Strange but Wonderful Avacado Sandwich

If you like avacado, you will love this mild sandwich with a variety of textures.

Ingredients:

1 ripe medium sized avacado

1 sandwich roll

1 scallion stalk

sesame seeds

salt

freshly cracked pepper

Assembly:

Cut avacado in half.  Remove pit. With a knife, slice inside one half of the avacado flesh into small cubes without cutting the outer skin, then do the same for the other half.

Cut the sandwich roll in half.

Take half of the avacado cubes and put them on one half of the roll. (You can easily scoop the cubes out with a spoon) Spread the avacado across the roll with the knife, covering the bread evenly. Do the same for the other half of the roll.

Sprinkle salt and freshly cracked pepper over each sandwich half. Sprinkle sesame seeds over each sandwich half.

Cut the white part of the scallion stalk on the bias, and gently press the scallion pieces into the avacado. When you are finished, the avacado should be evenly studded with scallion pieces.

(If you prefer a zestier onion flavor, substitute small pieces of red onion instead of scallion.)

Serve and Enjoy!

New Jersey’s Cultural Zenith: The Diner

Ahh, New Jersey.  Home to the infamous diner, the cultural heart of my home state.

You can go anywhere else in the United States, and they don’t understand how to DO a diner like New Jersey.  I would bet we have more diners in New Jersey than any other state.

I love diners. I love everything about them – chrome exteriors, kitchy interior designs, 24 hour a day service, and the familiar characters you can expect to see when you visit an authentic New Jersey diner.

Greek History

Diners are frequently owned by Greek families.  This is why so many diners sport names like The Athena, Zeus, or Mount Olympia Diner.  I was introduced to Spanikopita and Moussaka dinner specials at “the diner.”

If you are in a diner called “The Plaza,” or “The Galaxy” you might not know if you are in a Greek owned diner or not, but the signals are there if you look for them.  If the owner frequently gesticulates with both hands, and yells at the staff in what-sounds-like-Greek (although everyone on the staff will swear he is not yelling) then you can rest easy you have found the real thing.

Two Eggs Any Style

All diners have a 24 hour a day breakfast menu. The very first thing on that page of the menu is Two Eggs Any Style ( TEAS).  TEAS comes with two pieces of buttered toast (white, wheat or rye) and home fries.  Any style means just that: scrambled, runny, sunny side up, over easy, over medium or over hard.

TEAS and all of the menu items will be cooked to order by your invisible Mexican, Dominican, (or other Spanish) kitchen staff.  You will never see them or meet them, but they are in there making the magic happen.  If you walk to the back of the diner and see some guys hanging out smoking a cigarette, you found them.

The Jersey Waitress, a breed apart

Diners also come with a friendly bunch of gum chewing Jersey waitresses.  These ladies are the roughest, toughest bunch you’ll find and they don’t suffer fools.  Many of them are adorned with a variety of tattoos, and you can sometimes count the number of piercings on both hands. 

These gals are extremely hard working and they rely on their tips to pay the bills.  They want to take your order, get your food to you quickly, refill your coffee or soda glass once and get you the bill. 

Do NOT linger at a diner table unless you are prepared to leave an ample tip!  These girls wouldn’t hesitate to cut you in the parking lot if you sit at their booth for two hours and leave a three buck tip.

To a Jersey waitress, everyone (male or female) is named honey, as in “What can I get you honey?”

Am I a “regular?”

You qualify for “regular” status at a Jersey diner if you eat at one particular place very often… let’s say at least once every two weeks or more.  You may also qualify as a sometime-regular if it’s a diner you used to visit often, but now only go several times a year.  As long as the owner and the waitresses who have been working there a long time still recognize you, you have maintained your sometime-regular status.

Being a regular has its advantages.  For example, if a regular comes and sits at the counter and sees a waitress he knows, she might turn to him and say, “the usual honey?” If he says yes, he will get a plate of whatever it is he always orders quickly and efficiently.

