Why I Make Pancakes

While I am not yet eating eggs with a comb out of a shoe, there is dog shit on the porch, mouse shit on the counter, a pile of week-old dishes soaking in putrid water in the sink behind which festers a crust of black mold, and grain moths hatching from and having their way with god knows what forgotten stash of dry goods. There’s no use denying it, I live in a house full of slobby men, and I am one of them. I flee from the mess I can’t stand.

The sight of the disgusting, somewhat toxic kitchen adds an unhealthy layer to my morning grumbling: I am loathe to cook anything, and for the first hour manage only to put the tea kettle on. On rare exuberant mornings I might wash some of the dishes while the water comes to a boil. Most of the time, though, I just pace around bemoaning the unendurable injustice of having to prepare and eat breakfast. This morning I stooped to a new low by making quesadillas for breakfast. They tasted largely of rubber and heartburn, but there wasn’t anything else around I could imagine being able to stomach.

After sitting in denial of my bodily needs in front of the computer with a cup of tea, reading new emails or perusing Google Reader for new amusements, most mornings I end up making pancakes. It is difficult to explain why I do this. I, and perhaps you, wouldn’t think that mixing together pancake batter from scratch is the solution for someone who wants non-nasty breakfast with minimal effort. Why not, say, cereal? It is the result of a collection of interconnected, deeply entrenched kitchen habits. I never think to buy cereal. I often buy yogurt, thinking that I’ll eat that in the morning, and I do, but it’s never enough to just eat yogurt. What else do we keep in the kitchen that’s palatable for breakfast? Well, there are eggs. Sometimes, there is bread, and when there is I make eggs on toast. But somehow, even though it is basically the same ingredients, fried eggs and buttered toast are more nauseating than pancakes. Also there is oatmeal, in my mind the least vomitable substance despite looking a bit like vomit, but I made the mistake of buying steel-cut oats. They are delicious, but take about half an hour to cook properly. I don’t get the normal, rolled variety because why buy those when I have the kind I will never use? Basically, I cook pancakes to not think about what to make for breakfast. They are the status quo.

And when the kitchen is disgusting, it is still somehow possible to scrape off whatever grime is on the cast iron pan and while it heats get out the pyrex measuring cup, crack an egg in, add milk, oil, flour, baking powder, and salt, mix it with a fork, and wait until the pan is hot. It’s a ritual that can happen amid squalor.

The result is a very starchy, tiring food. Eat a couple of pancakes and you may just want to go back to bed.

Having written this, maybe I should invest in some muesli.

Sour, Spicy, Smokey Drumsticks

In moments of unfounded, starry-eyed optimism, I think of myself as one who can and will eat whatever. I think I’ll eat the dregs of the pantry, making strange yet nourishing dishes!

What such notions actually lead me to is standing lightheaded in front of the fridge, wanting something even mildly appealing to appear, and making myself sick with toast and butter. It is a terrible thing because not only is everything worse without food in the belly and sugar in the blood, but also in such a state it is impossible to think creatively about what to eat. Just give me something. Having fallen off the boat so to speak, I have been awash in endless Costco food items, which I choke down (whoops, there goes the ocean metaphor) in insufficient and nauseating quantities.

I realized that cooking for myself in a deliberate way is not an indulgence, it is a way to get myself to want and not just to need to eat. It keeps me in a stream of gustatory desire, so that I do not wither away in disgust. There is undoubtedly some psychological peculiarity belied by my need to control and be actively involved in the process of making food. But the point is, cooking is important, damn it!

And so we arrive at the last thing I cooked. It is in some way inspired by Adobo, which is not something I have ever made, and have only tasted once. Having been mostly distrustful of sourness in savory cooking, it is now a novelty that I want to explore.

2 tablespoons cooking oil
4 chicken drumsticks
1/2 a medium cabbage
1 large onion
3 cloves garlic
3 small dried jalapenos
juice of 2 lemons
juice of 1 large orange
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
salt (1/2 teaspoon?)

Sprinkle salt on both sides of drumsticks. Cut cabbage half and onion into thin radial slices. Smash garlic cloves and chop into largish pieces. Chop dried japapenos into largish pieces. Juice lemons and orange and reserve juice. On high heat, heat oiled saucepan until oil begins to smoke. Being careful not to burn yourself, lay drumsticks in pan and cover with lid or towl to keep oil from splattering everywhere. Brown both sides (a few minutes on each side) of drumsticks and remove to a plate. Reduce heat to medium-low. Fry garlic and dried jalapenos for about ten seconds before adding cabbage and onion slices and stirring to coat everything in oil. Increase heat to medium and fry vegetables for five minutes, stirring every minute or two. Add chicken drumsticks, blanketing them under the vegetables. Add citrus juice and smoked paprika. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover. Cook for roughly half an hour, or until chicken is cooked all the way through. Salt to taste.

