The Food Stamp Foodie: A Sample Recipe

My husband can cook anything.  I mean anything.  

I used to cook before we got together, but now I don't bother.  If you lived with Picasso, would you be saying, "Pablo, why don't you let me paint the pictures once in awhile?"

What I can do, that my husband has absolutely no facility for, is write.  So several years ago, I started copying out his recipes as he chopped, braised, explained, and created.   Because a lot of what he comes up with is not in any recipe books - he just riffs.  It's like watching a one-man jam band.

The down side is that he'll cook something fantastic, and I will fall in love with it and want to eat nothing but that dish each and every night for the rest of my life, but by that time he'll have forgotten what he did when he came up with it, or be off to the next culinary adventure.  This is the other reason I started writing things down - so I can say, "It's been a really long time since you made that dish with the glass noodles and the mushrooms and peppers and tofu and sesame oil, and when are you making that again?" To which the invariable response is, "Oh - sure, I can make that. Why didn't you tell me you liked it? Uhhh...tell me what was in it again."  So now I can go to the laptop, and I can tell him what was in it again.

We also decided to set ourselves a challenge.  We aimed at coming up with a series of dishes made with healthy ingredients that would feed a family of four on a very restricted budget.  We called the resultant collection "The Food Stamp Foodie."

Writing out the recipes was a bit of a conundrum, because my husband never measures anything.  I had to convince him rather forcefully that "a nice glug of," "a handful or two," and "whatever you've got in the fridge" is not going to be helpful to anybody who is trying to cook the dish he is attempting to describe.  I did my best and was often royally chewed out for cutting off the flow of the Creative Chef Process in midstream.  (You are welcome, and yes, there is a Kickstarter campaign to cover my hospital bills.)

In recent years I became a vegetarian, which has ruffled my husband not at all, because he's perfectly happy to cook two different dinners and put them out at the same time, since he still eats meat, so we have both vegetarian and non-vegetarian recipes.  Today being a cold any yuckky day, I thought I would share one of his vegetarian creations with you.  It is one of my personal favorites.  If you make it, let me know what you think!


Texas Thai Hodgepodge

FIRST: make your

Vietnamese Coleslaw:

MIX
1 bag coleslaw
2 T fish sauce
3 T rice vinegar, mixed with 3 T sugar, microwaved till sugar dissolves
Salt, Pepper
REFRIGERATE and allow to marinate for at least 8 hours before serving.

NEXT: Make your

Texas Three-Bean Pate:

1  15 oz. can each of pinto beans, pink beans, black beans, drained (3 cans total)
4-5 T finely-diced sundried tomatoes
4 T finely diced red onion, sauteed in olive oil till translucent but not caramelized.
1 tsp Veggie Magic
1 tsp Frank's or other mild hot sauce, to taste
3-4 T olive oil.

Mash all above ingredients together until they form a smooth paste.  (If you are lucky enough to live near Zabar’s, you can simply buy their Texas three-bean pate.)

NOW make the

Texas Thai Curry:

1 large zucchini, diced into ½ inch cubes
1 medium eggplant, peeled & cubed
1 package extra-firm seasoned tofu, cubed
1 can coconut milk
1 box sliced mushrooms
1 bag raw coleslaw
2 tsp Thai green curry paste
1 tsp Adobo (spices -Goya section)
½ tsp Veggie Magic (Paul Prudhomme spice mix)
4 T olive oil (or a bit more if needed)

Method: Heat wok on high approx 1-2 minutes.  Add olive oil. After about 5 seconds, throw in green curry paste & stir with spatula to break up the paste; keep it moving.  Add all the vegetables: zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, coleslaw. Stir.  Sprinkle with Veggie Magic & Adobo.  Stir.  Cover; wait 3 minutes; uncover. Stir.  Once veggies have started to wilt, add coconut milk & 1 cup of the Three-Bean Pate (8 oz).  Keep stirring so that pate blends with coconut milk to make a sauce.  Allow to cook down for about 5 minutes, stirring, so nothing sticks or burns.  Add tofu; keep stirring.  Allow to cook 2-3 minutes, and serve.

