calamity's child

“If everyone ate more garlic, the world would be a happier place.” (Ruth Reichl)

The thing about 44-Clove Garlic Soup is that while 44 cloves of garlic for 4 servings is totally reasonable, 44 cloves of garlic soup multiplied for 8 qts of soup swap soup, is (very decidedly) not. But since my mottos for soup-swap are “keep it simple” and “go big or go home,” I decided to go for it. It didn’t hurt that I’ve made this soup before, so I knew it wasn’t that hard of a soup to make.

264 cloves of garlic and the realization that I didn’t own a blender yet later, my sous chef and I were not sure I’d made the right decision. Thank god for the dollar store and its 15$ blenders: the 8 quarts of shit-ton-of-garlic soup came out perfectly. There is really no way to go wrong when the ingredients of your soup are: onion, butter, a shit ton of garlic, thyme, and cream. It’s a soup from heaven, and on these last days of winter/first days of spring, it is exactly what is needed.

this yogurt is changing my life. it is so satisfying, so yogurty, so filling, so maple-y. it is the ideal desert, the ideal breakfast, the ideal snack. i would eat it for every meal. for a while, anyway. from the first bite, i just want to drink it.

this is what is in the refrigerator, even after cleaning:
two rows of various types of pickles, some jars of which i have no idea the age
one row of jars of mustard
a half a row of jars of bbq sauce
two rows of jams and jellys
two bottles of fox’s u-bet
a row of bottles of hot sauce
two jars of salsa
a kazillion eggs
martinelli’s sparkling apple cider (from many holidays ago, i think)
half a bottle of kedem grape
one bottle of magic hat beer
two bottle of fancy root beer
butter
many cheeses
vegan goat cheese
soy milk
orange juice
vegetarian buffalo wings
frozen spinach
frozen chicken tenders
a kazillion boca patties in a variety of flavors
4 bags of coffee, two of which are from vivace in seattle
mint jelly concentrate
various browning agents
vegan caviar (?!)
acidopholous
baking chocolate
assorted other condiments
kale
carrots
leftover rice
pesto
fresh sage
pine nuts

you will note that not really much of this makes a meal; most of it is put *on* a meal or an item in a meal. this is telling me that perhaps i should be more thoughtful about my shopping ….

however, i do believe that dinner tonight will be spinach linguine with either pesto or browned butter with fried sage and pinenuts

the list of what i threw away is even more absurd

dinner tonight, remarkably delicious, remarkably cheap: whole wheat rotini with sage fried in browned butter and a magic hat beer to go with, total cost, under $3.00. i can never get enough of browned butter. when the weather grows cold, i want it’s salty, nutty, caramel-y flavor. i like to play it off as healthy with whole wheat pasta, and by using less butter than i need. but the illusion is incomplete; you can’t eat buttered pasta without knowing exactly what is on your tongue. if i am good at making only one helping, i can make sure i don’t go back for seconds (and thirds).

there are two recipes in gourmet this month i can’t stop thinking about: sweet potato gnocchi with fried sage and roasted chestnuts and squid ink pasta with squash and peppers. the latter is somewhat cheesily billed as a halloween-themed dinner. orange-on-black pasta. but it seems a brilliant flavor combination: roasted sweetness of squash combined with the salty brine of kalamata olives and brightness of peppers. it sounds genius.

i am looking forward to autumn cooking. the temperature dropped dramatically. commuters are in scarves prematurely, there are hoodies, there are coats. crisp wind on my face as i walk to work and home. my mind feels clear for the first time in ages.