7th Annual Oregon Chocolate Festival

Booths, whether they are in a market or in an event, whether selling food, trinkets, or political causes, have always frightened me. I think this has to do with how supermarkets taught me to approach transactions. In a supermarket, the closest one comes to interacting with the seller is in the checkout line, and there the cashier hardly cares what one buys. I have a feeling of relative freedom in a supermarket because nobody is watching me, or at least only a very general someone. I am just one among many customers in the store at any given moment, and no employee is really in charge of the place; they just work there. In a small shop, on the other hand, I find myself running toward some secluded corner first, to collect myself before, if i have to, making the foray to where I can be seen. There is nothing keeping the employee or proprietor of a small shop from being interested in whatever I’m doing, even though, in all likelihood, they are not interested. Booths are the worst: everything I do can be seen, and we might even chat about it.

When I see booths I think of the two open markets that happen weekly in Ashland’s warmer months. Markets of this sort in the U.S. today are part of a more general trend of rejecting bits of postwar capitalism in favor of The Way Things Used to Be, or taking the Old World to the New. The boons of the 1950s have become the horrors of the new millennium: processed foods are bad, supermarkets distance us from our neighbors, agricultural technologies are poisonous. The list goes on, and each horror has given rise to a burgeoning alternative. Although some of them are more nostalgic museum pieces than anything else, these are all good things, I think. But even if the rigors of economics accept them, I’m not sure I entirely can. The mores of the supermarket have been encoded into my being.

So when I discovered that the chocolate tasting part of the Chocolate Festival consisted in visiting a bunch of chocolate vendor’s booths, I was scared. What was I to say? How was this interaction supposed to happen? How could I approach the booth without its occupants noticing? Would they be annoyed that I obviously wanted to eat their samples and nothing more?

I clung to the water spigot, downing draughts of ice water as if it were booze and I were drinking courage. Then I began walking around and around trying to work up the nerve to approach a booth. I was grateful for the vendors who, without preamble, thrust chocolatey things into my hands. Sometimes there were conversational spielers who asked me questions, brave souls. Not trusting my capacity to keep up my end of the talk, I would flee from these when first possible.

One time my flight led me up the hotel’s stairs, trying to distance myself from the festival, only to reencounter it. There was some sort of barely polite spat between a chocolatier, or maybe a chocolate company representative, saying that the Chocolate Festival screwed up the description of his company. Or something. Or it was put in the wrong category. Or he entered it into the wrong category, and thus lost the contest. Part of the Chocolate Festival is a judged chocolate contest. It’s a big hullaballoo, I imagine. He called the mistake “very embarrassing for me.” They argued for ten minutes, saying the same things over and over, while I sat on the stairs a floor above them. Nothing could be done, there was nothing he seemed to want or could want other than to let them know that they will never be forgiven. And the staff he was bitching at, in turn, could only apologize for their alleged error, and self-justify.

But down the stairs among the booths, any dissonance between chocolatiers and festival is invisible. In the end it is largely self-destructive to try to signal one’s dissatisfaction with the means of enunciation one is given. Although occasionally it can be quite lucrative.

Somehow, despite my skittishness, I managed to make my way to each booth. Well, I was guided through the gauntlet by a Chocolate Festival veteran. She said she has “plenty of taste but no standards.” This also describes my relationship with chocolate rather well. I am by no means a connoisseur, but some things I sampled at the festival, for whatever reason, I reacted viscerally to. Everything there tasted like chocolate--well, okay, the raw chocolate didn’t quite--but some things surprised me. Some of the most memorable bites follow.

There were the delightfully gooey, dark truffles from Branson’s Chocolates. I completely agree with their purveyor who said that’s how she likes ‘em, disdaining the stiff variety of truffles.

There was Lillie Belle Farms’gorgonzola chocolate spread. Contrary to their cute purple logo, they revel in trendy chocolate juxtapositions. There was chocolate with bacon, chocolate with tons of hot chili, and chocolate with local gorgonzola cheese. This last was like milk chocolate, but sharp with mold and saltiness.

