Why I Don’t Get a CSA Box

Kale and Dumpling Soup

Everyone I know in the Bay Area gets something called a CSA box. This is not, as it first appears, something you must check on a tax form, but rather a box of vegetables delivered to you weekly from a local farm. The acronym stands for Community Supported Agriculture, as opposed to the more common Ill-Conceived and Outdated Subsidy-Supported Agriculture. You never know what you’ll find inside your CSA box, because the farmer determines the contents. It’s like Vegetable Christmas.

If you don’t yet see what’s wrong with CSA boxes, let me repeat that for you. Vegetable Christmas. Remember reading the Christmas chapter in Little House on the Prairie — you know, the one wherein Laura is excited to find a penny and an orange in her stocking — and thinking, “Wow, the past was pathetic”? Well, this isn’t even a Fruit and Penny Christmas. It’s a Vegetable Christmas.

Now, CSA boxes do have some redeeming features. They support small farms. The produce is fresh, seasonal, and possesses the dubious virtue of local provenance.* I guess it could be fun to be surprised every week if you’re the sort of person who likes uncertainty and disruptions to your routine.

The problem is that CSA boxes, like most Californian social experiments, work best in California. If you lived in, say, Nunavut (née Northwest Territories East), your experience would be somewhat different. “Ooh, let’s see what’s in our CSA box this week!” “Oh. Seal. Again.”** Even in California, winter is a little sparse, judging by Facebook posts like “Anyone have a good recipe that calls for celeriac, and just celeriac?” (They’re better sports than I. If I received a box of celeriac, Dr. Unexploited and I would probably stage a celeriac fight. At the local farm.)

Still, we don’t have the excuse of living in a cold climate; given our current proximity to the Mexican border states, we could probably get a pretty good assortment of produce year-round. “Tomatoes! Chili peppers! … Cocaine?” (Kidding, of course. Cocaine would never come in the same CSA box as tomatoes and chili peppers. It’s a cool-season crop.) The real reason that I refuse to sign up for a CSA program, aside from the cost, is that when faced with the all-important choice between broccoli and kale, the organic elf stuffing my stocking could make the wrong choice. And there is a wrong choice. The famous saying “De gustibus non disuputandum” has a little-known coda: “Except when it comes to broccoli.”

As you may know, broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and some kinds of cabbage are members of the same species, Brassica oleracea. Generations of inbreeding had the same effect on the cruciferous vegetables as on the royal houses of Europe. Some offspring were paragons of buck-toothed blue blood, with the precise genetic makeup necessary for such difficult tasks as waving to swooning crowds and having mildly titillating but still respectable love affairs. Such is kale. Other offspring were hideous perversions of nature who had to be locked away in drafty castle attics and fed a sporadic diet of wayward servants. The attic monstrosity of House Brassica, of course, is broccoli.***

Choose wisely. Choose kale.

Kale and Dumpling Soup in a Rice Cooker

A standard rice cooker, despite its unfortunately specific name, is ideal for cooking soups and stews because it has both necessary settings: simmer (cook) and steep (warm). Warning: If you are making soup, not rice, the sensor will not automatically determine when your dinner is ready. Your rice cooker may seem magical, but sadly, it is just a relatively stupid robot.

For the soup:

• 1 head kale (6-8 large leaves), washed, de-stemmed, and torn into bite-size pieces
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced
• 5 cups chicken broth
• 1 cup leftover or canned beans (I used black-eyed peas in the pictured batch)
• 1 tsp thyme
• salt and pepper to taste
• optional: other assorted vegetables nearing their expiration dates

For the dumplings:

• 2 tablespoons butter, softened
• 1 tablespoon cream cheese, softened
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• pinch of baking powder
• drizzle of olive oil
• 1-2 tablespoons water (just enough to hold the dough together)

1. Throw the onions in the rice cooker, add the broth, and set the switch to “cook.”
2. After the onions have been simmering for ten to fifteen minutes, add the rest of the vegetables, the beans, and the thyme.
3. In a small-ish bowl, combine the butter and cream cheese. Add the flour, salt, baking powder, and oil, and mix until you get pea-sized crumbs (as though you’re making a pie crust).
4. Slowly add the water to the dumpling mixture until the dough just starts to stick together.
5. Roll the dough into 1-inch balls, as if you’re making cookies.
6. When the soup is simmering steadily, or even boiling, throw in the dumplings and immediately replace the lid. Cook for 5-10 more minutes, until the dumplings are cooked through. Flip the switch to “warm,” season and serve.

*Dubious in that buying local is only sometimes (kind of, slightly?) better for the environment. Like most issues that people consider simple, this one is actually very complicated.

**Using the same standards by which we consider tomatoes vegetables, one could argue that seal is, in fact, a vegetable.

***My knowledge of the history of the European nobility comes from such indisputable sources as gothic novels and the Daily Mail.

Ramps and Duchamp, or Yet Another Cupcake Recipe

Microwave Coffee Nutella Cupcakes

The world does not need more cupcake recipes. There are millions of them — so many, in fact, that bloggers will soon be forced to resort to combinations like “wasabi cupcakes with peanut butter frosting,” “menudo tartelets with a caramelized tripe garnish,”  and “carob-bean cakelets frosted with that white stuff herrings leave on the beach after a mass spawning.” These may sound disgusting, but good lighting, a $649 Nikon, and a few “Boost Color” filters on iPhoto will have you salivating over them readily enough. After all, they’re cupcakes, and our love for cupcakes will never die. The culinary cognoscenti have tried to steer our attention towards a series of lesser desserts — the macaron, the gourmet doughnut, the cake pop. But the public has refused to move on. Why?

