The plan is that I make every single one of the NYT 100 Easy Dinner Recipes For Right Now. The plan is that somehow helps me riddle out the right now.
As best I can tell, my paternal grandmother had approximately five things she could (or would cook): 1) Lasagna with low fat cottage cheese in place of ricotta 2) Broccoli and Cauliflower salad 3) Country Club Chicken (chicken breasts wrapped around dried beef baked in a combination of canned golden mushroom soup and sour cream and served over rice)this is better than it sounds, but still 4) Ground beef chili that was, more or less just the meat sauce from 1. If she were still alive, she might tell you that she had a couple more tricks up her sleeve, but I don’t count “heating up the Long John Silvers takeout on a baking sheet” as a family recipe, no matter how accurately that might convey her opinions on the value of either family or recipes.
Mostly, though, I can’t remember my grandmother having particular thoughts about food at all. She was a petite, affluent, blond—imagine Lucille Bluth, but southern— and like many women in that category, her interest in eating anything at all was pretty far down the list after cocktails, wine, cards, shopping, parties, witty (bordering on cruel) repartee, floral arrangements, and periodically moving large pieces of Chinese/Japanese porcelain around her living room. Maybe to redecorate. Maybe just to throw you. Either one would have made sense. Which probably explains why I remember absolutely in the way of dessert, except for the extremely dodgy fruitcake that managed to look like something Damien Hirst might cook up in Hell and taste like cherry tree bark dipped in latex and brandy. This she served to the grandchildren while the adults drank Bloody Mary’s on Christmas Day. Usually it caused at least one of us to cry.
She was always watching her weight. She was always perfectly thin. And I couldn’t ever work out whether her indifference to food was a result of some internalized perma-diet or if she was successful at the internalized perma-diet because she didn’t really care about food.
I tend to think it’s the latter. That’s puzzling to me. I cannot imagine what life must be like for people that just don’t really care about food. Probably easier than mine. Certainly less fraught. Like, if I’d just come out the kind of person who was like, “yeah, I could eat something and as I’m sitting here faced with the choice between a three peanuts and a wide variety of tastes and textures and flavors, the peanuts will be absolutely sufficient” I would have definitely been able to fit into Guess jeans in the sixth grade. And from there, who knows? Anything would have been possible I might have been a great actress. I might have invented time travel. I might have achieved world peace. My paternal grandmother might have actually remembered how to spell my first name on the $15 checks she sent to me each Christmas, made out without surname, in pencil.
Probably not.
Alas. I like food. I like cooking food. I like writing about liking food and cooking food like it’s still 2005. So I probably won’t cure cancer or win an Oscar, but I can tell you that Ali Slagle’s Green Curry Glazed Tofu is absolutely fantastic. And you can trust me on that one because you know I’ll always choose the thing that’s not the saltine.
This was an easy recipe. I was going to make my own green chile paste, but I didn’t make to Asian market in time. So I used the jarred. It was still delicious. I opted for snow peas and broccoli as vegetables. The one downside was that I realized I was out of almost all varieties of rice in the middle of the cooking process. This was a shocking development. I stockpile rice like a doomsdayer who is planning of surviving the apocalypse on curries and red beans and rice. But things happen. My only rice options in the cabinet were paella rice, arborio and Carolina Gold. I used the latter. I almost want to tell you the text didn’t work, but with the curried tofu and vegetables it almost played like sticky rice. Total comfort food. A+++ Would forget to buy Jasmine Rice again.
Accompanying drinks: Drumshambo Gunpowder Irish Gin & Tonic. Twist of Lime. In one of the cut class tumblers my paternal grandmother left me.
Soundtrack: Archer Prewitt—White Sky. This has not-so-secretly one of my favorite records since 1999. And it is without question one of the all-time great autumn records. I could go down a real rabbit hole here and talk about the Coctails (Prewitt’s original band) and the Sea and Cake (his better known post-Coctails project. Both of which also made great autumn records (Peel and The Fawn, among them). But I’ll hold it together I swear to god you can almost see the leaves falling. You can definitely feel the dry, curious bittersweet of a warm, sunny late fall afternoon. I could go down a real rabbit hole hear and talk about It finally made it to Spotify a few years back, which means I can easily recommend it without making you try to track it down in a used bin somewhere.
The Night: It was a pretty laid back Monday. Which was good. And I had plenty of leftovers for Tuesday, which was wonderful and wild. We had a local election and all the good people won. I went to a watch party with a bunch of local candidates on a slate together. There was dancing and drinking and some truly excellent homemade tostadas courtesy of one of the candidate’s mothers. It reminded me of all the reasons why I like living here. And it was really, really nice to have a good guys win election night. I feel like I haven’t had one of those in over a decade. Nice work, team.
Next up: Shrimp!
Tiny Commotions 