Things to put into your mouth

In our household we underspend, as we are saving money to pursue our dreams. One thing we don't underspend on is food because we are both filthy little piggies when it comes to things you can put in your mouth. At least it feels like we overspend on food, but when I sort out the bills at the end of the month the amounts are never staggering.

Part of this is probably because we live in a working-class neighborhood with a daily outdoor market that has a couple of 'fell off the back of a truck' sections, and another part is probably because we're both from a peasant background and have a taste for staples, like lovely cabbage, that eternal cheap-ass standby. Not cooked, though - sliced into teeny tiny strips, marinated in some sort of acid (heh) and made into a salad. It's gross cooked. Or so I thought . . .

When I grocery shop I operate on the principal that the prettier things are the better they are for you and the more delicious they will be. So last week I bought, for the first time, a Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbages are the ones that look like this:

Pretty-wise, I prefer red cabbages. They look like this:

And when you cut them in half, they look like braaaaaaains. Delicious braaaaaaains. Num num num num. But we'd just eaten three of them in two weeks, which is a fuckload of red cabbage, and I felt like a bit of a change.

We tried the slice/marinate/saladify trick with the Savoy cabbage and it was fucking gross. The F-word had more luck wokking the strips in a black bean sauce with some garlic and mushrooms but it was still not so hot. So we had half a Savoy cabbage sitting in our fridge disgusting us for about a week until Epicurious came to the rescue with this recipe for bacon and cabbage soup:

-(1/3-pound) piece Irish bacon (available at specialty foods shops) or Canadian bacon
-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
-1 medium onion, finely chopped
-2 large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch bits
-5 1/2 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
-4 Turkish bay leaves
-2 teaspoons kosher salt
-1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
-1/2 small head Savoy cabbage, cored, thinly sliced, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

In small saucepan, combine bacon and cold water to cover. Cover, bring to boil over moderate heat, and skim foam from surface. Reduce heat and simmer 7 minutes. Drain and cool, then cut into 1-inch chunks. Set aside.

In 6-quart heavy stock pot over moderate heat, melt butter. Add onion and sauté, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add potatoes and sauté 2 minutes. Add stock, bay leaves, salt, and pepper and bring to boil. Reduce heat to moderately low, cover, and simmer until potatoes are soft, about 8 to 10 minutes. Add cabbage and simmer 5 additional minutes. Discard bay leaves. Working in 3 batches, in blender purée soup until smooth (using caution when blending hot liquids). Return to pot, stir in bacon, and rewarm if necessary.

I made some alterations based on the necessities of our household. For example, the F-word doesn't eat meat, so no bacon. I didn't mind, as frankly the idea of boiling bacon makes every molecule of my Calabrian-ity recoil in fucking disgust. If God wanted us to prepare bacon with water, he'd have made pigs aquatic. Fucking Irish, man, I love them, but boiling pigmeat? Holy fuck. I know the British do it too but that's the opposite of an excuse.

So I replaced the bacon with one-inch chunks of oily sundried tomato. We use an immersion blender because they make all other blenders look like retards unless you want to crush ice or something. It worked a treat with this recipe. And no bay leaves, so I used herb bouillon instead of the chicken stock, and then only half the reccommend salt. It was still a little over-salty.

Aside from over-saltiness, it was fucking ace. Fucking delicious. And even with the peeling, dicing, clean-up and writing to my old roommate about how she and her unemployed husband might be able to find a job in Europe, it took about 30 minutes. So it turns out that you can cook cabbage and have it be not fucking gross, as long as it's only cooked for five minutes and then puréed into oblivion. And as you can notice from the ingredient list, it probably cost a cumulative Euro.

Nice. What's not nice is this morning; I'm eating quinoa for breakfast in a sweet, fruit-laden preparation that was reccommended by this site. Goddamn hippies. It's gross! This seed is too nutty, too savoury, to be anything but shitty in a sweet preparation. Maybe in a savoury, in some version of a risotto, for example, but sweet? Icky icky icky. Listen, hippies, just because something comes from the same place as cocaine does not make it good or cool, okay? Jesus.

Pomp and heroin

First, because it's awesome, more Bill Withers, and more of his drummer. I like his drummer because looks just like me the first time I took pills for fun, except black and a man.



I think I also like my job. It's letting me visit Scandinavia for the first week of June for something that sounds like even less effort than a conference. Scandinavia is one of those places that I always said I'd visit if someone else paid, and hey, here they are paying. Considering extending my stay a bit and going to Copenhagen to hang out in Christiania - I figure either the powers that be (politicians or gangs, the 'tax-free' version of Wal-Mart coming in and shitting all over a community's economy) will crush it, or it'll be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution. Either way worth visiting.

Speaking of places that should be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution but everybody's too busy getting fucked up. Last night I had a couple of drinks with a Welsh girl and fuck, do you know how cheap heroin is in Great Britain? It is so fucking cheap. And it's got cheaper since the 'liberation' of the Afghanistan. Nice one, free world. I wonder if that's been the case all over the place. It was super cheap in the south of Italy for as long as I've paid attention to these things but I figured that's because it was doing the black market version of 'falling off the back of a truck' whilst in transit to some other part of Europe. I wonder what colour market that would be. What's blacker than black? I think I'll call it the jet market. Jet's pretty.

