domingo, noviembre 23, 2014

Pork is nothing to be trifled with, tacos and Thanksgiving thoughts

"¡Con el puerco no se juega!" (or, "pork is not to be trifled with") I wittily proclaimed to an audience of friends and congress-goers, and "Not just another orgy" (as a collaborative tagline to a conference, any conference).  I'm at my wittiest, I'm told, when the world is spinning crazily out of my control, and pain is searing at my pleural interstices, pain in my chest, either physical or metaphorical. Or as Cabrera Infante infamously claimed, "puns hide pain." I think I agree. Thus, weeks back, stiff from sitting in conference chairs, I made quite a few snarky proclamations, aphorisms, or snotty retorts, if you prefer.

One of my sharply cruel punchlines was, "Lady, I didn't sleep with your husband, but I know who did." And another, in response to a colleague chiding some of us for hitting the wine a little hard, "Aquí los alcólicos anónimos" to which I replied, "Qué anónimos, somos alcólicos bien balcónicos" (roughly translated in rhyme as, "what do you mean anonymous? we're alchoholics eponymous" or, more literally, "nope, we're openly alchoholic."

You'd think I would remember that pork is not to be tolerated, at least not by my enzyme-lacking self (divine justice?! genetic engineering?! You choose). But no... yesterday I found myself sicker than I have been in... well... since the last time I chose to eat pork pupusas... or perhaps since I had tacos al pastor in  Tijuana... maybe both. I don't know, I just know that the day after I make the terrible choice to eat delicious tacos de cochinita pibil, I am doubled over in the worst kind of body-rending pain and cursing myself for not remembering my easy jingle. Next, time, dear GI tract, next time I will not forget. Never Again. (About as useful as that phrase has been, I admit, when referring to atrocities of human carnage. Never again, actually never really means Never Again... it just means... next time it won't be me! But, I digress).

So, this morning, once again feeling myself, and after a long sunny walk with the child and our porcine puppy (one need only look at his speckled pink belly, or hear his snore-grunts as he flops in my arms at night to draw such a conclusion!), I set to a more vegetarian-friendly set of activities, swearing to myself to recall that meat is not so kind to anyone involved, and setting about my mostly vegetarian thanksgiving prep.

Between grading papers, and washing dishes (how do the piles keep on piling?) and laundry (ni hablar), I set about making gluten-free cornbread so that it will have time to be dried in cubes for a few days and integrated into the basis for the stuffing (or "dressing" as my Mimi used to call it) for Thursday next.

It was a simple recipe, and while I don't necessarily recommend it for eating as-is (it can be doctored with more honey and butter while still warm, of course), it makes for a great stuffing:
2 cups corn meal
2 cups buttermilk (I knew there was a reason my sub-conscious made me buy it the other day! Yes!)
2 eggs
2 Tbs. butter
1 tsp salt
1 tsp soda
1 Tbs raw organic honey (well, that's what I had)

I actually 1.5'd the recipe, but it worked perfectly. I mixed the wets and dries separately, melting the butter and honey apart, and beating the eggs and buttermilk thoroughly before mixing into the dry ingredients. I added wet to dry, stirred, allowed the soda and the acid from the buttermilk to interact in fabulous bubbles, and then added the honey-butter melted into the center and stirred for a few minutes. The oven was set to 400 degrees, and I baked for about 20 minutes in the pre-buttered pan (makes for a lovely crisp brown edge to the crust).

The stuffing, for those interested, when trifling with pork, will use roasted brats, or chorizo, but... since I'm being good to myself and my vegetarian guests this Thanksgiving, I will make it with the following modifications:

My makeshift stuffing recipe:

1 large 9x12 in pan of cornbread, cubed and dried for a few days (see above recipe, 1.5x)
1-2 cups vegetable (or chicken stock)
two bulbs roasted fennel (oh, yes...)
sauteed large onion
3-4 garlic cloves
8oz. sauteed quartered crimini or other delicious mushrooms
1 cup roasted chestnuts, roughly chopped
3-4 stalks celery, sauteed with onion, garlic and mushrooms
1/2 cup organic unsulphered apricots (or dried cranberries, or fresh apple, or all)
vegetarian chorizo, about 1/2 the package
oil
fresh thyme and/or sage

Sautee herbs, chorizo, onion, garlic, celery, pre-roasted fennel, chopped, celery, and mushrooms. Add chopped apricots (or dried cranberries, and/or apple), pre-roasted chestnuts, chopped, and finish the sauteeing. Salt and pepper to taste. Toss the sautée with cubed bread, add broth until the entire mass is tender but not mushy and bake for 20 minutes or so. Can be reheated by adding a bit more liquid and reheating in the oven.

