Gentle reader, you’ll find that I’m as capable of unabashed bragging as the next person, when the occasion warrants. Like now:
My kitchen smells like heaven.
When your thirteen hour days regularly run to fourteen or more, you don’t have much time before & after work to take care of the little things–like procuring, preparing, and packing decent food so you’re not subsisting on gas station and drive-thru fare. You need to plan, just a little. In its simplest form, that can mean simply steaming great piles of whatever looked best in the produce section; in its more complex iterations, it means epic cooking sessions on a Saturday afternoon, sipping a tasty beverage and singing along to whatever the iPod roulette spins up. The dogs mill around my feet, using Jedi minds tricks to coerce tasty morsels to rain down upon their heads. I stand at the counter and put together what we’ll be eating for every meal for the next four days.
Today, the fickle, fey March weather showed up in the menu. The Chicken Dopiaza fits the month’s cold and wet whims, warm and comforting on the plate (and a great excuse to practice my still-imperfect butchering skills). But just as quickly as the storm brews, it blows over, and for the sunny, shirt-sleeve afternoons, there’s pasta (wheat-free, of course) piled with asparagus, peas, mint, basil, and lemon zest.
And then there was the new gluten-free pizza crust I’m trying–I’ll have to tell you later how well it holds up to its farmers-market-poster load of leek, chevre, and roasted tomatoes. The avocado salad, I’m afraid, became my dinner, supplemented with tastes and scraps from everything else. My side counter looks like a fruit juice ad, and my sweet tooth demanded, of all things, tapioca. It’s on the stove now, browner than I remember, and hinting ruefully that I should have bought whipping cream.
I tried to be a good blogger and take pictures for you, but the ones in the links are so much better. And, truthfully, I forgot about the camera once things really got rolling. All I have to offer you are some onions, caramelized for almost an hour, tempting me from their plate:
Don’t worry… most of them made it to their final destination, folded into a thick curry and studded with summer-green cilantro, ahead of its season.
Comfort food for some might mean something starchy, breaded, fried; something with cheese or gravy (or cheese and gravy)… For me, more and more, I find that comfort food is anything that comes out of this: real food, with echoes still on it of the ground it came from, passing under my hand and becoming the fuel that keeps us going through long days.
I have a politics hangover today
A grain of sand works its way past the thin grimmace of the oyster’s shell, and like most agents of change, begins to irritate the shit out of the poor bivalve. We all know what happens next, and by now it’s a tired metaphor, maybe, but still beautiful, simple, elegant.
I’ve had a lot of sand stuck in my shell
recentlywho am I kidding–I shovel it in by the handful most weeks, and I’m not sure I make the right juice to turn it into anything shiny.Here’s one: Politics. It’s so easy to get worked up about the circus going on in Washington and your state capitol and over at town hall–even more so when you start paying attention to the ahem measured and well-reasoned commentary littering the airwaves,newsstands, and blogosphere. I mean, it’s just all so damned important. I have a theory that the size of the average human spleen has doubled since the rise of mass media–how else would we accomodate the sheer volume of ill humor civic engagement cultivates in the average person?
As much as I want to fully disengage, to pull the plug once and for all on the talking heads, I can’t. Because it really does matter, all this negotiating and maneuvering and voting. What those blowhards and morons and snakes do matters. And that might be the biggest, sharpest piece of grit ever to touch my skin, because we have not put good people in charge.
It’s a plain fact of politics that, to even be involved, one must get dirty. Some are far dirtier than others, to be sure, but everyone in office got there by doing some version of what we put ladies of the night in prison for.
I’m doing my best to salve my chapped ass. Like I said, I can’t pull out, stuff my ears with cotton, and wholly ignore the perversities of government–I have to keep tabs on the state of things. But I can exempt myself from the mud-slinging and name-calling that passes for debate these days. I can work to cultivate within myself the very qualities that I see lacking among our leaders–because while I can make myself look awfully good on paper, all fraternite and equalite and stuff, I was born with the same tendency toward greed and disdain and willful blindness that they were. Getting pissed off at the latest bad behavior to come out of the hallowed halls of congress is like road rage–entirely unproductive, and more likely to hurt all the wrong people.
I know I’m supposed to get involved and shake my fist in marches on Washington, but I just don’t see the point. I can stay home and bang my head against the wall and achieve roughly the same effect, with the added bonus of not requiring air travel. Simply put, the average individual has the power to change exactly bupkis within the confines of the current system.
Knowing my hands are tied is my least favorite feeling of all.
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Posted in Commentary + Philosophy
Tagged news, politics