Let me offer my hypothesis. Cupcakes are popular for the same reason that food blogs, Twilight, and Lady Gaga are popular: our obsession with cute but ill-considered pairings.* Such pairings occupy the adorable little nexus between tweeness and absurdity, practicing a sort of Dada that doesn’t deny its origin in infant babble — imagine Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal signature written in Gelly Roll pen and enclosed in a heart. I shall call this aesthetic movement CupDada.

Supposedly, Dada’s refusal of coherence is a mode of critique — of capitalism, logic, or that old bourgeois standard, good taste. CupDada, however, does not engage in critique, because CupDada does not engage in anything: it filters, supersaturates, or dusts with powdered sugar. CupDada is why all food blogs in the world must have names that A) combine two seemingly unrelated objects or concepts that are, on closer inspection, still unrelated; B) evoke pretty pictures, preferably in the foreground of a Parisian market; and C) rhyme, alliterate, or consonate (but not assonate, because that would be vulgar). Think “Pies and Butterflies” or “Simple Folks with Artichokes” or “A Promenade of Tapenades,” but not “Eating Kale and Posting Bail,” “Big Mistakes with Cakes” or “Broccoli Raab and My Dead-End Job.”

And you know what? Maybe that’s ok. I love criticizing things, but not as much as I love cupcakes.

Here is my contribution to the massive CupDada movement. Because I can be only so twee without entirely losing my self-respect, its novelty will lie not in its combination of flavors, but rather in its mode of preparation. At the risk of being excommunicated from the food blogging world (with which I am not particularly communicated in the first place), I shall prepare these cupcakes in a microwave.

Microwaving cupcakes generally leads to three problems:

1) They cook unevenly.

2) They’re excessively dry.

3) Too much leavening remains unreacted, leading to a strong aftertaste.

This recipe thus makes three concessions to the limitations of the medium:

1) It makes small cupcakes. My guess for why this helps is that the small size ensures that more microwaves can penetrate the entire cake, reducing the difference in cooking time between the surface and the center.**

2) Small, steamed cupcakes. This sounds like blasphemy, but they do it all the time in Asia.

3) It uses eggs and a tiny bit of baking soda as leavening agents.

Microwave Coffee Nutella Cupcakes

• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp finely ground coffee beans
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 heaping tablespoon Nutella
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• extra Nutella for frosting
• extra coffee beans for garnish

1. Find two microwave-safe dishes that can be stacked on top of one another. I used an 8 x 8 square dish on top of a 9 x 5 loaf pan. Fill the lower dish with one or two inches of water.
2. Arrange paper cupcake liners on upper dish. NOTE: Do not use foil liners unless you have recently signed up for a massive fire insurance policy.
3. Beat eggs until fluffy. Add wet ingredients and coffee grounds.
4. Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
5. Fill cupcake liners with one tablespoon of batter apiece. This will make your cupcakes relatively small but will help them bake more evenly.
6. Place the two-dish contraption in the microwave. Microwave on high for two minutes, four cupcakes at a time. They won’t look done, but they’ll finish cooking on the counter.
7. Let them rest for 10 minutes.
8. Frost sparingly and garnish with coffee beans.

*Note that I resisted the obvious Bad Romance joke, as that would evince an embarrassing degree of familiarity (i.e., any) with Lady Gaga. The “cute but ill-considered” pairing in this case is between Lady Gaga and her career. Sorry, Gaga fans, but it’s true.

**The popular myth that microwaves cook from the inside out can be easily disproven by heating something briefly in a microwave and then observing the difference between the inside and outside. Disproving a myth, however, does not mean dispelling it; people have believed far stupider things with far more evidence to the contrary.

Some Recession-Friendly Advice and Some Friendly Recession Advice

Dear reader, I know that you, like many others, have been hard hit by this recession. Heck, after feeding your family, you may only have $400,000 left over. Well, you’re in luck! Since the recession began, many blogs have begun posting money-saving tips. Did you know that you can make a home-cooked meal for under $15? Or that you can do this crazy thing called stretching a chicken rather than eat it all in one night? Who knew?* All over the internet, tips and tricks are popping up. Buy what’s on sale! Buy in season! Don’t buy pre-packaged meals! Cook at home!

Unfortunately, how blogs expect people to act after the recession hit is how we already lived beforehand. Where do you cut back when you go from poor to poorer?

Here are some tips for those of you who fall into the wasteland between people who qualify for food stamps and secretly middle-class people who’ve romanticized the idea of poverty.

1. Don’t eat meat

Your mother probably won’t like this one. If you tell her it’s what you’re doing, she might come visit and feed you meat for four days straight, after which you’ll notice that your nails have stopped breaking and your hair looks nice and shiny. (Note: Advice not guaranteed to work with all mothers. If mother is not Chinese, proceed at own risk.)