At table, mix in: VIETNAMESE COLESLAW, which adds a delightful note of coolness, crunch & contrast.

Homesick

Homesick

For Corine Pettey

I thought I missed the theaters.  It turned out

That what I missed was seeing plays with you.

I thought I missed the restaurants, but dining out

was so much better when I ate with you.

I thought I missed museums. I forgot

Vermeers looked better when I gazed with you.

And now you’ve gone to your long home, and part of me

is homeless till the day I go there too.

Dormitory Dreamin'

Monday was one of the great days of my life.  Monday, we ferried my son to his dorm room and, after lugging his various "can't-live-without-its" up to the second floor, in obedience to his none-too-subtle-hints, expeditiously got back in our car and left him to plunge headlong into that eternal bacchanalia some of us fondly remember as College Life.

This wouldn't be a big deal for most parents in January.  But the fact is, due to a glitch in the system, my son's school apparently did not get our housing deposit for the Fall semester.  It was the end of August, and the work-study student handling phone calls from similarly disappointed and disgruntled freshmen who had expected to be living on campus and who now, two weeks before the start of classes, were being handed the news that the reason they hadn't gotten their room assignment was that - tee-hee, surprise! - they didn't have a room, laughed merrily and told us that so many people were in the same boat as we that my son was not even going to be added to the waiting list.

Fortunately, the house we moved into last June has a separate small downstairs apartment built into it. Quaintly known as a "mother-daughter apartment" the smaller apartment has everything except a stove. Apparently, if there's a stove, that kicks the house out of the mother-daughter tax bracket and into the two-family-home tax bracket, and since nobody here is looking to pay higher taxes, we got my son a hot plate and a microwave, told him to come upstairs if he felt inclined to roast a turkey, and called it a day.

It was not an ideal solution by any means, since we now live on the wrong side of the Hudson (i.e., the west side) and my son's SUNY is on the right side of the Hudson.  So every. fricking. day. he had to be driven to the Mall, to catch the bus, to transfer to the campus shuttle, and thereafter all too frequently to tender his apologies to the professor if rush hour traffic had slowed down bridge traffic and he missed the connection for the shuttle, which runs once every hour, and if you miss it you're shit outta luck - all of these jump-through-hoops shenanigans due to the fact that we live in the House That Jack Built.  And every afternoon I had to keep an eye on my cell phone for the text that would announce it was time to jam my feet into my boots and peel off for the Mall because he was on the homeward leg of the journey.  And I would get to the Mall, only to find another text that read, "Oops - take your time - got on the Local by mistake, haven't even hit the bridge yet."

Let me tell you - I am not a fan of malls. Home Depot got a lot more money than they should have, just because I was bored and you can always put up another towel rack if you think hard about where you haven't put a towel rack yet.

My son was a good sport about it, all things considered.  And I did my utmost (no, really - I did - don't listen to my husband!) to be a good sport about suddenly becoming a Suburban School Bus Mommy, which had certainly not been part of anybody's plan. Why didn't my son drive himself to school, you ask? Because we have only two family cars.  We moved from Manhattan, remember? What sane family in Manhattan has a car for each and every member of the same household?  I'll bet not even each of the de Blasio kids has a car - and I'm pretty sure Gracie Mansion has a garage.

So it was a glorious moment when we learned that my son had managed to get on-campus housing.  I had called and I had called and I had called, and I think that I basically tortured so many people in the housing office with my incessant pleas that they "take away my adult child and put him     somewhere," that they put him on the list just to shut me up and stop the phone calls.  The news that he was finally in was greeted with the same sort of jubilant dance-around-the-kitchen-table-hugging-everybody-in-sight-and-inarticulately-shrieking-variations-on-"Whoopee!" that most families reserve for "I just found out I got a full scholarship to Harvard!" or "That Lotto ticket I found on the sidewalk outside my ten-dollar-an-hour job at Gray's Papaya just paid off at twenty-five million tax-free dollars!"

