Coaching Cooking

Being a movie snob means never having to watch tacky crap unless trapped on an airplane or stuck in a hospital waiting room. I just couldn’t resist this one though. Maybe it’s all the articles in US Weekly, People.com and endless reports online and elsewhere. I took the plunge and began watching…

Technically, I never finished watching “Crossroads.” My brain cells and my inner intellectual began to rebel and it was getting tougher and tougher to buy Britney Spears as the innocent, hard-working square with the inner hooker who also happens to, ahem, have a heart of gold (can we see where the road to baldness lay?).

Anyway, there’s nothing like driving on the road with your stereotypical pregnant teen friend and your cold-as-ice, bitchy token minority friend to make one hunger for some down home food.

If I had to hang out with those three girls from “Crossroads” then this is the ammo (at least food-wise) that I would need to survive them:

Lots of Red Vines (even sentimentalist crappy lines like “Y’all, we used to be so close” sound better with a little sugar…)
A great gallon of iced tea (see recipe below)
Several ham sandwiches (or, if you dig it, mortadella)

The list continues…
The crunchiest potato chip I could find: these ones are so crunchy that I could almost block out all of the cheesy dialogue in that sinkhole of a movie that I mentioned earlier
Several books on tape…maybe something by Margaret Atwood or Margaret Cho or anyone NOT found in an airport bookstore

Jenny’s Iced Tea

4-5 bags of favorite tea (I like to use Republic of Tea’s Ginger Peach plus a few bags of Celestial Seasonings Decaf Green Tea or Celestial Seasonings Vanilla Rooibos Tea)
4 cups of boiling water
2 cups of ice cubes
1 lemon, thinly sliced
A few sprigs of mint or basil

Brew the tea with 4 cups of boiling water for 5 minutes in a heat-safe container. Remove the tea bags and add the ice cubes carefully. Refridgerate for at least two hours. Serve in glasses with more ice plus lemon slices and mint or basil. This refreshing drink should cleanse you of any bad movie (although you might also need something stronger…my suggestion is to add a shot of lychee vodka)
**If you’re travelling, put this ice tea in a Nalgene bottle or a travel mug with extra and add the lemon slices and mint or basil on top.