Oregano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano

Kids from Rockland County don't know shit about real drugs growing up, because our hardcore city parents wanted to give us a taste of the "good life" in the country, where the air is cleaner. We live a wholesome lifestyle that's hard for some transplants to adjust to, accustomed as they are to the networks of "Gotham City". It can be harder to survive if you're, say, a hardcore racist redneck "Welfare Queen" (no one cares about your insane ideas about some "confederacy": http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/07/confederacy-of-dunces.html), or a pampered Nuyorican playing the fake minority card you think you have as darker southern European looking to game a bunch of crazy white women from the dykey "Social Do-Gooder" class of condescending pseudo-intellectuals. Uh uh. Not here.

And that was part of the charm for us, too. We were such quick New Yorkers that our one childhood foray into the hinterlands of the Northeast known as "Pennsylvania" (it borders New York State), saw us immediately bumped up a grade or two, just for being able to read things like "maps", which are crucial for a successful urban childhood. The rural teachers in that small mountain town were both charmed and in frightened awe of us, because we could speak as children, too. How....odd. Yes, that's it. That's what our educated genetics were to their brand of "townies": strange! We considered it flattering to be their opposites, because even a toddler knows that the flip side of "bad" is "good", like turning over cards in a playful card-matching game, or sorting shapes and sizes to fit inside a colorful plastic ball, one of my all-time favorite pastimes as a very little girl.

It was a good variation early on in habitation among different types of communities: the big city life, rural mountain towns, and then the rather bucolic country charms of a newly settled Rockland County suburb, still ripe with farmland all around us. We grew strong and outdoorsy and independent, though the farm kids left us bored, and then that congealed into an excruciating pace that felt like an eternity, even with the advanced classes in a very good public school system, with our Regents exams and college credits received before our senior years. Waiting to move on while stuck in someone else's bad head is torture for the gifted class, like putting a "Special Needs" child in a foreign language class, just to watch them surely explode in a frustrated rage. It felt like that for me and my friends.

So, we did what every smart kid does while waiting for older humans to figure it out, get you out, or give you help that never comes until it's too late in its cruelly unnatural suppression. We naturally turned to experimenting with fruity wine coolers (kiddie taste buds=marketing genius!) and cigarettes, in the lull that's intellectually like one long hot summer with the constant drone of cicadas in the background, as a white noise we couldn't tolerate anymore. I took my PSAT's and I think one SAT test at the high school either drunk and/or high, just for the thrill of it. I had a nearly perfect score on the English side of it, without even trying hard or studying beforehand (surprise surprise), and I still didn't need any classes or credits to graduate as a senior. What would you do, if you were me and still a child in someone's disordered household? We all had the same problems.

Because my friends at school were also older by at least a year or two (in deference to my "Irish Twin" brother, because my parents forbade me from moving up another grade as was natural for me to do, so as to not offend him with his Dyslexia, nor compete with my mom's early graduation that she was coached through by her gifted parents, huge artificial advantages for them both), they got into a lot more trouble way ahead of me. They had already dated and lost their virginity, were on birth control and/or having very early-term inductions so as to go through college uninterrupted or, conversely, plotting marriages through intentionally manipulative early pregnancies with a big fat Catholic wedding, in lieu of college. 

They were shipped off to rehab and/or their grandparents' homes, both here and back in the "Old World" (because it moves in both directions in the Colonies: America for the Euros living overseas, and Europe for the Americans established here), or upstate to "juvie" and mental institutions, all before I had my first date, first kiss, and/or first real teenage rebellion experiences. Of course, instead of teaching me anything with their knowledge, they sought to one-up the house genius, but I digress. That was anything I wasn't already used to.

Kids began sorting out addictive preferences according to their genetics. The obviously bad kids hung out at "The Wall", smoking and listening to po' white trash heavy metal. The Irish kids hid their homosexuality from their uptight parents with dubious hetero links to suburban normality. Smart kids hid behind their grades and their ingrained roles as "teacher's pet", loudly bragging about test scores that were largely determined by the test designers' conceits as a scholar (publishing is like that, too). The rich Jewish kids already had Ivy League lawyer/doctor/dentist/chiropractor fathers who "made it". They just had to not screw up badly enough to wind up in jail. And then there was me and my friends, cooler than any one particular strata, and adept enough to straddle as many roles as we had to adapt to, taming stresses long held in our families as best as we could.

