day 3: i dove into the abyss

First I should clarify that by “abyss” I mean “the space between the stove and the counter,” and by “dove into” I mean “cleaned.” *

I have been meaning to do this for years, but every time I’ve considered it my overwhelming fear of rotting food – my ex-boyfriend once chased me around our apartment with a molding jack-o-lantern, and I locked myself in the bathroom until he promised to take it to the dumpster – has forced me to stay away from the space into which I’ve seen egg shells, tofu, carrots, zucchini, etc. disappear as though entering the Bermuda Triangle.

I pull out the stove to discover this:

Though I have lived here for three years and am embarrassed to have contributed to this mess that appears equal parts furry and crusty, it isn’t all my fault; the abyss was already the grayish non-color of decaying organic matter when I moved in.

Close up:

Seriously, what the fuck is that? It looks like a mushroom, some croutons, and sadness.

After sweeping the (I get a little gaggy just typing this) chunks of food into the trash, I attack the space with bleach. I am horrified – and no, it’s not too strong of a word – to discover an ancient bag of mouse poison next to one of the “best friend” jelly bracelets I wore when I dressed as a Person of Wal-Mart for Halloween. After collecting myself and wondering what percentage of the filth constitutes mouse droppings, I wipe the floor and end up with this:

Not perfect, but much better.

*I know this isn’t exciting at all. But if I’m going to try something new EVERY DAY, they aren’t all going to go over like gangbusters.   

day 2: i wore four-inch heels

I am a low-maintenance kind of girl - I prefer comfy to fancy and cut-offs to dresses, so wearing heels for a day, especially four-inch heels, is completely out of the ordinary. In fact, the last time I did so may have been at my friend's wedding in 2007, when I preferred to walk barefoot around Union Station rather than endure another moment in those awful excuses for footwear.

I know other women (and some men) wear even higher heels on a daily basis at jobs where they have to stand for eight-plus hours, and it quite honestly confounds me; today I almost walked barefoot to the bathroom after only a few hours in heels, and most of that time I was sitting behind a desk.

Because when I wear heels I essentially feel as though I'm re-learning how to walk, I've written some limericks, my favorite poetic form from childhood.

There once was a girl from K-City

Who found four-inch heels quite tricky

"My shoes might be killers,"

she said with a shiver

And downstairs she stumbled too quickly.

When a tomboy decides to dress up

She thinks brushing her hair is the stuff

Until one more genteel

Presents her with heels

Though before she was quite tall enough.

She wears her high heels to the bar

Three drinks in, she doesn't get far

Caught on the rug

Her shoe gives a tug

She spills as though poured from a jar.

day 1: i met a pulitzer prize-winning author

Having spent nearly a decade trying (and largely failing) to write character-driven fiction, I was struck by Marilynne Robinson’s live interview at the Kansas City Public Library when she said that after finishing Housekeeping in 1980, she mourned the loss of the characters she had spent so much time getting to know.

Similarly, the characters in Gilead, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, stuck with her long after the book’s completion, so she had to continue telling their stories in her most recent novel, Home.

“If these characters want their lives,” she said, “I should give it to them.”

My signed copy of Gilead is awesome.

While I am looking forward to reading all of Robinson’s novels, last month I read Housekeeping as part of the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read series. In this poetic, observant novel, the characters are fully realized in an organic way that seems effortless and inspires a great degree of admiration and envy in my cold, cold heart.

After losing their mother to suicide when she drives her car into the same lake that swallowed their grandfather’s derailed train years earlier, young sisters Ruth and Lucille fall under the reluctant care of their eccentric, train-hopping aunt Sylvie.

The haphazard family lives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, which is a character in itself – located in a valley alongside a temperamental lake that is always flooding or freezing, the town’s difficult climate threatens its mix of residents and transients and rattles its already shaky foundation.

Like Fingerbone, Sylvie is unstable. She sits alone for hours in the dark, fills rooms from floor to ceiling with newspapers and tin cans, “borrows” unattended canoes, and doesn’t know the whereabouts of her husband, whose very existence seems to occasionally slip her mind.

While Lucille rebels against Sylvie’s strangeness, Ruth seems almost intrinsically a part of it. The inherent similarities between Ruth and Sylvie and their inability to conform even when faced with loneliness and isolation raise questions about how much people are capable of change and how much certain tendencies such as transience and privacy (or in Lucille’s case, conformity and propriety) are simply hardwired.

On an unrelated note, Robinson teaches fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she is a self-assured, competent product of a lifetime spent in quality educational institutions. Though she claims not to think of herself as such, she is a capital "W" Writer, part of a group very few people successfully infiltrate.

if you're bored then you're boring

It's the curse of adulthood - boredom. Complacency, sometimes to the point of numbness. The death of one's soul is a slow process, unnoticable on an incremental basis but devastating in its finality. One day you realize you've been staring at the same spot on the wall for 30 minutes, and you're like... fuck. Because your ability to think critically has been reduced to one-word, pseudo-emotional reactions that simultaneously communicate dissatisfaction and passive acceptance.

