YOU KNOW WHERE

I'm retiring this blog. Thanks to my readers, regular and irregular (a lot of you were irregular and wound up here after googling Dannon Activa Yogurt, a product I reviewed in a past entry). To the latter, I hope you feel better. To the former, au revoir.

I'm ending on a high note, which is this: the author Jay McInerney, whose novel Bright Lights, Big City I read at WAY TOO YOUNG AN AGE (what nine year old needs to know that in 1984 the Cool Kids called cocaine Bolivian Marching Powder?), linked to my blog in his most recent House & Garden Blog.

!!!

This is a small thing, but I just found out and I'm crying because it feels like something. I am obsessed with something, that feeling that I am always writing for, eating for, living for. The surprise, the ephemeral something, the unexpected experience that makes me feel connected and Here.

I am Here and I wrote things here and an author found me over here and read me and then connected me to his readers over where he is so that they might find me over here and read me. It's a small thing, it is nothing. It is something, it is everything. I am Here! Thank you for finding me!

You know where to put it,
Megan

MORE THAN THIS

Some things you should do in private. I think you know what they are. But I don't know what they are. That's why I'm Me and not You. One of the things that makes me Me and not You is that I don't know that it is impolite to eat while walking in the street. Or: I do know but I disregard the knowledge. The only thing worse than knowing and disregarding this knowledge is that today I did it with just about the worst food one could. It being eating and walking. In public. Where there's PEOPLE.

The food? All Natural Spicy Pecan Smoked Beef Jerky. Here, let me give you a moment to imagine me, a grown woman, power-walking through New York City while attempting to gnaw on large strips of salty-spicy leather. Please, take your time. And be sure to account for a lot of chew action:


...


This is unaccaptable behavior! One day I will look back on this moment and maybe but probably definitely wonder sadly why I wasn't better to myself. Not Giving A Shit is overrated. You are what you eat, and I am what I am, but starting now I want to be more.

MY PEASANT FOOD

I'm going to keep cooking until something good comes out, and even with near-hits and definite misses I'm really enjoying making things with my hands and then using my aforementioned hands to feed myself the aforementioned made things.

Tonight I had an onion that was about two days away from going to waste and also some leftover white rice so I decided to do something with both. I suppose certain cultures' peasant food arise out of circumstances slightly similar this one, and peasant food is my favorite kind of food (generally one-dish, hearty, meat-n-veg combos that you can eat with a spoon), so I was happy to invent my own.

Caveat if you find the tooting of horns offensive, because I'm about to toot some major horn on behalf of myself and my dinner: it was DELICIOUS! I made GOOD, SIMPLE FOOD! Also: vegetarian. But: meaters would love it.

Here is the recipe if you care to try:

Two cups leftover pre-cooked white rice
One almost rotten Vidalia onion (make sure it is NOT rotten) medium chopped (you can also use a totally fresh onion)
Two little cans of sliced mushrooms
1.5 tablespoons sesame oil
1 teaspoon hot chili oil
1 tablespoon chopped garlic (about 2, 3 cloves)
1/4 cup fresh chopped cilantro (I love cilantro, some people don't. If you don't, I feel bad for you but you can sub fresh chives or dill but not basil!)
1 tablespoon butter

Okay -- heat a pan and combine the oils (but not the butter) and stir the onions in. Cook them on a medium to low flame, and let them get slick and transparent. Add the garlic, and keep the flame on the lower side. Add the mushrooms...let 'em cook. Throw the rice in there with about a half cup of water and the butter; let the water reduce out, but not so things get too dry -- you want things to be soft and mushy. Add the cilantro, or if you're a sad person who has no taste for cilantro, the chives or dill. Stir stir stir, and that's it.

This dish is TOTAL COMFORT FOOD and just SO DELICIOUS and yummy. Not to mention CHEAP AS SHIT. Even if we're lucky enough to afford better, on occasion we should all eat like peasants.

EDIT

Everything about today's lunch could have used an editor. It basically tastes like steak au poivre, which is unfortunate because I ordered penne with chicken, spinach, mushrooms, and tomato sauce. How could there be this much pepper in ANYTHING?

And I LIKE pepper but hey Chef! Next time spare me your first draft.







Edited to say: This is a first draft.

50% HUNGRY 100% OF THE TIME

I don't know what's wrong with me but if I'm not eating then I'm thinking about eating and if I'm not thinking about eating then I am looking at pictures of food porn on the internet and coaxing myself into a state of stomach-arousal and if I am not doing that then I am probably killing time until the next time that I can eat again.