So, here's to a productive Sunday, in which work will happen, on many fronts, and I will give thanks that I have a mantra meant not to forget, until the next time tacos wink at me, and I think, "it wasn't so bad last time, was it?"

domingo, noviembre 16, 2014

Pilfered lemons and other adventures in self-care on a sunny Sunday

Never is one more keenly aware of their singleness in the world than when one is in the grips of the grippe... too sick to care for oneself, too sick to even care... and yet, still managing to... somehow...

This illness, if I may cheer victoriously, perhaps prematurely, was as intense as it was short-lived, and required mostly sleeping, ingesting liquids, and consuming copious amounts of BBC television shows, including Call the midwife! Because. Midwifery.

But I digress. This keenly felt singledom is most trying at these times, when there is no medicine left in the house, and there is a delicate child who still needs her needs met, and one's brain is in a fog, and there are midnight emergencies, and it just feels too hard.

So, obviously, my response to mildly encroaching self-pity is to cook. It doesn't make me less single, or more lovable, but it does make me feel soothed, for a moment... and when one suddenly remembers that they have body parts heretofore unnoticed, such as a throat that feels like it has been grated with a cheese-grater, or sinuses that are akin to a pressure cooker (ah! note to self! must procure a new pressure cooker as the old one may have seen its last pressurized days), and bones that ache, not with sadness, but with actually metallic blue-lightning pain of activation of armies of white blood cells, or whatever it is that our bodies, mostly healthy, not as perfect as we are told they must be, but our bodies nonetheless, do in such circumstances, feeling soothed, is, perhaps, all that we may hope for.

In any case.

There were lemons, not the pilfered ones, which will come in later, but ones gifted kindly to me by my erstwhile gardener who sometimes comes, and often shows up at odd hours with flowers for me, and waters what I forget, when I forget it. Upon dragging my sorry self home from Friday morning school run, with less-than-typical agitation because my ability to give-a-fuck was impaired by my cotton-filled headache, I promptly juiced all the lemons in the house into a half-gallon's worth of homemade lemonade. These lemons were from various friends' gardens, truth be told, my ability to utilize such gifts surpassed by their sheer abundance and shelf-life. But, agua de limón, it was, and a pot of chicken soup that is the cure-all to ailments of both the physical self and the psychic fallout that abounds when our bodies fail us.

Boiled in a pot:
chicken (with bones is better, but I only had frozen breasts)
salt
bay laurel leaves (they're old, so I just throw in a bunch and hope for the best)
onion (it was left out and dehydrated, so, what better recycling than a pot of stock!)
4-5 garlic cloves, halved
many organic carrots (I no longer bother to peel carrots, it feels liberating)
salvaged celery (the slightly discolored and wilted outer stalks that would be inedible if they weren't boiled to all hell)
brown rice thrown in for sustenance

While the soup made itself I pretended to be healthy and met with students via Skype, sipped mint tea with honey and cursed my work ethic. When 2:30 hit, and child was fetched, medicine procured ("mom, I have a run in my leggins... but oh well..." "Yeah, whatever, it's just a body" "mom!you aren't wearing a bra, you can tell!" "Meh. Fuck it." "Yeah, why care what anyone else thinks?!" "(unintelligible snuffle-grunt of agreement") I stumble back to bed, and sleep from 3 to noon the next day. 

But noon brings with it a child who wants to see friends and a kitchen that once again calls... I must be feeling better, dizzy-self muses, and shuffles pantsless to the kitchen, remembering to close the shades before parading across the dining room window-stage. Lentils, she thinks... because, lentils... and a tortilla española.

Tortilla:
Sautee in olive oil;
a few potatoes, sliced thin so as to lose their rawness more evenly and quickly (I stopped peeling potatoes a while back too...)
half an onion chopped and sauteed, along with the potatoes
garlic cloves (crushed and added after onion is translucent)
add a bit of salt to potatoes as they cook... makes for a much better tasting tortilla

In a separate bowl:
crack 6-7 eggs, add a half tsp or so of salt, scramble with a fork

Add fully translucent potato mixture to eggs and let sit for a while.  Clean pan and add more olive oil.

