Namaste, Bitches

Just in case:

My super-simple Citrus Pepper Rice

2 cups uncooked Rice, whatever kind you use - white, brown, jasmine, Texmani. I like sticky rice, so I don't rinse it much before cooking, just enough to check for rocks & bugs. If you like fluffier rice, rinse it, soak it, rinse it, drain it thoroughly.

Half & half chicken broth & water to cook said rice according to its individual cooking needs, w/a little salt.

2 decent-sized green bell peppers (aka capsicums), diced

1 decent-sized red bell pepper, diced

Shredded carrots, about 1 cup or so, more if you're making more rice

1/2 tsp. fresh grated ginger or powdered ginger to taste preferences - I like my rice a little zingy.

1/4 tsp. powdered nutmeg (or 1/8 tsp. fresh grated nutmeg)

Juice of 1/4 medium lemon & 1/2 medium orange

Finely chopped green pepper, about 2 - 3 stalks

I use a rice cooker, so my broth/water, salt, grated carrots & rice all go in the pot at the same time. If you're doing it on the stove top, I think you have to boil the broth/water & then add the rice, so I'd put the carrots in the broth/water & bring to a boil. Shredded carrots don't get mushy/overcooked easily.

When about half of the liquid has been absorbed by the rice, add the diced peppers. You can sauté the peppers first in a little oil if desired.

When most of the liquid has been absorbed by the rice, add the lemon & orange juice, ginger, nutmeg & green onions. Taste & see if you need more ginger.

Let the rice sit off-heat or 'rest' for 5 - 30 min, depending on individual texture preferences.

Nom!

I picked up some rather inexpensive swordfish steaks tonight at Smith's - $4.99 a lb & I got two nice thick steaks. I broiled them w/salt, pepper & a little Balsamic & Olive Oil salad dressing (from Trader Joe's - it has a smoky black-pepper flavor, savory but not too vinegary)... I get nervous about thick slabs of fish because Rob is just learning to enjoy sushi & sashimi, and a wide strip of raw fish in the center of a filet would turn him off of it in a heartbeat.

I don't like to toot my own horn, but that fish was the absolute most fantastic thing I've ever cooked in my entire life. I have never had swordfish that good in a restaurant or cooked by any other person. It was done all the way through, but still tender and juicy, and the thin strip of skin on the outside of the filet was crispy, and the flavoring was amazing. Every bite made me want to just burst into tears because it all came out so good and I was lucky enough to get to eat it.

One single pink & white flower... and another on the way :D I noticed the first bud day before yesterday - it was all tight and green. Yesterday, it was a tightly rolled-up flower. This morning it unfurled into all its pink and white glory.

The best flowers are always trumpet-shaped... and sometimes bell-shaped.

One vine has reached the top of the trellis. I've been having a problem w/the lower leaves turning yellow & falling off, so I looked it up & turns out I've been overwatering them. I'm going to need to get stakes for my sunflowers soon because right now they're acting like vines, crawling all over the pot they're in.

I'm attempting to bake coffee-flavored flan for the office potluck tomorrow. The first batch of caramel for the topping didn't make it - it seemed like the sugar reabsorbed the water and turned back into sugar. The second batch was perfect. The first 5 eggs got scrambled in the process of making the custard... the second I used the double-boiler method. And then I managed to pour about half a cup of water into the flan when I added water to the bain marie. Nice, real nice. Soooo, I'm hoping it'll still be okay. Otherwise, I'm making an early-morning trip to a bakery.

( Morning Glory flower )

So, I've been cooking. Made a pot roast Wednesday. Made the sausage/cabbage/beer thing last night. That totally rocked, btw. I sauteed some onions & sliced carrots, added fresh cabbage, poured half a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale on it, a coupla spoonfuls of apple cider vinegar & some apple cider, sliced some kielbasa & beef smoked sausage & just let it simmer for awhile. I was worried that the vinegar would be too vinegary, but it added this fantastic tartness to the cabbage instead that offset the sweetness of the carmelized onions & carrots & regular apple cider. It turned into flavor instead of remaining vinegar. So tonight, I had some pesto-stuffed tortellini from Trader Joe's, & some shrimp. I decided I was going to make a bechamel sauce.

Now, this is really my biggest shame. I cannot make sauces or gravies. I mean, here I am, one half Cajun & one half Tennessee dirt farmer & I cannot make a gravy to save my life. I have to settle for pre-made cornstarch preservative-laden things that come from envelopes & jars. And I don't like the jarred alfredo sauces - they just taste kind of blegh. My cooking is sort of a fusion between Southeastern & new Western... mainly because stir fry is easier than say, gumbo.

Now, roux is basically a fat and a starch, slowly cooked over an even heat, used as a thickening base for almost every kind of gravy or cream sauce known to mankind. It's just butter and flour. Should be easy. It's not. There's a definite art to making roux.