Forbidden Things to Never Eat at the Diner

If you know what’s good for you, you will never, EVER eat these things at the diner:

• Surf and Turf – that lobster hasn’t seen water for a long time, and the steak will be grey, and covered with canned “gravy”
• Sushi – this needs no explanation
• Fruit salad – (exception: if you like canned marischino cherries in heavy syrup, go ahead)

Helpful Tips to tell if your New Jersey Diner is authentic

***   NO!   ***

1. None of the waitresses chew gum or have tats. You overhear them say Please or Thank You.

2. Looks “too clean;” no juke-boxes bolted to the tables; no spinning dessert cart

3. No one is wearing a tee shirt or flip flops; patrons have all their teeth

4. Waitress doesn’t understand the following: “I’ll have two over easy with white – OR – I’ll have the Alpine Deluxe, medium.”

5. You wait more than 10 minutes for your food.

6. Menu includes truffle oil, organic free range anything or Croque Monsieur.

***   YES!   ***

1. Menu is at least 8 pages long.
2. Dinner special: Spanikopita with a Greek salad and Jello or Rice Pudding for dessert.
3. The waitress sees you and says, “Hi Honey, meet you at the counter. You want the usual?”
4. Serves 12+ kinds of burgers with at least some the following names: Cheese Burger, Pizza Burger, Alpine Burger, California Burger. Of course all of these can be “deluxed.”
5. License plates in the parking lot are 75% New Jersey, 20% New York, and 5% Other
6. Offers milkshakes OR egg creams

Reasons Why Your Short Story Was Rejected

 

Dear Writer,

Here are the reasons why your short story was rejected from our fine, upstanding and highly reputable literary magazine.  We have won no awards, and until we listed ourselves on Duotrope no one knew who we were, but our standards are extremely rigorous. 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We expect nothing but the best, we don’t accept haiku or limericks, and please stop sending us submissions in Russian, Polish and Slovakian. We called ourselves the Red Army Journal but we expect you to understand it has nothing to do with the actual Red Army.

Read all of the fiction in our archives before submitting, or permanently subscribe to our mailing list so we can send you five emails a week despite the fact that we will never accept your stories. Slavish devotion to our journal does not equate to reciprocal love.

Please send us documents only in kju, or opp formats.  If you have never heard of them, that is your problem, those are the only formats we accept.  We accept submissions on Thursdays from 2:35pm PST until 5:40pm EST except in months with 30 days, then we don’t.

As you know, we are only staffed by part-time volunteers whose mothers have nagged them relentlessly about why they got an MFA when a Computer Science degree would have allowed them to move out of the basement.  Regardless, we have entrusted your work to our lovable grunts, and here are their highly esteemed opinions which we have carefully crafted into a form letter rejection for you:

1. I read the first line of your story and I kind of liked it, then my cat barfed on the floor and I had to go clean it up.  Have you ever smelled cat barf, writer? It stinks.  When I sat back down I was in a bad mood.  I re-read your first sentence and determined it to be the work of a hack. (FORM REJECTION)
2. I liked your submission and sent it on to the second volunteer reader. She didn’t like it.  The third volunteer reader was not available (she is with her boyfriend and not doing her slushpile reading!)  I argued with volunteer #2, but she convinced me to go drinking instead.  On our third glass of Chardonnay we decide you are better off being rejected in the hopes you will take up Computer Science. You can’t get a good night’s sleep in a basement. One sentence personal rejection inside the (FORM REJECTION.)
3. I hated your story.  I especially hated the fact that I had written a story that was similar to this one, and it had been my first rejection.  That magazine has never accepted one of my stories and I really liked that story.  That was my favorite story and it still hasn’t found a home. (FORM REJECTION)
4. Your story was really funny and witty.  We don’t like funny or witty. (FORM REJECTION)
5. Your story was 2001 words and if you read our submission guidelines, which you are now blatently violating, you would know that we only accept fiction pieces from 1-2000 words.  Why couldn’t you just edit out one word for us? Just pick a word, any word, at random and take it out.  Then you would have had a fantastic story and we would have accepted it.  (FORM REJECTION)
6. Your story is perfectly attuned to our submissions guidelines.  I love this kind of writing and value it highly.  Unfortunately, I’ve run out of funding and I just can’t run this magazine by myself anymore.  I’m closing shop and getting a job as a waiter, but I’m sure you’ll find a home for this story elsewhere, writer.
7. Your story was the best story ever submitted to us.  This story is so good, we wouldn’t be able to compare it to any other story we’ve ever published.  In fact, we can’t compare it to anything because your story has been lost in our electronic submissions management system. Bill left the magazine a year ago and the submissions management system has been a mess since then.  Maybe you’ll query us after you haven’t heard back in nine months, but it won’t matter, we’re never going to find it.