Then we move on to the weird and the nonchocolate. Linda Shumate of PremRose Edibles was quite insistent on having everyone try her rose preserves. “It’s like eating rose water,” I said, which she seemed to find somewhat insulting. ”Which one?” I think she thought I was humoring her and that I hated the stuff, but actually I love it. It is a piece of high confectionary (or in the parlance of this blog, “pastry”) to simmer down enough rose petals to create a heavily perfumed preserve. Or whatever is done with the rose petals. I’m ignorant as to how it’s made. I imagine the arcane, perverse chemistry of “Perfume”.

Finally there was Zorba’s raw chocolate green tea ginger truffle, which is as much a mouthful in taste as its name. It was more than visceral. It eviscerated. Its green powdery coating puckered my mouth with intense bitterness. It tasted not of confectionary but of medicine, and made me feel like I had been given an inebriating dose of healthfulness. I felt dizzy. It was spectacularly awful.

There were a lot of raw chocolatiers at the festival. Jen Moore at the Jem Chocolates booth was chatty. “Have you ever experienced raw chocolate before?” she asked as I chewed on my sample. Of course. I should have guessed that one doesn’t have, taste, or try raw chocolate, one experiences it. She went on to tell me that raw chocolate is rich in nutrients. I blinked. Silly me, eating chocolate for pleasure. Roasting chocolate brings out the tannins she said, and hides the nuttiness of raw chocolate. She was one I eventually fled from. It turned out later that my ambivalence was as visible as I had feared. The second time I found myself there she said I (unwittingly) gave “good feedback.”

But I think, unlike booths, I dislike raw chocolate on principle. Every raw chocolatier seems to deal in the discourse of Truth. Processing and cooking chocolate corrupts its true healthful nature and noble flavor, turning it sour with tannins. I do find raw chocolate’s flavor refreshing in contrast to conventional chocolate’s intensity, but raw chocolatiers seem eager to take the word ‘raw’ literally and convince us that it’s better because it’s more real. Maybe I don’t understand because I just haven’t put enough effort into overcoming my entrenchment in industrial comforts. Maybe if I wrapped my head in hand-spun cloth, dressed entirely in Indian imports, renamed myself, and converted to Sikhism (in that order and not the reverse), I too would feel raw chocolate’s goodness.

Soup of Leftovers and Throwing Stuff in the Oven

Let’s talk about how meals happen. Because we are sitting down to a nice chat, and you’re the most indulgent listener ever, just dying to hear whatever half-baked spiel that crawls out of my mouth. You see, dear reader, for the most part making food happens out of desperation for me. I am horrible at planning ahead, and when I’m busy as I have been recently, I do the cognitive equivalent of grabbing whatever is within reach. Or I literally grab the nearest things in the kitchen. At such times, some basic forms of cookery are necessary frames to keep it all from getting too unmanageable both mentally and logistically. The past two days indicate that apparently I have at least two such shortcuts on hand: make soup of leftovers, or throw things in the oven. Probably I don’t have them on hand or in head at all, but somehow, thankfully, they happened.

Soup is probably the most well-trod way of using up leftovers. A lot of various things suddenly become commensurate when thrown in a pot of water or stock. I made soup of leftovers because I saw refried beans, fried kale, cooked ground beef, half an onion, a tortilla, and some mushrooms in the fridge, and I thought “soup!” And of course because it’s me, before any water came into the picture I browned onions, mushrooms, and garlic in some oil. And there was quite a bit of chili powder. And some possibly ill-advised cumin. (I couldn’t help but think of the overpowering odor of Rufus’s chili.) I know, these details outside of a recipe have you rapt, don’t they? Little did you know I’m trying to snuff you out in a blizzard of Irrelevant Facts.

A tangent: I actually have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to seasonings. (Or, well, anything really, but seasonings especially.) I am either falling into strange habits, experimenting blindly, or being minimalist (salt, pepper). The thing is, I only understand how flavors go with other flavors in the negative. If I’m putting things together I’m thinking sure, I guess this might taste good together, maybe. But suggest to me a combination and often you’ll get a response of “ew,” or an extremely ill-masked dubious look. I apologize for this particular knee-jerk of mine.

Anyway, throwing stuff in the oven seems initially like a wonderfully lazy option. But I always end up babying the stuff. Tonight the stuff was pork chops, onion, red pepper, and mushrooms. Pork chops cook quickly, apparently, because they were done in about half an hour, at which point I thought nooo they must be browned! and turned the oven to broil for five minutes. Then I put them on a plate, and continued to bake the soupy vegetables. Of course, I may as well have put them in a pan on the stove for all the stirring I did. Must’ve opened the oven five or six times. The problem was that the vegetables released a lot of water, thus stewing the pork chops rather than roasting them, and thus no sear. Maybe pork chops roasted with vegetables is just not to be. The only viable method I can think of is to suspend the poor things on a wire rack above the roasting vegetables, and basting them in the vegetable juice a few times. But that just sounds wayyy to involved. Although it can’t really be more involved than what I did this time.

