When it’s a thundery April night and one is suffering the effects of over-indulgence, be it chemical or emotional, there’s only one way to woman up and fly right. (And I dare you to listen to this song, sober or otherwise, and not end up feeling like you’ve overdone it)
So, now that you’re suffused in the light glow of melancholy, here’s what to do: eat a bowl of virtue. Specifically, eat a huge bowl of kale. “But closet-dweller!” I can hear you say, your voice small and muffled by ions and tubes and pictures of cats (that’s what the internet is made of, right?)
“I thought you were one of us! The great unwashed and unrighteous legions of lazy vegetarians who eat kale with a sense of dull, anhedonic, puritan purpose, much like a tethered cow sullenly chewing its cud!”
And I say to you, fear not. For I have tried kale anew. I have doused it in warm olive oil and balsamic and garlic. And lo, it is good. It also tastes extra tasty cause I got the idea from a farmer at the farmer’s market, where I went and handed over money for vegetables and did not even cry, not even once, not even alone in the parking lot.
So, do what I did, and chop all this stuff that’s in the conveniently placed photograph up (not the kale, wash that and put it in a bowl. And really wash it if you give the farmer’s market your custom, or you could inadvertently eat some bugs you’ve just killed in hot oil and have to turn your back on your whole way of life). Put it all in a pan except the kale, with lots of oil, more than is appropriate. Put salt and pepper in there, and a splash or two of balsamic. Then, when everything is soft and fragrant and smelling of righteousness and vitamins, pour it over the raw kale, and let it sit while you check your email or pick the lint out of your bellybutton (or both, who am I to limit you?) Then eat that beautiful big bowl of greens, and you’ll feel a little better.
Righteous Ingredients
Bowl of Virtue
And if you don’t, heat up a big bowl of pasta and cheese and go to town. I won’t tell.
I have a few controversial opinions, and this is one: I like my egg sandwiches like I like my men: Cheese, Stress, and Accessory free.
This is awesome.
My basic philosophy behind the egg sandwich is as follows: Of course you can dress it up. Put cheese on there, avocado, tomato, bacon if you can stand the guilt, fancy lettuce, mushrooms. Go all Richard Gere dressing up Julia Roberts on that sandwich. It’s going to be delicious. But it’s not what I think of when I think about egg sandwiches. (Insert your own “what we talk about when we talk about blank” Raymond Carver bullshit here. Seriously when are people going to stop doing that? Am I the only one who notices this?)
This is bullshit.
But in the same way that I find Julia Roberts more fun and appealing as a prostitute than as a rich prostitute, an egg sandwich can be even tastier when left alone. An egg sandwich is about having no money and no patience and no creativity. You can make one when you wake up in the afternoon starving and the fridge is almost empty. Or right before you go to a party where you’re scared there won’t be any food you want to eat. Or when you come home drunk from a party and need to put food in your stomach immediately and are too poor for the all-night diner and too dignified to just eat uncooked bread. If you have friends and do things like go to parties and don’t live in a closet in small-town New York, that is. The upside of which is I can eat an egg sandwich literally any time, because I am always home.
The Julia-on-Sunset egg sandwich is the opposite of fancy, the opposite of carefully arranged gruyere and goat cheese and extraneous vegetables getting between me and hot egg yolk that has just sizzled in butter being in my mouth. Save the drama for your mama, put a fried egg on a hot piece of bread, salt and pepper, take a moment to gaze in wonder at the beautiful golden drippiness, and then shovel it into your mouth. And then you should probably eat another one, too. Here is a picture of what I mean. It is not a good picture, because I don’t have a nice phone or steady hands.
With all this said, if you want to put more shit on there, I’m certainly not going to stop you. This is America. You can put whatever you want on your sandwich. If you can put an undead baby bird on it, then you can put some cheese on it too, let’s be real.