for yontif, e and i made a seitan brisket. for much vegan/vegetarian cooking, i basically act as though i am not cooking vegan/vegetarian, and make the most reasonable substitutions possible. so, for brisket, we made 4 seitan logs, using tomato sauce, not-beef boullion, and soy sauce in the liquid (we modified the recipe in isa chandra moskowitz’s veganomicon), then cooked the seitan in the same liquids plus water. then we covered the seitan in browner, seared it on all sides to form a crisp outer crust, and cooked according to this incredible recipe for 36-cloves-of-garlic brisket courtesy of jayne cohen’s jewish holiday cooking. i can not even describe how beautifully it turned out. crisp on the outside, perfectly chewy on the inside, rich, salty, and moist. l said it was exactly the same texture as the brisket she grew up with. i never had brisket growing up, so i don’t know any better, but i do know good meat and good not-meat when i taste it, and this was simply incredible. more adventures in seitan making imminently

it’s been almost two years since i last posted here, and i’ve determined that now is a good time to start up again. i’m in a completely different place, though, and i’m sure that while some themes from the past will re-emerge, there will also be a whole host of things that are unique to where i’m at now.

some of the things that are capturing my imagination these days: tarot, astrology, juvenile fiction, libraries and information access, law libraries and legal reference, eschatological questions in a non-theistic context, liberation and justice-making, depression and loneliness, and family. i don’t know that i’ll write about all that, but it’s more than an adequate starting place.

mostly, this is just so that i make sure i’m writing again. everything was better when i was writing often. i want to try to write 2-3 times a week, ideally. we’ll see how it goes.

to start with: some thoughts on food.

i grew up poor and working class. we never really had enough food in our house. throughout high school, we would only ever have scraps of things: cereal and no milk, tortillas with nothing but margarine to put in them, cans of vegetables with no protein to go with them. i got through that phase of my childhood eating canned cream of mushroom soup with noodles in it and “fajitas” that i would make out of frozen vegetables, refried beans, tortillas, and cheese (when we had those things). otherwise, i worked at taco bell, so i got food there, and i made sure to go to friends’ houses a lot. i think that’s also when i started eating out a lot, since i had a job, i had some money to spend. i bought groceries to round out what we needed at home, and also did what i could to stay out of my house as much as possible.

but here i am, 10 years later, and i am still stuck in the same eating habits. i confronted this squarely last week, when i realized that i hadn’t really eaten anything fresh in two weeks, my housemate and i hadn’t been grocery shopping in as long, and i was still reeling from a conversation about food politics with some friends over, dinner. conversations about food politics have always been touch-and-go for me. i inevitably leave them feeling judged because i’m not “choosing to prioritize” health food. the “choosing to prioritize” piece feels to me no different from the familiar mantra surrounding poverty – people choose to be poor. if folks just chose to work harder, put more effort in, etc., then there would be better jobs and more money. if i just chose to eat healthy, everything would be better (for the earth, for my body, for organic farmers, etc.)

the thing is, if i learned anything from my 5 years as a vegetarian in high school and college, i learned that it is not that simple. being vegetarian was stressful for my relationship with my family. all of the sudden i had these dietary requirements that were *absolutely* classed. my family, we buy what’s on sale (this is a different, though similarly economically located, family then the one that i grew up in: this is my dad and step-mom and her three kids, plus my sister. i didn’t live with them, but they’re the people that i continue to build and struggle with re: family and class). cheap and healthy, often on-the-go, though there are weekly family dinners (whenever they can be managed). my eating didn’t make sense to them. there was never really anything around that felt good to eat, and it definetly feed into the seemingly apparent class division i was making between them and me. it didnt’ feel good. i didn’t feel healthy. and i couldn’t really afford to be vegetarian, either. between being in school full time, working three jobs, and church work i was doing, i couldn’t come home and cook, so i was constantly eating ready-made vegetarian meals, which are astronomically expensive.

so, inevitably in these conversations, i reach a place where people tell me that it’s just about what you choose to value, and i have to wonder, how much is it really about that? i mean, i theoretically value eating well. it’s only at this point in my life that i really have the leisure time and extra money to do so. and that’s going to do the same thing to class dynamics in my relationship with my family, as far as i can tell. this will be something that will never be easy or clear for me, and it will never just be about what i value: it will always feel to me like i’m betraying my family, and conversations about food in which people can’t imagine all the possible class implications break my heart.