Cheap Approaches to Regenerating Labour Power

By The Exploited

Lunchtime is not a time for celebration, merriment, or joy, but instead, serves as a tender reminder that the day’s servitude is barely 25% complete. As such, the lunches I prepare tend toward the repetitive and unoriginal but redeem themselves entirely for one reason: I do not die of starvation.

Because so little time remains to be spent on activities like “relaxing,” “bathing,” “sleeping,” or any other “-ing” that is not preceded by “work,” preparing food is no exception.¹ These meals will be evaluated based on the Labour-Power Regeneration Scale (LPRS): a quantitative method of ranking meals that consists entirely of arbitrary values, rendering it a completely ineffectual approach but one which has the appearance of legitimacy. This is what I have learned in graduate school.

The LPRS scale:²

E = [(P₀ + P_nL)/L]

Initial Preparation (P₀): This is the time it takes to prepare the meal, including clean-up.

Measured in: Minutes that you could be sleeping.

Subsequent Preparation (P_n): The time required to assemble the meal in a poorly stocked group room. We assume only the presence of a toaster, refrigerator, microwave, packets of crusty Taco Bell sauce, and chopsticks that were intended to be disposable.

Measured in: Minutes you hope your boss doesn’t stop by and ask how those experiments are going.

Longevity (L): How long will the food last before it goes bad? This is somewhat subjective. One person might strictly obey food expiration dates (not recommended), whereas another might dispose of the item once it begins to grow mold. I choose to simply eat around the mold.

Measured in: Days without overtime pay or sufficient vacation.

Efficiency (E): This is the time efficiency index in units of minutes/day.

But what about cost? Aren’t you also underpaid?

An excellent point, italicized text! The cost is readily incorporated into the metric:

ξ = {(C/L) + [(P₀ + P_nL)/L]}^-1

Cost (C): Total cost. Units in blood, sweat, tears, or some combination thereof.

Squigglypoo (ξ): Our final score. This is clearly a valid approach as evident by the presence of a Greek letter in our equation. We seek to minimize the denominator (units: (cost+minutes)/days)) and effectively maximize ξ.³

Let’s put this to work.

Midnight Chili

10 servings

2 pounds ground turkey ($4)
1 onion, finely diced ($0.50)
3 cloves garlic, minced ($0.25)
1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes ($0.59)
2 (14.5 ounce) cans Italian-style diced tomatoes ($2)
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce ($0.50)
1 cup water ($0)
1 (15 ounce) can kidney beans ($1)
1 (15 ounce) can pinto beans ($1)
2 tablespoons chili powder ($0.50 for remaining spices)
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons white sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce

Total: $10.34

1. Use a cheap mandolin to rapidly mince the onions. (2 minutes)
2. Brown meat in large stock pot with onions and garlic. During this time, open all of the cans with the Magic Food Revealer. (10 minutes)
3. Add all remaining reagents and heat for 30 minutes. Clean up while chili is simmering. (35 minutes)

Total time: 47 minutes

ξ = 0.093

¹“Complaining”, “whining”, and “being annoyed” are the exceptions as these can be performed while working.
²The name is an homage to such phrases as “ATM machine” and “MRI imaging”.
³This equation is also representative of the graduate school experience: seemingly unnecessary, overly complicated and avoided by anyone with common sense.

How to make any vegetable delicious

I have often said that I wished I could be a head in a jar, not unlike the titular (untitular?) character of Beckett’s The Unnameable. This sentiment arises in part from frustration with my lousy excuse for a body. I’m not speaking in cosmetic terms; I don’t find my body actively painful to look at, which is surprising, considering I’m an American woman and therefore expected to spend half my life counting my fat cells. I’m speaking in terms of utility: my body is clumsy, weak, and seems to have been put together by the guy who assembles bikes at Target. Not only is it never able to do anything right, when it’s wrong, it’s wrong in the wrong way.

