Sculpin

I had a bit of an unnerving morning today. I’d stayed up very late doing the Emerald City Search treasure hunt, so at about 10:15 a.m. I was still dozing when my coworker Bob pounded at my door. He’d injured his back and couldn’t play his case today, the big demanding End of Life role. Could I do it? Please please? When does it start, you ask? Oh, in forty-five minutes.

Time seemed to slow while I decided. I hadn’t played the case since February, but I knew I could do it, and Bob looked like he was in a lot of pain. Knowing isn’t enough to keep the adrenaline at bay, though. ZAP! Run run run go go go! I slammed through the house at speed, talking myself through the case as I showered quickly, the old case notes flooding back to me, and then it was into the clothes and out the door and into Bob’s car and away we go. Poor extroverted Bob was already having a long day, and I hope I didn’t offend him: I forgot about social skills, I was that task-focused. The civilized veneer, such as it is, dropped; I was 100% doing the thing.

Half a mile from work, Bob gets a call: oh, hey, they canceled that session. *pant pant pant whew* It all worked out elegantly, but damn, that was a rush. I’d compressed half a day’s worth of preparation and performance anxiety into about half an hour, and it felt like my brain was on fire.

Nothing calms the nerves like making something. What I made was ratatouille. Almost all of this came out of our own garden — it’s been a great year for peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes. There are a hundred thousand ways to cook ratatouille; this just happens to be what I did today. A little rosemary and savory wouldn’t go amiss in here, maybe some cayenne, maybe even a tiny touch of lavender. Normally I’d add the tomatoes at the end, but these were so startlingly sweet that I wanted them to fall apart entirely so they could coat everything else. No need to peel the vegetables, by the way — nobody’s getting that fancy ’round here.

Ratatouille
(enough for two generous bowls)

olive oil
generous amount of garlic — I used about 2 T in roughly a 3mm mince
1/2 large onion, chopped
5 smallish, very ripe tomatoes, chopped (about 2-3 medium)
2 Japanese-type eggplant, chopped in roughly 1-cm dice
2 large zucchini, diced
1 green pepper, diced (I used a fabulous yellow Gypsy pepper)
1/2 cup of vegetable stock or less
a dash of vodka or other mildly flavored alcohol
a small handful each of basil and parsley, chopped or chiffonaded
three stems’ worth of thyme

Gently sweat your garlic and onions in a little olive oil until they’re translucent. Add tomatoes and cook with a dash of vodka, stirring often, until they’ve fallen apart and reduced into a paste. Add a little vegetable stock to deglaze, then your chopped vegetables. Stir it all up, adding vegetable stock as needed to lubricate the vegetables for easier stirring. Simmer until tender. (About fifteen minutes with this particular batch of vegetables, iirc.) Add the herbs and let them wilt and perfume the dish. Salt and pepper to taste.

This would be good served with crusty bread, or even as an omelet filling, but I just ate it as-is and was perfectly well satisfied.

I’ve just come home with the best garage sale score of my life, plus something to think about.

The score: a Pilates reformer with accessories for twenty-five bucks. And this thing is rock-solid. The same model is going for about a thousand dollars on Craigslist right now; it was about $2400 new. My jaw dropped a bit when I tried the machine out; I’d expected that I’d at least have to replace some springs.

It’s perfect for me. I’m perfect for it. We are precisely the right match for each other. I’ve got the half-decade of Pilates experience and the recovering back injury that makes mat work imperfectly tenable. And I am oddly serious about Pilates — I tend to treat it like other people treat martial arts. This is going to be fantastic for my recovery.

Here’s the thing: the fellow who was selling it wasn’t ignorant. He knew exactly what he had and I’d bet he knew what he could get for it. But he was an interesting man. It looked for all the world like he had made a deal with the universe: he would allow his reformer to go out into the world at an unbelievable price, and in return, his reformer would go to a person who would make unusually good use of it. I had the unnerving feeling that he was seeing me as completing some kind of magickal circuit, and that this was completely ordinary for him. When we were chatting, I mentioned the disc injury; I expected him to perk up a little in happy surprise — it’s nice to know that your old stuff is going to go out into the world and do good work — but instead he relaxed. He gave every impression of thinking, “Oh yes, good, this is the one I made the appointment with. I thought so.”

It makes me wonder — what would it be like to live with that faith that things will work out for the best? It seems to be working for him.

For a good while now I’ve been hearing what sounds like a call from both my conscience and my common sense to adopt a vegan diet, or at least a very much more vegan-influenced one. Some of that is for health reasons, some for treehugger reasons, and some is pure sentimentalism about animal welfare.

Now, I think there are many ways to solve that particular set of moral equations besides flat-out veganism. What I’m finding, though, is that the solutions I’ve been trying haven’t been working particularly well for me. I’d hoped that I’d rejigger my diet to be much more vegetable-centric. Mostly I haven’t. Given, this has been a particularly trying several months, and I did not completely fail. Still, I could have done more. And maybe with a firmer guideline I would have.

Unfortunately, I hear an opposite call from the summer sausage in the fridge. Oh, delicious summer sausage, you have made my blood a cholesterol dump, but you are so tasty. How tragic and outrageous it seems when Josh is eating summer sausage and I am not. How can summer sausage be here, but not be here for me?

I’m not ready to give up meat and dairy 100%, and I’m definitely not giving up eggs. (I keep three chickens who are in their egg-laying prime. Come on now.) But I’m taken with the idea of becoming fractionally vegan. One way to fractionate would be to play vegan on, say, every Tuesday and Thursday. Another way — the way I’m going to try — is to take a strict vegetarian half-day. For the next two weeks, I’m going to experiment: before noon, I’m eating like a vegan. (I might move that up to one o’clock for more vegan lunch action. We’ll see.) If I’m still craving the cheese sandwich in the afternoon, so be it.

My outs: if I have breakfast with friends and there’s really nothing at all vegan on the menu, I can swap the half-day from morning to evening. And I’m not bothering about honey, sugar made with bone char, finings, etc.

Fortunately, I like rice milk in my coffee, especially in summer. Seriously, it’s good — very light. It turns out I also really like that Red Star nutritional yeast. And agave nectar makes an ideal lemonade. Not that I’m worrying about sugar and honey, but still, there’s another example of a Weird Vegan Food that’s actually pretty great.

Today was my first day. Breakfast was easy: two cups of coffee with rice milk, and then pigging out on blueberries and apple chips. Hey, I didn’t say I was going to be eating only meals I didn’t have any regrets about…