Endings

An email that I received in the dark hours of morning this fall bore the title "Endings". It was from an old friend and former boyfriend, confessing that our friendship was driving his current girlfriend to a level of insecurity approaching psychosis. He expressed remorse, I wished him well, and that was it. These things are supposed to be painful, but our dissolved friendship felt like a necessary and even pleasurable process, an option I never thought available.
Change can render many situations inadequate. You won't see doctors busting out their drills for good old-fashioned terpination much these days, nor is a pony the best way to get to class anymore (though many ladies wish it were). Change hits, you adapt, and hopefully you don't lose too much in the fire.
Many things have changed for me recently, most notably my acceptance into a dual master's program at UO. I am a full-time student, PR director, administrative aide, and financial aid recipient. That last part gives me the freedom, if I choose, to get my own place and leave the days of hot plates and toaster ovens behind me.
I chose.
I can now boast a real kitchen, with a real oven and a stove with four burners. I can operate both simultaneously without shorting out the entire circuit. I can close the door to my bedroom to mitigate the cooking smells that seep into my bedspread. I have counter space, a dishwasher, closed cupboards that don't invite cat traffic and pounds of dust. This may not seem like much to brag about, but it is more than I have known in two and a half years and I am grateful to the point of crying. However, a full kitchen renders my project here a little obsolete.
My last supper in the house was the typical Thursday night feast, with all of the usual characters in attendance (aside from Fitz). I made penne rigate with lamb, feta, parsnips, tomatoes, and cinnamon, and piled it all into big, comforting bowls. The four of us (Ben, Andrew, Miguel, and me) wrapped ourselves around our food, watched "Psych", and quietly accepted the new chapter. Andrew commented sweetly on the idea of me with a full kitchen: "If she can make this using just a hot plate, with a full kitchen she can cure cancer."
Thank you, guys. Thank you for everything.
And as a special note, thank you to Benjamin for doing all that he could to give me comfortable surroundings and a place that I could call home. Thank you for the gadgets, the encouragement, and the time that you made salmon with pumpkin seed and cilantro relish. Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.

What Just Happened?

I was supposed to make pancakes for Father Augustine. Instead, I witnessed the unraveling of the culinary universe as I know it, then I got in a fight. With a priest. At the church. And lost.

Let me back up:

Thursday was a fight night, which meant that Ben and I were going to Andrew's to watch us some MMA over chicken schnitzel sandwiches (a fight-related staple since Andrew's first jiu jitsu tournament). Ben and I stopped at Safeway beforehand to grab necessary supplies, such as chicken, beer, and something for dessert. This is where Ben, yet again, goes a little bonky for The Sugar. With a hunger that can only be described as Delphic, Ben bought seven boxes of Girl Scout cookies (two Thin Mints and five Samoas). We brought one of the boxes with us to breakfast.

Now, back to breakfast. Ben chimes in that we should dice up the cookies and toss them in the pancake batter. Coconut, caramel, chocolate, what's not to love? I flat-out rejected the idea (can't we have a breakfast that doesn't cause diabetes, Ben?), but Augustine, being equally buggy for The Sugar, diced up three cookies and threw them into the batter before I could say or do anything to protect my glycemic index.

The results were actually really tasty, so Ben deserves a nod for his sugar-inspired creativity. Augustine, however, needs to be locked someplace safe; he made a sandwich out of bacon, Girl Scout cookie pancakes, and more freaking Girl Scout cookies. The culinary universe as I know it has unraveled a little, and I'm frankly a little scared.

Anyway, I also mentioned a fight. I have two rules about cooking: don't touch that, and get the hell out of my kitchen. It should also be noted that any kitchen in which I am working becomes my kitchen, and "that" also refers to dishes. Stephen knows this, Ben knows this, Augustine should know this. And yet...