Take my asthma. Asthma is a disease that turns normal windpipes into vomiting lampreys, as can be seen in the Cleveland County Health Department’s helpful diagram. (For the curious, here is an image of a barbershop sextet of asthmatic tracheas.) Generally, the disorder appears in children, and gradually improves or even disappears when they grow up. My asthma was mild during my childhood; if I avoided cats and smoke (and above all smoking cats), I was fine. Over the past few years, however, instead of improving, it has taken over my life. This may have something to do with the fact that I started dating a cat owner, which, assuming you’re someone whose T-cells aren’t idiots, would be like you starting to date a canister of nuclear waste (not that I’m saying we should inter The Exploited at Yucca Mountain). Naturally, you and your knight in glowing plutonium take all the necessary precautions, but there’s always that slight chance that something will go wrong.

Because anything bad that can happen to my body will, Catnobyl occurred. The spent fuel rod had already gone to live with her human grandma, but she had managed to contaminate pretty much everything The Exploited owned, so he kept it in the storage room. Everything was fine until he had to dig up the waste to transfer it to a new location, spreading the contamination throughout the entire house. Luckily, we were about to move, so after an indescribably hellish week, I escaped.

Unfortunately, Catnobyl has turned my T-cells into paranoid schizophrenics who think all substances in the known universe are out to get me, so we have to keep the new place scrupulously clean. That means that everything has to be disinfected, preferably not by me, before it can enter the house. We even have to wash boxes of pasta with soap and water, something I doubt even obsessive compulsive Italian chefs do.

Because we were too busy making sure I didn’t die, we didn’t have much time for scrubbing the peanut butter. This meant that I had a very limited supply of ingredients — not to mention utensils — to work with when preparing meals.

Luckily, you don’t need many other ingredients as long as you have the following:

Olive oil, garlic, and salt.

You may have already noticed that they’re pretty much the only ingredients in my recipe for pasta. They’re also the secret to vegetables that don’t remind you of an unhappy childhood:

Well-Adjusted Vegetables

• olive oil, about 2 teaspoons per serving
• garlic, minced, about a teaspoon per serving
• salt to taste
• green beans or snow peas or asparagus or spinach or zucchini or peas or bell peppers or…

1. Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan.
2. Stir fry the garlic for a minute or so.
3. Add vegetables and stir fry until just tender. For particularly large vegetables, you may need to add a small amount of water and cover the pan for a few minutes first. It’s very, very important not to cook them too long; don’t be like the cooks in my college dorm, who would steam green beans by sticking boiled green beans in a steamer.
4. Add salt to taste.

These green beans also contain almonds because they were prepared prior to Catnobyl.

Cachapas

One good thing about California is the food, something you don’t really notice until you order California-style food in other states. On a recent trip to Nebraska with my family, my mother and I ordered California-style sandwiches, I because I like avocado and my mother because she dislikes it but thinks it’s good for her.

When the sandwiches arrived, there was no avocado to be seen. My mother complained to the befuddled-looking teenage sandwich artiste, who insisted that there was, indeed, avocado on the sandwich. We examined the sandwiches carefully and did have to admit that they contained hints of avocado green, but whether or not this counted as containing avocado would depend on your system of measurement. There was enough that the law would require a notice to allergic customers that the sandwiches may have contained traces of avocado, but I’m not sure there was enough that one could have actually advertised their avocado content. This is a great example of the Sorites paradox: there’s a point at which you can be sure the sandwich contains no avocado, and there’s a point at which you can definitely say it has avocado on it, but there’s a faintly yellow-green area in between.

The recipe I am about to provide definitely does not contain avocado.

Before I got sidetracked by the vagaries of avocado, I had intended to write a story that would illustrate the fact that although California has few other merits, it has great food. During a visit to Berkeley several years ago, I learned that no one in this city knows what day it is, can keep an appointment, or even has the slightest idea how to do his or her job. Nevertheless, during that same vacation I learned something that made it all ok: the cachapa exists.

Cachapas are corn pancakes, but more than corn pancakes. If you were to imagine them as pancakes made of corn, you would be technically correct and yet wrong in spirit. You can only understand cachapas by tasting them.

