How To Turn Steamed Vegetables From Valedictorian Into Sad Dropout

This weekend, I made a totally awesome vegan chili, which I promptly dumped sour cream on because the dairy doesn't count if you chant “HORNS UP FOR VEGANISM” ten times and pledge to adopt an autistic goat.

I took pictures, I devoured, I attempted to blog about it. I felt like I had forgotten how to tie my shoes – total case of writer's block. And now that chili recipe is in exile for the next week along with my food soul. I'll explain.


After my husband's accident and surgery, me trying to cut my finger off, and some miserably hot weather, I have not been inclined to do a whole lot of cooking. Something about pain and surgery – whether I'm the patient or the caretaker – seems to dig Junk Food Tierney out from the purgatory to whence she is typically banished. After my shoulder surgery, I ate almost nothing but Easy Mac and beef jerky. I had a Golden Ticket – I was INJURED and in PAIN and I couldn't even shave my armpits and if that is not an excuse to eat my way through the Sad Person aisle at my local convenience store, then I don't know what is.


Anyways, while taking care of my husband after his shoulder surgery, we fell into the same pattern. I should have been cooking vegetables and quinoa and filling our house with intoxicating, healing aromas and maybe burning some sage or something but I am a weak human being of low culinary caliber during times of stress – so I resumed my long-abandoned love affair with Lean Pockets (they're LEAN! Like celery, your body actually incinerates its own FAT when you eat them – the more you know), pickles, sugar-free popsicles and self-loathing. We knew it was time to turn our backs on the dark side when I walked into Super Torta (our local amazing Mexican joint and purveyor of godly burritos) and the guy behind the counter says, “Same, si?” Si, amigo. *sigh* Si.


So after my final meal of vegan-not-vegan-but-basically-vegan chili, I decided to just eat vegetables, fruit and some nuts for at least 7 days, mostly raw or gently cooked. On Sunday, I hit up our Woodstock Farmer's Market and got some greens, green beans, peaches, berries, etc. My breakfast and lunch looked like this, and I grazed on it throughout the day at work:

For dinner, I steamed asparagus and had a handful of nuts. Day one was a BREEZE, I felt so healthy and just, you know, CLEAN (you know?), and I'm pretty sure I lost like 9 pounds and also my pee can now be distilled into pre-natal vitamins, because I am So Full of vitamins.


Well that hippie-dippie bullshit died real quick on day two (today). See, whenever I do any sort of diet improvement or cleanse or anything like that, I crave one thing more than any other – a giant tray of boneless Buffalo wings and a pony keg of blue cheese dressing. So when that horrible craving hits, I try to improvise. This Buffalo chicken kale salad with yogurt-based blue cheese dressing that I made a couple months ago was so good I wanted to ask it to prom:

Tonight, my plan was to steam broccoli, cauliflower and carrots. But I needed my fix in one way or another, and I figure Frank's Red Hot is really just vinegar and peppers so, TOTALLY raw... So I dipped my steamed vegetables in hot sauce. Sans blue cheese (quelle horreur), and I created a barrier with carrots to contain the hot sauce. Because I am an adult, and I know that letting your food touch gives you the cooties.  This is probably the least impressive picture of food I will ever post.

It was actually delicious. But I noticed something – a good dip in the hot sauce on say, a bit of broccoli, was overwhelming to my palate. I found myself barely dabbing them in it. If I had wings or fries or tots in front of me, I'd be DOUSING them in Buffalo sauce, and that never struck me as overwhelming. Then I thought about some of my favorite recipes and how they are similar in their simplicity – something fresh, cooked with thoughtful ingredients and a proper technique. When you cook nutritionally void stuff like fried chicken wings and tater tots, slathering it in sauces and dressings makes it palatable. How backwards is that? Instead of enjoying what our local farms can provide – raw and uncooked in most cases – we eat frozen crap and douse it in more crap to choke it down. (I don't mean that, frozen crap. I love you. You're secretly my favorite aisle in the grocery store, especially after mini-corndogs were born)


So this week I will start reminding myself that good cooking starts from the ground up. Learning to appreciate ingredients in their purest form is a good start.