2. Drastically reduce fruit consumption

You can nearly cut your grocery bill in half by limiting fruit consumption to one serving a day. The food pyramid recommends 3-5 servings of fruit or vegetables, right? Certain vegetables are much cheaper than fruit. (Remind me again– is iceberg lettuce a vegetable or a packing material?)

3. Stop eating whole grains

Whole grains cost more than refined grains and take longer to cook; by eating food products made with generic white flour, you can save on both your grocery and utility bills!

Help! I followed your advice, and all I did was get fat and/or scurvy!

Congratulations. You’ve qualified for membership in the not-very-exclusive club of the Actually Poor.

Ok, ok. My point has been made. Here are some actual money-saving tips that won’t lead to malnutrition but don’t require you to patronize (get patronized by?) Whole Foods.

Money-Saving Substitutions

-A cheap replacement for butter:

The next time you buy a chicken (i.e., the next time the price dips to $0.79/pound), don’t remove the fat before cooking. Afterward, skim off some of the cooking juices and refrigerate them. The saturated fat will rise to the top and solidify, while the unsaturated fat/bone goo/stuff you shouldn’t try too hard to identify will sink to the bottom and make, er, chicken jell-O. The saturated fat will be the color of butter and have the consistency of butter you’ve already softened in the microwave. The best part is that because you were going to throw it out anyway, it’s essentially free. I haven’t tried it in desserts, but it’s great for savory dishes.

Or, you know, you could just buy margarine.

-A cheap replacement for bouillon cubes

The aforementioned chicken jell-O.

-A cheap emetic

The aforementioned chicken jell-O.

-A cheap replacement for cleaning solutions

You can use vinegar to clean pretty much everything. Well, not metal, extremely lipophilic substances, or The Worst Kitchen Counter in the World, which isn’t designed to stand up to contact with acids, bases, water, oils, heat, cold, or the gentle breath of the mayfly. Don’t buy the special “cleaning vinegar” sold in the “green” section, which includes a 200% dumb yuppie tax. Instead, buy the gallon-sized jugs of white vinegar from the grocery section, which range in price from $2 to $4.

You can use vinegar to replace:

-All-purpose cleaners

Dilute the vinegar with water. Various sites will insist upon various concentrations, but no one really knows what concentration is best, so just dilute it until it no longer stings your hands. Some internet-approved recipes require you to mix it with baking soda. The authors of these recipes are to be roundly mocked and encouraged to make massive quantities of their special cleaning solutions near their newly installed cherry-wood floors.

-Hardwood floor cleaners

That last sentence was not meant to imply that you can’t clean hardwood floors with vinegar, only that you must first dilute it and take care in wringing out your cleaning cloth. This cleaning regimen will remove years of dull, caked-on Pine-Sol residue and make your floors nice and shiny. In the short term, at least. The expensive hardwood floor cleaner industry insists that years and years of cleaning with even very dilute amounts of vinegar will ruin your floors. I’ve never lived in one house long enough to see if this is true, but I contend that if you expect your floors to look fantastic after years and years of cleaning with anything, you probably preserve your designer sofas with museum-quality dust covers and make your children sit on plastic folding chairs instead. I hope you enjoy the impeccable upholstery at the nursing home in which they inevitably stash you.

-Fabric softeners

A cup or so of white vinegar in the rinse cycle will serve the same purpose as fabric softener, although unfortunately, it will not produce that comforting, old-timey acetaldehyde-and-benzene scent. If you find that you’re breathing too well and are in need of a little bronchoconstriction, or perhaps you’ve grown tired of your boring old DNA and would like to change it up a little, by all means stick with conventional fabric softeners.

-Hair Conditioner

A vinegar rinse will make your hair soft and shiny but also involve a lot of screaming “Ahh! My eyes! My eyes!”

-Deodorant

Dab some vinegar under your arms in place of traditional deodorant. This seems to work fine for me, but Dr. Unexploited claims that my sweat tends not to smell, anyway. On the other hand, there are too many compelling reasons for a husband not to say, “Wife, you smell faintly of zoo” for me to take his word for it.

-Drano

To fail to unclog a drain, pour a sizable clump of baking soda down it, chase it with copious amounts of vinegar, and immediately cover both the drain and the little overflow hole. Presumably, the gust of CO2 this reaction produces will force the clog through the pipe. This doesn’t really work, but neither, in my experience, does Drano, and this is a significantly cheaper way to do precisely nothing.

*You can actually make the first meal for $4 and the second string of 22 meals for about $20 with this one simple tip: don’t shop at Whole Foods.

Is it sloppy, or is it rustic?

My photography is also rustic.

Note: Apologies to my 1.5 readers for the long hiatus. Though I escaped Berkeley nearly a year ago, it sent assassins after me. I detected them with my supernatural lung-fu skills (not a typo) and disposed of them before they could kill me, but it took me a few months to recover, and thus no household experiments of interest to anyone with a sane immune system were conducted.

One of my hare-brained get-middle-class-slow schemes (I have long since given up on ever getting rich, much less quickly) is to teach myself how to code. My plan is to somehow combine this useful skill with my (almost-)Ph.D. in uselessness and market myself as a person of moderate utility. Of course, still being essentially the same person as the little girl who tried to overcome the limitations of HyperScript with hundreds of invisible buttons,* I immediately tried to do extremely complex things with my extremely limited resources. Sure, after hours upon hours of debugging, I finally got them to work, but my code was so ugly it would make even a 12-year-old aspiring computer scientist… er… leave me racially tinged insults on an anonymous message board? That seems to be their solution to everything.

