Sculpin

We’re going to build a rack for the bikes pretty soon here, so it will be good for them to stop by and eat.

That’s Montida L. of Thai Fusion, who was briefly interviewed by Q13 as part of a story about the upcoming Nickerson Street road diet. I’ve gotten all too used to stories about road diets that feature angry business owners pitching fits. So Montida’s statement struck me as refreshing, so much so that I wrote to thank Thai Fusion for being so friendly to bicyclists, saying that I’d be sure to try their place soon. The other owner, Ranee, wrote back to say, “Please do stop by,” and to let me know that it’d be fine to lock the bike to the patio railing if I get there before the bike racks do.

It’s just all so civilized. It’s a breath of fresh air. And check out the site — they’re allergy-aware (a whole gluten-free menu, neat) and they have a Thai coconut cheesecake and a street-food menu… And, ooh, they do a meing khum. I love meing khum. Right then. Definitely on the list of places I want to try. It’ll be a good tandem trip when I get my busted lumbar nerves more in order, but I’m not sure I want to wait that long.

So. Out there in the atheist blogosphere is this loopy scandal of sockpuppets and lies and misogynistic fixation and secret identities and provocative accusations and the kind of ugly pseudo-journalism that Bob Novak would have produced if he’d been a concern troll. (Oh, Chris Mooney. I remember when you weren’t so obviously full of crap. Those were good days.) At this point I’d need a wiki to keep all of it straight, but Zachary Voch does as good a job at untangling it as anybody.

So there’s a lot of anger flying around out there, especially between New Atheists and the Nice Police. One commenter on Butterflies and Wheels really– well, we all have days when we get an idea and run it into the ground, eh? He’s been advised to brew some chai and take a breather. It’s pretty good advice. I can think of some times when I wish I’d gotten and taken some advice like that.

As usual, as soon as food is mentioned, my attention is thoroughly diverted. One good thing I’ll say for all that mess is that it’s gotten me to revisit my old chai recipe, which I hadn’t thought to make in years. I do like it quite strong, so I think I’ll start calling it:

Predictably Vicious New Atheist Chai
(Hat tip to the spittle-flecked ravings of Jeremy Stangroom for inspiring the title. All ingredients are subject to rational argument. Though if you want to leave out the water, I’ll look at you funny.)

1 cinnamon stick, broken
4 cardamom pods, smushed
4 whole cloves
2 peppercorns
a 3/4″ chunk of ginger, sliced and the cut surfaces scored
2 cups water
milk and sugar to taste
black tea (optional)

Bring the spices to a simmer in the water, then let sit to infuse, covered, for a good eight to ten minutes. For a caffeinated variant, bring the mixture back up to a simmer after about five minutes, add some unperfumed black tea, then immediately turn off the heat again and let it sit for three minutes. Strain and serve with plenty of milk.

The problem with being all, “I will eat what I want! Hooray!” is that sometimes what I want is to sit down with a spoon and a jar of tartar sauce; that’s too weird even for me. What can I say? That Captain Toady’s stuff is freakishly good.

Their cocktail sauce is also tasty. Josh and I have been doing a lot of shrimp cocktail lately with little wild Oregon pink shrimp.

After all these years, it’s finally happened. Josh has finally acknowledged the deliciousness of my own special sandwich trick. Vindication at last.

It’s possible that other people do this as well, but I don’t believe I’ve heard of anyone trying it who hasn’t heard of it from me. It’s a slightly delicate operation, but I promise it’s worth it. What you do is, you toast one slice of bread to a medium brown. (You’ll have an easier time if it’s a plain white or wheat bread without inclusions.) Then, while it’s still warm, you stand the toast upright on your cutting board and slide a serrated knife right down through the soft middle, parallel to the broad surface of the toast, dividing it into two ultra-thin, crunchy-crackly slices.

This is especially good with egg salad, tuna salad, or thinly sliced leftover Thanksgiving turkey with lots of pepper. Any relatively delicate filling would do. Today’s winning sandwich was a tuna salad loaded with minced celery and a touch of paprika.

I’ve been told more than once that slicing toast like this looks bizarre and borderline insane. Well. They called me mad at the academy, but I’ll show them. I’ll show them all! Muah hah hah hah hah om nom nom nom *crunch*

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.

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…

Any day in which I get to use the term “mangle-wurzel” in conversation is a pretty good day in my book. Even better, it made sense.

Why was I talking about mangle-wurzels? It’s unholy hot out there for early June, which means it’s about time for solar beet salad. It’s a sign of summer around here. I roast the beets for several hours in the solar oven at about 300F, then slip their skins off, chop or slice them, and chill them. Sometimes I dress them with a little vinegar the way Delores taught me, or I pair them with greens, but sometimes it’s just me, a fork, and a jar of cold beets, and that’s fine too. It’s all kind of amazing considering how many times I was threatened into eating my beets as a kid, but those were canned beets that’d generally been left in an open can for a few days. Slow-roasted beets are a whole ‘nother story.

A lot of people like baby beets, but I actually prefer that edge of bitterness that the more mature beets can have. Knowing this, Josh brought home the biggest beets he could find. They’re almost alarming in their oversizedness. If you want a five-pound beet, this is your time to hit up Whole Foods.

I hate to rag on one of my favorite institutions, but this was not one of the more successful Tilth Harvest Fairs I’ve gone to. We went up there hoping to get a case of the world’s best pickles from China Bend and some cranberry honey from PSBA. Mostly, though, we were going there to clean out the China Bend stall — they make these great salsas, good enchilada sauce, some killer dips… it’s all good. We brought the trailer so we could really stock up.

But China Bend wasn’t there (boo!) and the PSBA booth appeared much reduced. No cranberry honey for me. Shoot. Poor Josh looked a little shocked; he’d been looking forward to those pickles for weeks, and (so he tells me) he had plans for that salsa.

Maybe it’s been a rough year for China Bend, what with the fuel costs and the bad weather. Therefore we should mail-order extra pickles.

It wasn’t a total loss. We came home with a bag of keeper onions and some decent-looking plant starts. I picked up some kind of loom in a free pile on the way back. Most satisfyingly, we made it up the hill to Wallingford without feeling like we were seriously overdoing it, which was a big change from the last time we dragged ourselves up there.

The tandem gets a lot of attention with a trailer on the back. We’re practically a parade. One woman even went sprawling on the pavement because she was looking at our bike instead of at where she was going.

You know what works well together? Strawberries and rosewater. I’m having some homegrown strawberries with Port Madison Farm yogurt, lightly scented with rosewater and sweetened with a dash of turbinado sugar. It’s killer. I’ll have to try this with blackberries or raspberries.

Strawberry season is almost here! Last year’s strawberry-rhubarb jam was fantastic; I thought I’d can some plain strawberry jam this year.

If any of you would like to come over and learn to can, you’re more than welcome; let me know and I’ll drop you a line when it’s getting to be canning time.