Don't get me wrong though... I will never swear off Lean Pockets, and it will be a cold day in Hell when I don't attack a particularly shitty day with an entire bag of pizza rolls and drink wine through a straw. We all deserve to, and NEED to, indulge ourselves sometimes. This has been a messy blog post... I'm going to sign off and lick the Frank's Red Hot off my keyboard. I'll wash it down with some cucumber water to atone for my shame.

Duality and Balance - Let's Talk About Pickles

Duality and balance... these are things that I've always been perceptive of, as a Gemini (the Twins). Sometimes it really seems to be at the forefront of my life events, and lately has been one of those times.


A year ago today, I was living in a tiny downtown studio. Today, I live in a 3 bedroom house with a sprawling garden and 7 chickens. Two years ago almost to the day, I had been in a motorcycle accident and had to have shoulder surgery. On Friday, my husband had been in a motorcycle accident and had to have shoulder surgery. Same injury, his was his left shoulder, mine was my right. He is left-handed, I am right-handed. Spooky, right? Not really duality, but balance. Strangely enough, my husband is a Libra (the Scale). There's your daily hippidippiness quotient! Shifting gears now and putting away my tarot cards and crystals.


I can't really think of a smooth transition so I'm just going to get all blunt with it. We're going to talk about pickles now.


I love pickles. I love everything vinegary or briny – so that being said, I'm very disappointed that at some point in my life I had some sort of life-altering negative experience with olives, because while I should LOVE them, they make me dry heave. Weird.


Anyways, back to pickles. I've always loved the really garlicky, sharp, dilly, gently spicy pickles. Luckily, my mother-in-law is a master of pickling (I think jarring and canning aptitude is genetically predisposed if you're Eastern European), and a few years ago she started teaching me how. I've made several good batches over the years and am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I can eat an entire Mason jar in a single day and I keep the juice and add it to everything – soups, vinaigrettes, eggs, BLOODY MARYS, I can't get enough pickles.


When we made our pickles traditionally, we would go to one of several local farmers and buy some huge bags of pickling cucumbers – about the length of your index finger but nice and fat. Don't slice them unless you're trying to fill some awkward gaps in your Mason jar – the whole ones maintain such an amazing crispiness without the insides getting too soggy, as they would if they were pickled in slices. See, pickling the traditional way involves pouring boiling pickling liquid into jars filled with cucumbers, sealing the jars, and letting them rest for at least a couple months.


A good pickle is so good. And I love them enough that I firmly take the stance that pickles on sandwiches is absolutely blasphemy. Some may disagree, some may be deleting my number from their phone in disgust – but hear me out. The beautiful thing about pickling is that, if properly done, it allows to preserve the crispness of a fresh cucumber, while infusing it with flavor and adding a completely nuanced texture. It's perfection. When you slap it on a sandwich, you make the bread soggy, it's overwhelmed by whatever mayo/mustard/etc is on there, and is serves as a layer of slip-and-slide between the other ingredients that make the sandwich fall apart. I weep – I truly do – for every slice of awesome pickle that died covered in mustard, slipped off a sandwich and fallen to the plate, and thrown out with the last crumbs, never to be enjoyed at all. Give me a minute... I just got the feels.


I felt there was proper balance between the ease of purchasing my pickling cukes from a local farmer rather than growing them myself (not possible in a downtown studio), and the amount of effort and length of time it takes to make great pickles. Once I had an enormous garden, I decided to double-up – what if I could grow my own pickling cukes from seed, THEN pickle them! No need for balance when you kick ass that hard. So I planted a zillion pickling cuke plants – literally dozens of which were destroyed by my cat – and a few more that just didn't take off. I do have several Burpee cucumber plants that took off like crazy – but they are larger and could never be pickled whole.

