I Need You to Need Me

Grilled Shrimp Spinach Salad with Avocado

Sometimes its so hot outside that your dinner needs to have cooled elements, like this giant spinach, tomato, avocado, mushroom, red onion and artichoke heart salad, dressed with a light vinaigrette. 

Giant Horseshoe crabs getting it on in the Gowanus

Lefty the cat, getting in the last fiddles with my keyboard before falling asleep mid try.

Our appetites in summer switch from wanting, I'd say needing, lighter foods, to craving fatty, salty items like pizza and cheese burgers.  The heat can do a number on logic.  I guess the key is to let the fresher food win out more often. 

Whatever Happened to all this Season's Losers of the Year?

P's Kielbasa Sandwich

P made these delicious kielbasa sandwiches on toasted rye bread with chips and watermelon.  I wasn't feeling great, another round of flu storms, as I've learned to call them.  A few days too many of waking up feeling like I have COVID again.  Major eye pain, body aches and stiffness, sore throat and general weakness. Then it stops, but another round of oddities happen the next day, like charlie horses in my legs and my voice goes out, chest pains, and shortness of breath.  I think they will find out these are reoccurring remnants of the Alpha COVID virus and the long-haul lasts much longer than anyone had anticipated. It doesn't matter, it happens but always goes away, which I can live with.  My coworker thinks I should be able to go on disability but our thinking is that you have to trick yourself into believing the virus can't still control you or that's exactly what it will keep doing. 

I Won't Hide It, I Won't Throw Your Love Away

P wanted a late night snack so he bought a couple of pepperoni slices from the newly revamped Lean Crust Pizza parlor downstairs.  Pssst, it's not as good but definitely good enough.  I had a genius idea to cut off the crusts and use them as dippers for hummus.  So good, like warm pita bread.  Then I cut the slices into little squares to share.  

For lunch having returned from the road trip and I'm sure excessive beer drinking he wanted to eat lighter, but I needed substantial grub, so I made a big pot of chicken sausage, potatoes, kale, Savoy cabbage, red onions, red apple and garlic.  A nice balsamic vinegar, pickle juice and pepper flakes really boosted the flavor pop of all the vegetables.  I did big bite size chunks in order to taste the nuances of each one.   There is something to remembering the food you ate that day due to a series of circumstances.  That's interesting to me and fun, to make a little story out of it.  I like reading them years later and thinking about it.

I used to have this plant in San Francisco that I kept alive by storing it's overgrown roots in a separate jar that my roommate called it's colostomy bag.  I had carried that plant from Fresno to San Francisco from apartment to apartment, broken relationships and it too had been on it's death bed at times.  My roommate had a green thumb and was bothered by it's odd look.  She couldn't understand why I felt compelled to keep it alive.  Sometimes that's what this blog feels like to me.  Maybe I should let it go and die somewhere in the internet universe but I can't.  All these meals are connected to life and stories.  I made this because that happened.  But everything I'm understanding right now proves that we should shed any ideas of who we think we are, our egoic connections.  So I can't decide if this is that or something different.   Am I holding onto the past by constructing this site as a monument to the idea of me or is it simply an innocent way of sharing dumb thoughts and food ideas out to the world? 

We're All Alright! We're All Alright!

When we used to have weekends off together and could ride out to Red Hook to watch the soccer games (sigh) on Saturdays, we loved to eat from the food carts.  We'd normally get a huarache, which are those giant oblong taco/burrito mutant dreams from Mexico. They are a meal in themselves but sometimes, we'd have room for Salvadorian pupusas as well.  They always served them with that amazing pickled cabbage, that I now see is called curtido.

Well today I just had to have that cabbage slaw or I'd just die.  And actually, I needed to top it with this particular red tomato sauce that they traditionally top the pupusas with. So I desperately searched the web for a recipe and made my own version to serve with my stewed chicken breast.

 I made the slaw first with thin sliced green cabbage, onions, jalapeno and carrots mixed with vinegar, s&p, Mexican oregano and a squeeze of lemon since limes are so darn expensive right now.

 The sauce did double duty.  I did a fresh raw sauce with canned tomatoes, real tomato, onion, peno, cilantro, garlic and cold water and salt.

 Blended that and served it over the sauerkraut and then cooked it for the chicken sauce.

I'm going on record to say no matter how much flavor I add to chicken breast meat, I never like it stewed because basically it doesn't absorb any flavors.  Real cooks probably know this but it has been a very slow learning curve with me.  I mean, you can usually marinate it and that works, but stewing...no.  This same sauce cooked with chicken legs and thighs would have been dreamy even skinless.

I would grade this effort a C+.  The Salvadorian Sauerkraut was refreshing and crunchy and the sauce was almost there.  The chicken was a perfectly fine partner.  The plus is for giving a shit enough to try something new during the week.  All homemade food unless it sucks or spoiled is good.