We developed habits and coping skills as we needed them, as we watched our parents' lives fell apart. We became parents, mentors, elders, and counselors before our time, inadvertently pole-vaulting ourselves far above the heads of the generation immediately before and after us, the good results of which you are reading about now, as the "X" that marks the spot for you to find treasure, on the road-map we laid as our joint beneficial futures. We became law enforcement, clergy, teachers, social workers, activist, artists, writers, and philanthropists, without the corrupted money inherited from other people's labors, because there was none to be had. We would have donated what we didn't need, anyway.

And so, when me and my friend Molly were bored in homes empty of mothers, we fiddled with grown-up stuff, like any teenager running a household would: we played with the stuff that was around us, and available for us to use. She delved deeper into drugs, alcohol, and sex, to a level that scared me, but I was interested in any experimentation that made time go by faster. We giggled as we recollected the smell of "pot" (marijuana). It kinda smelled like burning oregano! Kids that we were (and already experienced cooks, which girls were expected to know how to do, in our large traditional households), we found the spice on the shelf and dived right in. Here it is!

We had cigarette rolling papers, but no real drugs, because none of us liked the time it took to go into the cities worst neighbors for something as silly as dried-out weeds. Not worth the risk. We didn't have the money or the cars that'd make the drive into town either, scant as our working class resources were (are), because every single one of us had to have after-school job(s). We took our badly-wrapped pseudo "joint" (a rolled marijuana cigarette) into my mom's bathroom, because her small powder-room had a window we could crack open to dispel the strong smell, only to be promptly discovered by my "Irish Twin" brother now home from school, too. He banged on the door to scare us, and we laughed even harder as we tried to put out the burning paper in my mom's tiny bathroom sink. Oh, well!

What did we learn from this banal experiment in recreational party tricks? Well, since we'd already taken lab classes with dissections in junior high school, not much. Unlike other pantry items (<cough> meth monkeys <cough>) that the much harder and more ingrained addicts around us must have known could give you a "buzz", we simply found out what we already knew at the outset of our funny little time-waster: oregano is made for better things, like spicing up a Sunday dinner spaghetti sauce, but I'm sure you kids today are much hipper at this kind of stuff than we were back then, what with the decriminalization of cannabis as your "Medical Marijuana" today, because of its mildly narcotic medicinal effects, and all. GenX did that, too.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/340818/Better-Off-Dead-Movie-Clip-Nasal-Spray.html

Cotto Cooks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_water

When I worked out of the Brooklyn Public Library in Park Slope, I was often beset by the usual characters one would expect lurking idly about during the day, in a space designed for heavy public usage. My friend named "Cotto" was just such a person. He sat next to me huffing and puffing away to attract my notice, shuffling in his seat and looking around, until I finished writing my piece and my headphones came off. Now! He hit me up for my earbuds as soon as I laid them down to the right of me, next to his workstation. Sure...I was a little hesitant about loaning them out, since they're designed to go directly into dirty waxy ear canals but he looked decent enough, so I said "yes".

He thanked me and went back to his work, while I finished my day writing publishing-related emails and copyediting. After we were both done working on the public-access computers (just around the same time, wink wink), we easily struck up and conversation as he handed my little earbuds back to me. He was filling out a test online for a type of hygiene certification that was his boss' direct orders to him because (as he told me), he was a "chef". Aha! I always brighten up around other working artists, since we're rare in the real world. We have a lot in common creatively, and we share the same types of problems out in society. I told him about my website that has "food" built right into its subtitle because I'm on par with a low-level cook, even though I'm not certified to do professional kitchen work, which would be a whole other life trajectory that I do not have time for.

But he certainly did have available time, and from what he told me, it was definitely worth it, at least at first. He was working (at that time) in the kitchen that serviced the VIPs who came to see the Jets play football at the Meadowlands. Whoa! That's a big name to drop 'round the way. Good for him! Finding quality work is the biggest challenge a real working artist has. He said his boss was very strict while running his kitchen ("Top Chefs" usually are, since the competition is fierce and their reputations are always on the line), and he was "riding him" at work about his cleanliness. In order to keep this plush gig, he had to do coursework for a certain type of kitchen certificate, if he wanted to keep his job washing dishes (read more about Cotto's bottoming-out phase here: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/dirt-weed.html).