 I had envisioned a vast bounty – all ripe at precisely the same time, of course – of pickling cukes, and so far instead I have a vast bounty of big-ass not-pickling sized cucumbers which are delicious and beautiful, but more bountiful than I can eat as they ripen. I don't want to slice them and pickle them in the traditional way, which results in mushy pickles in my opinion. I decided to explore quick pickling.


The recipe is simple: 1 cup rice wine vinegar, ¾ cup sugar, 1 cup water, 1 tbspn salt. Boil. Add thinly sliced large cucumber, cover, put in the fridge. Wait a couple hours until it's cooled. My hand quivered as I dumped that much sugar into the pickling liquid, and a nervous tick took over reaching for my garlic and spices. But I was determined to give this a shot. The exact opposite pickle experience than I'm used to – long time preparing the actual cucumber, short time pickling it.

Jesus tap dancing Christ, those pickles were amazing. I say “were” because I ate them all. A completely different texture and flavor than I'm used to, but so delicious. I can affirmatively say that these would be great on a good Cuban sandwich, layered between the pork, or perhaps even on a bahn mi in addition to the pickled daikon. They're just thin enough that they would melt into the sandwich and provide a vinegary and sweet bite, without causing the aformentioned pickle slip-and-slide or bread sogginess. Next weekend – making a bahn mi and a Cuban with a quick-pickled cukes from my garden. I will report back.


My favored spicy, sharp, not-sweet pickles depend on effort and time for myself in preparing them, but no time in acquiring the cukes themselves. I depend on months and months of the care and attention of a farmer somewhere, and I hand a few bucks to them and then the pressure is on me. After some care and patience, in a few months – I'll have delicious pickles.


Then I flipped it. I spent months and months caring for cucumbers from seed, and once they became ripe, I decided to do it quick, easy and dirty to pickle them. The result was so different than what I thought was the only pickle I'd ever love – but equally delicious.

Being receptive to the duality and balance of the universe is pretty neat – and I think it's everywhere if you look. As I've been caring for my recovering husband, we've experienced balance – he's now experiencing an injury that I once did, and in caring for him I know how much he is hurting, and how it feels, and where it hurts, and how the perfect pillow arrangement for maximum comfort looks. He now is understanding everything I went through, and gaining a new empathy for my continued pain. Clearly not a situation to strive towards, but interesting. Scales.


Then on to duality.  I've been adjusting to spending more time attending to my garden and chickens and fresh produce, and less time buying food grown tirelessly by others, from the store, then spending hours and hours on slow-cooking dishes. I've shifted my focus this summer to growing delicious food myself from start-to-finish and then not messing with it so much. Raw, sliced vegetables, salads, quick vegan zucchini soup, and now – quick pickles. Twins.


I think after awhile of tackling challenging recipes, I'm going to keep it simple for the summer now that I have the opportunity to enjoy a simple, easy meal and enjoy all the work I put into growing the ingredients over the last few months. Going back to balance – things just might be getting crazy for me here in the coming months, so tonight I enjoy the simplicity of walking outside, grabbing a handful of lettuce and eating it with my first ripe tomato. More news to follow. In the meantime, here are our chickens enjoying their first watermelon.

Loss and Egg McMuffins

You might have noticed I haven't posted recently – or perhaps you didn't and I'm flattering myself. It's been a crazy few weeks, and my usual therapist (my cookbook) gathered dust.


First, my grandmother Ruthie passed away – and while not unexpected it was hard to swallow as she was a true gem and taught me much of what I know about being a take-no-bullshit Lady, and her sense of style and design forever altered the course of my life and I will miss her forever. Work was tumultuous, my husband was in a motorcycle accident and badly injured his shoulder which will require surgery next week, I got other news that I'll keep to myself (no I'm not pregnant nor do I want to be, I hate that I have to say that so often). My head has been spinning, and while cooking usually calms me, recently it's felt like a burden. I just want to burrito myself into my fuzziest blanket and sleep all the time. I've been having migraines and just really feeling like shit.


