I went downtown and snapped photos of some of my favorite things.  This pawn shop makes me giggle whenever I see it.  The sign, the charming gorilla family, everything really.  These photos say more about my town than I could ever express in words.

While I was leaving the house my mom yelled out, “I did my duty, I put weight on your bones before sending you back to Japan.  And ALL of it is in your BOTTOM.”  hahaha.  Oh, it is true.  It has been a delicious 6 months at home.

The fair came to our town, yay.  The rides were all sketchy and rusty and creepy and beautiful-looking.

For the Jedi it is time to eat as well. Eat, eat. Hot. Good food, hm? Good, hmm?

*ahem*  My dad took me to have breakfast at Cracker Barrel this morning, aww.  They now have a breakfast casserole on the menu like the one that they discontinued 10 years ago, so I ordered one of those, and plenty of biscuits and gravy, of course.

In other food news I’ve been searching for the perfect sweet/spicy/sour Chinese eggplant recipe.  I still haven’t found it.  I made this and it was OK I guess.  At the beginning I sprinkled the eggplant cubes with salt and soak them in water for 30 minutes to drain out the bitterness.  I’ve tasted the results of not doing this; it is pretty dreadful.  Also I replaced garlic powder with pressed garlic and like, quadrupled the amount, and added a generous helping of green onions.

In my last cooking post I said I was a sloppy cook, but I do recognize and honor cases where detail makes all the difference.  Hard boiling eggs for example.  Now that I’ve learned to make them perfectly by boiling them for exactly 8 minutes and then dunking them in ice water, I’ll never go back to being careless about them.  Gross grey outer yolk, your days are over!  I feel like the eggplant must be a similar case.  I imagine there’s some minute detail that preparers of eggplant do without thinking and so don’t bother to mention in a recipe that keeps the eggplant skin deep purple and keeps the eggplant meat white inside even while the outside is browned in sauce.  You’ve had perfect eggplant; you know what I mean right?

I would be eternally grateful to anyone who can point me to a perfect sour/sweet/spicy eggplant recipe or share their eggplant secrets/tips.  Maybe I’d even bake you Wookie Cookies.

I am apt to build a meal around a single impulse purchase.  I saw sweet potato whole wheat gnocchi and grabbed them without any specific plan, just thinking “Oooh, interesting”.  They’d been lying around for a while in the pantry, forgotten, but they came to mind while deciding on this weekend’s menu.  “Pesto, I’ll make them with pesto.”  Nevermind that I’d never made pesto before.  How hard could it be, right?

Usually, saying that gets me into trouble but luckily this time I was not being overambitious and naive.  Pesto really is about the easiest sauce anybody could make.  I loosely followed Chocolate and Zucchini’s (a food blog I adore) recipe, and I’ll confirm that she really really means it when she says the recipe is forgiving.  The grocery store was completely out of fresh basil, so I opted for fresh parsley instead.  Our family’s on an almond kick lately, so I used almonds for the nuts. How much of each?  You have enough spatial reasoning skills to approximate from the photo right?  No?  Honestly, you can just throw the following ingredients into a food processor, in pretty much in any proportion, and blend, and you just can’t go wrong.

hard cheese, grated
nuts
leafy green herb
garlic
olive oil

(she also suggests lemon zest but I had none on hand)

That’s how easy it is.  Save a tiny bit of the water from boiling the gnocchi and thin the pesto into a sauce while you heating it on low heat.  I loved the slightly different taste of a parsley almond pesto vs. a regular basil pinenut pesto.  What could be next?  Cilantro Pecan pesto????  Man, maybe that would be amazing.  I love flexible recipes like this.  I’m the sloppy kind of cook that prefers to use my intuition when I decide how much of something to put in (or what to put in).  I see cooking like jazz.  I never follow procedures.  I only approximate ingredients.  I just follow my heart and improvise based on how I’m feeling that very instant.

I find that I can’t do that with baking though.  Baking’s like ballroom dancing.  It’s best with flourish and emotion but requires military precision.

It made for a nice Saturday lunch.  My dad liked the pesto enough that he licked the food processor clean, like a kid licking cookie dough off of a mixer.

My mom and brother are away for a swimming competition.  They’re the noisy ones of the family so the house is so quiet when they are gone.  Since it’s just us, my dad and I cooked and served for a community pantry/ homeless shelter tonight.

Before you get the wrong kind of idea that I’m charitable or anything, I’ll have you you know that it’s 100% out of selfishness and gluttony.  The hearty southern food that we and everyone else make, let me tell you, it’s flippin delicious.  After we’re finished up, we fix up a plate of the leftovers for ourselves.  I liked the moment in “The Princess and the Frog” where the little girl’s dad makes gumbo for the whole neighborhood, and says her something like “Food is amazing, it brings everyone together.”  Who could say no to hash brown casserole with fried onions and sweet iced tea?  Most certainly not me.

oh the valentines things on sale at walgreens!

I love Valentine’s day.

I struggle to explain why.  I recognize why other people hate it, the cheesiness, the commercialism, the forced gestures.  I am not even a romantic person.  In fact, I winced when one guy wanted to celebrate month anniversaries, and grimaced at the beau who picked me up at an airport with a red rose (call me ungrateful but I’m sure I told him that I dislike roses, red ones most of all.)

I haven’t even had that much luck in love.  Even though I’ve had my share of boys, through circumstance every single one of the last 23 Valentine days has been instead spent with my friends and/or family.

Nevertheless I have memories of wonderful Valentine’s days.  The only way I’m familiar with is the Valentine’s day of school kids– decorating a shoebox with construction paper and doilies, choosing a candy to hand out, choosing which fandom should grace my cards, wondering if cute boy who sits to my right will finally realize that I like him because I gave him the card that says “You’re the best”, wondering if cute boy who sits to my right really means it when he puts “Bee mine” in my shoebox, but probably not because the only other options in his transformer box were “I’ll fix your heart” and “You’re high voltage”.

Things haven’t changed much since then.  Sweets still make me happy and ruin my teeth.  Tacky cards still make me laugh.  Boys still confuse me as much as ever.  But I still have plenty of people to love.  And I still get as much satisfaction from handing out Valentines as receiving them.