^%@$%ing shingles, or what I did on my summer vacation

I got shingles. David Letterman, after a month off work due to shingles, celebrated his return to the "Late Show" with a top 10 list:

#10. There's nothing good about the ****ing shingles. The ****suckers are so ***damn painful, every minute you pray some giant son-of-a-bitch will shove a red-hot poker up your ***.

Um, yeah. And I'll bet Letterman didn't have to deal with a cheap breast pump clamped right over the blistery rash. Or a baby desperate for "mama milk."

I hope you came here for culinary inspiration, because this shit is freaking app-et-i-zing!

On to the next course.

I came home from my trip to visit the baby's grandparents with shingles and a total lack of desire to cook anything. So I decided to make something my sister's been telling me about forever and always sounded kind of unexciting to me. Until I tried it—it is exciting, so good, so easy: Sweet potatoes, baked in the jacket at 375 degrees until tender (about an hour), with butter, salt, a squeeze of lime, and a sprinkling of cilantro. Really, it's awesome. Thank you, Alice Waters.

I looked forward to it all day. And isn't the setup pretty, especially in front of get-well flowers and fruit harvested from my parent's trees? The baby and W. sat in eager anticipation of the soft, sweet, goodness.


And then the bad health-food store produce strikes again. The sweet potatoes (yams?) were hard in some places, grainy mush in others. We missed the farmer's market this week and paid the price. They looked like this:


We ate salad and apricots, put the cilantro away for tomorrow's tostadas, put the baby to bed, and made a pie.

Nothing like pie to ease the pain of shingles and sweet potato disappointment.