrots, and hopefully some mushrooms if you’re doing the meat-less version. It’s less important what’s in the bag if you’re making chicken or turkey stock, though onion-like things of some sort are probably necessary.

So after a meal, when you have some poultry bones lying around taunting you with how you’ll never be as good a cook as your mother, you can go ahead and make stock with the bones and those frozen veggies. OR (!!!) if you’re a lazy sack like me and just made the damn dinner and want to sit with your feet up and drink wine because you already cooked once today dammit, you can throw the bones in a ziploc in the freezer and make it when you have time. That’s the key. The freezer. Because especially after you’ve just eaten a chicken or a turkey and are filled with wonderful happy tryptophan, that is the time for rubbing your belly and then taking a nap, not being all productive and making stock from scratch.

OK, so then let’s say it’s a Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks later, and I’m feeling like I have some energy. My hubby let me sleep in, and then I got up and had some bacon, and then started my day of reading smutty novels while the kids played in the back yard. And then lunch and maybe a little mini-nap on the couch. Now it’s 2pm, and I’m feeling well-rested and wicked productive all of a sudden. This is a good time to make some stock.

Throw a bunch of veggies and herb stems and whatever’s in the freezer bag into the bottom of a big soup pot with a little bit of oil. I brown them a bit to get some caramelization going. Since they are frozen, this takes more time than usual. You don't have to do this if you don't feel like it. If you don't care about caramelization, skip the oil. Throw some garlic in—fresh, from a jar, garlic powder, whatever. Black pepper. A bay leaf if you have it. Only if you have it. Don’t buy stuff for this. Once the veggies have some color (or when you’re tired of standing up at the stove), put the chicken or turkey bones in, and fill with enough water to cover the bones. Bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer and simmer all day uncovered until it tastes like broth. For me, that usually takes about 6 hours. It depends on how much water you use. Your house will smell like soup. Be at one with that reality. Your kids will whine that they don’t like the smell and don’t want to eat whatever you’re making. Reassure them that they don’t have to.

If you’re doing a vegetable version, fill your soup pot maybe 1/2 full with veggies. For poultry, maybe 1/4-1/3 full. You know, it’s not an exact science. If you put in too much water, you’ll just have to simmer longer. No big. At the end, when it kind of tastes like broth but not quite right, add some salt. The one thing that’s hard to fix is too much salt, so go easy. Don’t add salt at the beginning because it gets saltier as you simmer and reduce.

That’s it. You strain out the stuff* and you have free f*&#ing broth. People talk about cheesecloth and whatever to make your broth very clear. I don’t have cheesecloth, so I just use a colander. Once I have my fabulous free broth, I use the smallest size plastic food storage container thingies and put 1 cup of broth in each. Freeze it, and then once frozen, you can run hot water on the bottom of the container and pop the frozen broth out. Put the 1-cup portioned broth ice cubes in… you guessed it… a ziploc. That goes back into the freezer to use in recipes. (No, I do not work for or take money from the ziploc people. And I re-use the veggie and broth-ice-cube ziplocs indefinitely because those things are not free. Unlike your broth.)

If you’re like me, you will wind up with more broth than you would normally use. Find a couple of broth-heavy recipes you like for when that happens. My favorites are sausage soup and risotto. My mushroom risotto recipe uses 9 cups of broth. Rice is extremely cheap, so at that point, you’re basically just buying mushrooms and a couple of shallots and dispensing a cup or so of wine from the Big House Unchained Chardonnay box in your fridge. What? You don’t have a box of Unchained in your fridge? Why not? It’s awesome.

Sausage soup… I can give you that recipe right here. My mom got this recipe by asking what was in a soup she liked at an Italian restaurant. They told her. It’s 4 things. And one of those things is your free f*&#ing broth. This recipe is delicious and super easy. Next time Italian sausage is on sale, buy it and make this with your free broth. Cut a package of mild Italian sausage into coins or chunks or whatever. Brown in the bottom of a soup pot until cooked through and very brown all over. Drain the fat, but you don’t have to be super fastidious about it. Sausage fat is yummy. Pour in a bunch of broth (defrost frozen broth in the microwave first). I don’t know how much. A bunch. Enough to cook a pound of pasta in. Scrape up any brown bits to make sure they’re all in the broth. Pour in a pound of pasta. I use rotini. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until the pasta is cooked. When the pasta is ready, stir in a huge amount of raw spinach. Like two bags worth or one of those big tubs. Let it cook a minute or two to wilt the spinach. Serve topped with parmesan cheese. If you have leftovers, the pasta will soak up all of the broth, so you can either eat it as a pasta dish or add more frozen free broth to make it soup again.