Why, just this past the week I surreptitiously ate french fries out of a garbage can (AT WORK! BUT! I knew the owner of both the garbage and the fries and they were clean and untouched and even though I'm not a Freegan for that moment I was one) and then I sat in a really stinky restaurant because I so wanted its ramen soup that I was willing to forgive its malodorous odor even though it put off my companion and if THAT'S not shameful enough then this is: as I write this I am STARVING and my stomach won't give up the ghost it is bottomless it is a slavedriver and I just fed it not 20 minutes ago so COME ON YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS, ME!

THE FLIP

Success! I made a DELICIOUS meal last night, using leftover ingredients from my botched dinner earlier in the week.

What you might not know is that I'm really a ninety-year-old Jewish retiree and my taste in food often reflects this. Yes, I actually ENJOY gefilte fish (even from a JAR), and growing up one of my favorite foods was my paternal grandmother's stuffed cabbage. I still love stuffed cabbage, but I refuse to order it at a restaurant and so I rarely eat it anymore. Until last night, when I made a lazy-man's vegetarian version that was so delicious I think (I mean I know) that I will do a repeatsies on this one for sure.

First, I put on my apron, because I like to be cute for myself. Then I sauteed finely chopped mushrooms, garlic, and onions in olive oil and added a little bit of sherry wine to reduce it. While that was happening I browned some spicy vegetarian sausage that I picked up at Whole Foods out of a weird, but not misguided, curiosity. It didn't crumble as easily as ground beef, but it was seasoned well and after browning the texture was approximate enough. I added this to the mushrooms and a heaping portion of chopped Napa cabbage. To this I also added a small can of Hunt's tomato sauce, which I like for recipes like this because it's a little bit sweet. Then I added some fresh ground pepper, covered the pot and let it simmer.

I knew things were going well because my apartment smelled GREAT. After about 10 minutes I checked on it and voila: done. If I had had white rice I definitely would have dumped spoonfuls of the cabbage/fake-meat mixture over it, but I didn't, so I didn't. Instead, I ate the "stew" from a little bowl, and was really impressed with how much it evoked that old-world stuffed cabbage taste I was craving, and how quickly I was able to achieve it. Again, I had A LOT of leftovers and I briefly entertained the idea of going over to my new neighbor's door and asking him if he'd eaten yet and would he like to try my concoction, but then I realized that no, I'm not that folksy and yes, he would think I was weird. So I did what any Nana would do and I stuck the extras in the freezer for another time.

THE FLOP

I really botched my dinner last night. And I was so excited to cook! But: passion doesn't guarantee results! At least: good ones!

After a Chinatown shopping spree earlier in the month wherein I went condiment crazy, I was inspired to make a spicy vegetable stir-fry and serve it over rice noodles. It was supposed to be a classy stir-fry, too; I bought Chinese eggplant because I wanted to see how it was different from uh..."regular" eggplant which sounds kind of racist but is not. I think the primary difference is that Chinese eggplant is a beautiful lavender color, thinner, and extremely more phallic than any vegetable ought to be. I also picked up mung beans, onions, garlic, napa cabbage, white cap mushrooms, and tofu. Sounds good, right?! But: it wasn't. It was TOTALLY BAD.

My first mistake was that I bought way too much food. I just had TOO MUCH STUFF to mix together, which led to my second mistake: I stir fried my garlic, onions, and tofu in a grill pan that I had specifically purchased for the SEARING OF MEAT. You know the kind...it has RIDGES? Yeah, it does, and those ridges mean that it is the opposite of a good idea when you're mixing around ingredients. But I used it because it was the biggest pan I had! And I bought too much food! What a mess!

My second mistake was that as I was soaking the rice noodles I separately sauteed the mushrooms, eggplant, and more garlic in the same big soup pot intended for boiling the noodles. As the mushrooms and eggplant turned a horrible gray and released their water, I figured I'd just throw the noodles in with them and cook them all together. BIG FUCKING DUMB MOVE! The noodles congealed almost immediately, the eggplant disappeared, and the mushrooms got caught in a gloppy-gluey noodle web that may or may not have ruined my pot. I'm not sure of its status because it is still soaking in water.

At this point it would have been prudent to give up, but I am a Fighter and an Optimist and so I mixed the spicy tofu cabbage mung bean onion blooper into the gloppy-gluey rice Chernobyl and, yes, it was just too much food for the size of my pots, so yes, my tiny kitchen floor knows the sensation of so much hot food spilling if it didn't already. I forced myself to eat whatever it was that I had cooked, and, here's a spoiler: IT WAS BAD. It wasn't offensive, but it had zero sex appeal looks-wise and I would have had a more exciting taste sensation if I had dipped a piece of white bread into water and let it air-dry on my tongue. The irony of all this is that I have a TON OF LEFTOVERS and an ABSENCE OF DESIRE to eat them.