Mealies

Using the food I consume to illuminate what it says about my life and perhaps, by extension, what it may say about yours.

[mealies-blog]

Avant Garde Eggs?

This one comes to your eyes through the passages of time. From the room marked 6/15.

Sunday. Breakfast is the healthy, feel good deliciousness. It seems to me that a lot of the foods I concoct fit squarely into my palate, but have traditionally veered left when it comes to crowd appeal. Salsa on everything may be accepted, but not condoned. Poached eggs on salad are unorthodox, but also hella fine. 

I find that it's these types of breakfasts - healthy and fresh but not necessarily fruity, that are coming into fashion right now, albeit with names more alluring than 'egg salad but not, like, eggy egg-salad, just egg and salad, like separate but together, you know?' The names we find on menus are more commonly along the lines of 'cultured yogurt and mixed produce from meadows with a sparrow's egg next to heat filled cool gazpacho'. I love them for their originality, not for their obfuscation. 

Today, I woke up knowing I wanted yogurt and warmth. Feeling like I wanted bananas as well, I veered initially towards a go-to of myself and several other million people in the contiguous breakfasting states: bananas and yogurt with cereal and peanut butter.  Yet before I had time to reach for the fruit basket, my brain kicked in and told me to use a little forethought- often something of a rarity when I  make dietary decisions. 

I knew I'd be having pizza for dinner with family friends and that my mid-day snack would more likely involve brownies or beer than anything resembling healthy. With that in mind I replanned...then stepped comfortably to option B, my favorite breakfast. 

Here's where it comes.

Let's call it the warm salad. I recently ate a variation of it in a Seattle restaurant and so feel validated in writing about it here. That is to say, at least one of you may like it. Make no mistake, it is a little...heterodox, we'll say.

Hear me out. 

Take a few handful of blueberries and throw them into a medium cast iron (or whatever you have you, just give it a touch of butter if it's not lubed up, ok?) set to medium heat. Then, add in half a thinly sliced zucchini and perhaps a clove of garlic. Shake the pan every minute or so and roughly tear up about two cups of kale, spinach, chard- one, two, or all- as well as about 2 tablespoons of fresh sage. Pop the sage into the pan and two minutes later about a 1/2 a cup of European Yogurt- that is, a yogurt slightly thinner in consistency than conventional yogurt. If you have a harissa or chipotle (or salsa!) and the desire, add a small amount. Two minutes later, add the greens, turn off the heat and cover for a sec.

Finally, pop it into one or two bowls and top with salt, pepper, a half a cup of wheaties or equivalent bran cereal, and a squeeze of lemon.

Place next to a cup of coffee and enjoy. 

Thoughts? To me, a recipe like this, a concoction if you will, conforms to no specific palate, bridging the gap between sweet, savory, tart and fresh that we often find ourselves having to choose  between each time we near a meal. There are times when falling wholly within one category is perfect- with a macaroon perhaps or a cup of tea, but more often than not, our taste buds ache for a melange of flavors. More often than not, dishes are improved by it, becoming more complex.  Turkey and cranberry sauce, sazeracs with orange and absinthe,  pickles on barbecue. 

The question then lies in how adventurous one is prepared to get when mixing and how far one can go without punching through to absurd. Is there a line and if so where and why? To compare it to modern art, where does the fashionable, Avante Garde end and the  art and the pile of bricks in a corner too far begin?

[mealies-blog]

Snacks for sneaks 11/10

What to do in a dead end job where the benefits are minimal, the pay below that and the 

My pay check was due to me a week ago but hasn't pitched up, I'm stuck at the shop after work for a clinic (for which I won't get paid) and know that every day for the rest of the week I will similarly be spending my evenings at the shop- learning to sell things to people.  

There are things I can do and am doing but even with busy hands, my idle mind wanders into dark surroundings. How long can I make two bean last if I decide to jump ship? What happens if I never leave this pit of retail? How can I if I spend all my time outside of work still at work?

To wash these feelings away, I excuse myself for a ritual I enjoy several times a week. Walking to whole foods and enjoying the day for a bit, finding something cheap to cheer me.

Today, it's milk for coffee and swedish fish. yum. A little walk isn't all I need to make me happy but the sugar rush I get from the destination and the caffeind boost I get after doesn't hurt. 

Plus, on the walk back I found a Mariner's hat. lucky me!

[mealies-blog]

08/07 Dinner

Becuase I'm an adult, I can do whatever I want. Today, I maybe went on a sort of precurser date with someone in Columbia City (who's to say what is was?). We shared a papusa at the farmer's market and by the time I got home I thought, oh, that was kind of dinner enough, I'll just polish it off with an evening beer.

And then my housemate got out the icecream. So it was icecream. and beer. and more icecream. and beer. and then more icecream. 