God and jive broads reconciled

So today I was going to write about Bill Withers and how much I love him, and how great he was before he discovered synthesizers and singing about God. I like God and I like Bill Withers, but I don't like Bill Withers' songs about God. Funny, that. Maybe I would have if he hadn't discovered synthesizers at around the same time he discovered singing about God. Pop songs about God disagree with me deeply - I can't think of a single one at the moment that I like. As far as I'm concerned it's all been downhill since 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'. That's a fucking awesome song.

But before he found God and synthesizers he released songs of stupendous lyrical simplicity that are nonetheless so very, very pretty, and that make me emotional or, you know, hot. And the simple lyrics are straightforward and nice and don't make me think that listening to the song is making me stupid. Probably owes a lot to his beautiful voice, certainly in this song, where he can make his third verse out of repeating the words 'I know' 30-ish times and still be awesome:



Hmm, I guess I did write about Bill Withers and how much I love him. Just as well. I had a check to see if I had already written about it and came across this little navel-gaze about being too evened-out, mood-wise, and how I didn't like that. But I wrote that back in the wilds of 2005 when I was still single and living alone. So today I was going to write about how the single most stressful thing about being in a relationship is feeling like you have to spare your partner your well-earned bad moods - at least for me. But Bill Withers is much, much more interesting. Autobiographically, too.

The rats of the conservatory

Went to da symphony last night, the Charlemagne Orchestra again, and while it was pretty I spent most of it sitting there wanting to scream. The F-word had brought his sketchbook and was scritch-scratching away next to me through the delicacies of the flutey Bach, and then half of the Rodrigo, which was a killer as it was a fucking classical guitar concerto so it was full of delicate passages. It was like sitting next to a walled-in rats' nest. I try not to be one to shit on my man's artistic aspirations but finally I had to tell him that I was finding the scritch-scratching distracting, to which he replied he thought it might be and closed up sketchbook shop.

You thought it might be? And you kept going, making me afraid I was going to shit on your artistic aspirations? I thought, my head close to explosion. But I stuffed all the anger deep inside, helped by the prettiness of the Rodrigo concerto. It felt so telegenic somehow - damn near Zorro-ish or something - but with such careful delicacy as well. Yummy.

And then in the second half, the stranger to my left started indulging in his own artistic aspirations by scritch-scratching his prose impressions of the Deimecke classical guitar concerto. Oh fuck me, I thought. It's one thing to risk shitting on my boyfriend's artistic aspirations as there's a world of ways to try to make it up to him, but quite another to shit on the artistic aspirations of a sensitive young Belgian whose cock I will almost certainly never touch. Luckily he was so into the music that he scritch-scratched in time, so it wasn't nearly so rat-nesty. And then when the jolly loud Mendelssohn came on he closed up shop too.

Things to do instead of getting pregnant

The most strenuous thing that I've done all weekend was open a stubbornly stuck jar of honey this morning. Oh yes, Monday morning counts as the weekend, I've decided. To keep earning my keep of free books, while the F-word slept off a little hangover I somehow managed to skip I wrote a review of Evolution for Everyone here, but it won't tell you anything I haven't written about it already. And getting through Gould's chapters about baseball and the death of the .400 batting average, which has been surprisingly interesting since I still only have the foggiest notion of what a batting average is. Outside of how to get shit-drunk before the second inning, my knowledge of the game hasn't changed since those golden pubescent years when the girls were always bigger than the boys.

Had dinner with a girl from my undergrad who ended up here with her family, working for one of the international organizations. Sounds too harsh to say we weren't friends back then but we weren't, really. She had lots of energy that looked a bit frenetic and abrasive to me in those years, maybe because I was so wrapped up in getting and keeping high, even in fourth year when I decided to get really good grades in case someday I decided to do more with my life than get high all the time. It was self-protection, in retrospect. Not knocking getting high, but I was so socially nervous back then, so scared of the possibility of rejection from anyone and everyone, that I couldn't deviate my favourite method of making friends and/or getting laid - smoking lots of reefer or putting things up my nose and seeing what would happen. Since she wasn't so into that we weren't close.

Well. I'm still socially nervous. At this point I'm running on the assumption that that's just the way I am and most of the rest of the world is coping with something similar with the same bad grace, if in different ways. What was my point? Don't know. It was a nice dinner, and I like this girl now. Dad called the next morning, whilst the F-word slept and I wrote the review, and I told him where we'd been the night before. Her family includes a two year old kid, which he used as a rather transparent excuse to imply I should make a baby pretty soon. I thought that was sort of funny because I was writing a review about evolution, and my Knight of Columbus dad had given up on the 'git married!' talk to cut to the chase: propagate the awesome genes I gave you, now.

Unfortunately, I have to go to the office instead.