This weekend was looking up – I finally had some vegetables to harvest from my garden!! Rejoice after months of coddling seedlings and threatening murder upon my cats who love to take dirt baths in my plots. Of course because I'm always striving for homeostasis, this exciting news necessarily required something shitty to counteract it.


First, I cut my finger badly while walking back from my garden after grabbing some mature cucumbers and zucchinis. I don't know what it is about fingers but they bleed like faucets which I know because my fancy German knives are trying to win me a Darwin Award. This is my third bad cut this year.


Second, and this one hurts more than my finger, Hornswaggle disappeared. We had built her an outdoor enclosure and drilled on a lip around the perimeter to ensure she couldn't climb out. One of our cats had taken a liking to sitting on that lip, and wore it down to the point it was basically an escape ramp for my tortoise. I spent hours, literally, combing our enormous yard and walking the neighborhood. Under the deck, under every bush, in every corner, I searched obsessively. After spending the last 8 years trying to escape to Mars, she was gone. She is gone. My heart is broken.

Pets give us affection and love and make us feel useful when we feed them, but they also provide continuity to our lives. Hornswaggle was the single thread that has followed me through every bump and turn and change over almost the last decade. Her sole mission in life was to not be contained – no matter how vast and luxurious her enclosure was. I have to respect her for that, but I will miss her forever. My little homie, the only source of consistency through almost my entire adulthood. You might laugh because she's “just a turtle”, but she was MY turtle. I miss her.


So after a tumultuous few weeks, I really wanted to cook something to distract myself. I wanted comfort food. I wanted the one thing I crave when I'm sick, mad, happy, hungover, injured, mourning, or having a religious experience.


I wanted a goddamn Egg McMuffin.


I toasted the English muffins in a cast iron pan with butter, then crisped the Canadian bacon in the same butter. I cooked the egg in a perfect little egg pan that I impulsively bought during an Amazon spree which I still do not regret. After adding a slice of Kraft American cheese, it all came together..

I could have gone to a fine French cafe and ordered a croissant, or Eggs Benedict, or a beautifully constructed omelet. That trashy, cheap Tinkerbell of my soul however, insisted on an Egg McMuffin. And I needed to make it myself.a


Loss is a difficult thing. Something that was always there all of a sudden, just... isn't. I think during those times we turn to the things that ARE still there. Our creature comforts. They provide the continuity that we lose when we lose those we love.


So tonight, I went through an obscene amount of effort to make something I could have bought for a dollar. It was not the time to take the easy route. I made myself an Egg McMuffin, and I cried. Just got really ugly with it and mowed through that McMuffin like it was my last meal. And it felt really good. I felt better.

Sometimes life sucks. Seek out those things that make you wiggle in your seat, even if they're sinful or high-calorie or verboten. Sometimes you just need to cry over an Egg McMuffin. And that's okay.

Taco Tuesday with Zillion Dollar Fish

It's Taco Tuesday.


In my youth of yesteryear – you know, like three months ago – on this weekly holiday we typically would hole up at Area 52 which is a dive bar near our house that serves $1 tacos that are so delicious yet somehow also make you hate yourself and your life choices. But when you wash them down with a $2.75 well cocktail, it evens itself out. Since I've been trying to cook relatively healthy every day, and I had a hankering for halibut, I decided I'd make some healthy fish tacos and circumvent our usual Tuesday routine.


I walk past Portland Fish Market every day on my way home, and today I stopped in. I asked for enough halibut to serve two people, and the friendly fish monger – side note, is that not the best job title EVER? I want to be a monger, of any variety – grabbed two small fillets, weighed them and proceeded to ring me up.


TWENTY FIVE EFFING DOLLARS!


I'll let that sink in. $25. For two small pieces of halibut.


First of all, you shifty fish monger, halibut is a bottom-feeder and really is like the mole of the fish world. YES it is delicious, but how do you sleep at night? Do you roofie yourself, or perhaps drink enough to forget that you make a living charging people 4x the hourly minimum wage for two slabs of fish?


