A choppy week in the life

The Vitamix box is now a mask. But a mask of whose face? The first person to answer correctly in the comments wins a copy of Smoke and Pickles. 

Shorter, more frequent posts going forward. This one wore me out.

LAST WEDNESDAY I made the yellow squash soup with pickled strawberries from Smoke and Pickles and a prettier soup you’ve never seen. Just look at it. Sadly, it's a cold soup and I don't love cold soup. I thought maybe I'd changed, but no. I heated the leftovers for lunch the next day and in my view hot is the way to go with this and all soups except gazpacho. Pickled strawberries sound daunting but are just sliced berries tossed with salt and sugar and allowed to sit for an hour. The recipe for the soup and strawberries is here. 

THURSDAY Made fudgy, soil-black brownies from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite. The batter calls for both unsweetened chocolate and cocoa powder, then you sprinkle sea salt on top of the brownies before putting the pan in the oven.  (The recipe also calls for cayenne, which I omitted.) Mark and Isabel declared these brownies the best I've made. I liked them, but The Essential New York Times brownie remains my #1. You can decide for yourselves. Clark recipe is here. 

FRIDAY In Smoke and Pickles Edward Lee offers a handful of recipes for what he calls "rice bowls:" individual bowls of hot, crusty rice onto which you pile a variety of other ingredients and then mix into the rice with a spoon. It's a dish that appears sloppy and effortless, like something a young drunk guy  throws together when he comes home starving at midnight and then shovels into his mouth while standing at the counter of his crappy apartment in Ballard or Oakland or Brooklyn. 

Well, it's not like that at all. No drunk person could assemble an Edward Lee rice bowl except maybe Edward Lee. Friday night I made Lee's rice bowl with beef and this “simple but satisfying rice bowl” contains 43 ingredients including homemade remoulade, freshly shucked corn, cooked collard greens, marinated flat iron steak, and fried eggs. It’s a little deflating to go to the trouble of gathering/making all these components and then see everything dumped into a little bowl and mixed up. But I got over it real quick. The steak was tender and full of flavor, the collards rib-sticking and almost meaty themselves, and the crunchy-creamy-salty corn remoulade tied it all together. The recipe is here and you should make it before the last of the summer corn disappears. This is a stupendous dish.

My family, of course, is not a family of eaters. Isabel didn't eat the collard greens or egg. Mark didn't eat the collards. Owen wouldn't eat the collards, remoulade, or rice (which he complained was "mushy") and because he was in a lousy mood he also informed me that despite all evidence to the contrary, he hates brownies and why would anyone put salt on a brownie?

Eighth grade is a hard year.

SATURDAY I decided to help Owen clean his room, which hasn't been vacuumed in 6 months. The floor was covered with Legos, Optimus Prime figurines, Joker drawings, clown wigs, school papers, and dirty jeans in layers so thick and ancient that you couldn't even see the the floor much less vacuum it. In the course of our cleaning, he yelled at me. I yelled at him. Mark came up and gazed at us both reproachfully and asked if we couldn’t do this without yelling. I wanted to throw Decepticon at him. After several hours, the room was 67% of the way toward vacuumability and Owen went to a birthday party. 

I decided to sign up for a 10-day free meditation program. 

SUNDAY Owen woke up with puffy eyes. Apparently we'd stirred up a hive of dust mites during our cleaning, but I decided this should be a day of rest. I went to see Short Term 12 which is wonderful. Did day #2 of the meditation program and felt calm for about 3 minutes afterwards. No cooking.

TUESDAY Owen woke up with puffy eyes again and had to take a Benadryl before leaving for school. He begged to stay home because he thought he looked "freaky," but I said no because he didn't look freaky. We argued. He slunk off to school. We're not getting along, but we'll always have Cuzco. I decided I’d finish cleaning his room myself and get it vacuumed. I scooped up fistfuls of Legos and dirty Kleenexes, petrified gray socks, stuffed animals, a grotesque horseshoe crab shell, crayons, unwanted Harry Potter books, Archie comics and a broken picture frame on which I cut my hand. Once finished with his room, I booked a business trip, made a dental appointment, answered a query letter from the IRS, bought batteries and a canister of Comet, paid the auto insurance, ordered a cover for the Weber kettle grill, and sorted laundry. I did meditation session #4 and took a moment, as directed, to “notice my mood." Mood: foul.

But it improved. Since we had leftover remoulade, I made Lee's rice bowls with salmon for dinner. Holy smokes, this is an amazing dish. Even better than the rice bowl with beef. Marinated salmon, shiitake mushrooms, proscuitto, remoulade, slivered dried mango. Big hit with all. I can't find the recipe online, so you'll need to track down a copy of Smoke and Pickles.  Library, bookstore, or start trying to identify that mask.