So, there you go. Free f*&#ing broth. What else can we do?

Bananas. Did you know you can freeze them when they get too brown? And then thaw them when you’re ready to make banana bread? They look black and gross on the outside and smell like a banana liqueur factory when they thaw, but inside, they are perfect for banana bread. Stone fruit, apples, pears, or berries feeling “less than fresh” (heh)? Cut them up and freeze them, to thaw later for a crisp or crumble.

OK, that’s enough. We’re like a paragraph and a half from my friends starting to ask if I have been taken over by aliens, so I’ll stop. But if you have any money-saving tips for making free or almost-free food** or throwing away less waste, please put them in the comments. If you would like to maintain your (perhaps questionable) street cred, clearly my preferred methods are F-bombs and revealing embarrassing things about yourself. If you would like to do both, please feel free.



*P.S. When straining out the stuff, don’t forget to put a bowl or something under the colander. It seems like a no-brainer, but usually when we use a colander, we want the liquid to go down the drain. You don’t want to pour your broth down the drain. I recommend setting up the bowl and colander on the counter at the beginning of the process, while you are still sober, so you don’t forget. You laugh, but at least one of you would have poured your broth down the drain if I hadn’t said this.

**Regarding almost-free food, one of my good friends has a food blog called The Impoverished Foodie in which she gives recipes and a cost breakdown per serving. She's gluten-free and mostly vegetarian (with some fish), and I completely trust her to make astonishingly good food on a professional musician's budget.

Sex in the suburbs

Three of the other moms in my kids’ dance class are triathletes. One is a nutritionist. They talk a lot about training and diet and upcoming races. I am in awe of what they accomplish, but I’m also not that interested. So I read a lot. Sometimes we take a break from workout talk and talk about our kids, or cooking, or laundry, or funny stories from the aesthetician about waxing male body hair. I put down my book then. But mostly, I read. It’s a lovely hour to myself in a world of my choosing.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the women recommended a book, Fifty Shades of Grey. She said that she thought of me when she read it and knew I would like it. She mentioned that it was recommended to her and that she was surprised (and embarrassed) at the bookstore when they pointed her to the Erotica section. So I guess I knew it would be sexy. But I thought it was “Erotica” like the Outlander series is “Romance,” categorized that way, but genre-crossing. I was expecting maybe something in the Jacqueline Carey oeuvre.* Erotic, graphic, hot, but not… you know… one of those books.

Three pages in, I could kind of tell it was one of those books. I used to read romance novels. And by romance, I mean smut. I love romance novels. I used to think (and still sometimes think) that I would like to write them for a living. My high school AP Calculus teacher, as well as many of my classmates, signed my senior yearbook with references to wanting a copy of my first smutty novel. At 17 and a virgin, valedictorian of my high school class, my career aspiration was to write fabulously dirty fiction, and I made no secret of it. OK, so it’s one of those books, OK. Oh look, a ludicrously rich, ludicrously handsome guy. Shocker. I bet he has a ludicrously large package as well. Those kinds of clichés are why I eventually tired of romance novels. But still, they have… hmmm… a certain appeal. Skim skim skim… let’s get to the good part.

Um, this isn’t regular porn. Are they really going there? Wow, they’re going there. This book is not just porn. It’s kinky porn. It’s full-on BDSM porn. Wow. And that lovely, put-together mom at dance class said she knew I would like it. Holy hell. What did I say in that room to make her think that? I’m pretty open with my friends about sex. I like talking about it and joking about it. I am quick with a “That’s what she said,” and even quicker with a slightly raised eyebrow when innuendo presents itself. But these dance moms, they’re… proper. A few of them know each other from the Catholic school their kids attend together. I thought I had been discreet. Not discreet enough, apparently.