This is also how I cook. According to Berkeley-based culinary ethics, that makes me a bad cook; everyone knows that the quality of the dish depends entirely on the ingredients’ freshness and local provenance — a standard that forces us to recognize deer, who steal their food right at the source, as the best chefs in the world.

Luckily, a competing trend in gourmet cookery (espoused by the same people, of course, because they like the flavors of their logic as complex as the flavors of their wine) has taught me how to transform scarcity into artistry with a single magic word.

That’s right. “Rustic.”

“Rustic” used to have a slightly negative  connotation. Sure, it could mean “charmingly quaint,” but only in that dismissive Victorian sense according to which “Aren’t they the salt of the earth?” really means “Fetch me my smelling salts!” Now “rustic” means “natural,” “pure,” “organic,” and probably “vegan” and “gluten-free,” too, despite its association with chicken pot pies. If you define the category by its cases, however, you will quickly realize that what “rustic” really means is “irregular.”

A rustic loaf of bread is one you can bake without a bread pan (of course, to truly replicate the bread your impoverished nonna once baked in the Italian countryside, you’ll need the same $45 Williams-Sonoma baking stone that she had). A rustic pie is one you can make without a pie pan (although the organic, hormone-free fillings must be flown in that morning from an eco-friendly farm in Provence, because somehow a French origin trumps a local one). You see, “rustic” dishes are really about appropriating poverty as an aesthetic, and thus — Oops, sorry. The Ph.D. in uselessness rears its head again!

I, like an ouroboros of alimentary aesthetics, frequently appropriate my own poverty (the fact that I just wrote that sentence proves that my attempt to become useful has already failed). When Dr. Unexploited comes home to find me with flour all over my “slightly rustic” clothing — made of pure, natural decayed plant and animal matter that has been slow-cooked over millions of years**  — he knows that I’ve been making rustic pasta.

Rustic pasta is the ideal gourmet dish for the poverty-stricken, as it looks impressive but costs only a few cents. Those of us who lack servants to grind our wheat into flour must buy it for $2.30 at our local granary (i.e., Target) at a unit price of $0.12 per cup. An egg from the local chicken farm (i.e., Target) costs about $0.17. A dash of salt (Target) and a few drops of olive oil (Target) and water (not from Target!!) are of negligible price; let’s make them 1/3 of a cent each just to bring our total cost up to $0.30.

The only tools you need are a rolling pin (alas, I know from personal experience that a plastic water bottle won’t work), a pot, and a flat surface. If your kitchen counter, like mine, is the made from the Stupidest Kitchen Counter Material Known to Man,*** you’ll need a cutting board.

Traditional recipes for pasta sound intimidating, probably because of that step in which you make a well for the liquid ingredients in the middle of the dry ingredients. Don’t worry. This isn’t like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All you need to do is make a little indentation — more like a crater than a well, really. And “gradually incorporate the dry ingredients” is just the gourmet’s attempt to mystify “stir from the inside out.” Now that those riddles have been solved, it’s time for my recipe for

Slightly Irregular Pasta

• 1 cup generic all-purpose flour
• 1 egg
• dash of salt
• sprinkle of olive oil (I’ve never measured it, but it’s probably about a 1/2 teaspoon)
• just enough water to hold the flour together

1. Mix the flour, salt, and olive oil either on a flat surface or in a large mixing bowl. A flat surface is more traditional, but you really can’t taste authenticity. I promise.
2. Make a crater in the middle of the dry ingredients. Crack the egg into the crater and stir until the yolk is blended with the white.
3. Starting from the inside, stir outward until the dry ingredients are nice and eggy.
4. Add a little bit of water at a time and stir until the dough sticks together.
5. Knead until the dough is uniform. You can knead it for another five minutes if you want stretchier, more traditional pasta, but I usually don’t because I’m too lazy — er, rustic.
6. Separate the dough into fist-sized balls. Traditional recipes say to let it rest so that the gluten can develop, but isn’t gluten evil these days, anyway? I sometimes let it rest and sometimes don’t. Unless you’re making something like ravioli, it doesn’t make a huge difference.
7. Roll out each ball until it’s fairly flat — about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Don’t bother getting the dough any thinner. Rustic pasta should be big, fat, and doughy.
8. Cut the flattened balls into strips. Try to make them roughly the same size so that they’ll cook evenly, but don’t worry if they’re not perfectly straight.
9. Throw them into a pot of boiling water and let them cook for about 4 minutes. Test them frequently, as it’s easy to overcook them.
10. I usually serve these with minced garlic, olive oil, parmesan, and a little bit of lemon juice — more ingredients that cost a few cents apiece. If it’s tomato season, I add halved cherry tomatoes.

* You probably won’t get this reference unless you went to middle school in the mid-1990s. Poor HyperCard, unlike older siblings Oregon Trail and LogoWriter, has not yet been reanimated by the voodoo of hipster nostalgia.

**Petroleum: Mother Earth’s carnitas

***Cement. Clearly, the person who designed this kitchen has never been to a cave. Or, you know, walked on a sidewalk. Actually, given that most people in Southern California don’t realize that feet can propel you across the ground, not just treadmills, the latter supposition is quite likely.

