Mashrubaat Ruhheyya

That is how you saw 'alcoholic beverages' in Arabic. And that is what this house is evidently full of.

Today I ate:
1. Breakfast consisted of a "Ham" and "mayonnaise" sandwich with spinach and some old tomatoes.
2. I had the same for lunch, sans tomatoes, they were gross. Then I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dessert.
3. For dinner we went to Kyoto for sushi, and I must say, that rocked my world.

Post-dinner the other night, Dan and I were sitting on the couch watching the dogs lick peanut butter off the ends of their noses, he drinking a chocolate milk and me finishing some wine, and talking about how nice it is to be grown up. It's awesome, awesome, to be able to do whatever you want, and I think we lose sight of that. Maybe I will have another glass of wine! Maybe I WILL eat peanut butter and jelly on crackers! Maybe I will do all of these things, at the same time, laying in bed, watching He-Man on dvd! I won't list any of the other things that can happen (so to keep this family friendly), but man, I'm thankful for all of it.

A New Project

While planning my Thankgiving menu yesterday, I found the menu from last year's Thanksgiving. It seemed like a sort of artifact in the study of my own life. I felt inspired. I think that I'm going to start a new and interesting, well, hopefully interesting little project. I want to make a list of everything that I eat every day. I see bargraphs and pie charts in my future.

So, today.
For breakfast I had a sandwich made of whole wheat bread, veganaise, Lightlife fake ham, and spinach. For what I guess I could call lunch I had a small cup of coffee (and I never, ever, drink coffee, I'm not sure what possessed me to buy it, aside from tremendous lethargy I suppose) and an oatmeal raisin cookie. I went home two hours later and ate delicioso Milagro corn tortilla chips (which were in actuality the tiny little crumbly remnants of much larger chips that had gone the way of the passenger pigeon days ago) with veganaise on them, then some rolled up fake ham, dipped in veganaise, sprinkled in chips.
In two hours I'm going over to my friend Casey's house for a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner, so I'll just have to update the rest of the list later.

UPDATE: excellent spread! Broccoli and cheddar melt, green bean casserole, tofu in an apricot and balsamic vinaigrette glaze with sliced vegetables, mashed potatoes, stuffing (into which I suspect a piece of meat had been secreted), eggnog, rolls. And I even met a kid who had biked down here from Wisconsin and was sleeping on rooftops in frightening neighborhoods.

New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival

Yesterday was the first annual New Orleans Po-Boy Fest on Oak St., currently the site of some very interesting regenerative spirit. Upon arriving to find throngs, literally throngs of people stuffing the streets, children getting lost and dogs being stepped on, we were somewhat terrified and had to temporarily abandon ship for a predictably-awesome lunch at Lebanon's.
Highlights - some guy's boxer yowled after getting a toe crunched. A woman walking by with her two little sons said "Oh dearie! Poor pup just got stepped on! Why dontcha' give him a little kiss!" Her son, about eye level with the dog, gave him a nice wet one on his rump. She says "There, now it's all better." That warmed the cockles of my heart, as did the 2nd line that erupted right before the Iguanas hit the stage. Standing there watching that red and white tassled umbrella fly up and down while cheeks ballooned behind brass instruments, and everyone dancing, young and old, black and white, face-tattooed and yuppie alike, I swear a goddamned tear came to my eye. A friend of mine is in town after moving away last January, and he's currently planning on moving back home. In some ways, I'm seeing the experience through his eyes, and in some ways it's me seeing the future, a reluctant but perhaps necessary return to Washington D.C., a real job, school and all of this behind me. I reassure myself by saying that inevitably I will come back, but I think the point is, how can I leave in the first place?

Wish I Could Go To San-Fran

Expanding the Frontiers of the Vegetarian Plate, NY Times, 11-18-07.

PETA kinda sucks.

They did it again.

Some of the black and white shots of her make her look like a corpse. Once again, PETA seems to miss the point; instead of a hamburger we're visually eating her body. Ho hum.

Pumpkin Broth and Spaghetti Squash

Dan always tells me that I'm turning into his grandmother, Margaret. It's because I pick up cans and bottles on the street and bring them home from the restaurant to recycle, I'm obsessed with the notion of 'dumpster diving' (simply because I can't stand the idea that good food is just being thrown away, uh, and I'm a poor student), and I've been known to do really odd frugal things, like save dental floss (in my defense, we were traveling and damn if I didn't know if I would need some dental floss) and bring home chicken carcasses from friend's dinners to turn into broth for someone else's meal. My most recent thing is that I've been collecting the pumpkins that silly people throw away, assuming that now Halloween has passed, their usefulness is exhausted. Not true! A pumpkin is tasty! It has lots of seeds that can be baked! Sure, it's a pain in the ass to process it, but sometimes I feel like lobotomizing and cooking a pumpkin.
I had no idea what I was doing last night but decided to go at the smallest one I had. Knife in hand, I attacked, but discovered that the outer shell was like pressed wood. By the time I had gotten about a quarter of it peeled and cubed, I decided that would be enough. Then I tossed it into a pot with some onions that I had carmelizing, plus some cumin, and waited for it to cook. A little bit of vegetable broth later, I started wondering what else I could do with it. How about some dried galangal and kaffir lime leaves? Tossed that in. A little bit of allspice, some salt, some sugar...

It kind of looked gross. But it tasted okay. I let it cook a while longer, and in the meantime wanted to use up some leftover wonton wrappers on their last legs, so made stuffing out of a package of mixed mushrooms, a little soy sauce, minced garlic, and sausage (vegan, and quite spicy) squeezed out of the casing. Soup tasted better, but I didn't like the idea of eating all the solid stuff in there, so I decided to strain in, squeeze out the pumpkin mix, and use the pumpkin-broth as a base for egg-drop soup. Brilliant! I'm serious, this turned out to be one of those rare moments that I exhibit true and unwavering brilliance. It was so, so good. Plus, I added the pumpkin (sans galangal and lime leaves), to the wonton filling and hence pumpkin-mushroom wontons were born. What didn't get stuffed into the wee wrappers I mixed in with a spaghetti squash that I was baking, so then I had pumpkin-mushroom spaghetti.

So, in conclusion, I take this as a positive development in my culinary evolution, and wanted to share. Also, I realized the other day that I don't think about sex anymore, I think about food.

Bento

Okay, please go here, now.