Tomorrow I brave the small-talk wasteland of the farmer’s market. (Sample dialogue: Nice Farmer: “Hi!” Pause as he or she tries to place where they know me from, namely me hovering behind my roommates while they “normally interact” every weekend. “Where are the non-closet-dwellers?” Me: “Oh! (Exclamation because I am relieved I know the right answer) They’re in England…” Pause as I try to remember their name, almost say it, then as I am saying it I decide that’s not the right name, which results in a winded snort-giggle. NF: “That’s amazing! What are they doing there?” Me: “Oh, like, stuff. Your basic England stuff.” Long pause while we smile at each other. Longer pause while I shove some potatoes onto their scale, drop some on the floor, and then crawl on the floor to retrieve them, escaping from this suburban hell-scape only after becoming so verklempt I forget how to count money and the farmer finally takes what they need out of my hand, giving me a pitying head shake, as if to say, “Now I understand why your role is to hold the bags and smile into the middle distance”)
Oh well. For this, and many situations, I listen to this song. If you’re going to have cheeseless opinions about breakfast foods, if you’re going to live in a closet, if you’re going to drop the entire bag of beer bottles you’re bringing to the grocery store so that they roll all over the lawn and street, glinting in the sun and clinking merrily to broadcast your alcohol consumption to the neighborhood, if you’re going to be dumb, in other words, you gotta be tough.
A door creaks open in a central New York Apartment on a blustery April day. A trembling, blinking creature emerges from the dark recesses within, moving slowly into the harsh afternoon light, a la The Beast of Disney fame. Who is this pale and disheveled form, you ask, wearing a bewitching mix of leggings and marinara-stained t-shirt with mismatched socks, inquiring of the cat as to the time?
It is I, the closet-dweller. I, who revels in the dark embrace of the closet by day and gazes, hypnotized, at glowing screens by night. I, who wrangles toddlers and recycles all those beer bottles whose labels I have not torn off in a frenzy of unused energy. I, who provides almost no monetary but much comedic support to my steadfast and lovely roommates. And where, you might ask, are these providers of vegetable knowledge, givers of gentle prodding into the warmth of the kitchen? Whither, they not of the closet?
My fellow denizens of small-town America have fled to England, leaving me to face alone the yawning cupboards empty of onions and greens and the anxiety-producing prospect of a solo farmer’s market. But I will not quaver! For they have also left me to indulge pleasant pastimes: Washing the dishes in one’s underwear whilst belting hits of the lovesick-country variety. Feeling no compunction about eating ice cream for breakfast. Talking to the cat freely in his natural tongue.
So I will press on, knowing as I do the shadowy contours of the apartment, the insomniac secrets of its culinary abundance. Join me, on this journey of discovery and peril, of fear and opportunity, as I leave the closet and prepare to fend for myself.
Tonight’s adventure involves pasta, mushrooms, butter, three-buck chuck, and the musical stylings of Ms. Dolly Parton. Let’s begin:
You might want to start by tying a red ribbon around your ponytail and clearing away some dishes, while listening to this song.
Ponder the contents of your fridge while you do so, and the big questions, such as, why exactly is food at the bottom of the drain so much less appealing than food on a plate? What does the mime in Dolly’s video symbolize? Where can I find those suspenders she’s wearing?
Congratulations. You have earned your first glass of wine. This can be consumed while cutting up some garlic and if you’re me, your second-to-last shallot. Chopping can be soothing but also boring, so you should listen to this awesome song. I give you my full permission to dance around singing the chorus into a wooden spoon, as I know you want to. Go on. If you can’t be undignified and cliche in front of your cat, you’re depriving an animal of the chance to harshly judge your melodramatics, and what kind of responsible pet owner would do that? Think of the animals!
If twangy, confusing, and unrequited love is not your thing (and if not, why not?) this is also a good opportunity to call someone you love but who lingers on the phone, as one: you have wine, and two: you can say, “I would love to talk some more, but I have to put these shallots and garlic onto the stove in a frying pan with a shitload of butter and salt and pepper. Goodnight!” (See what I did there? Subtle recipe instructions!)