I try to shoo Augustine away from the dishes, which is hard to do even at my height. I get him away long enough to "soak" the bacon pan (and by that, I mean completely clean it), which peeves him to no end. Aimee comes in for a goodbye hug, which Augustine uses as a chance to maul us rugby-style and usurp my dish-washing throne. I grab a dish towel and attempt to choke him with it, but he is simply too tall. Jesus loves him more, and I end up ass-first on the floor of the kitchen.

But don't trust me; trust Aimee, who witnessed and documented the whole thing. Her comments are in print below each photo, with any comments of mine in italics:

The components: bacon!! Samoas, and Samoa pancakes.

Hiding the amazing combo. See, Augustine is hiding it because he knows that it's wrong.

The cookie pancake bacon sandwich bring consumed. And Kala's mind springs a leak.

More eating. This is where Augustine starts to go a little buggy from the sugar, as you can see from the chocolate dripping from the side of his mouth. He reminds me of a zombie right here. Creepy.

Unsuspecting Kala noticing that the dishes are being done. You holy bastard.

A fight ensued. He started it!

It got kind of rough. Yes, my feet are completely off of the ground.

And Father Augustine won. Because Jesus is on his side.

Chicken is Boring

Confession: I love, love, LOVE unusual meat! I often get bored with your standard supermarket butcher selection, but the mere mention of bison, venison, pheasant, or rabbit can snap my stomach to attention faster than a terrier mix responds to bacon. This isn't a new development, either; as I kid I loved stopping in Davis for one of Redrum Burgers's delicious ostrich and emu burgers. If it's an animal, and I can't find it at Safeway, odds are I want to eat it.

Fortunately for me, Oregon shares my love of the strange and unusual (you've seen "Portlandia", I'm sure). Unfortunately for me, I live with a tight budget and one picky eater. I can usually get around the latter by just not telling him what he's eating; I once made a root vegetable penne rigate and he picked out all of the parsnips (which he likes) because he thought that they were potatoes (which he hates), while he ate all of the sweet potatoes (thinking they were carrot bits). The less Ben knows, the more I can get away with culinary novelty.

This week found him in a rare open-minded window, which was nice because I was itching to break away from beef, pork, chicken, and turkey. Still keeping his mild xenophobia in mind, I eased him into my kinky world of animal consumption with a Greek-style penne with lamb, tomatoes, parsnips, and cinnamon (I skipped the feta and the parsley). He was frustrated before I even started cooking, since only cuts of lamb were available at my favorite butcher shop in history, and he had to wait around for it to be ground to a fine, protein-rich pulp. The balancing between cooking meat, simmering vegetables, and boiling pasta was also a trick with our one burner, so the electric skillet was put on pasta duty while my Calphalon 10-inch super pan did double duty with the meat and vegetables. At last I put everything to simmer for a few minutes, pleased with my work and feeling validated enough to put on a favorite movie of mine while I finished cooking.

Oh hot damn, that was some tasty lamb (paired with Concannon cabernet).


On a side note, I think it's unfortunate that so much attention is paid to pairing wine and beer with food, but there is little regard to pairing fine films with any of the aforementioned three. For my part, I say that this dish is ideally served with "Inglorious Basterds" or anything else with Michael Fassbender's glorious accent (except, perhaps, "Hunger", which is too rough to be paired with anything except sorrow).