On low heat setting pour egg mixture back into pan, let cook until it is almost fully dry on top, then, using a skilled, burn-resistant hand, place a plate over the top, flip the omelet, and slide the wet side, face down back into the pan and cook for a few more minutes.

Lentils:
A cup of green lentils
A half potato, cubed
Carrots
Onion
Garlic
Celery
(You see the pattern)
A large, juicy chipotle in adobo sauce
1/4 cup tomato sauce (non-seasoned, or homemade tomato puree)
boil the above in 2 cups of water, with salt to taste, and a bay leaf or 7 (remember, old spices lose their potency, but I hate throwing anything away)

So, I had the energy to cook, but not really to eat very much... and so, we ended up caving, ordering an amazing thin-crust pizza margerita with mushrooms (because... mushrooms are one of life's basic staples, obviously), crawled back into bed, snuggled with sympathetic child and sleepy-protective-dog by my side.

But? The pilfered lemons, you ask... ah, the pilfered lemons.

After another mostly-bed-ridden day (I always think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I spend too much time in bed) I slept another long night... awoke still dizzy, but determined to feel better. What is this? I can no longer feel my throat-grated... I am healed!

The windows are flung wide, though a momentary flash of fear crosses us, as the dog goes wild and there is a man with a machete climbing our back wall and then tip-toeing his way across our neighbor's roof.

I think, what better time to take the dog out for a walk to explore such madness, and maybe warn the neighbors. But, lo! the machete wielding white dude is still on the roof of the neighbor's house, my body relaxes just a bit and I call the kid to tell her of my discovery.  All is well in the enchanted barrio. So I wander with the dog, through a neighborhood built in the late 40s and early 50s, and muse at the wholesomeness of it all. There are still people everywhere, couples doing yard-work, a woman cradling a baby as her husband gets into a car with a Grateful Dead sticker (I think it is a black BMW, and by association, my twisted mind plays a Don Henley retrospective, much to my chagrin). There is an old man sitting with his eyes closed and his upturned face to the sun, and I think... well, this is glorious, and my dog doesn't poo, because I forgot the bags. Things are going my way! No room for self-pity here!! And I calculate the ways in which I might improve my house, making mental notes of the others, much like my own, and the creative solutions that neighbors have come up with to enhance vegetable growing, or car-storage, or mother-in-law accommodations (not that I have one, but maybe one day... my sappy hopefulness embarrasses even me. Full stop.)

Lemons! there are lemons rolling about, lolling listlessly on the opposite side of a cement blocked contention wall. They are technically on the sidewalk, and so, I help myself to one. Just one. I don't know if I need it, but I think, I am fresh out of lemons. And one can always use lemons. And then there is the secret thrill of taking something of the earth but not entirely one's own...

And then, as if by magic, the lemon serves to complete my previously unplanned emergency hummus:
 I prefer to cook my own garbanzos from dry, but, as previously noted, my pressure cooker is semi-out-of-commission, and I only have canned organic garbanzos, so they will do.

1 can, rinsed and then heated back up in water on the stove.
A quarter cup sesame tahini (just ground sesame, nothing else added)
A few cloves of garlic
A pinch or two of salt added to the garbanzo water and a few more added after the fact to the food processor
The juice of one pilfered lemon (or slightly less)
A quarter cup water added to all of the above
A tablespoon or so of olive oil
Cumin

All of these should be processed in a hand-held wand food processor or a larger one (if one has one handy, which I, shockingly, do not!)

This can be savored with a swirl of harissa, or topped with pine nuts...

And so, I credit the copious amounts of sleep, and the neti pot with hot salt-water, and the mildly good work news, and the cooking for my speedy recuperation. And though there is no abiding wisdom in a day spent cooking, and talking on the phone with my darling friends, and pacing in my socks on the sidewalk in front of my house while conversing, (with pants!) there is something about the lemons that makes the rest of life a little bit less sour, a little bit more sweet, even.




lunes, noviembre 10, 2014

It is strange. I just came "home" to my house, a house I bought, a house that exhausts me, a house that feels like it is not enough and is too much all at once. I came home from Santa Barbara, from a conference that was at once both nourishing (for the intellect, for the spirit) and exhausting (for the body, for the soul). We are at once humans, fully in our bodies, incapable of allaying psychic and physical exhaustion, to be pure mind, unable to inhabit our bodies, however, without the razor sharp critical view from the panopticon of our own structural apparatuses of failure.

