we call this hectic

Hi fat tuesday fans,

There’s been some cookery, and some chaos.

It goes like this: the anti-violence organization I do Americorps at will be closing it’s office at the end of February, and continuing to function….somehow….in some capacity…..and they are in lots of debt. There has been a great to-do.

I will probably moving to another anti-violence organization. More words on that later.

But the cooking has been happening! I will update these in an abbreviated fashion!

I made peanut soup this morning for Americorps team meeting, and there was a large communal freak-out, which is silly because there was also barbeque, but people were so, so enthusiastic about this soup. Or maybe I was just sitting in the corner with the rowdy people and I keep making raunchy jokes and snorting when I laugh, so they’re eventually going to figure out something to get verbal about with me.

But it went like this:

4 cups collard greens

2 cups kale

1 1/2-2 cups peanut butter (crunchy, Adams. really, any other kind just disappoints me a little.)

3 sweet potatoes

1.5 yellow onions

1 can diced tomatoes

Throw this is in a pot, put in enough water that it is level with your heaping piles of stuff, flavor liberally with red pepper flakes, garlic, salt and black pepper. Cook for 45 min-1 hour. People will RAVE.

I  made bun, which is a Vietnamese salad type thing that I love, love, love. I made a bastardized Maria-style version, which is mediocre, but amusing.

Boil rice noodles, chop up lettuce and carrots, pan-fry chicken with lots of olive oil and garlic.

Mix it all up together and dump the sauce on top, which is evidently called nuoc cham. I made this with 1/2 cup hot water, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 cup oyster sauce (was supposed to be fish but Safeway has none FAIL), 1 tsp chili powder, and juice of 1 lime whisked together. Mer, it’s okay. Not bad for homemade bun.

But paralleling things that were well-received, I don’t make a lot of dessert, particularly savory dessert, but  something I made that was particularly well received:

1 bunch chard (this was mostly rainbow and a little bit of Swiss, I pick up a lot of chard), 3/4 yellow onion, 2 chicken thighs, chopped up and pan-fried in olive oil and, again, flavored liberally with garlic and red pepper flakes. Serve with scrambled eggs, and toast if you’re really really hungry.

Conclusions for recent cooking adventures: garlic and red pepper flakes will seldom to never fail me, I have an unjustified preference for yellow onions, and throwing shit in a pot is a reasonable method of cooking, and sometimes I just hit it, and isn’t that awesome.

Look forward to vegan cookie recipes. Joy of joys.

In other news, I need to stop cutting my own hair because it is not long enough for that to be okay anymore, and I am now on the path to filling out stuff for financial aid for grad school. Which is almost as sexy and interesting as writing personal histories and statements of purpose. Eventually I will become a grad student and will struggle not to communicate in my increasingly more specialized theoretical gobbledygook. And I will have to cook things just to make sense of anything.

Also, I have adopted arugula and kale plants, and found out I have collard greens in my garden. Amazing.