It was a start. I gave him one of my black "Illumination" stickers with my email address written on the back, and told him to keep in touch with me. He was new to the neighborhood, and very excited to show me the place he scored through a bodega contact about ten blocks from my apartment building. After our first meeting for coffee, he told me that his rented room didn't have a kitchen, and he was worried about losing his skill sets as a chef. Could he use my kitchen? Okay, why not? I was in the middle of an eviction case and in serious limbo. Who knows how much longer we'd have access to it? Besides, I hadn't eaten all day and I was feeling lightheaded from hunger. It was worth a shot. He seemed clean and respectable, even buying me a Chai Latte at the local hippie cafe in the 'hood.

We went to a nearby grocery store, and that was when Cotto quickly began losing his bearings. The old Nuyorican neighborhood had slowly changed from gentrification, with the typical influx of rich white out-of-town hipsters and "wanna-be" art fags, which seemed to throw him off, plus the layout of the store had changed with recent renovations. Where to go? Also, he had no shopping list, preferring to dazzle me with his limited memory. I wasn't that worried, because his food was free for me with my kitchen use serving as his fee, so I tagged along as he aisle-surfed. We left, bought some wine, and then he hesitated outside the store again. I forgot something! And that wasn't something a pro would do. Ever. Without a firing. Huh...

He also made a relatively simple Italian-American dish called "Fettuccine Alfredo" that I could have made in my sleep, if I cared enough to do so, which I didn't. Let him try to "dazzle" me with his prowess! I happily played the role of "Sous Chef" to him as a kitchen second (I like being an amateur, at times), thinking he'd enjoy being the lead guy after working at the bottom of a creative hierarchy, like those in the top kitchens of New York. I chopped as he added ingredients to the pots and pans on the stove, but my kitchen quickly threw him as a new environment for him to maneuver around. I turned my back to empty off my cutting board into the garbage for a mere second and when I turned around, Cotto had a bizarre wide-eyed look about him, as we watched one of my tea towels go up in flames.

Oops! He'd used it as a pot-holder in lieu of my actual potholders within easy reach of the stove (it was a small apartment kitchen), which caused him to let the corner of the small flammable towel drop directly into an open flame. Uh, that's more than a ten-point deduction, dude. I calmly put out the fire in the sink within another couple of seconds, and before he knew what to do, I had another tea towel in his hands so he could get back to work. The dish came out lumpy and overly rich, with chunks of congealed cheese clumped together in sodden clumps, which was his ultimate finish for me as part of any ongoing "Demo Team" I might have. No "personal chef" work for you, esse! Besides, after we ate, he noticed me as I laid down on the floor with my feet propped up on my couch, where he took up residence as my house guest while I sat on the floor, and he began to notice my beauty, with first one comment followed fast by another that betrayed his dawning nervousness about me and my excellent home.

After my housing deal went bust and I moved into his "Casa Crack Shack", we had plenty of more time to get acquainted, which we did quickly as I lead our conversations. Turns out, Cotto had to pick a training program as part of his release from prison, so he picked "cooking" at random, though as he told me, he "never really wanted" to be a chef. This, as he played his video games, chain-smoked, and then blew part of his city funding for school on more tacky "hood rat" shit, like shiny new gadgets and other things dumb stoners really like, but that's a story for another day. 

Suffice to say, after generations of a paid education with special ESL classes, free cell phones and public utilities, mass transit, welfare, Section 8 housing, incarceration, rehab, drug and alcohol addiction recovery programs, medication, healthcare, psychotherapy, institutionalization, and crime, we New Yorkers managed to completely piss away millions of dollars on one very sick Puerto Rican guy whose greatest feat of cooking will be passing out underneath a palm tree somewhere near a turista beach cabana back on his warm tropical island home, waking only after one particularly large coconut falls hard on top of his big round head, finally rousing him from his comatose-like slumber brought on by his raging manic obsessive schizoid bipolar identity disorder (because he likes skipping doses to bring out the psychotic in him: much easier to commit crimes that way), preferring instead to "slow-roll homie" his way late in the afternoon to shake down the wealthy Americanos who are already a couple of drinks into their Puerto Rican beach "vacay", paying for his spot beneath the tree by helping the cabana cook crack open a couple of conch shells for the grill, because that's all he can really do. Really. He's that sick.

The real deal: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Public-Policy/Social-Security-Income-%28SSI%29-and-Social-Security-D

The scam: http://www.disabilitysecrets.com/mental-impairment-claims.html

Asparagus

Welcome to "The Garden State!"