Bang and Whimper

I may have complaints about my studio apartment's hot-plate-and-toaster-oven setup, but it hasn't stopped me from making delicious, complicated food for large groups of people. However, I have yet to find a silver lining for the refrigerator. It is old, it changes temperature and humidity levels on a whim, and the "freezer" portion is unfit to maintain the structural integrity of ice cream. Ben and I have wasted many of our dollars on food that went bad too soon.
Last Sunday I tried to open the "freezer door" to discover that frost had unhinged it. Also, I couldn't see Ben's bottle of Jagermeister (pretty much the only thing that we keep in the "freezer") because it had been swallowed by the frost. As I was dealing with the recurring pains of being genetically Swedish, this left Ben to defrost the damn thing. It seemed to be going well (chunks of ice dislodged in an eerie homage to the Arctic Circle) until a horrible Bang!Pop! noise, followed by the hiss-whine of an herbivore in the death embrace of a jugular-biting predator. Something had gone terribly wrong, I thought, as the air filled with the faint smell of a gas not suitable for breathing. Apparently the cooling coil was offended by our defrosting efforts, and just gave up in defiance.
The good news: our landlord was willing to let us pick out a new fridge and deduct it from the rent. The bad news: our new, awesome, modern, working fridge would not arrive until Thursday. That meant that for four days I would be without eggs and yogurt, essentially 2/3 of my diet.
For four days I relied on fruit, protein bars, and the occasional peanut butter sandwich. I would be waiting for Ben as soon as he got home, starving and desperate (which was tragic for a hypoglycemic such as myself, but the burgers and burritos I got for dinner sort of evened everything out). On Thursday the awesome new fridge (with real working freezer, novel idea) arrived; by the time Ben got home it was cool enough to house perishable food (another novel idea). I would include pictures, but I imagine that the rest of you are lucky enough to know the joys of a working fridge and freezer. Since moving to Oregon (aka The Undeveloped North), it has become a foreign concept that I once took for granted.
That is, until now.

The Atom Bomb

Our story starts with Aimee, and ends with a mushroom cloud.
Aimee Fritsch is a freshman at UO and an active new member of my church. She is an irrepressibly fizzy child (I say child because of the way she parades herself; there is a frightfully capable woman in there), with a mane of springy hair that recalls my cousin Annie, and a laugh that gets into your muscles and stays there, warmly nesting. The sweet dear has attached herself to me like a little mollusk, and I love it.
On January 16th we had planned to feed the geese at Alton Baker Park, but the pouring rain and Aimee's thinly veiled lack of sleep put a clear stop to our plans. Instead, I invited her to my cave for an afternoon of kitties, cupcakes, and "Big Bang Theory". It has been at least a month since I baked, but it has been even longer since I baked "just because", so this was going to be a lovely day.
I serendipitously had the right ingredients for Ben's favorite: chocolate cupcakes with a cream cheese and chocolate chip center. I increased the amount of sugar in the recipe, since I found the previous batch to be far too savory, and before we knew it we were diplopic from a sugar rush. Unfortunately, Ben gets a little crazed when he gets The Sugar. Case in point: he went to the grocery store to get me more chocolate for baking (like we needed more at this point), and came back with marshmallow creme that he intended to put in place of the cream cheese filling (as if the cupcakes weren't diabetes-inducing enough). I rebuffed his marshmallow advances.
But I could only be vigilant for so long.
My darling and adored brother-by-royal-decree, Andrew Hard, had a jiu jitsu tournament yesterday. Cutting weight has been an ordeal for him, not because he had much to lose (he is a lean one as it is) but because man was not meant to live on granola and salad alone. I was taking his pains personally, deciding to make him an epic post-fight lunch and dessert to crown his efforts. All he wants, said Andrew, is salt and fat. Salt and fat. Chicken schnitzel sandwiches should do the trick for lunch, but what about dessert? What can I make that's fatty and decadent enough to properly reward hi...
Well hello, Marshmallow Creme. We meet again at last.
To properly make epic, moxie-rich cupcakes without over-thinking it, I had to call in Mirielle. Mir is my brain-child, my muse, my crazed and eccentric blood who is rarely allowed in the kitchen because of ensuing explosions. In fact, she did get a little Swedish Chef on us, and she did knock over a painting in my kitchen. She also cross-bred two of my cupcake recipes with the genius of a Swiss geneticist, and before my inspired eyes slid into the oven a batch of vanilla-and-chocolate-chip cupcakes with a marshmallow creme center. The creme was nestled in a small ball, the batter having been pressed to the sides and spooned atop it before baking.
After twenty minutes, the nuclear reaction began.
For those of you that have never been camping, marshmallow swells. In fact, the first batch of cupcakes looked like a cross between a Julia Child show and a Ridley Scott movie: the marshmallow creme burst out of the belly of the innocent cupcake, cruelly perched over the top in perfect mushroom clouds. The bits of chocolate chip and vanilla batter still stuck to the marshmallow just furthered the effect. The mushroom clouds receded as the cupcakes cooled, leaving a rather deformed but just as delicious runt in its place. They were frightening, macabre, and... Oh my holy Saints, incredibly delicious!