Peach Fruit-on-the-bottom Cupcakes: A successful recipe with a less successful description

Are they peach fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cupcakes or tartes tatins pêches au yaourt?

As I inch (nanometer?) toward the end of my Ph.D. program, I have begun searching for job opportunities outside academia. As the academic job market shrinks, those of us trained in the teaching of literature seek hope in the classic maxim, “Those who can’t teach, do.”

Of course, spending the better part of a decade studying experimental literature doesn’t exactly prepare one to write popular novels. I can already imagine the conversations:

Me: You see, it’s an epic fantasy starring a modern hero. Lord of the Rings meets The Waste Land, if you will.

Editor: The main character just sits there while the villain destroys the world.

Me: Exactly.

Even were I capable of writing anything suitable for public consumption, there’s no guarantee that the public would consume it. These days, as publishing creeps ever closer to content farming, Basically Twilight, But With Chimps will outsell any novel worthy of the name. Give an unlimited texting plan to the trained chimp who authored that tale of simian simpering, and the gap in sales figures will only grow.

Writing, you see, is increasingly about self-promotion, and I am terrible at marketing. So inept am I at search engine optimization that the most frequent visitors to my wedding posts are fans of coprophagia. Not to stereotype, but I have a feeling that people with such pastimes are less likely to require wedding advice.

Food writing, too, is a game of liquid smoke* and mirrors, as whoever came up with the idea of naming various animal glands “sweetbreads” well knows. A successful menu writer can make a hamburger sound like it’s worth $10. A successful restaurant reviewer can make it sound like it’s worth waiting in a block-long line for a chance to order that hamburger. A successful food blogger, having waited in that line and paid that $10, can make the experience sound like it’s worth having yourself.

I am not a successful food blogger. That is why I named the following invention “Peach Fruit-on-the-Bottom Yogurt Cupcakes,” ensuring that you imagine them squirted into polyethylene containers and sold for twelve cents an ounce. Someone with marketing flair would have named them tartes tatins pêches au yaourt. Someone with a commercial bone in her body could have made you actually want to try these. Instead, I have taken something delicious and made it sound disgusting.

Enjoy.

Peach Fruit-on-the-Bottom Yogurt Cupcakes
Serves four.

For the topping:

• 1 peach, sliced
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 pinch ginger powder

For the batter:

• remaining topping
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 2 tablespoons white sugar
• 1 medium egg
• 2 tablespoons yogurt of a complementary flavor (if unsweetened, add a pinch more sugar)
• 1/2 cup white flour
• 1 tsp baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 350º. Mix 2 tablespoons melted butter, 3 tablespoons brown sugar, cinnamon, and ginger powder. Stir peaches in mixture until well coated.
2. Generously butter the bottoms and sides of four ramekins (7 oz ± 1 oz). Arrange peaches on bottoms.
3. To remaining topping, add the rest of the butter and sugar and mix well (the proper verb is “cream,” but that can be too easily confused with the noun). Mix in egg and yogurt. Add flour and baking powder and stir until of even consistency.
4. Add equal amounts of batter to each ramekin.
5. Bake for 20 minutes, rearranging halfway through.

You could serve these fresh out of the oven, cracked tops and all.

Or you could let them cool a few minutes and flip them onto a plate so that the caramel-hued glaze on the peaches glistens in the sunlight. You capitalist peon, you.

UPDATE: These are, by Dr. Unexploited’s estimation, 93% as good when baked in a microwave. I spread the peaches on the bottom of a glass loaf pan, pour the batter on top, and stick them in the microwave for about 4 minutes. The result is light, fluffy, and retro-futuristic!

Voilà! Instant marketing!

*I looked up the process for making liquid smoke, and it turns out we’ve been doing it accidentally. When my neighbors heat their houses with wood (This happens every time it dips below 65, because that’s “cold” in San Diego. So much for silicone being a great insulator), I use a dehumidifier to capture the asthma-inducing chemicals. I could have been bottling and selling it all this time. “Here’s all the crap I don’t want in my lungs. Put it in your food instead!”

Consider the Killer Whale

The killer whales swam to the end of the ocean and looked over the edge, whereupon they were driven mad by its vastness.

In the twilight hours of the day, when many a young neighbor’s internet connection turns to Warcraft, Dr. Unexploited and I like to gather together enough bits and dribbles of bandwidth to watch a nature documentary. The best series we’ve seen, by a nautical mile, is The Blue Planet, which taught us that deep sea creatures fart rainbows.

What we also learned from The Blue Planet is that killer whales are evil. There are two kinds of killer whale: the swift, merciless predators and the psychopathic mammal murderers.* They’ve run an expert PR campaign, tricking us into making movies like Free Willy when what they really deserve is Life in Prison Without the Possibility of Parole Willy and convincing us to call them “orcas” because “killer whales” is so hurtful and negative, as if spending six hours wearing down and drowning a baby gray whale, then eating only its tongue weren’t hurtful and negative. As Dr. Unexploited put it, they’re the Reavers of the sea.

