Food Interlude VI: Thai Curry

A few simple rules govern the RB kitchen:

1) Meals must be reasonably healthful (some exceptions allowed)
2) Meals must be delicious (no exceptions!)
3) Preparation and clean up should be as easy as possible; anything elaborate better be damn good!
4) There should be leftovers

These rules are pretty universal, I concede, but I would add that they are especially salient for those of us who cook for and clean up after one, especially one who is single. I need to eat well because I cannot afford to become a big fat slug again, at least not until I ensnare my future future ex; the food must be tasty because I must keep my spirits up during this period of unbidden solitude; prep and clean up must be easy because I have to do it all, at least until the aforementioned future future ex materializes; and there must be leftovers because God created a meal called lunch, and a person who cooks for one cannot be preparing several meals a day from scratch. As an added bonus, if I eat lunch at 2 o'clock, I can have dinner reruns while watching a rerun of the previous night's Daily Show. That's a bit of cosmic synchronicity, and I dig it.

Few foods fit my four rules as neatly as does a Thai curry. Thai curries are simple to make, they're reasonably good for you (do you see many fat Thais? Neither do I), they are awesomely delicious, and, as with all stews, you can make as much as you like, meaning you'll have all the leftovers you can handle.

I am partial to yellow and masaman curries, which are both sweet and hot and pair well with chicken or shrimp. Purists make their curry pastes from scratch, and while I have no doubt that homemade curry pastes are infinitely better than store-bought curries, I confess that I find Maesri brand curry pastes quite fine, fine enough that I use them without the slightest remorse. They are also very inexpensive.

Like all stews, Thai curries can be--are meant to be--made with whatever you have sitting around the kitchen. You don't need a hard-and-fast recipe, just a few basic cooking techniques (sauté, stew) and some ingredients. My curries often include some of the following: potato, sweet potato, carrots, frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen green beans, fresh green beans, mushrooms, spinach, and some sort of flesh. Here's the one I made tonight:

Ingredients
1 lb. shrimp
1 onion, halved and cut into thin half-moons
1 large russet potato, cut in 3/4" dice
1 green bell pepper, sliced lengthwise to 3/4" width, then halved
1 Serrano pepper, halved and seeded
some tomatoes, diced
cilantro
1 can light coconut milk
1 tbsp. fish sauce
1 tbsp. peanut oil
salt to taste

I started by sautéing the onion in the peanut oil until the onion was cooked through and limp. While the onion was cooking I cut up the potato and bell pepper.

When the onion was cooked, I added the potato and cooked for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, just long enough to brown the potato a bit. Then I added the coconut milk and fish sauce. I brought the liquid to a boil, then added the green pepper and the Serrano pepper. I stirred in a generous tablespoon of yellow curry paste, reduced the heat to a simmer, and covered and cooked for 10 to 15 minutes, until the potato was cooked through.

When the potato was done, I added the shrimps, brought the liquid back up to a steady simmer, and cooked for a few minutes, until the shrimps were cooked through. At that point I turned off the heat, added the tomatoes and cilantro, hit it with a pinch of salt, and gave the dish a quick stir. It was now ready to serve, so serve I did.

After I was done, I realized that the dish was missing basil, a traditional ingredient in Thai curries. It was no worse for the basil's absence, truth be told. You can serve this dish over rice--jasmine rice is probably the best option for Thai food--but for me the potatoes make the rice unnecessary.

Best of all, this is a one-pot dish, making clean up a breeze.

So there you go.

XV: In Which I Find A Buyer For My Home

In mid-February, my future ex and I decided we needed a trial separation. By mid-March, we had separated for good.

In mid-April, we had tickets (purchased back in February) to see Nick Lowe and Ron Sexsmith in concert. To my future ex's misfortune, I had possession of the tickets, and my state of mind back then was such that I couldn't imagine our being together in the same concert hall, much less sitting next to one another; the hurt was still too fresh and too raw. I found another taker for the second ticket.

It's now mid-August, and while I still don't think I'd much enjoy a concert at which my future ex and I were sitting side by side--I'd be too self-conscious, and I expect she'd feel the same way--I can now at least imagine our attending the same show and enjoying it so long as we mostly kept out of each others' way. I may well be wrong about this, but at least it seems conceivable. That in itself is a step forward.

What I'm getting at here is that time makes things better. At first, a big bust up leaves a nasty open wound that screams at you pretty constantly. Your rational self knows that the noise will end eventually, that the entire rest of your life won't be an endless wail, but your emotional self isn't so sure. Eventually, though, the wound does start to scab over. It still hurts, but not quite as much, and you start to believe your rational self when it tells you that things will be even better tomorrow and again the day after that. Things quiet down.