Local eaters like me eagerly await each new season that brings us back to the foods we love the most. It's kind of like getting a gift every single day, except we shop at our grocery store to feel wonder at our easy access to freshly grown food.

Most folks around the world don't know that every New Jersey license plate reads "The Garden State" underneath the vehicle's registered numbers, because much like New York, they have a lot of bad press to contend with. Ever see "The Sopranos" or "Jersey Shore"? 'Nuff said.

Trees, produce, and family horse farms are a big part of Jersey, too!

For "tri-staters" like me (an urban/suburban/rural area that includes the parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut closest to "The City" that needs no other introduction), we also know it as the state the grows most of our most prized and delicious fruits and veggies. 

The list of famous Jersey produce is like a "Who's Who" of the best American crops: sweet corn so good it needs no butter; rich, juicy tomatoes every Italian-American sweats over ("It's the sauce, boss!"), perfectly ripe, juicy peaches that melt in your mouth as the pit falls away from your hand when it's eaten at its' peak...it goes on and on.

Dressed with lemon, Parmesan, and sunflower seeds, pan-seared in butter.

The borderline between New York and New Jersey is less than five minutes away from Rockland County, so my grocery store naturally stocks the best produce that's available. My handy little iPhone app tells me about each month's new growth, and that's backed up by the stock for sale on the shelves, or at the farmer's market. 

Omelet with asparagus, toasted sunflower seeds, and sharp cheddar cheese, with a squeeze of lemon on top.

This week, me and my other media pals reflect the same great taste: http://newyork.cbslocal.com/category/cooking/recipes/ and http://www.producepete.com/shows/asparagus.html.   

Here's to you, "Asparagus".  I hope we did you proud!

The proper way to store it: in the fridge and in water, like fresh cut flowers. Fresh asparagus only has a 2-3 day shelf life.

The Bronze Age

My bronze sculpture.

Years ago one of my part-time jobs was "pizza-maker" at a small place in Providence. It was boomin' when I applied for a job that first summer in town, but it went down quickly from the owner's neglect. He was all about money, which pretty much guarantees that you lose the soul you have for your food like <snaps fingers> this!

It was actually the perfect lesson for master "Artists-in-Training", and there were three of us who worked there: Crystal, a beautiful girl with perfectly straight, long brown hair with a sweet attitude, Greg Van Zandt, a disturbingly talented sculptor in love with Crystal the photographer, in a relationship that didn't quite work because it felt forced, and then there was me, awkwardly stuck into their love triangle at the restaurant. The other worker was an Italian-American lady from East Providence, working class like our boss, and friends with all the native-born security guys who worked at the school.

Close-up of the casts' cutting.

Gradually we quit the joint, one by one, leaving us with less people, and then less customers, as he took the heart out of the business and walked away. People could feel it, and his longer-term staff tried to talk to him about it, but at that point, he was all about the "Benjamins", which culminated in me working the counter and the ovens one night solo, and you all knew what happened to me from that scenario. 

We were fleeing a sinking ship, and we knew it. The food had no more soul, which is a major shame because we served a deep dish, Chicago-style pizza that's still rather unique for the East Coast, and a Providence version of a subway sandwich that they call "grindah's" which is "a grinder" in English. Oh. Yeah, I never heard of it either. 
It's a food word that exists only in Rhode Island.

The details of the shoots that grew out of the potato.

Anyway, one night when the work was slow, Greg was in the back with me talking about, well, work. It was pretty much all we thought about, because that's the way they want it, "they" being the Master Educators/Artists who trained us. But crossover was always there, as our worlds collided between the kitchen and the studio. Greg was a handsome boy with brown curls and light eyes who reminded me of my Irish twin brother, driven mad with work. 

He started having "hauntings" at the old house he lived in, that he said he captured in his black and white photos (or so he told me about his crit, but you couldn't really trust a fellow students' word because competition starts to eat at them badly, making them do rotten things to one another), so I took his mental degrading with a grain of salt, thinking it would ease with time upon his graduation, not knowing then that our teachers' built into us a type of post-RISD "PTSD" that's part of our artistic journey home.

Such intricacies in nature captured in metal that has cooled.