Sorry, no recipe. Come on, you don’t really want a recipe for Soupy, Overcooked Pork Chops With Roasted Vegetable Topping, do you? There was once a time when this blog was about perfecting techniques and recipes. It has since devolved into me babbling about whatever the hell I feel like, sometimes connecting it to what I happened to have cooked recently. The defining change is that intentionality has left. I no longer cook things to post them on my blog. I cook what I cook, and sometimes take photos to keep the possibility of blogging about it open. In this case I forgot to take a photo of the roasted things, and instead you just get these photos of the uncooked ingredients arranged in the pan to go in the oven.

The Cooking Blogger's Nondilemma

I began composing this post, including this sentence, in the shower, which both is and is not an ideal place to compose something. It’s ideal because there aren’t many distractions and because there is no actual page upon which what I’ve written is visible. It is possible to crystalize by editing and editing, without really having to edit anything because nothing is set down. But the problem with composing things of any length in your head like this is that they never come out onto the page as you’d hoped. For one thing, it’s very easy to forget what you never actually wrote. Writing in general is not much different; composing in the mind rather than on the page just delays the problem.

Sometimes writing this blog is a pain. It has to be thought about (tragic, I know). It’s not anything like, say, Alicia in “The Good Wife” typing out an additional argument to a Legal Aid appeal in 48 minutes with a crowd looking over her shoulder and talking over each other to give her information. It is at least somewhat believable that one could actually do such a thing because the form and content of the document would be largely, I imagine, determined in advance. (Law students, correct me on this?) This blog, on the other hand, while it has vaguely defined a genre for itself, has not really settled into a consistent form, and its content often comes from intangible sources. Generally I just cook something, take a few harried photos, and hope that something a little bit interesting will suddenly befall me when I finally sit down to write about it. Often coming up with something to say about whatever I’ve cooked means writing in the most over-the-top way.

But what tires me about this blog is not the actual writing. It's that sometimes when I cook I think must I really think about what I’m doing? One of the pleasures of cooking, to me, is losing myself in a nonlinguistic activity. If I’m to post about what I’m cooking, not only do I probably have to take mental notes on techniques and measurements of ingredients, but I have to (well, okay, I want to) think of some way to frame the post other than “I cooked this. It was interesting. Some things went well and others did not.” This turns cooking into a queer experience: I have to create the frame and be within it at the same time. I get tired of being in-frame.

I may be making a mistake in, well, framing the problem this way. While being split between inside and outside, observer and actor may be awkward, is there really any time when one isn’t?

I have experienced the fatigue of framing in another way, through photography, in which there is literally a frame. I always say that I got tired of photography because I didn’t like that my vision was turned constantly into a search for a good composition. The problem as I saw it was that whether I not I had a camera, photography never really went away. Photography was a scene of anxiety: I didn’t want to miss an opportunity for a good photo. This put me in a very odd relationship with the passage of time. While every new moment afforded the possibility of a photo, I didn’t want each moment to pass because even when I took a photo to record the moment I was never sure it was the right photo. But I think what I ultimately ascribed my dislike of photography to was how it demanded that I objectify my visual experience. Things seen were there for one purpose: to be photographed. From inside my photographer’s gaze, I felt that this collapsed the experience of seeing. My complaint was that I didn’t want to see for a purpose, I wanted to just see. I wanted out. There is something paradoxical about this. In the politically naive way I approached photograph y, it was the most purposeless way of seeing possible. It created a fascination with form for form’s sake. But this purposeless seeing, I thought, became unbearably purposive. So I stopped, and considered myself free from the frame.

My idea regarding both cooking for a blog post and photography, I suppose, is that there’s a great blossoming of depth and complexity when I step out of my framing mechanisms. The problem is that this blossoming can only be felt in relation to what I want to distance myself from. So a few nights ago when I made dinner and I thought how sick I was of this blog business, I had a nice, peaceful time cooking. Cooking can be a good time to reflect in a non-deliberate way on things other than cooking. And while cooking my world consists of more than cognition; I feel, smell, and taste ingredients. But because I insist on an ill-defined idea of “the grass is always greener,” I have to wonder if what I liked about the experience was any positive feature at all, but rather what it was not. It was not a cooking experience destined for a blog post. (And here I am writing about it.) I liked the way the distance from blogging felt. It felt like privacy, which is not something that can be felt on its own; one can only feel private from some form of visibility.

