After getting that long and draining and important-feeling post out of me, I for some reason now feel obliged to detail some of my own recent consumptive and productive practices. Bear with me.
Productive practices: in the past several days, I’ve appropriated and distributed my own surplus labor in the kitchen into
- Hoppin John, for which the NYT recipe (pay archive link; you might be able to get the 1/1/03 article free via LexisNexis) is pretty good, though I do it a little differently, most significantly with what I learned in Savannah about saving and freezing the shells from when you steam peel & eat shrimp and then boiling those shells for broth to use with the black-eyed peas and rice, and I also use sweet Italian sausage instead of hog jowl,
- Palak Paneer, or at least a variant thereof with potatoes added and some serious heat,
- Doro Wat, which I had at Meskerem in Washington, D.C. and immediately resolved that I had to learn how to make it,
- Brussels Sprouts in a light walnut oil, wine vinegar and dijon vinaigrette,
- and what I guess I’ll call South-by-Southeast Asian Curried Pork Chops, crusted in cardamom, cumin, red pepper, ginger, and other spices, browned, and then slow cooked in a coconut milk curry that wound up tasting like somewhere between Bangkok and Bombay.
Suffice to say I’ve got a lot of tupperware in the fridge and I don’t have to cook for a while.
Consumptive practices: I did $3.96 of badness at the iTunes music store. Call me a cheap date.
- Erykah Badu et al, “Love of My Life Worldwide”;
- Ohio Players, “Skin Tight” (those cheesy backing vocals can’t take a thing away from that bass, those horns);
- Tower of Power, “What Is Hip?” (the live version);
- Grace Jones, “The Fashion Show”.
And, finally, while I’m at it tonight, I’ll note that I just had the good fortune to stumble across a pretty amazing voluminous and comprehensive source of government data correlating income, financial aid, college admission and attendance, and a whole lot of other stuff. I’m ecstatic for the punk-ass lie it gives to some of the know-nothing knucklehead arguments about privilege at IA, and I’m slowly working my way through the data and trying to sort it out. I’ll share soon: expect a well-cited big nasty burner of a post on privilege and higher ed before December.
I hate to cook, but that brussels sprouts recipe sounds just easy enough for me to try…and delicious!
“Groan”. You are so cruel to post such delectableness when I’m on the skittle/coffee diet. I have no idea what you’re talking about on the privilege arguments (although I know you’ve posted about it and it was something about Swarthmore and a state U), but a good piece of nasty burner always puts a twinkle in my eye so I’ll be watchin’.
The cooking comes and goes in fits and starts. When I was living with someone, it was a pleasant routine; we split the duties half-and-half and collaborated or went out on Saturday nights, and the one who didn’t cook cleaned up. We were both good cooks, and having someone else to cook for gave it a nice “big production” spin.
Doing it alone is a lot harder. I eat out more, and eat junk more. I’m lazier. And then I get to the point where I’m like, “I’m too lazy,” and I do something like I did last week, and wind up with too much to eat alone. This is a problem when you’ve been raised to never throw out food.
Clancy: score the undersides, steam ’em for 10 minutes, and the vinaigrette is easy as long as you get the walnut oil (the original recipe recommends sherry vinegar, but the dijon might need something a little less sweet, especially if you dice some garlic for it).
Michelle: I’m workin on it. There’s nothing like raising a little well-researched holy hell to make you feel better about the semester. 🙂
Mike, w/you on freezing.