Andrew and his compatriots were so grateful for the food that I was nicknamed Mother Goose during the tournament. The team shared the cupcakes (some had way more than others), Andrew and Chris Godowski got the coveted sandwiches (much to someone's dismay), and Andrew fought even better after he downed half of his sandwich (he mistakenly thought that he had been eliminated). Andrew came out of the tournament with an injured shoulder and elbow, and over his second pizza of the night (yes, we ate two pizzas) he said that the high points of his day had all revolved around food.
Happy to help, brother.
Oh, and a message to Matthew Rubenstein: if you try to steal my brother's food again, or try to get swag when you're not even competing, I will choke you. True story.

Eggs Benedict -or- The Rookie Mistake

Last week I boldly poached an egg, which I have never done before. This week I am taking it a step further, throwing some pig meat and hollandaise sauce into the mix to make my first eggs benedict.

This was how I saw it in my head, at least.

I was excited to make eggs benedict, because my culturally starved sweetheart had never actually tried them before. I know, I'm in love with a strange one. I'm working on him, I promise. Anyway, I pulled up Tyler Florence's hollandaise sauce recipe and figured that there was nothing else to know.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a rookie mistake.

The most important thing to know is that sauces share a common trait with chihuahuas, Siamese cats, and brides: they are attention whores. One should never walk away from a sauce recipe. It doesn't matter if an important call comes through; hold the phone with one hand and stir yourself into early arthritis. Because of this it is ideal, sometimes essential, to have all sauce ingredients pre-measured and on hand to add as needed.

I was not prepared with ingredients at all. I was already whipping up my egg yolks when I noticed that I was out of lemon juice. When you're missing one fifth of the listed ingredients, two of which are needed in pinch increments, you can expect a long hard road ahead. I tried two versions: one without lemon juice, and one with lime juice instead. LIME. JUICE. I wish I could claim massive inebriation, but I can't (nor can I say which version was worse).

Ben didn't seem to mind my massive breakfast blunder. He liked the entire combination, and while he didn't ask for seconds he did ask to try it again (for real next time).

I will spare you the photos, as the end result was not that pretty.

My Father's Daughter

I cannot credit all of my cooking know-how to my mother. Actually, I probably spent more hours in front of my father's stove, making all sorts of dishes that would piss off the average single dad. He would take his time in explaining recipes and techniques to cooking, but I started blocking him out when I realized that he just loved to hear himself speak.

I wished I had paid more attention on Christmas, when Dad would make milk-poached eggs on sourdough toast. I was too busy paying attention to presents to remember anything, except that it takes a ridiculous amount of milk to do it properly. I cannot remember how to properly poach an egg, or whether the sourdough toast needed any prep work aside from slicing. I do remember that it was delicious; that memory stands out the strongest.

Yesterday when I asked Ben how he wanted his breakfast eggs he told me to surprise him. Aside from wondering who this sexy Ben-like stranger was in my home, I decided to try out my dad's old holiday special. I really pulled a Captain Kirk on this one, doing a quick scan of poached egg techniques and hoping that the rest would come to me like some ancient family spell.

Amazingly enough, my family magic came through. The eggs were soft, delicious, and creamy. The milk made a great topping for the sourdough toast, as well. Ben and I polished off a dozen eggs between us, and I was ready for more. I have already scheduled a breakfast date with Father Augustine so I can share more family food secrets with him (he's practically family at this point, anyway).

The only drawback is that I crave poached eggs EXCLUSIVELY today. Pancakes? No thanks, I want eggs. Caramel candy? No, eggs. Anything else in the history of anything, ever?!

Nope, I made more poached eggs instead. I'm pathetic.