Facebook is a massive nexus of transparency. It’s monstrous, and turns its users into monsters. We are there to be seen and to peer at others. Thus not posting anything on Facebook feels like privacy. But if there were no Facebook, I could not have privacy from it. And it produces privacy in another way: you may show all sorts of things about your life there, and yet live outside of your publicity. You may live bits and pieces of a private life because it is so publicized. Similarly, because I write a blog that is largely about my life, I am afforded privacy.

(If I say “privacy” one more time you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?)

Mickey the Milk Man

It has been pointed out to me that I am often appalled by food. For someone who writes a blog about food I have remarkably little enthusiasm for eating. I push away my plate, content more with the freedom from having to eat I have just won. Eating is often merely a distasteful means to an end. Maybe this is because I read In The Night Kitchen over and over as a child. Or perhaps I read it over and over because in some way it spoke to my tendency toward disgust. In either case the book is certainly related in some way.

There is actually a convincing case to be made for the latter possibility that I have always been prone to rejecting food. As a very small child, I am told (I don’t remember this), I went so far as to pick the bowl off of my highchair and throw it at my parents. They were the oppressors who had introduced this cruel new economy into my life: to survive you must eat. I rejected it as a theory for as long it was possible to do so. The doctor worried. My parents worried and, hoping that the problem was merely an uncontrollable enthusiasm for throwing food at them, bought a bowl with suction cups. Somehow, I managed to throw this new bowl at them too. Their idea of why I did this remained unchallenged. But today I am convinced that I did not just take pleasure in throwing things at them (though I’m sure I did). I think that I was appalled by the notion that this stuff in the bowl had to go into my mouth, and moreover that I had to make it do so. No more were the good old days of breastfeeding and bottles. I’m sure I’m getting the chronology wrong somehow, but after a rather extended period of drinking from a bottle, I chucked it into a trashcan myself, in a symbolic gesture full of melodrama. I didn’t know at the time what I had just gotten myself into. My will to self-determination was propped up by the idea that beyond the bottle lay not just dignity, but freedom. Nobody ever told me that I would have to eat.

In a way my childhood fast is the very height of heroism, and in its extremity reveals heroism’s absurdity. Here is heroism: one stands between a reality and a truth and throws a fit. I would deal with primal loss by viewing the world with skepticism and occasionally denying its vicissitudes altogether. I would not accept eating as my access to the good stuff. No, it was just some new shit.

Mickey of In The Night Kitchen has a much less problematic relationship with, um, milk.

Among other things, In the Night Kitchen is the story of Mickey's nakedness.

Mickey falls into the night kitchen under a mistaken identity: milk. Yes, that is his hand.

Mickey asserts his identity, his separateness from the night kitchen and its ingredients. He is not a part of their mad cake production. He is not milk. He is special. Or at least he certainly has no doubts that he is.

Despite his protestations the bakers still take him for milk, and for this reason chase after him.

At this point he has transformed as if by magic two foods into tools for his use: a jumpsuit from the cake he was baked in, and an airplane from unbaked dough with which to evade the bakers. The bakers in fact form no real threat. He is the master, almost effortlessly shaping all the world to his will.

Refuting that he is milk, he goes to get milk. This is the story, then, of the formation of Mickey's masculine subject-position. I daresay it's not a coincidence that the bottle of milk is an enormous phallus and the tallest building.

But to get milk and yet be separate from milk he must form a new relationship with the milk. Rather than being confused for milk, he and the milk interpenetrate. Distinction is just another word for friction. Interestingly he and the book celebrate this moment. To have rather than to be might necessitate objects circulating through you, but it's not a price. It's a kind of glory, it seems.

The milk, it is worth noting, dissolves his cake-clothing. Getting the milk demands nakedness.

Mission accomplished. Mickey relishes in his newly forged identity: he gets milk.

This is the only red text in the book.

He is restored from nakedness to the regular world and clothedness, but now a boy. His identity is from the night kitchen is not lost, but reflected: oh to ho. He shares this secret joke with himself.

Perhaps I liked the book so much because it offered a new, exciting possibility for my relationship with things that come in bottles. Maybe I threw away my bottle in hopes of becoming Mickey, the perfect boy.