Considering my recent propensity to park in front of the tv for three-hour Law & Order marathons and my something-approaching-genuine interest in the outcomes of paternity tests on the Maury Show, I fear I'm reaching this state, so I am going to vow to try something new every day. And to force myself to blog about it. Which sadly means I'll be spending less time looking at the following:

• fucking Facebook
• People of Wal-Mart
• Passive-Aggressive Notes
• Go Fug Yourself
• Cake Wrecks
• Huffington Post
• Look at this Fucking Hipster

...and much more time slyly (or perhaps not-so-slyly) giving the finger to the gray matter that composes so much of adult life.

Among mung

The recipe

Spicy mung bean soup

1 cup dried mung beans, washed and rinsed
5 cups cold water or vegetable stock
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon garam masala
4 teaspoons canola oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 or 3 large tomatoes, chopped
a 2 inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
2 or 3 serrano peppers, very thinly sliced (do not remove the seeds)
1 cup coconut milk
2 medium or 1 large chicken breast (optional)
1/2 cup minced fresh cilantro
salt to taste
juice of 1 lemon

The process

I’m not gonna lie – spicy mung bean soup sounds wholly unappealing, because what does it rhyme with? A name my dad might give cow manure before laughing and saying, “Smells like money!” In fact, when I was about 12 I was playing “golf” with my cousins on my grandma’s farm, and we were teeing off from dung piles in the pasture (I know, I know). The game ended abruptly when the front of my shirt got splattered after a cousin’s errant swing.

Unfortunate word associations aside, everything else in the recipe sounds delightful, and it came highly recommended from a friend. I make the pilgrimage to Whole Foods in Overland Park to hunt down the exotic Indian spices I’ll need, as well as the mung beans themselves. When a stocker at the store tells me they don’t have my mung, I begin to panic and wonder what would make an acceptable substitute – lentils, perhaps? Surely not kidney beans – but luckily he locates them in the bulk foods section, and moments later I am among mung.

When I get home, I sit all the ingredients out on the counter, and they’re just nice to look at, like I am a legit cook who knows exactly what she’s doing. Even Phoenix jumps up to inspect my loot.

For cooking music, I start with “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” by the Pogues, and the inherent booziness of “Fairytale of New York” triggers my subconscious desire to get hammered, so I pour myself a nice, sloshing-over-the-rim glass of Yellow Tail cabernet sauvignon. Then, because this recipe requires a fuckload of veggies, I start chopping. When I see the immensity of the pile of chopped tomatoes alone, I am reminded yet again that I need to invest in a larger soup pot.

The recipe tells me to mix the spices ahead of time, so I put them in a bowl and set them aside. As I look at the yellow, brown and red pile sitting there like a granulated desert sunset, I can’t help but think: what if I sneezed on it?

As it simmers, the soup smells increasingly delightful, and when I’m momentarily interrupted by my neighbor who forgot his keys, I’m disappointed that he doesn’t mention the warm, wonderful smells wafting into the hallway.

The verdict

Holy fucking cats, the soup is delicious. The serrano peppers provide a biting but not overpowering spiciness, the ginger provides an unexpected but pleasant tang, and the coconut milk complements the Indian spices nicely. If I had included the optional chicken breast, it would have been off any of the following: the chart, the chain, the hook, etc.

Next up

I’m leaving the world of soup and attempting eggplant parmesan.

getting hammered on a budget

You’re not getting a raise in 2010. Kansas City has also experienced a record-breaking 21 inches of snow, and you’re depressed, anxious, and taking it in the ass from Father Time, a meth-addicted version of Santa who leaves the house shirtless wearing acid-wash jeans from 1987 and brings back a pack of Pall Malls and some circus peanuts from the Shell station.

The good news: though you’re broke, you can still get a bit tight after your three-hour strategic meeting at work or chain-restaurant dinner with your more-successful friends. And because you’re not fermenting grape juice in a trash bag with a piece of moldy bread stuffed in your gym sock, you’ll still be high-class compared to most bums and prisoners.

But if you want to want to poison yourself with what is essentially top-shelf rubbing alcohol, there are a couple of ground rules.

1. You will be massively hungover tomorrow.

2. The booze will not taste good.

In fact, there are no concrete benefits to getting blackout drunk on cheap booze, but if you want to obliterate some intangible, abiding malaise that resides within the thorny depths of your soul, odds are you don’t care that in 12 to 18 hours your brain will try to chisel its way out of your skull and your liver will be the size of a pummelo fruit.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 handle of Viaka, Popov, or McCormick's vodka, $12

1 jug of Carlo Rossi sangria, $10Buying booze on a budget is the same as buying 50 rolls of toilet paper at Costco – the initial cost is slightly more than if you bought, say, a fifth, but you’re damn well not running out of that shit. And when it’s 4 a.m. and you want, no need, just one more nightcap before you stumble to bed, you want a half-full liter of vodka to work with, not the dregs of a sipped-to-death pint.