What I’m getting at is that while humans may be irresponsibly carnivorous, we’re not as bad as nature itself. You can put down that knife, Mark Zuckerberg: we Americans consider our lobsters with much more reverence than a killer whale grants its Whale Jaw McNuggets. Furthermore, as the linked article points out, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to get in touch with the process of meat consumption by doing only the slaughtering, not the butchering. You know who else would slaughter an animal and then let others deal with the remains? That’s right: a killer whale.

Anyway, as I’m not much of a meat-eater myself, I don’t have a huge stake in the Great Meat Debate (pun not intended but still appreciated). Still, as the inaugural purpose of this blog was skewering the poorly considered sanctimony of Bay Area food trends, I could not let this latest and most sanctimonious one pass. I’m open to the idea that eating meat may be wrong; I’m also open to the possibility that it may not be wrong. But if you do think killing an animal for food is wrong, killing it yourself does not make it less wrong. You’re not Ned Stark carrying out an unpleasant but necessary (in his view) sentence; you’re just trying to feel less bad about indulging in a fully optional violation of your ethical code.

By the way, as I learned from classic Korean drama Dae Jang Geum, whale meat tastes a little bit like beef. Not that I’m suggesting orca burgers for your Memorial Day barbecue. No, not suggesting that at all.

*Actually, there are at least three kinds of killer whale, but the third type falls into one or both of these categories.

A Turd Blossom Bouquet, Part II: Say “F@$# It, I’ll Just Buy This One” to the Dress

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, my chief goal in wedding planning was to get the best deal. Bargain hunting is an art, not a science; in our interdisciplinary household, it is a task that falls to me. The expert bargain hunter, like an English grad student, knows that ideality is a moving target: finding the Platonic Deal* involves continually renegotiating the relative values of cost, quality, time, and ease. While planning my wedding, I completely and utterly failed at taking the last criterion into account. Sure, I saved the approximate price of a year at a private college (or, to put it in a more depressing light, the medical emergency that immediately followed my marriage), but not without spending freely from my rapidly diminishing stores of health and sanity.

Was saving $60 worth the misery of, say, dragging myself to the copy shop in downtown Berkeley, braving crowds of Francophilic hipsters who mistook their cigarettes for Carla Bruni’s lips, when smoke made me feel like I had been huffing sea urchins? Probably not.

Other projects were definitely worth the time and effort. For the benefit of other thrifty wedding planners, I will determine each project’s worth the same way society determines yours: by determining its hourly wage. Note, if it even needs saying: results not scientific.

Make Your Own Veil
Price: $6-$10 (versus $100+)
Hours spent: 20
Hours I should have spent: 2
My wage: $8.25/hour
Your wage: $50+/hour

Really, how hard could it be to make a tutu for your head?

Not very, if you follow the advice here or here.

Very, if you, like me, see a $175 veil in a bridal shop, think “If I make that one instead of the $100 one, it’s like I’m saving an extra $75,” and determine to make a double cascade veil with an intricate beaded edge (once you let wedding terminology worm its way into your skull, it can never be unlearned). Making such a veil involves taping tulle to the kitchen wall, holding the measuring tape with your foot and a charcoal pencil with your teeth, and cutting at the wrong angle so that you have to start all over again. It also involves counting all the tiny hexagons from which tulle is formed, five at a time, until you inevitably make a mistake and have to undo an hour’s worth of beading.

Yes, the beading matched the beading on my dress. No, no one noticed.

Verdict: Yes, make your own veil. No, don’t make mine.

Make Your Own Bouquet and Flower Arrangements
Price: $100 (versus $1000+)
Hours Spent: 5 (it would have been more had I not noticed that the flowers my mom was randomly stuffing into vases looked just as good as the ones I was artfully arranging)
Wage: $180/hr

This is most definitely worth the savings. You don’t even have to be particularly artistic if you just buy large bunches of the same kind of flower. Who’s going to notice? Actually, one of my photographically inclined friends captured an aunt giving my bouquet the side-eye, but that picture is amusing enough to count as a benefit rather than a drawback.

I got my flowers at the San Francisco Flower Mart, which I highly recommend. It’s very San Francisco. By that I mean that I got about $25 worth of free flowers because a vendor liked my unkempt toenails. His explanation? “A real lady doesn’t paint her nails, just as a real pianist doesn’t keep books on his piano.”

Verdict: Yes, buy your own flowers. Bonus points if you wear open-toed shoes.

Buy Your Dress Off the Rack
Price: $250 + $80 in alterations (versus your life savings)
Hours Spent: 8
Wage: Hard to determine

This doesn’t work for everyone; you have to be within range of at least one store’s sample size. I say “within range” because I ended up buying a dress that was four sizes too large. To compensate, my mom pulled the laces so tight that I would have fit right in at the court of the Sun King. Sure, by the end of the wedding the laces had loosened, giving me the cloth-to-bosom ratio of a cast member on Jersey Shore, but by then, our wiffle ball reception had already smashed the metaphorical car window of decorum to smithereens.

Conceivably, dress hunting could have taken an hour or two; the extra time was wasted being wishy-washy. The wedding industry, which temporarily abducts the recently engaged and subjects them to extra-terrestrial mind control tactics,† had drilled too many questions into me. How would the dress photograph? How would it look on the mantel? What would my inevitable offspring think? You can avoid similar delays by realizing that any dress you choose will look dated in ten years but charming after twenty. Unless you got married in the 80s. Then you’re out of luck.