He was walking, eating, breathing stress. As he stood in the back, chain smoking and leaning against a stainless steel kitchen fridge, he told me about some of his background, none of which I can verify to you today; that he was related to the musician/actor Little Stevie, and that he got into Cooper Union by crumpling up his cigarette package into art (the only object he had on him) to complete the 3D portion of the exam in the prof's office, which immediately got him in and which he turned down, even though it was a free ride. That's how exalted our school was then, as it is now, and as it will be forever.

A bronze patina over time.

He began a series of castings in the same way, taking an old potato growing in the fridge and dipping it expensively into liquid bronze. 
It was experimental, extremely hard to do with unstable materials that made it completely risky, and also very brilliant. It was beautiful. 
He had one in his backpack that he tossed to me. Whoa... It had the heft and surprising weight of a much denser object, and it was art. He told me diffidently that I could have it, which astonished me. We were so broke, we depended on the food we made for our customers because we ate it at home, too. 

A sweeping motion captured in its' curved lines.

I fed my housemates with the stuff we made, as well. He shrugged his shoulders, and explained to me that the first castings were practice. See how he cut it here after it cooled? It didn't stand right, and at RISD we study "The Art of Perfection". It just didn't make the cut for a class critique. I understood, but I also realized that I would never get an objet d'art like this again. After each and every wandering gypsy move I have ever made, I have kept it with me, and here it is, photographed in my kitchen: with objects both precious and plastic, light-hearted and serious, expensive and expansive. Thanks, Greg.

Atop the kitchen fridge: it doesn't sit right, so it topples over. I love it!

Chops

Extra cabbage my mom gave me from her Corned Beef dish will do nicely!

Years ago my boyfriend's sister (then live-in boyfriend I didn't want, then fiancé, and also including soon-to-be annulled tricky disaster of a faux first marriage) went to Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, financed yet again by his desperate parents looking for a rock star in their two kid rubble of a messy family. Never happened, but I learned a thing or two, just like I honed my innate business acumen and musicianship on the side: I don't have time for more art forms than the many ones that I already practice at an expert level daily, but I do love to dabble, with the understanding that my dabbling is also at the maestro level. 
It doesn't go away simply because my brain is solving other types of problems, even when I may want amateur status. I like the newness of anonymity, like any other careful observer does.

Voilà! My homemade cole slaw.

And so it is with cooking, too. I cook almost every single day of my life, out of habit and enjoyment, or from necessity and want, so now I cook at the master level. I don't ever want to be a professional chef who runs a kitchen (Oh, good! Another job for me that's hard, low-paying and takes years to pay out), but I like listening. My brief "sister-in-law" did the wacky school stuff like deboning quail and many mindless hours of repetitive chopping, but she did tell me some useful stuff from her classes like: 1) pairing wines with food is a matter of preference that serves the customer well above any other snobby food rule, because a pro kitchen exists to show people a good time, not embarrass them with their ignorance. Want a nice red with chicken or fish? Have it! The "correct" choice is whatever you want and/or what beverage you think tastes good, not what anyone else says about it, unless you specifically ask a Sommelier for advice sur la table. Nothing blows the deal of a deep-pocketed repeat customer than humiliating some bourgeois "Nouveau-Riche" type looking to impress people with their freely thrown cash, so don't do it. Skills!

At the stove every damn day, people!

Same with cookbooks: 2) they can't teach you how to cook because it's about flawless timing, countless hours of practice, and the spills and mistakes that come with real trial and error mixed with ingenuity and bravery, the hard-won experience of a daily habit. That's what I have, whether I wanted it or not, because if I want to eat really good food, I often have to make it myself. And so it was with cookbooks, too. I asked her what her best recommendation was, and she told me the truth, as told to her by one of her professors: 3) it's "The Joy of Cooking", any edition and any version, from any year. The author doesn't tell you how to do it; she gives you a basic template to follow, with versions and iterations based on your choices, preferences, budget, and/or or pantry ingredients on hand. She can't think for you. You have to do that. So that's what I do, in a nutshell, every single day of my life, and maybe some day you can, too, because I don't want to be single forever, people!

Enjoy the fresh new Springtime produce that's hitting our shelves soon. We've earned it.

Perfectly cooked medium/medium-rare lamb chop, a total Spring dish.

Another perfect chop: this one a pork "Scallopine" cut in brown butter.

Perfect sticky rice with sprig of fresh thyme.

One perfect (and tiny) leaf of thyme on a bed of fluffy white rice.