You want vodka because, unlike whiskey or rum, the difference between well and top-shelf vodka is like the difference between getting arrested on the first day of spring in a dew-kissed meadow or on the coldest day of winter after falling in a five-foot snowdrift – it doesn’t matter, you’re still getting hauled off to the clink. The sangria will be used to chase the vodka. Forget about water and soda. You also will not need shot glasses, as these are for people who have an aversion to sleeping on the rug beneath the futon or puking on the bathroom floor and attempting to clean it up with their socks; in other words, pussies. 

Pour the sangria in cups (for your safety, it is vital they are plastic) and take a hefty swig of vodka straight from the bottle. Have a few swallows of sangria, and repeat until you are sufficiently hammered, though you may not be fully aware of when this occurs.

Suggested listening: Pogues, Violent Femmes, Hank Williams.

Suggested precautions: have a trusted friend hide your cell phone and car keys; don’t walk on wooden floors wearing socks; don’t keep an entire pizza in the fridge; have ibuprofen on hand for the morning.

curried lentil gloop

I can has basil leaf?

The recipe

Curried lentil soup
1 cup finely chopped onion
1 1/4 teaspoons curry powder
7 cups water
3/4 cup lentils
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes, un-drained

1. Sauté onions until soft. Add curry, sauté 1 minute. Add water and lentils; bring to a boil. Cover; reduce heat. Simmer 40 minutes or until lentils are tender.
   
2. Place 4 cups lentil mixture in a blender; process until smooth. Return mixture to pan. Add chopped basil, vinegar, salt, sugar and tomatoes; cook until thoroughly heated. Garnish with basil, if desired.

The process

After a particularly difficult zumba class, my confidence is low. I’m beginning to question my ability to build this soup, especially because, when I think about it, I’m not 100 percent sure I know what a lentil is. When I locate them at Sunfresh, I realize they are basically tiny peas. Really, pea soup? But I have committed to making it, so I toss the damn lentils in my basket.

At home I turn on Regina Spektor and drink a glass of cheap cabernet sauvignon, and I feel slightly restored. I am ready to cook.

Chopping the onion, as usual, makes my entire face drip and burn, and I am relieved to get it cooking in the frying pan. The sautéed onion mixed with curry powder smells sweetly dirty and spicy, like what you’d get if you parked a hot dog cart inside a perfume shop in the Shire. And then had sex on it.

While preparing to cook the lentils, I almost immediately suspect “7 cups of water” is a type-o, especially since it wants me to put the “lentil mixture” in the blender; I imagine seven cups of boiling hot lentils and curried onions will destroy the nearly ten-year-old blender I purchased on sale at Wal-Mart when I wanted to make margaritas one night. I text my boyfriend and tell him to come over later than planned so he won’t see me wading in the lentil lake after my blender explodes.

I switch my cooking music from Spektor to Chopin. Feeling immediately smarter, I improvise and add only five cups of water. I also decide to drain the mixture before blending. I am a genius.

While the lentils simmer, I seek the opinions of my colleagues. When presented with a basil leaf, Bubba Kinsey turns up his nose and stalks away. Phoenix, however, tries to snatch it out of my hand. I assume she's jealous because I offered it to Bubba first, but then SHE FUCKING EATS IT. I am reminded of when she stole my fresh cayenne peppers over the summer (and possibly ate them; several are still at large). She is a strange creature, but I’m glad she approves.

After draining the lentils and onions, I pour them in the blender and choose the “blend” option, pausing briefly to consider whether “puree” would work better but outright rejecting “liquefy” and “frappe.” The resulting mixture is green and resembles baby vomit.















Instead of dwelling on its appearance, I dump the green goo back in the pot and add the tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, salt, sugar and basil. It begins to take on a more soup-like appearance, and I suspect it might be edible. I lean over to inspect it more closely, and a bubble of boiling hot sludge explodes IN MY EYE. Fuck, it burns.

I turn down the heat and plunge a spoon into the mess. Surprisingly it is kind of good.

Still, it’s not fucking spicy enough for me, so I brazenly add a hefty squirt of Sriracha sauce, as well as another sprinkle of curry and a pinch of sugar.

The verdict















The end result is almost too thick to be called soup; it’s more like something you would scoop up with naan at an Indian restaurant. Still, it's rather savory and filling – my boyfriend calls it “hearty” – even though it is allegedly low-fat, and neither the curry nor the spice is overwhelming. It could have used a bit more water, and next time I would sweeten it with honey instead of sugar, but my boyfriend totally went back for seconds.

The score

This time, I made the food; the food did not make me (as in pissed off, dejected, nauseous, etc.).
Angela: 1
Food: 0

Next up:
Spicy mung bean soup