Food

Salmon, illustrated

Jul 24, 2012 9:35 pm•By: •What say you?

A gourmet kitchen is not a prerequisite to eating well.  Conversely, an SLK* is not a consignment to endless nights of instant ramen.  I know people with sixty-thousand-dollar kitchens whose idea of making dinner consists of heating frozen chicken fingers and microwaving easy mac; then there are people like the Russian lover and I who make everything from scratch in a two-foot square kitchen.  Really, cooking is nothing more than the art of making do, but in the recent and soon to be bygone era of affluence, cooking became another means of measuring yourself against the Jones’s.  Have dinner parties! Be fabulous!  But only when someone is looking.  Otherwise, cold cereal and take-out will suffice.

A kitchen shouldn’t be a credential, and it shouldn’t be an excuse. Eat well for yourself, not for an audience. Although when eating well, an audience sometimes appears anyway.  Especially if your idea of eating well involves a large fresh wild-caught salmon:

*Shitty little kitchen

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That’s right. I’m posting about my cats again. ‘Sup.

Mar 13, 2012 7:33 pm•By: •2 Comments

The Russian lover is filleting a 12lb salmon in the other room. He probably should have fed the cats first. They’ve gathered around the kitchen table in reverent awe, but any minute now the scene is going to turn tawdry and pathetic. Like it’s the eighties and a bunch of suits and supermodels are crouched around a coffee table waiting for someone to cut the blow.

Unlike dogs, cats will totally front like they have dignity and self-respect, and they won’t drop the superiority act when making demands, either. It’s like having goth teenagers. They are bored and disinterested and hate you…until they want something. Then they are bored and disinterested and hate you, but willing to stalk you patiently until they get whatever it is they’re after.

The cats don’t really like salmon that much, actually; they more so like to act like they really like salmon. This is because we will occasionally share it, and like any good freeloaders they know that what they want is simply whatever someone else has. Once they’ve established that what we have isn’t all that special, they move on to more aggressive forms of harassment, having determined that we are holding out on them. This is where they go from behaving like relatively harmless goth teenagers to acting like strung-out burglars.

They do eventually give up and slouch back to their corners. The rare exception is when Matilda has ascertained that we are eating bacon. She will ascertain this because I am a guilt-ridden indulgent mother who slips her bacon every chance I get. It turned out that bacon was the secret to socializing Matilda, a shelter cat who wouldn’t let me approach her for almost seven years. When bacon is afoot, Matilda will beg at my heels and crawl into my lap and generally behave like an affectionate whore. No, wait. That’s what I do when the Russian lover makes me bacon.

Anyway. Salmon sashimi awaits me, provided we can prevail against the opportunistic predators eying our plates.

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Food 2.0

Oct 14, 2011 5:09 pm•By: •What say you?

I just had a nice little snack of couscous with flax seeds and agave nectar. That sentence makes me want to punch myself in the face for being such a hippie douche, but I must admit that it was both tasty and satisfying without leaving me digestively impaired.

For much of my life I accepted that the act of eating was something that would leave me curled in a distressed ball of agony. As children, my brother and I dubbed these episodes “intestine squeezes,” because it felt as if our entrails were tying themselves in knots and having seizures. Today this would probably be diagnosed as IBS, but I have since realized what it was (and probably, what most IBS actually is) — eating garbage will trash your body. Growing up we were not allowed to have much sugar, but almost everything we ate was processed. We also went out to eat a lot, and not to any of these all-natural locally-sourced totally-organic jerk-off restaurants (which, despite their overkill on self-congratulation for serving real food, must actually be congratulated on serving real food). There was a summer where I ate grilled cheese and french fries from a diner for lunch almost every day. I never got fat, but the food had its revenge by leaving me doubled over for hours on end.

The decade after that is mostly a blur of cafeteria food and prepared food eaten out of my car between school and work or work and school. By the time I left college and had a 9-to-5, I was subsisting on frozen burritos and sour cream. When I met the Russian lover, I warned him that I almost always had painful cramps after eating and I probably had some condition. He brushed it off, and several weeks after he had been cooking for me and taking me to restaurants that served fresh, quality food, I realized that it had been ages since I’d spent hours in fetal position after a meal.

Of course. Duh. Processed food is the devil, and high fructose corn syrup is his bride. But how many of us really know that? And how many of us make choices that take this into account? Among those of us who cut our hair and don’t live in painted vans, I mean. Even though I “knew” the food I was eating was bad for me, I didn’t know what else to eat. It’s like dating an abusive guy that you just can’t leave, because he’s too familiar and the alternative is what? Even a brief stint working at Whole Foods didn’t change my fundamental approach to eating. That only came when I had the way I ate fundamentally changed for me, and I could notice the changes that made for my body.

The couscous is a new venture; when it comes to starches and grains, we’ve been white rice and potato people, with the occasional pasta mixed in. That sounds pretty healthy until you listen to the health nazis and they tell you that those are the worst of the good things you can eat. So now I’m on a mission to try all the various grains and such that the hippie nazi health douches recommend: quinoa, bulgur wheat, brown rice, wild rice, buckwheat, etc. The couscous is already a winner with me; it tastes good, it’s practically easier to make than cold cereal, and there is something about the texture that’s fascinating.

This is where the Paleo diet people come in and writhe around moaning that grain is the root of all evil and we should be eating like cavemen. They may possibly have a point from an evolutionary biology perspective, although I still feel like the whole fad is the creation of some guy who had a bad breakup with a vegan. The Paleo diet, if you didn’t know, is basically the inversion of the vegan diet (which by now we are all intimately versed in because those killjoys will just never shut up about what they can and cannot eat.) Paleos and vegans will agree that fruit and vegetables are awesome, and dairy is bad. But that’s the extent of their commonalities; Paleos shun any food borne out of the agricultural development of our species (grain, potatoes, legumes). Their ultimate food fantasy is the drive-thru from the opening sequence of The Flintstones.

Well, those hardcore Paleo people may all have tiny asses and exemplary bowel movements, but I think a little bit of flab and some occasional constipation is a small price to pay for a life that includes real pizza.

If you ordered a Paleo pizza, you know what you’d get? A tomato.

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