Unlike certain political wives, I admit it when I get a recipe off the internet. However, I found this recipe so long ago that I can no longer locate its source, and I’ve adjusted it so many times that I’m not entirely sure it shouldn’t count as original material. I guess I’ll have to credit the internet itself. Which, in turn, means I should thank the internet’s inventor, Al Gore. So, without further ado:

Al Gore’s Cachapas

• 4 cups sweet corn kernels (about 6 ears), lightly boiled and well drained
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 pinch pepper
• optional: chopped cilantro, grated cheese, and/or sour cream

1. Combine all ingredients except 1/2 cup corn kernels in a blender or food processor.

2. Blend. The resulting mixture should have the approximate consistency of normal pancake batter. If it’s too runny, add a little flour and blend again.

3. Stir in remaining corn kernels.

4. Heat oil over medium heat in a frying pan. Drop in batter by the tablespoonful, leaving enough space between pancakes to flip them with a spatula.

5. You’ll have to watch these carefully, since cooking times will vary widely according to heat–they’ll change even in the same batch, since the pan gets gradually hotter. When batter bubbles in the middle or when the bottom of the pancake is brown, flip.

6. When other side of the pancake is brown, remove from heat.

7. Serve with toppings of your choice, or eat plain.

The Exploited suggested a variation that turned out well:

The Dessert Cachapa

Follow the above recipe, but remove the garlic and pepper. Serve with powdered sugar, chocolate sauce, and fresh fruit.

Ice Cream Lasagna

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the lack of basic necessities is its father. (On second thought, in that context, “necessity” can mean “lack of basic necessities,” so I guess you’d have to say that necessity is the multi-headed monster that parthenogenetically reproduces in the form of invention. But then wouldn’t invention have to be genetically identical, barring random mutations, to necessity? This is why we don’t demand scientific accuracy of our metaphors.)

When I first moved to this city, I signed a lease for an apartment sight unseen. Among the many, many signs that this was an idiotic decision was a freezer not quite broken enough to justify repairs but not quite functional enough to actually freeze anything. (This was one of the apartment’s most minor problems; it was practically a luxury when compared to the nocturnal, techno-loving neighbor so devoid of rhythmic ability that he mistook angry pounding on his door for the beat and who, after finally answering in nothing but dirty boxers, slack-jawed expression, and cloud of pot smoke, would grudgingly turn the volume down from 11 to 10.)

This “junior freezer” or “refrigerator-plus,” as it would be marketed on craigslist, generally wasn’t much of an issue; it certainly made defrosting a cinch. However, one day I optimistically decided to make The Exploited an ice cream cake for his birthday. I should have given up and made a regular cake, but The Exploited has a perhaps unhealthy obsession with ice cream (nutritionally unhealthy is a given; I mean psychologically unhealthy. This is a guy who unconsciously revises childhood memories to increase the amount of ice cream involved), and I hoped that maybe, just maybe, if I put it in the very coldest part of the freezer, the ice cream would attain some semblance of solidity.

This did not come to pass. Instead, the ice cream ended up with the approximate consistency of a thick pasta sauce. Thick pasta sauce?

And thus Ice Cream Lasagna was born.

Ice Cream Lasagna

• 1/2 batch of Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever*
• about 1/2 gallon ice cream of flavor of your choice, either softened or put in my old freezer. To set world record of chocolate chip cookieness, use cookie dough ice cream.
• 1/4 cup butter
• chocolate sauce to taste

1. Reserve six or seven cookies for decoration. Crumble the rest. A good way to do this is to put them in a resealable plastic bag and run a rolling pin over it a few times.

2. Mix about 2/3 of the cookie crumbs with melted butter. Spread onto bottom of 9″ x 9″ baking pan to form a crust (a.k.a. “lasagna noodles”). Freeze about 15 minutes, or until relatively hard.