Verdict: Possibly worth it.

*I don’t mean a deal that doesn’t have sex, but what I do mean has been debated by fellow humanists for centuries.

†They obtained knowledge of these tactics by offering aliens free engagement shoots. “I’m soooo excited to share photos from Zork and Pwxv4sh’s beautiful session at the Japanese Tea Garden!”

The love between Zork and Pwxv4sh was amazing to witness. Working with them was an absolute delight!

A Turd Blossom Bouquet, Part I: Feeding Frenzy

The wedding buffet. Photo Credit: I really have no idea, but probably my dad.

It’s been about nine months since Dr. Unexploited and I got married. (On a semi-related note, everyone we know is having a baby right about now. We didn’t have a shotgun wedding; we had an AK-47 wedding.) I haven’t written anything about the wedding because, like a flower blooming in a dung heap, it was a good thing surrounded by crap. Now that I have a little bit of distance from the muck heap of 2010, I thought I’d write a few posts about our rather unconventional approach to wedding planning.

Weddings, as the cliché informs us, never go as planned. Well, our wedding more or less went as planned, but our wedding planning certainly didn’t. When Dr. Unexploited and I got engaged, I imagined a glorious summer of crafting and bargain hunting that would end in the best deal of a wedding the world had ever known. “What a beautiful wedding!” the dearly beloved gathered there would say. “Thanks!” I would reply. “The wedding industry was going out of business, so I got it for 90% off.” (Remember, this was a fantasy.)

Speaking of the wedding industry, it employs a lot of scary people. Remove their pearls and a few of their teeth, and you’re left with carnies, only instead of “Three shots for a dollar!” their refrain is “Please make me part of your special day! : ) : ) : ).” (That last dot is a period, not the smiley’s chin mole.) Every time someone called it my special day, I got a nervous feeling in my gut, like there was something wrong with my day that everyone was too polite to point out. I didn’t want a special day; I wanted a reasonably nice, somewhat forgettable day that would not embarrass my parents in front of my relatives (well, not too much). But people called it my special day a lot, in screened phone call after screened phone call, unsolicited e-mail after unsolicited e-mail. When I blocked their numbers, they tried different ones. They left message after message, each more terrifyingly cheerful than the last. It got to the point that whenever the phone rang, I would hide. Actually, that is my standard response to phone calls. But when it was the wedding industry calling, I hid better.

Only once did Dr. Unexploited and I work up the courage to go to a caterer’s tasting. We were met by an upbeat, friendly woman who ushered us to the place of honor. Moments later, she presented us with an array of beautifully named, beautifully presented dishes. We applied our forks. We chewed. We looked at each other.

“How is it?” she asked in her upbeat, friendly voice.

We hesitated. “It’s very….” I tried to think of a word that wasn’t “rectangle.”

“–very good,” Dr. Unexploited finished for me. “We’ll keep you in mind.” He is a gentleman, and gentlemen know when to lie.

Thus began our search for wedding food that did not involve a caterer. For some reason, this necessitated frequently Googling “disposable plastic container heat retention,” but the results never got more impressive. I briefly considered preparing all of the food myself, but by this point in the process, my health had declined from “less than ideal” to “buzzards circling head,” so I abandoned the thought.

Finally, Dr. Unexploited had an idea. There was a pretty good restaurant a few blocks from the wedding site. Wedding food is typically so awful that the shock of tasting palatable food at a wedding would convince the guests that it was the most delicious food ever. Because the food had only a few blocks to travel, it would not obtain the texture of vulcanized rubber. Best of all, the restaurant, not being part of the wedding industry, gave us an estimate that was a third of the price of the cheapest caterer we found.

My advice for the similarly thrifty affianced, then, is to do a Google Maps search for all the restaurants within a mile or two of your wedding location. True, the delectable morsels that will make your guests swoon will not be there, but that’s because the food will be fresh enough to avoid giving your guests food poisoning.

I did not get a chance to taste the food at my wedding. It got many compliments, but no one really tells the bride, “You know, the filet mignon at your wedding kind of tasted like nutraloaf.” Still, I feel confident in saying that the guests’ opinion of it was not “rectangle.”

The Most Exotic Vegetable in the World

Staples of the Shire.

Having had enough of beets, Dr. Unexploited and I decided to get something new and exciting at the farmer’s market. (Yes, that’s our idea of excitement. We are the kind of people who find TV overstimulating; we use the previous tenants’ LCD wall bracket as a coat rack and spend our evenings watching lint collect.) We spared the baskets of lemongrass and chilies barely a glance; we’ve lived in California for six years, after all. Nor did we pause at the clusters of gai lan or stacks of nopales. Finally, we spotted some promisingly sickly leaves. There, at the very end of the stall, peeking out from behind the kohlrabi, was the most exotic vegetable of all: the turnip.

Exoticism, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. As a child, I ate luo buo (Chinese daikon) every once in a while, but as far as I remember, I never, ever tried a turnip.* This wasn’t necessarily a result of my Chinese upbringing. Dr. Unexploited didn’t eat turnips, either. No one I knew did; the whitest of children blanched at the thought. Turnips, we all knew, were for hobbits.

What could possibly be more exotic than a vegetable whose major consumers aren’t even real?