As I said, I'm an adult. We all do this shit. 

[mealies-blog]

7/27 Ass-end of the day schmance pick-me-up.

Being too lazy for bus schedules and too cheap for a car, my bike takes me just about everywhere in the city. On the other hand, spending so much time in the saddle is obviously a little fatiguing- not only because my usual ride is an oft maltreated, early 90's mountain bike nicknamed 'Hellbent',  but also because I live in a valley.

I suppose its christian name is Madison Valley, but I like to call it ‘the pit’; it’s a bit more fitting, I feel. When I leave my house- for groceries, beer, to make money, I climb out of the pit. When I come home, I slide back in. It usually happens that I climb out and slip down into the pit several times a day (innuendo unintentional).

Yesterday, for example, I rode home after work had a brief respite then made my way to visit a friend a few miles away. Together we traversed a few more miles to get to a party and, having fested, I held no horses in making the late night trek back home to bedland. The day prior, I rode my nice bike to work and thus really had  no other choice but to spend an extra hour on the way home exploring  the evening air and the swiftness of something that works well.

Thus it happened that  today, I was spent. The shop was busy and  we closed late, leaving only a 30 minute window by the time I arrived down the last hill home before I would have to once again slog out of the ninth circle of hell to reach somewhere in the upper echelons. With no Virgil, I needed a serious pick-me-up, cool-me-down.

So, expresso maker goes on the burner. When it’s bubbling, off it goes and a milk foamer takes its place. Once combined, they make a fine enough yet thousand degree too warm macchiato. Which means I have to get serious….seriously fancy that is. I deconstruct the little gem with vast cinderblocks of ice, one after another after another. The result is unlike a macchiato, unlike an iced americano or latte. It is its own phase- like ice is its own phase separate from water. Foam peaks still linger and expresso still touches the tongue with its tang. The drink is called an icy-hot and I felt very accomplished making it.  

Which isn’t to say it was the greatest choice before a 45 minute ride up to a distant part of town. If I had paired it with a peanut butter sandwich or a banana and some sort of protein bar, maybe it would have been great. As it was I spent all of my 30 minutes home on my one little fancy thing so that by the time I was riding out I was alert, yes, picked up, yes, but also slightly of tummy ache and more than slightly of the shakes.

The house I visited? Had a pool table, a foosball table, a den made almost all of glass and way too many carpeted basement rooms with imperfect natural light. Win some, lose some, ride a ton in doing so. 

[mealies-blog]

second dinner, 07/12

Tonight, I went out dancing. First, I went out for a drink. and then I went out dancing. with my housemates. In seattle. Imagine what a night out in NYC would be like at a queer club, but everyone knows each other. except me. I'm new enough. and not queer enough. but you get the picture. dancing, drinking, talking and schmoozing. and after a housemate and I take down the dance floor on the waning side of two, we do the only thing there is left to do...eat p-i-z-z-a.

which we do. ok, ny, there are late night pizza places here too, thank you. So drea and I get a little. the type of hangover cure before it even comes. and the pizza place closes right after we secure ours so we sit on the curb to eat. Mine slice is vegetarian because well, where does the meat come from? I don't know, and neither do you, most likely. 

but besides the point. the point on food: pizza by the slice eaten on an emptying curb after a sweaty club equals just the ticket. while we're eating, two homeless fellas materialize beside us and strike up conversation.  Drea chats to the one man and I to the other. It is especially strange to think back on now, as I am in my bed, and he is still on the streets. His name was Herschel. From a family of note, he said. He's good at numbers, didn't want anything to do with farestart (a nonprofit in the area I brought up, bumblingly), and a self proclaimed drunk. went to high school and part of collge. nice guy. trashed. in the pits part of life. a human. that's what I couldn't stop thinking. He's just another human. He wants someone to listen and talk to.

I thank Drea for her conversation with the other man as it gave me the boost to keep talking when I might otherwise have slowly schirked Herschel off. I feel there is a tendency for us in positions of relative wealth (and I do mean 'relative' - I am by no means making an income of note) to do this, to slowly detach the homeless from their own personhoods, relegating them instead to just other figures on the streets, much as we forget that within the cars we sometimes ferociously honk and curse at there are humans much like ourselves.

It's convenient to seperate the humanity out of other people, no matter the income bracket. After all, it is then easier for us to focus on our own M.Os, to feel no qualms when taking the last bagel from the deli, to command our own sections of the sidewalk. 

I'd like to thank Herschel as well for bringing me back from 'planet ego' for a while and reminding me not only that every homeless person is still a fellow human being but also that every other non-homeless person is a human being, as well. 

Finally, I'd like to thank the food.

Who knew that late night pizza could be so philosophical?