Reasons Why Your Story Was Accepted:

We only needed one more piece to complete this issue, and yours was small enough to fit perfectly.

Two Stories Accepted for September 2011 publication!

I wanted to share that I have had two more stories accepted for publication!!

Halfway Down the Stairs has accepted a flash fiction story entitled Lancaster for publication in their September 2011 issue.

Bartleby Snopes (edited by Nathaniel Tower) has accepted another flash piece entitled The Return of the Lone Ranger for September 2011 publication on the website.

Very exciting news!  Of course I will send out links to the stories once they are published AND I will post permanent links on my “Published Stories” page.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading my stories and to the editors who said yes to my work!!

Reasons Why Fran Lebowitz Has Writer’s Block

 

 Reasons Why Fran Lebowitz Has Writer’s Block

1. $10-a-pack cigarettes can’t be smoked in restaurants, taxis, bookstores, or the 92^nd Street Y.

2. The only tea parties held in Manhattan require cucumber sandwiches.

3. The words celebutante, reality TV, and molecular gastronomy do not appear in dictionaries from the 1970’s. Neither does laptop.

4. She’s setting the VCR to record Rachel Maddow.

5. One does not go to a disco to do cocaine; one goes to a club to do X.

6. Kids don’t know about Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, Stonewall or mood rings.

7. Times Square is not riddled with drugs, prostitutes, or graffiti, it’s got something worse: tourists.

8. Everyone thinks she’s that woman who took photos for Vanity Fair.

 

Jeter-Meter 3000

I’m not a big sports fan, but I’ve always considered myself to be a Yankees fan.  I don’t watch their games, I don’t even know all the players on the team but I know the players I am interested in: Mariano Riviera and Derek Jeter.

I like Riviera because he is generous, humble and a fantastic pitcher whose miraculous late inning feats have helped shut out teams at the end of many games and sent the Yanks to the World Series several times.

I like Jeter because he seems to be a great team captain, and also seems to have a humility about him (even if he does shill for car and watch companies) and embodies the Yankee spirit.

Today I happened to be sitting in front of a television when the Yankees game was on.  Jeter was one hit away from a career making 3000 hits, amazingly all of those hits were with the Yanks.  I saw him hit the ball (a homer) and hooted and hollered my appreciation of Jeter and his fantastic career.

So, congratulations Derek Jeter.  I wish you many more successful years with the Yankees.  We fans are thrilled with your achievement.

I love the Strand but…

I love a lot of things about the Strand bookstore in New York City’s Union Square.

First, it’s in a great neighborhood. Union Square is two blocks away; and the store right around the corner from the 14th Street Whole Foods so you can take your new book, grab some grub at the salad bar and go sit upstairs and read your precious new find.

Second, the not-so-well-kept secret about the Strand is that it is a fantastic place to buy new books even though it is a used bookstore.  There are tables upon tables in the center isle from the entrance to the back of the store heaped with luscious selections: fiction; history; New York City pictorials; Pulitzer Prize Winners; British, American and foreign classics and much more. I’ve spent many trips to the Strand standing over those tables and I never get much further because I find too many books before I can even go to the second or third floor.

Third, the helpful staff.  I’ve been to a lot of bookstores and I’ve spent a fair bit of time in New York City where, let’s just say people with sunny dispositions aren’t always in abundance.  But the Strand staff are dedicated to helping the customers, and they will walk you to the section where you can find X, or Y and show you exactly where to look.  Or they will ask you enough questions about “this book my friend told me I’d love but I can’t remember the author or the title” to guide you to the correct book. (Yes, they’re just that good.)