So, I melt some butter & let the water cook out of it. I added flour & began to stir. Much to my utter amazement, it actually turned into roux. I was flabbergasted. By the gods, it actually went through the stages - first it was just flour in butter. I stirred to coat all those flour molecules with fat molecules and it became a grainy white sauce. I let it simmer for about thirty seconds, stirred it and watched as it began to turn golden, and slightly less grainy. I could actually taste that slightly toasted, nutty flavor flour is supposed to get when it is made into a roux. I was like, holy crap, it's actually working! So I added minced garlic & pepper & some nutmeg & the flavor came alive. Then I added milk & all that lovely golden creamy sauce turned into gray lumpy mush. However, I began whisking it like an absolute fiend, breaking up all the oatmeal-looking lumps as I brought it to a boil & it smoothed out into, well, bechamel sauce. Then I turned my attention to the shrimp & things went horribly, horribly wrong. That smooth, creamy, garlicky sauce turned into pancake batter. Smooth pancake batter, but extremely thick pancake batter. Argh. And ew. So I tossed half the shrimp in, plopped a blob of it on my tortellini & ate it anyway. Now I feel like I am full of grade-school paste. Garlicky, shrimpy paste. It tasted really good, and the texture wasn't gritty or lumpy or greasy, it was just thick and kind of gooey. It didn't really spread over the pasta so much as sit on top of it until the weight made it sink through the center of the pasta like a fat kid in a ball bin at McDonald's.

Eventually, I will get the hang of it. Both my parents were Southern, roux should run in my veins instead of blood!

I have a numb spot on the sole of my left foot, and my left big toe is numb, too. Instead of thinking about diabetes, my mind wanders to more exotic climes - elephantiasis, leprosy. I get hot & cold chills, flu-like aches, reach a point in my sleep where I wake up because I'm super-heated and sweating - and think about malaria and t.b. instead of mold in the ventilation system or the onset of pre-menopause, or just it's that time in the process of sleep where the body stops acting like a heat sink and instead turns into a radiator. I don't believe in chronic fatigue or sick building syndrome... but I find myself worrying about cholera sometimes. Diseases that weren't around anymore (with the exception maybe of malaria, which is on an upswing - yeah, there's no such thing as global warming) when I was born.

I also started wondering if depression could be diagnosed with a simple blood test, much like cholesterol or diabetes? Can serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine levels be measured and quantified? I've never gotten a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or schizotypal personality disorder... but so many of the physical things I've been feeling - tired all the time, muscles aches, joint pain, fatigue, back pain, insomnia - all those things that aren't anything that show up on any test but still feel wrong - can all be linked w/depression.

I know the numbness in my foot & toe are probably just from wearing crappy shoes and standing up all day after long periods of sitting around. Possibly there's some extra strain on my poor twisted spine & it's put pressure on my sciatica, which is sending funky signals to my left foot. I've also stopped my daily stretching routine, haven't been to the gym in a month, stopped paying attention to my diet... I'm just fucking tired all the time. It's much more convenient to do nothing.

There is some movie on SciFi having something to do w/a mutant creature of some kind & it instantly brought to mind the two flicks from the '70's that horrified me as an 8-year old or so: Prophecy: The Monster Movie & The Legend of Boggy Creek.

In other news, I got a mandoline. Not a jangly stringed instrument, but a fancy vegetable slicer. It is extremely sharp, and I don't know if I'll be able to use it safely ever again since it's tasted human blood. It may demand further sacrifices or start threatening to summon dark portals to Emeril's soundstage or something now. I don't know exactly where that small slice of me went, either - I was doing something stupid & trying to use it to slice a garlic clove. It was effective. Either Rob's a cannibal now or I am, but I'm not sure exactly what it could be considered if you're eating yourself. Is it more cannabalism or is it just recycling?

Went to physical therapy. I start out my session now with 10 minutes of walking on the treadmill. I'm supposed to concentrate on the whole heel-toe walking thing. I meditate while I'm walking. I chant the "Nam Myoho" mantra, one word per footstep. It's funny - I can close my eyes & walk at the same time, without the treadmill eating my toes or throwing me off the back. I concentrate on my breathing, one inhale per mantra, one exhale per mantra, so one breath for eight steps. I'm not really blocking anything out - I can still hear the chatter of the patients & gym-goers & the physical therapists & the assistants, the radio - two of them, both on different stations. But I'm not tuning in on anything except my footsteps and my breathing and the mantra.

Just watched the last half of Cirque du Soleil's Corteo on the Bravo channel. It doesn't matter how many of the Cirque's performances I see, or how often I see them, they never lose their magic. The acrobats and dancers and musicians constantly astound me and blow my hair back. The control and grace and balance they have... while I bounce off walls, even when I'm sober.