So last Monday we packed everything into the Honda, trundled across the bridge, got to the room, unpacked it all, and found that the double room was so nice and so big (with even a private bathroom, which is good, because my kid is spoiled after years and years of having his own bathroom, and spent most of his years at summer camp bitching, "I don't want to take a shower with all these fucking PEOPLE!") that there was room for things like the XBox and the PS4 and a large bag of video games and a small fridge and the little TV from our Adirondack summer cottage that my son says he is never going back to for the rest of his life because there isn't any subway station nearby and quite a lot of other things that he found he suddenly needed. So of course we all got back in the car, trundled across the bridge in the other direction, unplugged everything in sight, stuffed it in the car, and off we went, poop-poop, only to find that my son's room mate was unloading his stuff, including a second coffee maker, and was contemplating going back to his home for the bass guitar and the amp, since it's such a nice big room and they have so much space and anyway, he had forgotten to bring any blankets.

As my son gave is the hairy eyeball and jerked his head towards the door in the classic "What's that, Lassie? Timmy's fallen in the well?" move that every parent knows means, "Hit the road, please, Mom, and stand not upon the order of your going" my husband and I made eye contact, nodded at one another, and telegraphed, "Let's split before they can dream up any other essential equipment for Life in a Dorm."  We slipped out the door, raced to our car, and fled.

I assume everything is fine, because so far we have not received any calls from my son, or, more importantly, from the authorities.

Saucer-Eyed in Babylon

I don't watch the Golden Globe Awards - as a matter of fact, I don't watch television. (You can scream and run away now, if you like.)

I'm not going to go into a long polemic about how it's a virtue not to watch TV.  The fact is, I got out of the habit because ten years ago we decided that Time Warner was charging rip-off prices in Manhatan and we stopped paying for it.  Recently after we moved to Rockland County we got basic TV thrown in as part of our telephone/Internet package, so we said, "great, why not?" and once it was all up and running I flipped channels for maybe fifteen minutes, decided that it wasn't very interesting, went upstairs and returned to my book, and that was that. As any of our Puritan forefathers will tell you, it's no virtue to abstain from doing something that doesn't appeal to you.

Resisting the cheesecake at Peter Luger's - now, for that you get points.

I do, however, like movies, and I go to them if the review sounds like it's not going to turn out to be an utter waste of time and of seven dollars. (Did I mention that the movies up here are cheaper?)  And I do read the Times online, so when Amy Adams won Best Actress in a Comedy, I had actually seen Big Eyes.  And it puzzled me very much indeed, having seen the movie, that Ms. Adams won as Best Actress in a Comedy, because it's a movie about a newly-divorced naif who marries slick con man/artist manqué Walter Keane, who starts passing her kitschy portraits of big-eyed kids of as his own work as soon as they start achieving inexplicable success. (I don't know why I just said that "kitsch sells" is inexplicable - this is, after all, America.)  As soon as Mrs. Keane pipes up that she doesn't find this very honest of him, Mr. Keane sets fire to the very nice house they bought with all those Big Eye big bucks.  The husband is played by Christoph Waltz, so the audience pretty much knows where it's going from the start... I guess Christopher Walken was unavailable.

So while it was fun to see San Francisco at the tail end of the Beat era (the extras are costumed like the Mad Magazine beatnik parody of My Fair Lady, and I kept waiting for somebody to start warbling "Wouldn't it be Kerouac?") and the courtroom scene where nasty Mr. Keane runs frantically from one side of the witness stand to the other as he ineptly represents himself (and here, I was irresistibly reminded of some of William Shatner's more bravura moments as Captain Kirk) was certainly good for a giggle, I wouldn't exactly call the movie a comedy.

I will, however, admit that when Terence Stamp, representing the haute and haughty Times art critic John Canaday (you remember John Canaday? No? The one who wrote the four volume boxed set The Lives of the Painters?  Not to mention The Artful Avocado?) reads aloud that Mrs. Keane has gone public with the information that it is she and she alone who has perpetrated the Big Eye paintings upon the American public, lowers his newspaper in disbelief, and demands, "Good God...Who would admit to that?" I guffawed aloud.

Sadly, nobody else in the theater seemed to get the joke.  I'll bet they all have Big Eyes hanging on their walls.

Feed the Birds!

A friend of mine recently mentioned in a group email that she had put out suet for the wild birds that frequent her backyard, even though she finds suet disgusting.