3. Spread chocolate sauce on crust. (This is the “cheese.”) Freeze another 15 minutes.

4. Spread half the ice cream on top of sauce. Freeze about 30 minutes, or until ice cream is reasonably solid. (You can wait for full solidity if you have a real freezer.)

5. Spread remaining cookie crumbs on top. Freeze 15 min.

6. Spread another layer of ice cream on top. Decorate, then freeze for a few hours or overnight.

*The best chocolate chip cookies ever, as determined by a year of unscientific experimentation with various recipes, can be found here, at the Guittard Chocolate Company. Their chocolate chips are also good, even better than those of their famous and expensive neighbor, Ghirardelli.

Barack Pie

Although one of my favorite pastimes is poking fun at yuppies, I must disclose that I, too, am a wine-drinking latte liberal. I may not actually drink lattes (like the media’s most overlooked Obama constituents, my coffee is blue-collar black), I may prefer water to wine (don’t worry, Jesus, it’s the thought that counts), and my annual income may wobble across the poverty tightrope, but trumping all of these is the fact that I like Barack Obama, who is apparently the steamed milk of politicians.

In celebration of his primary victory, the Exploited and I decided to try out this delicious-sounding recipe for Barack Pie from The Root. Barack Pie is an excellent example of what I have defined by fiat as culinary miscegenation: its influences span at least two continents and the results are extremely tasty.

We didn’t have the correct ingredients, so we made a few changes we could believe in [insert groan]. I couldn’t find butterfish, so we replaced it with pompano, which at least looks like butterfish. The filleting process reduced a 2.5-pound fish to one measly pound, so we made up the difference in scallops and shrimp, which turned out to be welcome additions. We used regular salt instead of the fancy red sea salt because, well, you know how I feel about salt. In place of grainy French mustard, we used grainy French’s mustard. Our poorly stocked Safeway didn’t sell pie-sized pastry shells, so, in an homage to Barack’s diverse coalition of voting blocs, we mashed together six smaller shells.

The results were Baracktacular. Obamazing. Husseinsational? (The Exploited: “I can’t believe she’s still going.”)

Here is the pie in its native habitat. Note Macintosh computer, hydroponic garden, stack of books, and white wine:

The reality is not as it seems: the computer has fallen apart multiple times and been patched together with sketchy Chinese replacement parts, the wine is $4 Andre champagne, and the books — well, ok, the books are on Virginia Woolf and Max Horkheimer.

Also, because we are sore winners:

Culinary Miscegenation

It is perhaps something about the nebulousness of American identity that leads to our obsession with tracing national origins. It doesn’t matter whether or not these designated origins have any relation to actual history. Witness French fries, which are actually Belgian; Chinese apples, which are actually Middle Eastern; and Chinese parsley, which my mother has only vaguely heard of, even under the name “cilantro.” (If Americans think something is Chinese, the only thing you can be sure of is that it is not Chinese. Fortune cookies? American. Charlie Chan? Various white guys. Sharon Valerii? Cylon.) In fact, such inaccuracies only underscore the intensity of this desire — a desire so impatient that we hurtle past complex histories in our mad dash for the beginning, any beginning.

Things that lack a single point of origin drive Americans crazy, as we multiracial people learn long before the thousandth stranger demands, “What are you, anyway?” as if expecting an apology. (One young man was so unable to think beyond single national origins that he bet his friends that I was from Guam. As of July 2007, Guam has an estimated population of 173,456, which puts my chances of being Guamese at approximately .0026%. I hope he didn’t need that $5.)

Thus it surprises me that “fusion” cuisines have become so popular. I imagined that the first bite of curry chicken bao would send the typical diner into a wild-eyed existential crisis. “Is it Chinese? Is it Thai? Who am I? Why am I here? There is no God! … Hey, this is pretty good.” Apparently, it is the “Hey, this is pretty good” that lingers.

Or maybe, as the cynical part of me insists, Asian Fusion has been such a success because the ever-generalizing American mind can just categorize it as “Asian”; after all, isn’t that what they already do with Asians of the human variety? A similar theory explains the popularity of Latin Fusion: in America, all Latinos are “Mexican,” even the ones who speak Portuguese.