I had few tasks that HAD to be completed today, and yet, I failed to complete them. (The chiding voice claims that the night is not over yet, and the other voice, the one that whimpers meekly, but stands its ground firmly nonetheless says, just... rest... tomorrow... tomorrow it will all hurt less). I don't know why some days are better than others, some days, that open door to the world's sorrows is less open, or is partially obstructed by the bellowing laughter that we have stuffed, like feathers in a cotton-clothed pillow, into the threshold, pushing back gently, solidity made from the stuff of nothing, to keep the pain at bay. Some days, though, like today... the news makes me weep. Makes me despair. Makes me want to die.

I won't, of course. I mean, I will, of course, but not today, not of this pain, which is so unfathomably remote, and yet it permeates the seemingly sealed spaces that I have caulked myself into. I come home to a reconstructed bathroom. The walls are painted the color I had asked for. A panic-inducing emergency, that has become an opportunity for change, for peace, and for personalization... and all I can see is the slightly off-kilter angle at which the medicine cabinet was hung.  This is my problem, I think... I always see the cracks. They scream at me. I see the good things too, (that small meek voice offers, in my defense) but they are noted, and duly dismissed. The cracks... Oh, the cracks come out, and they glare at me. They taunt me. They remind me of why it is never good enough. I am never good enough. Why I don't deserve to be loved.  But you are loved, my wonderful loving friends will say, and I will concede this, briefly... but it isn't enough. The voracious hunger tells me isn't enough because I am 36 years old, and the only noise I hear, the deafening noise, the white noise that is like the ocean crashing around my head, is that I have failed. Ignore, for a moment, that I have raised an amazing child to almost adulthood, alone for the last 10 years, ignore the graduate degrees, the job-seeking success, the consumption of goods... (I am such a good consumer-citizen, except I'm not even... I am reminded several times recently, because men see my poor, sweet, functional, but ugly car and offer to buy her... they see my slovenly vehicle, and I see my failure to live up to some standard of... who knows fuck all what). I only see the ways in which I have failed.

Leaving Santa Barbara, I congratulate myself for my progress, my emotional successes, my standing up for my own self-worth in the face of those who would unwittingly wrest it from my clenching fingers. I have finally grown up, I think, for a brief, shining moment, floating in the Pacific ocean... but then, the waves of loss come rolling in. And then, the pain of the others bursts through the door, and I can't fight the tears, of loss, as if it were mine. Loss of life, loss of limb, loss of love... and what I feel isn't so much emptiness, but an endless pit of despair. The laughter cannot fill this hole with feather-cement, I cannot push the anxiety away. So, I only manage to cook soup, and pierogies, remembering how my once-upon-a-time partner, used to like this meal, and how that didn't stop the belittling, the anger, the rage. It is strange to think that one could be nostalgic for that, but sometimes, one still is. Not for those things, of course, but for the sense of belonging to someone, to something, somewhere. I don't know if I know how to belong anymore or if I ever did, but I do know that my edges are worn thin, and my emotional reserves, that sometimes appear endless, are running low.

And I think. Maybe this is it, maybe this is the reason that adults grow more conservative and less idealistic. Sheer exhaustion. Pragmatism. Such an ugly idea, and yet... so practical.

Tonight I am tired, and instead of being held, or holding someone, I will be enveloped by the blank page, a page that once offered so much relief, and still, from time to time, resurfaces as a reflecting pool that can assuage one's ego, allay one's pain. My pain. My ego. The nasty, vicious voice reminds me that I have no right to compare my insignificant discomfort with the real, tortured, suffering of millions, and yet... their pain is real to me, it wakes me in the form of a crying child that isn't there. It bores into my bones, it reaches into my chest and teases me with choking, wavering on the edge of life and death, knowing that death will not come so easily, knowing that I will soldier on, shouldering the boulder, climbing back up the hill to be pushed back down again tomorrow.

Must we push back against impunity? I wonder. Aloud and inside my head. What difference does it make? But it does make a difference, the tiny, shuddering, whispering voice urges from her corner, shackled to the walls of a prison of my own making. I suppose it does. Push back we shall. Even when our elected officials fail us, even when our compatriots vote for bigotry, even when our governments use their power to kill other people's children. To destroy them, beat them, maim them, burn their bodies in prisons, ditches, ravines, deserts, with drones, bullets, bombs, poisoning their food and water supply. It hurts. Too much. There are no words, but the words become the balm, they stand in for the love that I need to smooth over those cracks, to fill them in, to make their harsh, angry, ugly, gaping maws shut. Once and for all. Until the next time.