Dr. Martin's Mix

Much like my Mom's poor attempts at her half-baked feminism and her angered infrequent bouts of cooking that she rebelled against when I was growing up, (preferring instead to replace them with compulsive cleaning chores like laundry and washing dishes), her recipes also reflect her deluded, fractured sense of self that is so inherent with her disorders and her generation.

Much as I find her "I Hate to Cookbook" a sometimes silly relic of yore that is more akin in tone to old Russian satellites falling out of the sky than it is to reality, I found a family gem among her favorite recipes, as evidenced by the splattered pages of this well-worn recipe for "Dr. Martin's Mix."

Recipe for "Dr. Martin's Mix" from the " 'I Hate to Cook' Book".

My mom was drawn to it because she likes to pretend that she is a doctor (giving herself the name "Dr. Diane" when we were kids, like a commercial advertising a fake character called "Dr. Mom", made for selling cough syrup), given her science background and the many, many hours she is forced to consider her own challenging illnesses that were fed by a constant, steady pop culture diet of t.v. shows about similarly fake doctors popular in her time like "Dr. Kildare", because she also has open crushes on "out" actors like Richard Chamberlain, also a weird reflection of the warped sensibilities of her youth.

It's not real, but the food I make from the collected shards of her self that I put together on my own certainly are, such are the strengths that a "Master of the Arts" has always had, no matter who we are with, or where we are, out there in the larger world.

Hey, what's cookin'? Oh! Yum!!

Blessings and encouragements to you this week as you fight your many, many battles. That's the fun of life on our planet! Enjoy your time here, my peoples, because it goes by so, so fast.

Stick to your ribs food: perfectly filling on a cold, wet winters' day.

“Quiching!”

The perfect hot, bubbly, cracking crust of a quiche.

The grocery store had an amazing special on eggs last week: a full 18 pack with no broken eggs for $1.88 that I couldn't pass up. Would you? Could any halfway decent chef with half a brain walk away from a bargain like that, right in the middle of a really harsh winter? No, and  "%uck no!" So, I did what any respectable artist would do, by brainstorming meal ideas, first at my mom's house with her old feminist cookbook about hating cooking, which she urged on me along with her old taped-together-as-a-binding green cookbook with horribly outdated ideas. Of course, I already knew exactly what newspaper clipping I was looking for in her recipe box, because I remembered it as the essence of simplicity in a recipe, and here it is:

A humble, simply perfect quiche recipe.

Since my days currently revolve around simple as a life concept, I knew right away that this recipe was the basic standby I recalled from my childhood, because it seems like something my grandfather would make. Norman people are not typically fussy, overblown drama queens, nor are our shared recipes.

I gilded the lily (just like you would with any basic template) by adding mushrooms, onions, and good cheddar cheese, poured into an also-simple, easy pie crust from a box that just needed water added to it, with as few ingredients as you can make a pre-made, powdered concoction to be.

The perfectly flaky pie crust that crumbles into layers....from a box!

The result was perfection, and it occurred to me as I sat, stood, bent over, and alternately stooped achingly over a stainless steel bowl of egg whites, that I had just made my quiche into a sport, so athletic are cooking exertions without the messy clutter of stupid gadgets that don't ever work as well as one healthy, talented human being. 
Behold, human! I have made "Quiching" into a sport, and it is good.

I ate three pieces of quiche after it came out of the oven.

Food! The Wintertime Edition

I have a bunch of food pics that I started taking right after Thanksgiving, with the arrival of our very first snow of the season, and most of it comprised of hot, salty foodstuffs. Yum! Here we go, bangerz. 
Let's get into it:

Crack an egg in a pan, put it on top of a leftover salad, and call it "done".

Skipping breakfast for that second cup of coffee? Word! I got you, bro: go for it brunch-style with a fried egg on top of that already-dressed leftover salad and you're done, just like me. I have stuff to do anyway, and I want to get out the door quick, yo. Ain't got time for dishes and fussy stuff today!

Steak and eggs for breakfast: it's a dish every guy knows.

Same deal with this bitch right here: take leftover food from last night's doggie bag, add a cracked egg in the middle of them pan drippings, slice up a spicy white onion real quick, and you're done. You're welcome. (On a side note: this steak sucked as a dinner entree, but slammed as a late breakfast that became my lunch. Resting overnight in a fridge done it right, homey.)

Imported Italian grape tomatoes canned in olive oil. That's slick yo.