Here's where the story takes a predictable turn (if you know me). I smiled and handed him my money with no objection whatsoever, because I didn't want to cause a stir. If you ever want to swindle someone out of money with whatever cockamamie scheme you can hatch, come knock on my door because I am too nice to object.


Next stop was the grocery store for guacamole ingredients, cabbage and cotija cheese. If you've never had cotija cheese, do yourself a favor and buy a wheel... and then eat the whole thing without utensils of any sort. Whether you set out to do that or not, that is what will happen.


I no longer buy tortillas because one night I was craving tacos and had consumed a few adult beverages and logged onto Amazon and ordered pastured lard, 8 pounds of masa, a tortilla press, and one of those tortilla warmer things you get when you order fajitas. I thought I'd be a certified Grown Up when I turned 30 but those dreams have been shattered. I am an impulsive fat kid with a paycheck.


Anyways, homemade tortillas are absolutely delicious and easy. How many of these do you want to shove in your face?

On to the fish. I followed the recipe from my food bible, The Food Lab, for breaded fish and got it cooking after finishing up my tortillas and tucking them into bed in their fancy little warmer (I GOT FREE SHIPPING). I threw together a quick guacamole with a chopped onion, tomatoes, lime juice and 3 avocados. One thing I appreciate so much about Latin cuisine is that it is so delicious in its simplicity – the tortillas take like five seconds to pull together if you're blind and lazy, and guacamole really just requires a fork, a knife and enough upper body strength to brush your hair.


Considering it cost me more than I would typically spend on a dress, leggings, and a pair of sandals at H&M, the fish was lucky that it came out phenomenal otherwise I would have thrown it against my wall which seems to be a pretty undignified way to end ones earthly presence. Finally, it was time to assemble.

Homemade tortillas. Crisp leaf of Boston lettuce. Homemade guacamole. Crispy breaded halibut. Shredded cabbage. Cotija cheese.


It was delicious. It's very satisfying to see all these simple elements come together – it sounds cliché, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The sharp crunch of the onion, the creaminess of the guacamole, the chewiness of the tortillas, the crispness of the fish all topped off with a mild but pungent cheese – it was godly. It clearly cost more than the $1 taco down the road – and I did miss the sideshow of weathered day-drinkers trying to karaoke – but worth every penny.

I highly recommend getting drunk and ordering tortilla-making supplies on Amazon, and creating your own Taco Tuesday. Next week I think I'll make a taco with mango salsa because that sounds fancy and weird. The world is your oyster – go forth and Taco!*


*Note to self: Oyster tacos might be a thing

Bonus: Halfway through, with extra guac.

Braise Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Have you ever had one of those weeks – the kind where even the Buddha himself personally waking you up in the morning wouldn't inspire you to not pull a pillow over your head and hit the snooze and punch EVERY SINGLE BIRD that was chirping in their cute stupid face (seriously, shut up birds)? The kind of week during which you'd be walking through molasses to reach the Holy Grail even if it was full of Nutella and rainbow dreams and sunshine?


Last week I had one of those weeks. The rut I found myself in was mighty, and it was wide. Every day, I had great aspirations to cook stews and roasts and all those lovely things – evidenced by the now vacuum-sealed 9 pounds of meat in my freezer (IT WAS ON SALE, DON'T JUDGE ME). And yet, every night... I just wanted to braise vegetables from the recipes in The Food Lab (my food bible). I could not be inspired to do anything more than brown, add butter, close a lid, and open it. In the meantime, I would hang out with my chickens, who remind me that even if you have a shitty day, chill out and check yo'self – they are little feathered dinosaur creatures and they shit their little poultry-pants in pure glee when I hand them a bunch of weeds. I mean really, how bad can my problems be? They prance around me like I'm about to douse them with holy water when I walk into their coop with weeds that I'd otherwise toss in my yard debris bin.  I hear most children are not so appreciative - hey, prospective parents, consider hens!