[mealies-blog]

Breakfast, 6/12

Scones. On the way to work I stop by one of Seattle's many "elite" grocery stores- you know, the type that's better than whole foods because it's not whole foods but offers the same stuff at the same chic price? I click around for a few minutes on my cycling shoes and weigh my options for breakfast. As this store is a self respecting community consumer hub, its bakery case offers an impressive and  almost dizzying array of treats.  

What will it be? Decisiveness has never been a strong suit for me, but this morning I can begin to at least narrow my options by cutting out the frou-frouiest of the choices. Pain-au-chocolate, though delicious, is a breakfast for the leisure class and I have a day of work ahead. Muffins, though aesthetically pleasing with pillowing tops billowing over their little jackets, are really but a foreshadowing of how one feels after eating one.  Scones it is. 

Now it comes to choosing between sweet and savory.  

Sweet means chocolate. It always means chocolate. It never could mean anything but.  I want chocolate. But I also want savory, something salty and morish. But that would cut out the quick satisfactions that comes with chocolate. Yet, savory would mean more sustaining. On the other hand, sweet would...I drift into crisis decisive inability. Life and death decisions would be no

In the end I streamline the decision making process by saying screw it. I cave-in and get two scones, one of each. For a wallet that knows it will stretch itself again when the evening comes, this is not the ideal solution and I rectify my decision by assuming I've built enough Karma to get away with only counting one cone on the till. I then do the same with the coffee I get, rationalizing that the apple I buy with it costs way over a dollar- more than I really should be expected to pay for a package of fiber and sugar. And then, I go to work. 

This is  what happens when there is no coffee in the house, nor bananas, nor cottage cheese, nor apples. I get irrational- quick to make decisions and even quicker to lose my ethics. If it happens to me, surely I am not alone.So keep your fridges stocked, folks. 

(On the plus side, I now have a scone for tomorrow) 

That said, we still don't have coffee. 

[mealies-blog]

Drink, 5/25

Officially the second day into my no drinking, no going out sebatical. Let's get it straight that I meant to not drink and not go out in any form for about a week- not a sebatical whereby I took up both after a long period of abstinence and solitude. As if. 

Therefore, it may be pretty funny that earlier this evening I found myself not only hopping into the car with three of my housemates but also doing so with the direct understanding that we were on our way to a place called Chuck's, where the slogan is something along the lines of 'land of a thousand beers' or whatever. 

Long lived my sebatical may not have been, but it was well intentioned. Even if I ended up only taking one day off drinking, it was and is a good practice in taking a break. Trying something different. I've been so used to having a drink almost every night for at least a year that's it was hard to imagine what it would be like to go without one - unless of course that night without one was presupposed by a pretty heavy evening with them (if you know what I mean). It's not that having a drink every night is necessarily a bad or dangerous thing. It's just that's it's not something I'd like to be a fixed part of my life. 

I'm not just talking with regards to the drink, either; I feel similarly about everything I eat and really, everything I do. Why should anything that's non-essential become essential? For example, I like to drink coffee pretty much every day, Some might even say (myself included in those 'some') that if allowed to stay in a wakened state for more than a few hours without a minimum of a cup ingested, I can become a little hostile to most- maybe all, carbon life forms. But I don't want to have to rely on black sludge tempered with white sludge to turn from dangerous Mr. Hyde back to dapper Dr. Jekyll. 

Neither do I want to have to need air conditioning to survive, nor to require internet and microwaves in order to function day-to-day. 

That's part of the reason I tried the sebatical....and why I will try it again. Being high maintenance sucks even if it is with low maintenance things. When it comes down to it, we don't actually need very much,  just a couple thousand calories, a leaf to shut out the rain or snow and maybe a second one to make us decent when in public. No obligatory macchiato nor evening beer in the life description.

 I'm obviously still working on this (but aren't we all).

The things we like, we like for a reason,but knowing that they aren't the be-all and end-all... who knows, it might actually make them taste better. And that's worth taking seatical over. 

[mealies-blog]

Breakfast, May 5th.

So, I'm trying a remedy I usually avoid. Some grease, sumptuously disguised in layers of a ham, egg and cheese strada from Corina, a little bakery in Tacoma, WA. This is the stuff that hangovers were made for. I’m halfway through it but already poised to run for president of the strada fan club. In mine, the layers mimic fairly well that of the strata of life yesterday. And I thank god for that now.

It began, basic- fluffed eggs and nothing special.. My brother barraged a wake up at 7am and I thrashed into life in a manner akin, I imagine, to how one would wake if he suddenly felt a tarantula on his face or a snake engulfing their her legs. Flailing gracelessly.  

From that start, I moved efficiently enough as did my partners, brother and Sister in Law, here on in known as SIL. We were even out the door only 15 minutes behind scheduled take-off. Skip past wheel trouble and getting pulled over by a cop whose only intention was a little chat about the day and we arrived in a place called Vantage. It was east of the cascades and right where we wanted to be for a day of climbing.