I found an excellently-priced item made by my local grocery store that was on sale and came in a can: these beautifully-shaped, perfectly ripe, whole grape tomatoes stewing in olive oil and imported from Italy. Priced right, packaged well. Also a done deal, and so friggin' fresh-tasting, it's like you picked them that morning from your Italian grandmother's herb garden with a handful of leaves from the basil plant, right outside her kitchens' sliding glass door that's conveniently placed for your optimal cooking pleasure. I know! I know. That good. 
I cooked them down in a sauce with some leftover eggplant for a spaghetti dinner. Yeah, baby!

A late night diner classic: the perfectly melted "Grilled Cheese" sandwich.

Sometimes, all you want to eat for lunch is a melted American cheese sandwich (that we call a "Grilled Cheese" sandwich), with some deli pickles on the side. I had it as a lunch almost exclusively for an entire year in my grammar school days, (sometimes alongside a bowl of Campbell's tomato soup that's made with milk instead of water, with some crumbled Saltines on top that you fish out as they go soggy, which is a really fun thing for a kid to do), so I can attest to its' long legs as a foodstuff that goes the distance. It stays with you, man.
You know what I mean?

Swiss-made, with stylistic origins of the Pennsylvanian Dutch who live here.

I found these imported Ginger cookies on sale in a cardboard display at the end of the cookie aisle that was priced to move, so I did it. 
They were just OK with a cup of tea (and all you fuckin' Micks know exactly what I mean, so don't front that you and your mam don't do that every single friggin' afternoon, yo), but I found that I loved the Dutch Swiss design reminiscent of our own Pennsylvania Dutch culture here (my family lived briefly in Pennsylvania) that has remained largely untouched and linguistically intact, thanks to the isolationist practices of the Amish who live there still. Quaint, n'est-ce pas?

Have a banquet for $.88! I can (and will) accept this as a foodstuff to eat.

I bought three different flavors of these cheap pot pies that were on sale for .88 cents apiece. 'Nuff said really: it's all salty, melt-y, gooey, hot gravy goodness. That's it, right?

More salt with hot gravy, meat, and potatoes. Please!

Don't forget an old reliable like this can of salt and gravy that's heated up in a small saucepan. My mom always kept it in her pantry for us to eat when we wanted something quick (that, or a small can of Beefaroni, yo), and we did the same thing during our college days on tiny hot plates in a small dorm room while living on a very cold upstate New York mountain top. It was priced right (that's reads as "cheap"), and I wanted it. That's what I can say about that.

A hard-boiled egg on half of a toasted and buttered sesame seed roll.

I had eggs, I had leftover sesame seed rolls that were going stale fast, and I had butter; I was also hungry and running short on food, time, and money, so this is what I did with those ingredients, and I had two of them in a row. Hey man, good eats to you today. 

Enjoy life and eat something today, will ya?

Edamame Salad

Weekday salad with leftovers.

I bought a bag of frozen soy beans in their pods, known as "edamame" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edamame), because I developed a taste for them in sushi restaurants around the U.S., typically served warm and covered in sea salt. They are surprisingly good, but for a table of one, a whole bag of them grew cold quickly. What to do? 

Some out of them went into batches of box macaroni and cheese prepared with cooked chopped meat and fried onions, an old college staple for budget cooking that's been an on-and-off  but reliable go-to dish in lean times, or sometimes when I'm simply in the mood for it.

As their last day grew near (the pods emitted a telltale fishy odor, and turned greenish brown), I finally used the last of the soybeans in a salad dressed with red wine vinegar, non-GMO coconut oil that I melted stove top, salted and peppered, with a couple of cranks from an Italian seasoning herb blend for added flavor, diced white Spanish onion, a few fresh basil leaves, some leftover sunflower seeds, et voila!

Happy eating, cooks.

Summer Foods

Fried pork chop with onions.

Plated.

Summer pasta with onions and Jersey-fresh green squash.

Angel hair pasta with broccoli, onions, and a light cheese sauce.

Fully plated, with toasted bread on the side.

Oven-roasted chicken, seasoned simply with salt and pepper.

So flavorful and juicy! Hittin' it hard.

Homemade chicken salad with ripe Hudson Valley apple and diced onion.

Eggplant tomato sauce with shells.

Breaded chicken breast with mushroom sauce and side of shells.

Shells with a mushroom and onion sauce.

Pork cutlet breaded with seasoned quinoa oatmeal.

Shells with meat sauce.