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.
I stopped eating meat in early in my sophomore year of high school. I did this because the guy I had a crush on was trying to enlist his fellow vegetarian students to agitate for better meatless options in the dining hall. He wanted us all to get together to work on a petition to demand garden burgers. I wanted, simply put, to get together with him. So soaring on a high of infatuation-activated hormones, I didn’t eat meat for something like seven years. I don’t know why it lasted that long. It wasn’t the animal thing (I love animals, but my maternal grandfather raised Black Angus as a sideline to his lumber company accountant job, and I learned from an early age not to get too attached to the calves. Ditto the lambs at my mother’s best friend’s idyllic sheep farm in East Asheville). In retrospect, I suspect it had to do with most of my friends also becoming vegetarians at the time, for much better seeming reasons than I. I wanted to be perceived as wise and just and moral and righteous. And I knew, for an absolute fact that I could never be straight-edge (ha!), so out with the bacon, in with a whole world of disappointing eggplant dishes. And also, I am famously loathe to quit things.
In high school I was the sort of vegetarian that mostly ate French fries, cheese, chips and salsa, and vast quantities of hummus. You know. Healthy. Near campus was a branch of a local Mexican restaurant, where I regularly paid for meals in quarters. We went for the baskets of free chips and salsa and stayed for the faculty-proof smoking section. My preferred menu item was the Vegetarian A combo, which you’ve probably encountered on the menu of whatever strip mall Mexican joint that exists in your hometown. It consists of a bean burrito, a cheese enchilada and tostada, which is essentially just a crunchy tortilla with refried beans and cheese on it, sometimes sprinkled with iceberg lettuce. Gooey and shameless as a teenage crush with bonus points for being exactly the sort of thing my parents would be horrified that I’d order.
So the bar was pretty high for Kay Chun’s Bean and Cheese Burritos. I want to tell you that they are probably healthier than the ones at El Chapala (and if I’m honest, not as delicious) but they conjured a necessary salve of not-quite- nostalgia on a chilly November night when I kept looking at my face and wondering why I looked like a puffy ham sandwich a couple decades past her prime. I used canned pintos from the now-embarrassing pandemic-era legume collection, but I free-styled my own pico de gallo. I added some cumin and a pretty significant portion of cayenne to this recipe. I called it a success.
Accompanying sides: I had some avocados on hand so I mashed up some guacamole. The cabinet yielded up a bag of Vigo Yellow Rice, which is sort of a guilty pleasure at the grocery store, so I cooked it up with some chicken broth and garlic as a side. It was, once again, probably too much food, but it is very hard to cook for one with any dignity at all.
Accompanying drinks: Wegman’s Ginger Seltzer, a personal favorite.
Soundtrack: I rewatched “The Pelican Brief” because 90s Grisham adaptations are one of my comfort foods. The world it a cruel and uncaring place. It does not often give you Denzel Roberts and Sam Shepard in the same film. Though I have seen this movie probably a dozen times, I always remember it involving a steamy hook-up between Denzel and Julia Roberts on a washing machine in a dingy New Orleans laundromat while Irma Thomas sings “Time is On My Side” over a tinny speaker in the background. I am sorry to report this never happens in the actual film.
The Night: Solid. I even remembered to take the trash out. This is not a metaphor.
Tiny Commotions 