Clearly, a better measure of how much we’ve come to accept culinary miscegenation would be cross-continental fusion cuisine. (Americanized cuisine, which I covered in an earlier post, doesn’t count.) A brave few have already tested these waters, like the owners of the Lao/Thai/Soul Food place on Solano, which is delicious. However, their pad thai and fried chicken share only a roof. It would be even better if they shared a plate. Imagine the possibilities. Coconut milk biscuits? Mashed potatoes with peanut sauce? Curry barbecued ribs?

Here is one of my contributions to the great American melting plate:

Fajita Pizza, affectionately known as Fajizza

• one raw pizza crust, purchased from Trader Joe’s if you’re as lazy as I am
• one medium white or red onion, sliced into half-rings
• one medium bell pepper, sliced
• one large tomato, sliced and seeded
• one garlic clove, minced
• 1/4 cup corn kernels
• 1/2 cup shredded monterey jack cheese
• 2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped
• 1/4 cup salsa of your choice
• salt, pepper, and olive oil to taste

1. Preheat oven (and pizza stone, if using) to 450ºF.

2. Prepare pizza crust on generously floured surface.

3. Spread salsa lightly on crust.

4. Sprinkle on garlic, then evenly arrange vegetables and cilantro.

5. Drizzle on olive oil, then add salt and pepper to taste.

6. Cover with cheese.

7. Transfer to baking sheet or pizza stone and bake until crust is cooked and cheese bubbles, about 15 minutes.

Not a Victory Garden, Part II

If gardening enthusiasts are to be believed, home-grown vegetables are not only more virtuous than the store-bought variety, but also better tasting, more attractive, richer in vitamins, and capable of scoring higher on the SAT. Sometimes this is the case: pictured at right is what turned out to be The Perfect Strawberry. More often, however, home-grown vegetables resemble typical do-it-yourself products, like the tumor-shaped “stuffed animals” I sewed at age six or the Billy Ray Cyrusine “haircuts” my mother inflicted on my two-year-old self.

Last fall, I decided a few odd-looking runts among my carrot crop simply hadn’t yet lived up to their potential, so I stuck them back in the ground and came back in the spring. The carrots were certainly no longer runts, but they had more than fulfilled their infant promise of ugliness. As you can see in the following picture, some spent the winter battling leprosy, others hypertrichosis (i.e., wolfman-er, wolfcarrot syndrome):

In honor of their unmatched hideousness, I gave them fittingly hideous names. Yuppies may breed freckled McKenzies and organically diapered Kaitlynns, but I grow portly Wilburts:

hirsute Hortons:

and my favorites, the lopsided Plimptons (no relation to George):

How do you eat these unique beauties? You grate them, of course. Grate them beyond recognition.

Not a Victory Garden

Many years ago, after spotting one dangling modifier too many in my local paper, I picked up the habit of reading the New York Times. Because I am a goddamn liberal, I have continued to read the New York Times over the years despite the fact that its readership is ovine enough to hire consultants to name its babies. (Said consultants suggest names like “Beckett” because they “sound so masculine” even though Beckett wrote almost solely about impotent men. Soon they’ll suggest naming daughters “Paris Hilton” because it “just has that ring of chastity.”)

Recently, in a move sure to set the readership baa-ing, the Times ran an article by the obviously-from-Berkeley Michael Pollan in which he argues that we can all save the environment by planting vegetable gardens. Now, I have nothing against Michael Pollan except my usual objection to people who think they’re holier than I and won’t shut up about it.* The real problem is that this article may make gardening trendy. I can already imagine the hipsters up to their skinny jeans in loam, trying to breed an ironic tomato.