To this, another of my friends (a Harlem-reared transplant to Rockland County who, like myself, finds all the flora and fauna of country life a frequently enchanting, if sometimes bewildering, change from, "Ugh, a rat . . . Ugh, a water bug . . . Ugh, a rat with wings . . . Echh, there goes a             landlord . . ."  responded, "What's suet? I wanted to feed the birds in my back yard and figured I would just throw the food on the ground. I bought a bag of food for wild birds, have no idea if it's the right kind. Not a good idea? Let me know."

Now, this was something I did happen to know about because of my summers in the Adirondacks, and I responded to her query as follows:

If you throw the birdseed on the ground, the squirrels will grab it all, and they will frighten the birds off, too. Finding a squirrel-proof feeder is a challenge most of us who like to do the St. Francis of Assisi act have faced.  The first time you see what looks like a ratty grey boa hanging over your feeder, you think, "How cute! Gee, that squirrel is smart!" Then you inspect your feeder a couple of days later and you realize your expensive feeder looks like a teenager whose pack of condoms failed to come out of the vending machine has been whaling on it with a tire iron, and suddenly you don't think the squirrels are so cute and so smart anymore, you're thinking, "I wanna kill that greedy little m.f.!"  The idea is to somehow hang the feeder on a wire that is so thin and so long that that the squirrel can't climb down it, or leap onto it from a branch, or do any of those other annoying acrobatic tricks at which squirrels excel.  There are also feeders with things called "squirrel baffles" on them, but not all of them work.

Suet is rendered animal fat and it looks like Crisco.  The birds like it, for some reason.  The English make puddings out of it.  The birds and the English are weird.

This provoked a barrage of emails from the other ladies on our email list, all of us more or less in agreement that squirrels are a pain in the ass if you happen to like feeding birds, that nobody likes pigeons (that would be the above-mentioned "rats with wings"), and that the English are weird.

The subconscious being a strange and terrible place, all of this led to the moment after lunch when I was finally disentangling the lights from among the dessicated branches of the Christmas tree (snap! crackle! pop!) and found myself cheerily bellowing that song about the bag lady from Mary Poppins. I haven't thought of it since I was about six years old, but, to my horror, I find that when I sing it today I still make the same mistake I made when I was a tiny child and didn't know what an apostle was:

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Feed the birds," that's what she cries
While overhead, her birds fill the skies

All around the cathedral the saints and opossums
Look down as she sells her wares
Although you can't see it, 
You know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares...

Actually, if there's an opossum looking down upon me, I'd just as soon have it be a smiling one.

Deconstructing the Tree

Happy New Year, possums!

No, wait - that's Dame Edna, not me.  In any event - it's 2015, so let's agree to make the best of it.

I am reluctantly getting it in gear and taking down all the festive holiday sparklies - reluctantly, for the twofold reasons of sloth and that fact the sparklies sort of cheer you up whenever you look at them (until it's around April, at which point you stop feeling cheerful every time you look at the dry, dry needles on and under the tree and start feeling badly about yourself for being a slovenly person who harbors unnecessary fire hazards in the living room.)

In point of fact, the tree is already what my Hamburg-born Dad would describe, when displeased with the quality of the luncheon meat, in his delightful Plattdeutscher idiom as "trocken wie 'n Katzen's Arsch" - an untranslatable and somewhat unprintable phrase that used to elicit shrieks of "Heinz! Sei doch nicht so ordinair!" (which I am more than happy to translate as meaning"Don't be so vulgar!") from my mother.  She, more gently bred, attained her maturity on a small farm in a tiny village north of Lübeck, where, it seems, the aridity of liverwurst somewhat past its prime was not described by comparing it with feline posteriors.  Naturally, I learned considerably more colloquial German from Papi than I did from Mutti, a circumstance that once led my paternal grandmother to burst into hysterical tears and a perfect torrent of remonstration and lament after I'd amiably advised her, in my very best Plattdeutsch, to open up a can of whup-ass on my brother, and, upon being questioned as to who on Earth had taught me such a nasty phrase, had jerked a thumb towards my progenitor and retorted, ungrammatically but truthfully, "Him."

Where was I?  Yes - the tree.

