So here I am sitting with my award-winning chai with nothing much to say. I have been considering whether—

--what’s that? What? Oh, I see, you want my to clarify what I mean by “award-winning.” Well, that’s easy enough to do: my chai won an award.

As I was saying, I have been considering whether I should talk about—

--I’m sorry, what’s the matter? You want to know what award my chai won? Fair enough: my award-winning chai won second place at the library’s slow cooker competition. The first place contestant later confessed to me that all she’d done was dump some frozen meatballs and a bottle of teriyaki sauce in her crock pot. Not that I am sore.

Where was I? Right: I have been considering whether I should talk about the books I’ve been reading lately, because—

--Can’t a woman write in peace? What is it this time? Okay, fine, I will give you the recipe for my award-winning chai:

• Eight tea bags of a black tea such as darjeeling, or oolong if you’re feeling wild. Or use loose tea.
• Five slices of fresh ginger
• Five cinnamon sticks
• Lots and lots of cardmom seeds. I use about ten pods’ worth
• Sixteen whole cloves
• one cup, maybe a touch less, of sugar. Except I use Splenda. Or sometimes Brown Sugar Splenda.
• Eight cups water
• Optional: a dash of vanilla extract; a dash of black pepper; ten or so allspice berries

Put everything in a 4-quart slow cooker. If you have a 6-quart cooker, you can also add the milk at this point—up to eight cups (a half-gallon), though I usually do about six cups. I use skim. You can use whatever you like; I suspect almond milk* would be good.

Cook on high for 2.5 hours. Strain out the solids. If you’ve already added the milk, it’s ready to drink. Otherwise add milk to taste and heat on the stove. Or don’t heat. It’s very good cold, too.

*To make almond milk at home, instead of spending a week’s salary on the stuff at the grocery store, soak a cup of almonds in water overnight. The next day, blend the almonds with up to five cups of water. Strain out the pulp (not very tasty by itself, but decent when mixed with yogurt) and you’re left with a rather bland beverage, good for cooking, not so exciting for drinking straight. If you want a yummy almond milk, you can go crazy blending it with bananas or dates or figs or chocolate or cinnamon powder or what have you.

So that is how you make my award-winning chai. If you try this yourself, I’d like to hear back. It’s my own recipe (!), initially based on a one found in Make It Fast, Cook It Slow, which is the best cookbook ever, which is to say it is a cookbook with recipes that even a dimwit such as myself can follow. I’ve deviated a bit from the recipe, and borrowed extensively from other recipes I found online, but there are just enough tweaks that I can call it my own.

As you’ve probably realized by now, I did not actually have anything else to discuss and, basically, I just wanted to announce that I had developed an award-winning chai. My usual standby, talking about books I’ve been reading, is not so useful at the moment because my reading time lately has been consumed by a writing project for NoveList. Don’t worry, it’s not too awfully stressful and it pays decently and it’ll be finished by Friday. And then I’m going to respond to a hand-written letter I received from a friend a few days ago. A hand-written letter, for you youngsters who don’t recall, is a sort of antecedent to email. It takes more effort to compose but is curiously more satisfying.

So unless anyone wants to hear about my trials with a vacuum cleaner that refused to pick up kitty litter today, or about my video game character (she recently joined the Assassain’s Guild), you will have to wait till I’ve come up with some new material to discuss, most likely in the form of books I’ve read. I promise to get to that right away; I’m about to crack open The Hunger Games, and I won’t have to get up or anything because, see, I have everything I need right here, that is, I have my award-winning chai.

I just made a crème brûlée. It is yummy and smooth and it has all the proper diacritic marks. It is supposed to have a crusty brown top but I couldn’t get the dish close enough to the broiler thingie. (Note to self: look up definition of “broil.”) So I suppose what I really made is a fancy custard that tastes really good and will add about three inches to my waistline. If you notice me looking pudgier, try not to remark on it, thanks.

The crème brûlée was made in my slow cooker, using one of the recipes from my new cookbook, to date the only cookbook that does not surpass my reading comprehension. Right now am sipping a gingerbread latte that I prepared last night (no diacritic mark necessary), and in another six hours I’ll have some gumbo to eat.

This is perfect. Why is this perfect? Because, in addition to the gumbo, the diacritic-free latte, and the pants-shrinking custard, it is snowing, for the second weekend in a row. I have two cats in bed with me and a third one actually used the second litter box I purchased expressly for his use.

I am going to go play in the snow now. For me it is a biological imperative, similar to the instinct that drives people in the south to mob the grocery store if rumor of a possible flurry shows up in the forecast. Here is something to entertain you while I’m gone.

[Commercial break sponsored by Tom Waits: Women’s Nonfiction: A Guide to Reading Interests is on sale now! You can drive it away today! One size fits all! No muss, no fuss, no spills! Lasts a lifetime! Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations! It’s a friend and it’s a companion and it’s the only product you will ever need! It never needs ironing! Batteries not included. Act now!

And, we’re back! I can report that we’re at five inches of snow and still going.

At the library the other day a guy came up to the desk and asked how to get on the computer. Upon seeing the temporary login numbers we hand to folks who, inexplicably, do not have a library card, he pointed out that the word “internet” ought to be capitalized in the sentence “Type this number to login to the internet.”

Isn’t it annoying when people point our your flaws? Unless it’s me doing the pointing. My criticisms are always helpful and informative. It’s obnoxious when anybody else does it. I feel sorry for the guy, though. He hadn’t realized he was tangling with the wrong grammar snob.

“Actually,” I explained, “unless a style guide specifically indicates otherwise, the word ‘internet’ is no longer capitalized. Several years ago Wired magazine announced that it would stop capitalizing it. The word is ubiquitous; no one needs the capital letter to clarify its meaning.”

Do. Not. Fuck with me. On grammar. You won’t win.

(Irony: the above moral is riddled with grammatical errors, but corrections would leech it of its power. Let’s sidestep the issue by turning it into a poem.)

Do not
Fuck with me
On grammar
You won’t win.

Oh hey, that’s almost haiku! Here, let’s try this:

Do not fuck with me
On grammar. You won’t win. I
Am a grammar snob.

And now, because my poetry coffers are empty, I am going to foolishly post this without proofreading it. I am a glutton for irony. If it happens that there are some problems present, please refrain from pointing them out (remember, that sort of behavior is annoying and obnoxious) and instead understand that this post is simply an extended poem.