I happen to have a vegetable garden that I am very fond of (you can see my snow peas flowering at left). It started the way all my hobbies start: in the realization that I generally enjoy things 70-year-old retirees like. I would hate for my lovely garden to be sullied by an aura of holiness. Not that saving the environment isn’t a worthy cause, but I refuse to save the environment in ways that may be misconstrued as glamorous. Fluorescent light bulbs are fine in my book; Priuses (Prii?) are not. Besides, I could swear that I’ve seen Prius drivers try extra hard to run over bike riders so that they, not the poor people sweating up hills on their zero-emissions vehicles, can be the holiest of them all. Or perhaps they’re just too busy talking to their clients on their cell phones to not kill me. I hate them.

Okay, reassuming tone of detached amusement now.

It would be a shame if gardens became trendy, because then they would probably stop being such cheap sources of deliciousness. Because nobody famous and beautiful wants them, seeds are twenty cents a packet at Long’s. (This is what prompted The Exploited, in a fit of what he calls “youthful exuberance,” to buy 300 tomato seeds.) Gardens are also great for herbs, because you can use exactly as much as you want rather than buying your weight in pre-apportioned parsley because that’s the smallest amount your grocery store is willing to sell.

You can use those perfectly measured herbs to make the following:

Shrimp Pasta Salad
Serves two as main dish, four as side.

This salad may sound suspiciously Californian. That’s because it is. Nevertheless, it tastes good and is guaranteed not to make you self-righteous or vapid.

• 18 medium shrimp, marinated in mirin-ade
• 1 avocado, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1 mango, cut into shapes that somewhat resemble 1-inch cubes
• 1/2 lb rotini pasta, boiled and drained
• 8 cherry tomatoes, halved
• 2 tablespoons minced red onion
• juice of one orange
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons chopped parsley
• 2 teaspoons chopped cilantro
• 1 teaspoon chopped chives
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Stir-fry the shrimp and let cool. If you do not like your onions raw, you can throw them in with the shrimp.

2. To make dressing, combine orange juice, vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and herbs in small bowl.

3. Combine everything else in large bowl, then toss with dressing.

* Also bothersome is the fact that, as in a Bond movie, all of the villains in his piece are faceless Chinese people. Sure, I’ve been known to exclaim that I hate Chinese people, but that’s only after one of them has gone and done something stereotypical, like apply to med school. Seriously, my fellow Chinese people, other professions do exist, and your entire extended family was just kidding about disowning you if you took one of them up. I use made-up words to write about novels for a living, yet remain the recipient of many a red envelope.

The Inimitable Shrimp Ball*

Despite what yuppies would have you believe, processed foods are found all over the world, not merely in the poorer and therefore less virtuous parts of America. Where the West has spam, bologna, and hot dogs, the East has fish cakes, surimi, and, of course, shrimp balls. On the surface, the shrimp ball is exactly what it sounds like: a ball of processed shrimp. But in spirit, the shrimp ball is so much more than the sum of its ingredients. It is pink. It is round. It is at once something you would order when taking a date out for dim sum and something a four-year-old would dream up to feed a My Little Pony. Above all, it is delicious.

Some people will be put off by the fact that making shrimp balls involves putting raw meat in a blender, which may remind them a little too viscerally of the wood chipper scene in Fargo. Don’t worry. Your friendly neighborhood Asian grocery store can do the dirty work for you. Although Asian grocery stores generally aren’t so good at eliminating evidence that their meat was once alive (my local store marks the beef and pork aisles with adorable drawings of baby cows and pigs), they’re pretty good at packaging shrimp balls so as not to guilt you into sending checks to PETA.

Once you’ve procured your shrimp balls, there are several ways you can eat them. If you care about authenticity, you can toss them in your soup, where they traditionally belong. If you’re The Exploited, you can boil them with your angel hair pasta. If you’re like me, you’ll experiment with them, perhaps creating the following:

Coconut Shrimp Balls

• 12 frozen shrimp balls (can be procured at most Asian grocery stores)
• 4 bamboo skewers, soaked in water
• 1/4 cup coconut
• 1/4 cup panko or breadcrumbs
• 1 egg
• optional: 12 cubes of pineapple

1. Defrost shrimp balls by leaving on counter or boiling for a short time.

2. Crack egg into small bowl and whisk until uniform in color.

3. Mix coconut and panko on plate.

4. Spear shrimp ball on end of skewer. Dip in egg, then roll in coconut mixture. Push down skewer to make room for next shrimp ball.