Anyways, on to the week of braising. I started with asparagus. Side note – I am one of those freaks of nature that cannot smell a change in the odor of my pee after eating them, so I get super paranoid going to the bathroom in public after eating them. After this particular batch, I walked down a floor to pee in a bathroom I knew to be less populated by people who I know and would certainly knock me down a few pegs if they smelled my asparagus pee. I don't know what asparagus pee smells like, and maybe it is horrifying. The suspense of not knowing will plague my life until my dying day.


Anyways – I didn't know what to expect, as I've never braised vegetables before. After browning, I added a healthy dose of grass-fed butter and some homemade chicken broth, tossed on a lid – and that was it. When the broth and butter had simmered down into nothing, it was ready. The asparagus was coated with this perfect lacquer, and it was absolutely delicious.

Okay, so that was like.. one foot up on my way out of the rut. But I wasn't quite there, so the next night I decided to replicated that recipe with carrots. Okay – go find every cookbook and recipe you have regarding cooking vegetables, and set them aflame. They are utterly useless. Braised vegetables are like that girl in high school who wasn't only the prom queen and valedictorian, volunteered at Humane Society and hand-fed bunnies, but was so nice that the only reason you hated her was because you couldn't hate her.  (SCREW YOU, JULIA)*

Day 2, carrots.  Oh my God.



Braising is the buttery popcorn version of vegetables, except minus the guilt because VEGETABLES. My husband and I did not use a fork on Day 1 or Day 2 of my braising week. Fingers are the utensils that god intended for braised vegetables.


Day 3 I decided to braise some green beans, and this time I mixed it up a bit. While I'd usually use butter as the emulsifying fat, I slow-cooked some slab bacon, drained it, and used the leftover bacon fat instead. Also added some red wine vinegar, and holy crap. It looked like mushy drain leftovers... but it was the best yet of the braised vegetables. Served it with a Portuguese sausage because, come on... why not.

Braising is a beautiful thing. Fresh organic greens, healthy fats, low cooked until perfection. After my epic-level rut of a week, it was like Xanax braising every night. Well, braising in combination with my chickens, who continue to be my 7 little therapists. I mean, they only care about me when I'm feeding them and they smell like shit... but same goes for human babies and people love them right?


I found myself in a rut. In accordance, I only cooked using the same technique every day but with different vegetables. Even just mixing it up that much got my wheels spinning, like finally catching traction when you're stuck in the mud. Tiny little deviations – they go a long way when you're trying to crawl back to the surface.


Happy braising y'all.

*Julia doesn't exist.  I was fortunately enough to go to high school with some classy-ass ladies, whom I don't resent (because I can braise better than them)

Being Both Flawed and Tasty: A Lesson in Life and Ugly Food

Have I bitched enough yet about how hot it is? I don't know if it's my verified Northern/Western European heritage (no seriously I had DNA testing done), but this heat just saps me of any and all energy. I could not even stop by Safeway on my bus ride home for cooking supplies, lest I faint. So I decided I'm cooking whatever the hell is marginally edible in my fridge and hoping for the best and then calling Al Gore and screaming, “FIX IT!!”


I had three eggs left from my mother-in-law's hens, which are culinary GOLD. Must include those. Some salad greens, some mozzarella, three-day old cherry tomatoes and an avocado. I can work with that.


Then this happened, which was neat.

Now I have two eggs left. I do not prefer to cook eggs under such circumstances as I am known to throw them out when I try to cook them and they suck. Not because I'm like a horrible, vindictive person who is prone to fits of rage (I'M NOT, SHUT UP), but to do them the favor of not living their brief life marred by disappointment and mediocrity. Now the pressure is on, because I have been failing on eggs so hard lately it's like I'm a junior high kid who thinks it's cool to skip class.


My husband prefers hard-boiled, and I prefer soft. So I whipped him up this awesome salad then got to feeding myself. That hard-boiled egg was on point.