A few days later, a BlogHer post about the Fifty Shades trilogy popped up in my facebook feed. I found out that it was originally written as Twilight fanfic,** and then re-written with new character names and removing all references to vampires. Hmm, well, that explains the parallels I noticed. I assumed it was just lazy writing and that all female characters must forevermore be self-deprecating, clumsy, and have flighty mothers. But no, Ana(stasia) was originally based on (Isa)Bella. That makes sense. The blog also talked about this book as a phenomenon. Apparently it is being passed from woman to woman like Judy Blume’s Forever was in the junior high cafeteria. That makes me feel a little better. My fellow dance mom recommended it to me because that is what happens with this book, NOT because I somehow tipped my hand and revealed myself to be some sort of closet perv. The fact that I am kind of a perv was just luck on her part. Heh.

The success of the Fifty Shades trilogy has spawned a new genre: “mommy porn.” Mommy porn? Seriously? I kind of want to be irritated about that. There’s something demeaning about the phrase “mommy porn.” Just because I’m a mommy doesn’t mean I don’t want real porn. Or… something. I don’t know. It annoys me. But in any case, it’s sort of accurate. The next week at dance class, we talked about the book, and it turns out that one of the other women is scheduled to read it for her book club. Her book club?! I want to type a jaw-drop emoticon in here right now, but am restraining myself. No emoticons in my blog. Please just picture my dropped jaw. This woman has monogrammed bags and shops at Pottery Barn. Her child is always perfectly turned out in Lelli Kelly Mary Janes with seasonal ribbons in her adorably styled hair. She is on the decorations committee for the galas at her kids’ Catholic school. And she is reading S&M porn in her book club. I am utterly mystified. This book is being passed around like a Pinterest recipe for hot fudge Oreo brownies. Except instead of a brownie recipe, it’s S&M porn.

W. T. F.

I imagine the success of these books was unexpected. All of a sudden, soccer moms know about things like safewords, spreader bars, and the sexual uses of a Wartenberg wheel. That’s interesting, and kind of cool. On the other hand, BDSM urges are pathologized to some extent in the books. Not cool. For better or for worse, and almost certainly not by design, Fifty Shades is representing the BDSM community to non-kinky people. I wonder how the community feels about that. But the bigger question for me is why these books are so wildly popular among non-kinky, carpooling, meal-planning moms? Do mommies everywhere secretly just want to be bent over the pool table, (consensually) spanked, and taken?

Um, never mind. Yeah.

I am currently in the middle of the third book, and I’m glad I’ll be finished with them soon. I bring my kindle with me everywhere. Five minutes early to pick up the kids at preschool? I pull out my kindle and read a little. Kids playing sweetly and the laundry is already in? I put my feet up and go into fictional worlds until the next spat requires my intervention, or until someone wants Cheese-its or a glass of water or needs a snuggle or their butt wiped. But for the past week or so, instead of dropping into a gripping story, I am dropping into… well… you know. Stuff. It’s been very distracting. I’m not sure that “mommy” and “porn” mix so well during the daylight hours.

But maybe the time is right for me to revisit my high school career ambition. The minivan set is openly reading smut. That’s new. And right at a time when I am thinking about what I’ll do when the kids go to kindergarten. Maybe it’s a sign.



*If the kinkier scenes in Fifty Shades were your cup of tea and you have not read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, run, don’t walk. They’re much more extreme kink-wise—much more extreme—but they tell an epic story set in an exquisitely crafted world, and are stunningly well written. If I could sit down with any writer, alive or dead, it would absolutely be Jacqueline Carey. [Edited to add, because a few people have misunderstood, that Jacqueline Carey's work is NOT porn. The Kushiel and Naamah books are graphic and sexual, but that is just part of the story, not the point of the story.]

**In discussing this series with my friends, I was surprised at how many didn’t know what fanfic meant. Fanfic is fiction written by fans. The writer takes the universe and characters of a book, TV show, or movie and uses them to tell a story of their own. By story, uuuuuusually I mean porn. Not all fanfic is porn, but a lot of it is. Hot sex scenes you didn’t get to see on screen, or between characters who never got together in the original story. I don’t mean to belittle fanfic. It’s not all porn. Some of it is quite well-written. Sometimes you discover moving, original stories that just happen to take place in someone else’s copyrighted universe. But most of it… yeah… you know. And not that an innocent girl like me would ever read such things, but if you like yourself some good X-rated Buffy-Spike action, this bit of fanfic might make you happy. Enjoy. Don’t say I never gave you anything.