And for all of it’s magical and fantastic abundance of books, I do have one small complaint.  Not that I want to complain! A bookstore that boasts 18 miles of books and which has been in business over 80 years obviously knows what it is doing and does it well.  So as I said, this is one teensy complaint.  The short story anthology section of the Strand is ridiculously small.  In fact, when I went looking for it today and couldn’t find it, the Strand staff person remarked to me, “Yeah, we moved it.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter where we put it, those books don’t sell.”

WHAT? was my mental reply, which I kept to myself as he walked me over to the staff desk at the rear of the store and pointed me to the bookshelves directly beneath their counter.  He also pointed me to the table directly across from their counter, but pointed out that short story anthologies were sharing space in that table with erotica, and erotica was rapidly encroaching on the short story anthologies.

I scanned through all of the short story anthologies today, and I’d say about 25% of them are from the annual Best American Short Story series.  This is an excellent series which I love, and I own several recent volumes but frankly this should not be the majority of what bookstores carry when it comes to short stories.

I was pleased to find a volume I hadn’t seen before: This is not Chick Lit edited by Elizabeth Merrick from 2006.  An anthology of amazing women writers to tuck into! That was the magic of the Strand at its best – I’m pretty sure this anthology is not readily available in new bookstores and if you didn’t know it existed you’d never look for it.

So although my very small complaint still stands, I respectfully request that the Strand (and other bookstores as well!) beef up their short story anthology sections.  We book store browsers love the thrill of the hunt – finding something you didn’t know you wanted but realizing you had to have it after spending a few minutes reading the dust jacket or the introduction.

The short story writers of the world thank you for your support….

Random Insomnia Post – Incoherence

It’s 4am and I’ve been tossing and turning all night.  This happens from time to time.  I get in bed with the best intentions, but my mind and body are not cooperating with the plan.

I got up at 1:30am and watched some television until 2:30am.  I went back to bed, satisfied that an hour of random middle-of-the-night television was enough to exhaust any reasonable brain, but I was wrong.  I fell asleep for 20 minutes, then woke up again at 3:10am.

After 50 minutes of really believing I could get back to sleep, I gave up and decided to write a blog post about my frustration.

Perhaps the worst part of insomnia is that all of the completely disconnected thoughts that flow through your brain in stream of consciousness fashion seem to make sense at the time you are thinking of them.

Instead of counting sheep, I thought about where I might like to go if I planned a trip; then I considered what to wear tomorrow; that led to thinking about vitamins; and from there another four or five topics wandered by (including the television show I had just watched) and sprinkled their bits and pieces of thought into my exhausted brain.

It’s not so much that I mind having all these random thoughts, it is that I know these thoughts are preventing me from getting bodily rest.  If only these thoughts could lead to a great invention, or the next compelling short story, or just plain old sleep, then I’d be satisfied.

I’m not sure if any of this makes sense…but I’m going to post it anyway. And where I am not making sense, maybe the Mayo Clinic will… here is there page which cites some of the possible causes of Insomnia.

Red, White and Blue Salad for the 4th of July!

Make this Red, White and Blue Salad for yourself, your friends and your family this holiday weekend.  It’s a colorful addition to any picnic table and it’s delicious!

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

Red: Radishes; Grape Tomatoes; Dried Cranberries; Red Onion

White: Feta Cheese Crumbles; Sliced Almonds

Blue: Fresh Blueberries

Other: Peeled and sliced cucumbers (kirby cukes work well); salad dressing of choice; toasted sesame seeds (optional)

– Peel cucumbers and slice down the middle. If you don’t like the seeds, remove them. Otherwise, slice cucumbers into 1/8th inch thick slices.

– Wash and slice radishes into 1/8th inch thick slices.

– Wash and slice grape tomatoes in half

– Cut red onion into small dice

– Assemble a layer of cucumbers, radishes, red onion and grape tomatoes.  Sprinkle on feta crumbles, sliced almonds, dried cranberries, and fresh blueberries.  Repeat layers until all ingredients have been used.

– Add extra sliced almonds and blueberries to the top; add toasted sesame seeds if desired.

– Chill in the refrigerator for 30-60 minutes.  Serve with your salad dressing of choice (Caesar salad dressing works well)

ENJOY!