I should also mention that today, I got a package from Crate & Barrel from my parents that was full of AWESOME NEW PLATES(!!!!!!!!) because maybe they're proud that their daughter cooks stuff and puts it on the internet and they are encouraging good behavior because otherwise I would totally be snorting nefarious things off of a toilet bowl at Hidden East Tavern. Or maybe just because they're awesome. They are fancy and colorful (both the plates and arguably my parents) and I must do them justice.


I roasted the tomatoes not out of any sort of culinary inspiration but because they were starting to go soft, and my chickens won't eat them. Roasted tomatoes might be my new favorite thing – they become so sweet and acidic at the same time, and they're awesome even though they're ugly and wrinkly which gives me hope for my future. I am turning 31 in a couple weeks, so the pruning process has begun.


Now for my soft-boiled egg. That slutty mistress. I followed the recipe from my food bible, The Food Lab, and have had a hell of a time nailing down the cooking time. I've been told I prefer six-minute eggs, but for me and our stove, it takes seven and a half. Many eggs have perished in this determination.


WOW HOW AWESOME. After just straight up dropping an egg on the floor, I stood in a kitchen that was already hot as balls over a hot stove, and my egg had cracked. Did I mention I am totally an egg misogynist and hate the ones that are ugly even though they probably taste fine or possibly delicious? I only did this for the picture. I do sort of enjoy the fact that it looks like Batman.

It actually tasted perfect. And the roasted tomatoes, avocado and cold mozzarella drizzled with a bit of olive oil and some sea salt was really a tasty combination. Lesson learned – you can be old or wrinkly or ugly or any combination of the three, and still be tasty.

Fat Kid Day

It was a stupidly hot weekend.

Dodging under random and ever-shifting spaces of shade, I accomplished a lot in the yard, and spent ample time kicking it with our awesome chickens – but I still needed to clean my bathroom and do my laundry and scrub the floors and solve world hunger, of which I did absolutely fuck-nothing because I was too busy drinking beer (FOR SURVIVAL) and sticking my face under cold running water while my cats tried not to die.  After a hot and draining couple of days, I was tired.  I dragged my sorry ass to work on Monday and just felt like I was lagging all day.  I hadn’t cooked a new recipe from The Food Lab or blogged the previous day as per my mission, and felt pretty poopy about it.

So, I got home Monday night determined to check off a couple of recipes from my (LONG) list, and I was so sick of salads and healthy things because hot weather makes me want to mainline White Castle burgers.

 I decided to make smashed potatoes with a from-scratch herb mayonnaise so I could eat all the oil in my pantry and also some starch, just for good measure.  Basically cholesterol therapy.

I drove to Safeway and they didn't have the right kind of potatoes because everything has to be a goddamn tragedy.  So I got yellow potatoes instead of new potatoes which is like eating rehydrated peanut butter when you wanted Nutella.  And then it makes you make outrageous comparisons that have no foundation in reality.

I made it home, also with a bottle of Cocoban which is the best cheap red wine on this planet.  I needed it because it counteracts personal and situational failure (at least during consumption) and I'll take what I can get.

The mayonnaise was a miracle.  We buy it from the store for our whole lives because it's one of those things that is a fridge essential but no one ever thinks to make themselves.  I always thought it was like churning butter - why in the name of fanciful Moses would I go through ALL THAT EFFORT when I could just buy it?  News flash - mayo involves dumping things into a mug and running an immersion blender.  If you're cross-eyed and lack basic motor skills, you can make mayo that is delicious.  Even add some garlic and call it aioli if you're fancy.

I boiled the potatoes until soft and smashed them with a pan, then fried in oil.  Do you know that feeling that you get when you walk into McDonald's that's equal parts "holy shit fried stuff" and "I make poor life decisions"?  Smelled like that.

I've been trying to cook healthy, and I deviated.  But I think there's something inherently healthy in indulgence.  I walk past Dairy Queen every goddamn day and never treat myself - instead I learned how to make mayo and fried potatoes like a really industrious fat kid.  It tasted like heaven and improved my mood as much as it damaged my waistline.

I'll eat a salad next time.