It wasn't that long ago that I found the prospect of remaining in our house unimaginable. I was all but certain that I needed a completely fresh start, and that meant leaving the marriage home behind. But a funny thing has happened in the past couple of months. I've started imagining changes to the house that I could make, changes that never would have occurred to me back when I was married. I've also begun to establish a rhythm, a routine for cleaning and maintenance and all the other chores of home ownership that I used to shunt off on my future ex. In the process, the house has started to feel a little less like 'ours' and a little more like 'mine.'

Much as I'd like to pretend that my decision to buy the house is solely the result of some wonderful organic healing process, I must concede that more pragmatic concerns are also at play here. A real estate agent ran a Comparative Market Analysis to determine a likely selling price for our home, and the result was at once disappointing and fortuitous: disappointing because my ex and I had hoped it was worth more, but fortuitous because it meant that I could afford to buy out my wife's share of the house.

The prospect of selling the house was also a factor. When the realtor explained to me that I'd have to make my home look like an Ikea showroom and that I'd have to live in that antiseptic fantasy state for however many months it took to ensnare a buyer, my enthusiasm for a fresh start waned precipitately.

And there's also the remote prospect that I might have to relocate to a new city for work, meaning I might have sold this house, bought a new one, then had to turn around and sell that one too. To paraphrase Barney Fife's reaction when he learned that Aunt Bee was cooking up eight quarts of her kerosene pickles, the very thought of it shakes my will to live.

And so here I shall stay, at least for a while. Procuring a new mortgage was a bit of an ordeal because bankers hate freelancers, even those of us with spotless credit records. I imagine that either they think that there is something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with us--that they wonder "Who would choose to work at home and earn an unpredictable income when he could sit in a cubicle all day for steady pay?"--or they want to punish us for figuring out a way to make a living without having to sit in a cubicle. Either way, every mortgage I've ever gotten has been like having my wisdom teeth extracted. Through my anus.

Now that it will soon be mine, there's a part of me that indulges fantasies of turning the house into a bachelor nightmare, of painting the walls the colors worn by my favorite sports teams, of filling every space with rock and roll memorabilia and empties of every brand of beer I've ever drunk and piles and piles of comic books, of turning the living room into a combination home theater/bar/gym/piñataria, and of converting my office and/or bedroom into a replica of Elvis Presley's Jungle Room. Then there's another part of me that realizes that eventually I will have to sell this house, and that it will have to look like an Ikea showroom when I do. That's my rational self talking, and I'm learning that he's usually right. There'll be no Jungle Room for me, damn it.

So there you go.

XIV: In Which I Am Reminded of My Resemblance to a Boiled Frog

I've been cleaning up the house lately in preparation for putting it on the market. Sorting through seven years worth of accumulated junk is a formidable task, and one that is not without its occasional surprises. Yesterday, for instance, I found a photograph of me taken in September of last year. I was 20 pounds heavier than I am now, and I will not lie: I was big old tub of goo. What was shocking was not so much seeing myself so Sumo-esque but rather the realization that at that time I had convinced myself I wasn't as rotund as I actually was. I now recall dressing in ways that I thought masked my endomorphy and approaching mirrors from complimentary angles only and concocting all other sorts of strategies to maintain the fantasy that I wasn't a porker.

There's a paradigmatic science experiment that everyone, even science nitwits such as I, recalls. A frog is placed in temperate water. Then, the temperature of the water is increased gradually until it reaches a boil. The frog accommodates itself to the incremental increases and stays put until, ultimately, it is cooked. This is not only a nifty science experiment, but also the beginning of a fine French stock.

You no doubt see where I'm going with this. In retrospect, it's now clear to me that my marriage endured a slow steady decline during its final years, that it was over long before my future-ex and I headed off to counseling or attempted a trial separation or any of that. I reacted by accommodating the deterioration. I kept lowering my expectations and looking for signs of an oasis in the desert. I was a boiling frog. It seems pretty foolish in retrospect, but it made perfectly good sense at the time.

A more self-assured individual than I might at this point assert that he'd lost a lot more than 20 pounds over the last year; he'd lost the debilitating weight of self-delusion. Me, I'm not so sure. I am currently happy that I am no longer trying to convince myself that up is down or that black is white or that I wasn't a lardass last September or that my marriage was salvageable after it actually was, but I am also a golfer. I sense some head-scratching out there. Hear me out. Golf teaches you many things, but this is the big one: the lessons you believe you have learned from previous errors have an extraordinarily short lifespan, and you will soon have to learn them all over again. Just when you've finally figured out what is wrong with your weight distribution, your swing plane, your grip, your wrist hinge, the length of your backswing, etc. etc., one or more of them reverts to its former imperfection and you have to start learning the same old lessons as though from scratch. Ultimately you have a sequence of 'ah ha' moments out on the course. First, you realize that you have discovered the reason your golf game sucks. Then, you realize that you have had the same epiphany many, many times before and applied the same correction, only to return to the same old crappy swing. The moral: Most important lessons in life simply don't stick.