For me, climbing has always been something I’ve “done”- even if in this case, I haven’t actually practiced it for nearly two years. Yesterday was rebirth. It was awesome. Unlike certain skills (cooking for example or paying one’s taxes) which remain tuned regardless of time, my climbing skills have grown dusty. That said, even the fun of falling around on easy stuff made me eager for the scraping and scrambling road ahead to get back into shape.

And I was also pumped that all parties involved were on board. SAL is learning to climb and it was nice to be able to give her support on the wall. Bro is a strong climber even in the worst of times, but not one who’s too much into being cheered on. Some would say, he’s even a little anti cheery, like all the other strongest, strongest brothers I know- which is only a few. With SIL, finally I could practice the rallying I love to do. What can I say; I’m a little bit of a cheerleader?

I guess I would call the morning the ham layer: comforting, full of strength and protein, too good to last the whole strata through.

The fight happened later and needn’t be detailed. It’s the goopey cheezy layer of the strata where lots of tears, a little movie quality yelling of emotions and ‘I love yous’ through shut doors and runny noses run thickly and can be thinned with only one thing: a goodly flow of post-traumatic alcohol consumption. Pretty messy stuff.

That makes this morning the spongy, cheese and bacon crusted top. My body feels porous and my brain a little burnt. Perhaps solidified, though into metal and not cheese.

You know, there’s something about being hung-over that I kind of like. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out to start getting headaches just for the anti-rush it gives me. Neither am I planning to go full time into midnight binging on brownies and roast chicken…an event which usually presupposes the hangover.

It’s just that the clarity and pragmatism that come by operating despite your body’s intentions and attempts otherwise- it’s a pretty nice feeling. When hung-over, I feel a little like one of my idols; those straight-talking, no-nonsense, gods of personality. Like I’m Anthony Bourdain or any of the characters on Law and Order, especially if we’re talking Ice-T or that guy with the larger ears.

The way that food feels when hungover is also a little different. When else is the prescribed dosage for an ailment two cups of coffee and a mainline of cholesterol? Not for the flu, that’s for damn sure. Eating during a hangover is like cuddling into a clean, cozy bed after a hot shower-no towel, no clothes, just damp, warm skin. It’s the melted cheese feeling that goes down so well, better than in any other situation. And the bacon which cures like a fat streaked bandaid.

Hangover breakfasts like this are guilt free and necessary. But it takes some pretty dark magic to get to them. Beware. 

[mealies-blog]

Want to know what this is?

A few weeks ago, I finished reading a book by Molly Wizenberg: "A homemade life." If you're a middle aged woman in  a book club, you've probably heard of it. On the other hand, perhaps, if you listen to the podcast 'Spilled Milk', you also may have heard of it. The show is produced by Molly and Matthew Amster Burton, a man I was certain worked at the same summer camp as me until I remet David and was slightly crestfallen to hear that he had never had a podcast set in Seattle, nor was he really a huge food enthusiast. Bummer. that though he was a writer, he lived in DC, not Seattle and he had never gone by the stage name, Matthew Amster-Burton. Bummer. 

Back to the point. I read a book you may have heard of and I loved it. Midway through, I got one of those genius ideas that sticks in the mind pretty vehemently for about three hours before getting blithely swept out the way to make room for the next big thought- probably about picking up beer on the way home or looking something up on the internet. But this thought was pretty steadfast. It would crawl into the corner of my mind at times to make way for shopping lists or phone calls to make, but it never left the building completely. And now, before it has any more chances to be forgotten, we're going to realize it. 

Now. A blog. What's new? A foood blog. What's new?

This is a blog like a thousand other food blogs, but just a hint off. It's a food-centric blog, but also journal-centric blog. At the core, it's an experiment.

Let me give you a rundown:

My plan with Mealies is to write a journal based around the meals I eat. I want to use the food I consume to illuminate what it says about my life and perhaps, by extension, what it may say about yours. It's not a dieter's manual, a paleo or raw or southern food, etc manifesto, nor is it an instruction manual.  Rather, I want to use my meals as a basis from which to conjur ideas and significance. For example, a leisurely lunch taken at a table for two is much different from one inhaled mouth-from-hand on the way out the door. A lettuce wrap with cheese may mean I'm feeling classy or just out of bread.

No matter the circumstances or provenance of it, food is my raison d'etre.  The concept of food occupies my thoughts more than any other. For your enjoyment and my own, I want to talk about the various ways that this concept is realized in real life, not made up home-maker life.

I warn you: it won't always be pretty. 

It'll make more sense as it goes. 

Who knows, maybe we'll even learn something?