August 10, 2010
I have since the age when I could unburden my mom from making my meals for me eaten cold cereal with milk for breakfast.  Mostly bran flakes with dried fruit.  These days, especially when I get up late, past nine o’clock, say, I’ll make something like this.  It’s not really a proper omelette, but it’s whisked and fried eggs approximating the shape of an omelette with chorizo sausage and a few snippings from the green onions I grow in a cup on my kitchen window.  That’s a faery dusting of parsley and ancho chili powder on top.  There is also a fried tomato on top of a smear of whole-grain mustard.  Yesterday and today and in the near future until I my potential job calls me back, it’s toast and butter and tea and honey for me. Modest pleasures do indeed satisfy.  The terrifying crunch of my savings account is well under way, but in terms of food, I am still living by my estimation incredibly well. 

I have since the age when I could unburden my mom from making my meals for me eaten cold cereal with milk for breakfast.  Mostly bran flakes with dried fruit.  These days, especially when I get up late, past nine o’clock, say, I’ll make something like this. 

It’s not really a proper omelette, but it’s whisked and fried eggs approximating the shape of an omelette with chorizo sausage and a few snippings from the green onions I grow in a cup on my kitchen window.  That’s a faery dusting of parsley and ancho chili powder on top.  There is also a fried tomato on top of a smear of whole-grain mustard. 

Yesterday and today and in the near future until I my potential job calls me back, it’s toast and butter and tea and honey for me. Modest pleasures do indeed satisfy.  The terrifying crunch of my savings account is well under way, but in terms of food, I am still living by my estimation incredibly well. 

August 10, 2010 • 1 note

 I offer a round-table of things I’ve been eating which were delicious, as well as a dirty, edible brown-thing related secret:  I lust after fast-food friend chicken.  Not from the one place you’re thinking of, but the other one.

August 9, 2010 • 1 note

I grew up with my parents’ generation’s rejection of the beet as a delicious thing. They were a dull purple accent to all the untouchable pizza parlor salad bars of my childhood, an item of grotesque middle-American exotica.  They smelled.  They came in a can and decorated the high chapel of repellent curiosities.  I hadn’t so much as plunged a single eye-tooth into a beet’s flesh until I was twenty one years old. 

I wouldn’t have liked it anyway.  Children, having the same capacity for cruelty as their older relatives but only a fraction of their chaotic power, naturally select outsiders for exclusion and ridicule.  The beet falls well outside the sphere of the mostly brown matter that can only either be salty or sickly sweet that comprised my diet as a young’n.  Perhaps in a different world the beet’s orgiastic commotion of red juice that stains hands Phoenician violet after gentle handling would appeal to the same impulse in me that drew me toward any food and soft drink dyed a color that does not occur in nature.  But alas, beets taste like dirt, and kids don’t like that.  They can also turn urine pale red in color, which is alarming.

When I mention that they taste like dirt, I mean dirt in the way that a good scotch will taste like dirt, rich in minerals and scattered across your senses as if distributed by an ambling breeze.  Only Scotch fans call it a “peaty” sensation.  Bad scotch of course tastes like old shoe leather.  Wine people use the word “earthy” and I’m sick of that vague, ethereal bullshit.  Beets taste like dirt.  They come from the dirt and the element of the dirt in their robust, befuddling, sensual flavor is what I most enjoy. 

They’re also really, really fucking good for you.  Roasted or raw.  One of the first results of popular internet search engine makes the claim that eating a lot of them will cure any cancer.  That claim of course is utter bullshit.  But the beet is high in vitamins, minerals and fiber.  It provides visually stunning and nutritionally wealthy greens often disguised as “Swiss chard” by clever retailers.  The beet is your friend.  If the summer of 2010 is about anything, it’s about really learning and believing in my heart of hearts without samcimony that vegetables are just as fulfilling and delicious as the dainty animals that eat them on whom we in turn subsist.  And their king is the beet.  Long live the beet.

August 9, 2010 • 2 notes
What I typically eat during the daylight hours now that it’s summertime.  It’s a mix of cooked bitter greens (I eat more beet greens than any other) with garlic and red chili paste on a sloppy bed of ricotta cheese and olive oil.  I liberated and adapted the ricotta spread from the cookbook of a famous television chef that my mom bought for me and now I can’t think of a vegetable I don’t like cuddled up to a clingy smear of mild white cheese.  The ghostly glow is the steam from the greens and the sweaty overcoat of great-lakes summertime air.

What I typically eat during the daylight hours now that it’s summertime.  It’s a mix of cooked bitter greens (I eat more beet greens than any other) with garlic and red chili paste on a sloppy bed of ricotta cheese and olive oil.  I liberated and adapted the ricotta spread from the cookbook of a famous television chef that my mom bought for me and now I can’t think of a vegetable I don’t like cuddled up to a clingy smear of mild white cheese.  The ghostly glow is the steam from the greens and the sweaty overcoat of great-lakes summertime air.