It is a large tree, and a beautiful tree.  It is covered with delicate glass tchotchkes, which I have been collecting ever since my son was born. Today happens to be his nineteenth birthday, so there you go - that's a lot of years, and there are lots and lots of little glass hummingbirds, ceramic dogs that we imagine vaguely resemble dogs we have owned in the past, and blown-glass globes that look like varicolored soap bubbles.

The fact that it's my son's birthday reminds me that the Christmas tree was instrumental in procuring his presence onto the planet in the first place.  The fact is - and I'm not proud of this - I had baby fever, but my then-husband (now my former husband) did not.  Well, these things happen, and a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do, so I flatly refused to have a Christmas tree in the house until we had a child to share the holiday with.  It was scummy emotional blackmail at its finest, and I'm not proud of it, as I say, but - Well, actually, that's a lie.  I'm very proud of it.  It was a brilliant move on my part, and it got me my kid.  Happy birthday, Caleb!  There are no depths to which I will not stoop for your sake!  (Several Gentle Readers are now shaking their heads and murmuring, "No wonder she's divorced.")

There have been several years (notably high school years) when my son was Too Cool to evince any interest in Christmas, other than to disdainfully rip open his packages, sigh, and return to his room with a general air of discontent and ennui.  These were trying years, dear Gentle Reader, and I wondered whether I should just say "To hell with it" and donate everything to the Franciscan Thrift Shop on 96th Street, rather than schlep it all up to Rockland County when we moved last June - particularly since the man to whom I am now married is Jewish and regards all Christmas-related bling with gently ironic head-shake and a sotto voce "Oy...goyishe kitsch."

But I once read in dear Judith Martin's Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children that, if one perseveres through the years of eye-rolling and contumely, the day will come when the festive season rolls around and you resignedly suggest omitting the items that once provoked the worst of the groaning, only to be met with cries of, "What?! We can't not have the Advent calendars with the little pieces of bad chocolate that taste like 95-year-old cardboard! That's my favorite part!"  And, Miss Manners goes on to assure her Gentle Readers, when that day comes, you will know that you have succeeded in Creating a Tradition.

So this was the year that my son, now a college freshman (and thus, by definition, so intrinsically cool that he no longer needs to prove that he is cool) moseyed into the living room (well after his stepfather and I had done all the grunt-work of getting the tree inside and up the stairs, pounding it onto the stand, and stringing the miles and miles of lights) as I was unpacking the boxes of ornaments, helped himself to one of his grandmother's special holiday cookies, and inquired nonchalantly, "Hey, Ma...setting up the tree? Why didn't you call me?"

Stunned, I stammered something about not wanting to bother him for so frivolous an activity as tree ornamentation while he was busy writing papers on such weighty subjects as Anachronism In the Depiction of the Ancient World in Modern Film.  To which act of maternal deference he replied, with an apparent sincerity that nearly sent me into a swoon under the tree, "Are you kidding?  I wouldn't miss it!"

We then spent a splendid 45 minutes unwrapping everything from swathings of tissue paper, commenting on when and where each article had been acquired, making the red-coated wooden soldier with "New Brunswick, Nova Scotia" inscribed on the back do jumping jacks by pulling on the string, debating the particular placement of each crystal ornament for its maximal sparkle potential against the lights, greeting the emergence of each favorite trinket with cries of, "Oh, I totally forgot we had this one!" and at last being presented by my son with the little red,white, and green bookworm in the striped stocking cap and the words, "This one is yours, Mom. Where do you want to put him?"

"Her, not him," I said, and hung the bookworm up next to the little needlepoint birdhouse with the real birdseed inside that a very dear relative-by-courtesy had once made for us.

At last we stood back, squinted at our work with a critical eye, and pronounced it good.

"We're finished!" I caroled to my husband, who was playing chess on his laptop and trying to ignore what was going on in the living room.

"Great, great," he replied, with a perfectly unconvincing semblance of enthusiasm and nary a glance away from the screen. "Looks amazing.  You guys wanna go out for Chinese?"

There are traditions and traditions.  Lo and behold - Miss Manners was right.  Christmas trees and Chinese take-out...holiday fusion at its best.