5. If using pineapple, spear on skewer and coat with coconut mixture (not egg), then push down skewer.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until skewer is full, then do the same with the remaining skewers.

7. Broil in oven until coconut is browned and shrimp balls are warm, about 5 minutes.

8. If, like me, you hate wasting food, you can use the leftover batter to make a coconut omelet:

Coconut Panko Omelet

1. Stir remaining coconut and panko into remaining egg. Add a pinch of salt.

2. Fry in pan until browned on the bottom, then flip and repeat.

3. You can eat the omelet plain or serve it with the following sauce:

Omelet Sauce

• juice of 1/2 an orange
• 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons rice wine
• dash of soy sauce
• dash of lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon chopped cilantro

1. Combine all ingredients in a small pot.

2. Heat on stove, stirring constantly, for about five minutes.

*Actually, that title is misleading. It would be very easy to imitate a shrimp ball, probably with the gustatory chameleon of fish, pollock.

American Holiday Foods

When I was a kid, my mother did her best to provide my siblings and me with a Normal American Childhood. In part this involved eating Normal American Meals between helpings of shrimp balls. For instance, we usually had cereal with milk for breakfast. Of course, the cereal and milk were kept separate; I didn’t learn that they were meant to be served together until my friend’s mother served me a soggy white mess for breakfast after I’d politely requested Cheerios.

My Normal American Childhood was also full of American Holiday-Themed Foods. My favorite Holiday-Themed Foods accompanied Halloween. Like those ultimate Americans canonized in first grade classes across the nation — I speak, of course, of the Native Americans — my mother would use every part of the pumpkins we carved into jack-o’-lanterns: she’d scoop out the seeds, clean them and bake them, then use the meat to make pumpkin bread.

Or so I thought. Years later, when I asked my mother how she prepared the pumpkin for the bread, she absentmindedly replied, “Oh, I always bought the canned kind.” And thus another childhood dream vanished, flicked away by an offhand remark.

Until I came across a free pumpkin sitting outside the neighborhood garden store. I wasn’t sure of its provenance, as the garden store hadn’t been selling pumpkins during the build-up to Halloween, but I’m not one to pass up anything free.

It turns out that pumpkin purée is very time-consuming to make from scratch. Luckily (for me), another free thing I’m unwilling to pass up is my poor exploited boyfriend’s labor. This made the task much simpler:

Pumpkin Purée

1. Cut the pumpkin in half and clean out seeds and pulp.

2. Cut the rind off the remaining pumpkin and chop it into pieces small enough to fit in microwave-safe bowl. Cover bowl with saran wrap and poke holes in it with fork. Microwave until soft, about 5-10 minutes depending on microwave strength. Repeat until all pumpkin is soft or microwave dies.

3. Have boyfriend mash softened pumpkin with potato masher until his hands are tired, then blend in food processor until relatively smooth.

However, because you’re not a Victorian capitalist, you’ll have to reward your exploited boyfriend with more than a scant bowl of gruel. I suggest you put that pumpkin to good use:

Pumpkin Bread
Serves one jillion.

• 3 cups sugar
• 1 cup canola oil
• 3 large eggs
• 2 cups pumpkin purée
• 3 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon cloves
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• optional: 1/2 cup shredded coconut

1. Preheat oven to 360ºF.

2. Butter and flour a 9 x 13 cake pan. Or two bread loaf pans. Or two 12-muffin pans, or any other combination of pans adding up to a similar volume.

3. Beat sugar and oil in large bowl. Mix in eggs and pumpkin and beat until smooth.

4. Mix in dry ingredients and vanilla. Mix in coconut, if using.

5. Bake about 40 minutes if using 9 x 13 cake pan. Muffins will take 15-20 minutes. Bread will take longer, perhaps 50-60 minutes