A couple of things occurred to me tonight that I hadn't thought about. They were using a teeter-totter to bound into the air & they'd do flips & come back down. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head - just as amazing as the sheer ability to fly into the air is the ability to land on just the right spot on a narrow wooden plank. If they landed too far up the board or didn't land on the board at all, it would probably cause injury, not to mention throwing the timing for the whole act off. Later in the show they were using a safety net like a trampoline to jump into the air & be caught by performers on the swings above, sort of like a high-wire act in reverse. Once again, if the acrobat missed the net & fell to the stage below, the act would be ruined & the acrobat would probably be hurt. In an act like that, not only does the performer have to know and trust their own body to land on mark, they have to trust their fellow performers to catch them in mid-air as they are thrown back and forth between the swings.

After the acrobats left the stage, a man showed up with a ladder. Which he climbed, with no supports, no one holding the ladder... at one point he slipped between two of the rungs & I and the t.v. audience all made that sharp intake of air, that "Ah!" noise, waiting for disaster, until he flipped his body around the top rung and was on the ladder in the correct position again. At some point, an angel dropped from the ceiling and gave him a much taller ladder. Shortly after he began trying to climb the ladder & was dancing around on it, a man came up from a hole in the stage & said to no one in particular, "Excuse me, there's a big hole in your stage there." & wandered off. Of course, I and the t.v. audience were all waiting for the man dancing on the ladder to fall into the hole. They kept showing one older woman who was watching from between her fingers. They panned back over the stage & the lights illuminated the labyrinth painted on the floor, so all the hair on my body stood on end & I almost started crying, but luckily I was re-captivated by the man on his ladder, who never did fall into the hole, but instead got swept away by the ladder-giving-angel.

Ah well, I may not be able to fly, but at least I can cook. I've discovered this Mediterranean herb blend so I marinated some little steaks in it and Worcestershire sauce... I had some thick salmon filets, & I took some breadcrumbs & Parmesan cheese, blended them together with a little melted butter, lemon pepper and paprika & pressed that into the salmon & squeezed some fresh lemon juice over it, baked it for like an hour. Flipped it halfway through so the skin could get crispy & the fat could render into the meat. Sauteed some zucchini slices & fresh asparagus in lemon juice & butter. Yum yum. I'm sooo full of fish right now. Smith's has had fresh asparagus lately & it's cheap, too. I've noticed that fresh asparagus doesn't have that foul odor canned or jarred asparagus does when ya pee. It also has a spring-green flavor, and it's the best when it's still tender-crispy.

I get these urges sometimes, to just have Rob drive me out into the middle of the desert, where I can sweat and dance and cry out for visions. It would serve no purpose in the long run. Even standing in the middle of the living room & hollering, "Ok, spirits, sock it to me!" would work, but why stir things up? I spent many years shutting things down, why tease the entities-that-be? Guess I'll just sit here & watch Shin-Chan.

Ok, so I've become a cutlery snob. Got myself a Henckels butcher block set. Lovely, sharp, sturdy blades. Every single one of them (except maybe the sharpening steel) can slice through tomatoes like a hot knife through butter. As we all know from t.v., the ultimate knife test is being able to slice nails, pennies, tin cans and finally still be able to slice a tomato. There is no way in Hel I'm going to subject these knives to that sort of abuse. I got a three-knife sushi set, too. Love it. I've only used it to cut raw unfrozen chicken, though. It's a wonderful thing. So Friday at the Indoor Swap Meet, we descended upon the 'As Seen on TV' booth & I bought the Vidalia Chop Wizard. Debbie had gotten one for her birfday, & I tend to trust Debbie's opinion on novelty kitchen ware. She said it actually works. The lady in the ASOT booth said you couldn't be a wimp about it, you have to slam the lid down. So this morning I quartered & cored a nectarine & Wizard-Chopped it into perfect little cubes. The gadget doesn't seem that sturdy, but I saw no bowing or warping & the thing is pretty freakin' sharp. I thought to myself, "Wow. I could make potatoes o'brien! Can't eat them for another 45 lbs. or so, but I could make 'em!" I found myself gazing intently into my open fridge, looking for other vegetal victims. Maybe I will chop some up for dinner tonight.

After the Swapmeet Friday afternoon, we hit the Meadows Mall. Right around 6pm, we were in the food court & Metro walked by w/a dog. They started checking behind the restaurants, so we decided maybe it would be a good idea to clear the area. When we walked out, Metro literally had the place surrounded. The cops were escorting people out of Sears & there were cops standing around with shotguns. Rob & I fell asleep on the couch before the 10 o'clock news, so we never found out wtf happened. Bomb threat? Armed robbery? Murder? Unknown, all is unknown.

I got an even nastier scare last night. Got a letter from the IRS. Not a check in a cheery little manila-yellow envelope, but a letter. My heart jumped into my sinus cavities & my left arm went numb. I finally got the thing open & read it... They can't direct deposit our refund check. Holey moley. Why couldn't they have just sent me the damned check instead of trying to kill me?

Rob's nephew's car is finally gone. Na na na na, way-hey-hey, goodbye!!!