Sunny, One So True, I Love You

Sunny Side Up! Sometimes you just have to fry your eggs in the morning. The thought of an omelet, or timing the poached eggs or even chopping all the additions for a fun scramble is too much work. Cracking it on the side of the pan, hearing the immediate sizzle and you have your sausage going, the toast is popping up and you've already poured the juice.... The taste of a fried egg is very uniquely satisfying at times like these.

I Hear a Symphony

A big head of Savoy cabbage, turkey sausage and potatoes. Could fresh cabbage replace real Sour Kraut in this awesome threesome?

The answer is yes! In some ways, even better to have the flavor of the sweet braised cabbage mix with the sausage. To give it a little twang, what I did was to drain the potatoes then added some splashes of rice wine vinegar and lots of cracked pepper. After browning up the sausage and braising the cabbage, I put them all together in a hot pan with a bit of chicken stock. Let that heat through and meld for about 5 minutes.

Very easy with just three ingredients but the taste was like an orchestra of flavors.

It Only Hurts Me When I Cry

Nothing has changed here much except the view. The add-on to the building next door has officially blocked my warm Saturday morning sun and views of the Brooklyn skyline. And the building continues to rise. It seems almost symbolic. When do things start getting better and nicer instead of getting harder and worse? Am I just being a whiny little twit?

Probably. Maybe. I don't know. I mean me and P are relatively good, no major health issues. We both have jobs. We love Brooklyn 'cept when we hate it. We love our apartment. We ride our bikes to work. We enjoy our friendship and live like we're 20 when we're really almost 50. So what do I want? But its like that string theory and parallel universe type thing. In that same world but on another dimension good shit like my sunny views are being bricked over everyday. My hours are being cut at my suck-ass job. P hates his job. My mom broke her hip again and there is swirl of anxiety with all of that. The same cart of groceries is like $30 more all of a sudden. Our rent went up again. You can't even get away from the news even when you're trying not to watch it. You still get the images of millions of people out of work, homelessness on the rise, whole towns being bankrupt. I've given up on Tiger Woods ever winning a tournament and making us all feel like winners again. The conservative a-holes are the ones winning. The weather is going apeshit crazy everywhere. Breakfast was good though.

..You Can't Always Get What You Want

I know I'll get it together again but this was not my best week. I was wandering around like Mr Magoo. My eyes couldn't focus nor could my brain. Life was fuzzy and exhausting. Everything seemed just too much to bare. I rode in to work like Job, feeling like I was carrying all the burdens of the world in my backpack.



Food was an afterthought. Nothing sounded good. Nothing was good.

Last night I put in a small amount of effort and pre-seasoned and baked a nice big pork chop for P and wokked up some onions and yellow squash. For me, I wanted my stand-by spaghetti and meat sauce to lick my life wounds but I didn't have the right stuff. So I had to settle for creamy cheesy scrambled eggs with turkey sausage, onions and yellow squash to wrap in warm tortillas.

It wasn't the medicine I needed but it did the job and sometimes that's all you can truly expect from your dinner. I got those eggs just right though.

Cream Dream

I had no game plan at the PathMark this week. I went in hoping to find inspiration in the fresh seasonal produce. All the vegetables were wilted and on their last leg. Maybe last week's storm prevented the trucks from delivering? Regardless, I ended up with mixed bags of things on sale with no clear idea of how they'd go together. But that can be good. Sometimes I come up with a new dish when I have to be creative.

Then this morning on my ride to work while the icy sleet was pelting me in the face I realized I forgot to thaw out the chicken thighs. Tragic. What a rookie move. So I came up with a quick one pot supper tonight using arugula pesto. P doesn't really do pasta, so I have to disguise it somewhat. And the pasta vegetable ratio has to be skewed.




I wanted everything to be green because all you see outside now is dirty snow, white skies and black puff jackets. I found baby asparagus at the fifteen dollar store so I chopped those up and mixed them with peas and made the arugula pesto using walnuts, thyme, parsley and chicken stock. I had some turkey sausage that I chopped into small cubes and fried up with the onions and garlic to get a little crisp, then mixed that with some bow-tie pasta. I added a 1/4 cup of non-fat ricotta while the pasta was hot and then the veggies and pesto. Kind of a little cream dream.




The bright green color is refreshing and the ricotta gives it just enough smoothness to make up for all the lost olive oil, although I did use some. It tastes like a rich cream sauce but its not at all. The asparagus still has some bite and the peas just melt with the sauce while the thyme gives it fresh flavor. I'm stuffed after a small bowl.