Perhaps in the end we are all Sisyphus, rolling that damn rock up the hill only to see it roll back down again. We all hope for enlightenment and serenity, but history produces precious few Buddhas. Most of us can only hope to be like Quixote, which is to say to be like Sisyphus, except delusional. At least then we can approach mirrors at particular angles that don't make us look so fat, or tell ourselves that our failed relationships aren't yet doomed, and take the illusion for reality. It's not optimal, but unless we're ready to clock some serious hours under the Bodhi tree, it's probably the best we can hope for.

So there you go.

Food Interlude V: Greek Salad

One of the preconditions of my then-future-wife's relocation from Milwaukee to New York City--I met her in Milwaukee and spent two long years convincing her that she would not only not die if she moved to New York but that she would in fact quickly grow to love the place--was that I abandon my place of residence in downtown Brooklyn. I couldn't really argue the point. The list of the Brooklyn apartment's assets was short: it was cheap, and it was close to Manhattan. Its drawbacks were more copious. The landlady kept a herd of cats in the basement and was not at all fastidious about them, and as a result the hallways reeked of cat piss, so much so that my friend CC aptly dubbed the place "The Elephant House." And then there was the mouse that ran across my future-ex's foot late one night when she was perched upon the commode. There's a lot more, but you get the point. It was an appropriate place for a musician, or a college student, or someone already fully sold on the concept of living in New York. My wife was none of those.

And so soon after my then-future-wife's-now-future-ex-wife's arrival in New York, we went apartment hunting. Our explorations landed us in Astoria, an affordable if somewhat-too-remote section of Queens that is home to some of the city's best-known Greek restaurants. We availed ourselves of the local grub regularly and grew to accept it as 'normal' food, a misapprehension that held through our relocation to North Carolina; imagine our dismay at our new Tar Heel friends' tepid reactions when we offered them dishes of taramasalata (fish roe salad), skordalia (garlic and potato dip), saganake (flaming cheese), and ortikia (grilled quail). We eventually won some of them over and learned to keep less exotic stuff on hand for the others.

Lately I've been jonesing for an Astoria-style Greek salad. But what, exactly, constitutes the perfect Greek salad? I posed that question to the proprietor of Mariakakis, the excellent Greek grocer in Chapel Hill (he stocks Malamatina, the official retsina of the Greek National Soccer Team; enough said), who told me that where he comes from (Greece? just a guess) a Greek salad is composed of whatever happens to be in the fridge or in the garden. And then I realized that the Greek salad I had been imagining was actually the sort one finds in Greek-American diners all across the country. Lettuce, tomatoes, feta, cucumber, green pepper, onion, anchovies, pepperoncini, dolmades, feta cheese--I'm not sure I ever saw one of those in an authentic Astorian Greek restaurant. There's nothing wrong with that salad--I make it all the time, in fact, minus the dolmades, which are too labor-intensive to prepare for a salad--but it wasn't the salad to take me back to Astoria.

"Unless, of course, you're talking about a Horiatiki," the proprietor added, and I immediately decided that this was exactly what I was talking about. "Horiatiki" derives from the Greek word for "country" or "village"; the salad is often called a "Greek Village Salad" in America. It is the perfect salad for this time of the year, as it features tomatoes prominently. It is amazingly simple. All it really needs is tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, feta cheese, and vinaigrette. I seed the tomatoes and cucumbers, then cut them into 3/4" to 1" dice (they mix nicely this way and are fun to stab with a fork), slice the onion thin (I usually use a Bermuda onion but a yellow, Spanish, or Vidalia will do in a pinch), toss, crumble some feta over it all, and dress. I like to sprinkle some dried thyme on top; Kalamata olives aren't necessary but certainly are in the spirit of the thing and should be added if desired, as should green bell pepper. Me, I prefer to keep it simple.

Funny thing is, I'm just about always ready for a culinary return to Astoria. But as for an actual return to Astoria--a place where we were daily awakened by the sound of men spitting and snotting on the sidewalk, where the natives drove as though they were dodging fire, where every line in every store seemed as though it could turn into a scrum at any moment, where female store clerks could barely make change because of their debilitating artificial fingernails, and where you never knew which "public" places of business would welcome you and which were fronts for Mafia operations... not so much, thanks.

So there you go.