My verdict on the world’s most exotic vegetable is that, like me, it is generally inferior to its Asian cousins. It does, however, have two advantages over daikon:

1. It is smaller and therefore easier to use in reasonable amounts.

2. It does not produce that peculiar scent associated with old daikon. In other words, it does not smell like a rotting fish ate a bunch of spoiled eggs, got a bad case of gas, and filled a tupperware with the products of its flatulence, which, with the assistance of anaerobic bacteria, fermented into super-farts that burst through the plastic and coated the entire inside of your fridge.

On that appetizing note, it’s time for a recipe.

I thought it would be fun to use Western turnips in luo buo gao (turnip cakes), but Middle-earth, despite being more or less the Chinese name for China, probably doesn’t have a Ranch 99, so I also Westernized the other ingredients. Chinese sausage became bacon, rice flour became wheat flour, scallions became garlic, and soy sauce became ketchup. Ok, the ketchup was a little weird. Otherwise, they were pretty good.

Turnip Cakes.

Luo Buo Gao for Ha Bi Ren
Turnip Cakes for Hobbits

• 3 medium-small turnips, peeled and grated (about 1 3/4 cups)
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup chopped bacon
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1 1/2 cups water

1. Mix turnips and water. You could simmer this for about 5 minutes, but I microwave it on high for 2 minutes. Taste to see whether or not the horseradish-like taste has softened; if not, cook a bit longer.
2. Add bacon and garlic and simmer/microwave for another minute or two.
3. In a separate bowl, mix flour, salt, pepper, and cornstarch.
4. Add flour to turnips and stir until the mixture looks like thick mashed potatoes.
5. Butter the bottom and sides of a 9 x 9 glass dish (or 8 x 8, though that will increase cooking time slightly). Spread the mixture evenly across the dish and smooth the top with a spatula.
6. Steam these for 40-50 minutes, until generally solid. If you don’t have a steamer but do have a rice-cooker, you can jury-rig a steamer by pouring some water into the pot, placing your pan on top of it (make sure there’s room for steam to escape), and covering it with a dinner plate. The last option is to cover your pan with a plate and microwave it at half power for 20 minutes. The  middle will still be gooey, but that’s all right; “gooey” is Chinese for “intentional.”† Just fry the gooey parts longer in step 8.
7. Let cool completely, then cut into brownie-sized squares.
8. Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a frying pan. Reduce heat to medium. Add turnip cakes and fry until browned on the bottom.
9. Flip and repeat.
10. Serve with ketchup. Those with more taste buds than patriotism can use soy sauce.

*Of course, I grew up in Missouri, where I was .5 of the 1.5 Chinese people in my grade, so the luo buo I ate probably were turnips.

†As anyone who has partaken of geoduck knows, it is also Pacific Northwesterner for “not even remotely resembling a.”

Pre-Leftovers

Split Pea Soup Fritters, or Hush Pup-peas.

What do you call leftovers that you anticipate and preemptively use? “Right-unders” has the proper symmetry, but it sounds too much like Australian slang. It’s probably some derogatory term for New Zealanders. For lack of a better alternative, I will call them “pre-leftovers.”

Pre-leftovers are one step ahead of planning ahead; they’re not so much using protection during a one-night stand as making your co-participant sign a custody agreement (also a good way to learn his or her name). As such, they are the ideal dish for our excessively prepared and risk-averse generation. Or they would be, were our generation’s character not a mass delusion spread by the previous generation’s lazy journalism.

Our latest dish in need of pre-leftovers was split pea soup, which seems to be the only dish Americans can make out of split peas. The rest of the world has many other ideas, the best of which is the split pea fritter, also known as baya kyow (in Burma) or pholourie (in Trinidad). To gradually introduce Americans to the idea of split peas not in soups, I created the gateway drug of split pea fritters: the hush pup-pea.

Hushpuppies, according to one of their many origin stories, were used to quiet barking dogs during the Civil War. I use these hush pup-peas to quiet Dr. Unexploited when he’s imitating Disappointed Dog. They may sound weird, but they’re actually good; I guess you could best describe them as crispy exploding soup bombs.

You start, of course, with split pea soup:

Slow-Cooker Split Pea Soup

• 1 lb dry split peas
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 6 cups chicken broth
• 1/2 tsp chili powder
• 1/4 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• salt to taste
• optional: the few scraps of bacon you can pry off the solid mass in your freezer

1. Dump everything in slow cooker.
2. Cook on low for 8 hours or on high for 4 hours.

Before you mash the split peas, reserve some of them for

Hush Pup-peas

• 2 cups freshly made split pea soup
• 3/4 cup bread crumbs, plus extra bread crumbs spread out on a plate
• oil for frying

1. Drain the split pea soup as much as you can — a little remaining liquid won’t hurt. If you have a colander with small holes, that will work well. Discard liquid and mash the remaining peas.
2. Stir bread crumbs into mashed peas. The resulting mixture should have the consistency of brownie batter. If it’s too runny, add more bread crumbs.
3. Form mixture into 1-inch balls. Roll balls in bread crumbs.
4. You can deep fry these, but I hate wasting oil, so I quickly roll them around in a couple tablespoons of hot oil until they’re brown all over (30 seconds to a minute).
5. Serve with ranch dressing or mayonnaise, because you’re American. (Unless, of course, you’re not.)