Now, on to the improvisation portion of the meal. While the shallots and garlic are making sweet love to all that butter, fill a pot with water and set out the pasta of your choice. (I find it satisfying to methodically rip off the top of the box, but to each her own.) Cut up a hefty portion of portobello mushrooms. Throw those in with the other stuff. Here is where my night got tricky. I decided to be bold and go for a creamy sauce even though I had no cream. You could also take this recipe in the direction of the tomato-y balsamic if you have access to such things. What I did is perhaps unconventional, but turned out, well, let’s be honest, pretty ok: tear up some cheddar cheese (white, extra sharp, just like yours truly, heyo) and pour in the heaviest liquid dairy you posses, but not sour cream or yogurt, obviously. You want to keep the liquid in proportion with how much you chopped and how much pasta you’re making. With that in mind: pour a little bit of the wine from your glass into the pan but much more into your mouth. I also put some vegetable stock in there, cause it was in the fridge, and my mushrooms were a little withered and I thought it would perk them up. And yes, I realize this recipe is just to put a little of all your dairy products over pasta and mushrooms and eat it, but sue me. I’ve been living in a closet for six months.
I know you’re as smart as you are pretty, so you’ve remembered to cook and drain your pasta during all the above innovative saucing. Mix all the stuff you’ve cooked together and put a bunch of stuff on it: salt, pepper, more cheese. And pour another glass of wine. You deserve it. And let me know how it turned out. For me, it was sort of weird, but I liked it. That’s what she said. Closet-dweller out!
I took a shitty picture with my phone. You can just see the cat and the beer bottles in the background.
These are the biscuits/dumplings which we put in the potato dill soup. The recipe first came from Veganomicon but I thinks it’s been changed a bit since I first made them. They are quick, easy, and very yummy. For a sweet biscuit you can add a little sugar and cinnamon instead of the savory spices.
3/4 cup milk
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup earth balance
healthy pinch of any of the following: parsley, thyme, and tarragon
Mix the milk and vinegar and set aside to sour
Mix all the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl
Add the butter in small bits and mix it in evenly with your hands
Add the milk and vinegar and mix just until combined. It’s okay if there are dry bits
Now, either plop balls of the dough into soup and bake in the oven (like in the previous post) or bake them at 425 for 15 minutes on lightly greased sheets.
Finely chop 5-6 small carrots. Ours are mostly yellow carrots-hence the color.
Cut one head of garlic into medium chunks.
Cook the shallot, carrots, and garlic in three tablespoons of butter until the shallots start to soften.
Meanwhile, chop 5-6 medium potatoes into small chunks.
Once the shallots are starting to soften, add the potatoes and stir until everything is coated in butter. Cook for 4-5 minutes.
Add 6 cups of veggie stock and a healthy smattering of dried parsley and thyme. Cook until the potatoes are soft.
Add 1 cup milk
and about three tablespoons fresh dill. We froze fresh dill last fall and it has been a life-saver-just wash, dry, and chop it, then pop the dill in a freezer bag and you are good to go.
Now you add the dumplings. We'll post this recipe later, but here's what you do now: make the dumpling/biscuits into balls about an inch in diameter and drop them into the soup so that none are touching. Sprinkle a little more dill on top.
Cover your soup pot and put the whole thing in the oven. Bake at 425 for 15-20 minutes.
You have awesome, delicious, potato dill soup with yummy dumplings. Eat with or without cheese.
This week, for the first time since moving to Upstate New York, the only allium we bought at market was garlic. Which is to say that we found no shallots, onions, scallions, or leeks. These last five shallots, left from the previous market, are the end of our onion and onion-like foods. My hope, of course, is that scallions will be in at the next market, but this does leave us with five shallots for two weeks of cooking and since we use shallots or onions in basically ever meal we cook, it could be a sad few weeks. Or month. This is the first time that I feel like we may be truly tested in our resolve to not buy non-local produce. I hope we’re up to the test, and I hope we can find delicious onion-free recipes.
Potato Famine 