Year: 2013

Tax Day

Sometimes, bombs go off, and you don’t even realize the impact they’ll have through all the smoke and chaos and initial “WTF happened?”. Meaning sometimes, it’s not the Apocalypse but the Aftermath that really stings, that lingers in the air—often invisible but still noxious, clouding your senses.Vinyl of the day: “So runs the world away” by Josh Ritter. The fallout feels like fog. I owe(d) thousands to the IRS. To me, numbers are painful realizations that make self-employment feel like Sisyphus-style self-immolation. Fortunately, there’s food. And silk. And vintage “pearl” neckties. And Dan Costello. Even, and especially, on tax day. I don’t even know how he does it. He took the scraps of haphazard, neglected and wilting vegetables and over-exposed-to-the-air tortillas and made magic happen. We got this cast iron dutch oven somewhere for some such cheapness (Dan will remember and I’ll ask him later and then delete this part with just a cheap-ass number and you will forget this sentence ever existed. Poof. Like magic). All this became Black bean & radish fried tortilla pie.Then …

FOOD: Eggplant stuffed eggplant

By Dan Costello, made while Jessica was out of town. (Damn it.) So you take an eggplant, see, and hollow it out like a little canoe… You can see most of the other ingredients there as well. That’s a grapefruit, an apple-Gouda sausage (optional if you’re going veggie), and yes, a habanero pepper. More on that later… Those ingredients, along with some butter and olive oil, apple cider vinegar, fresh ginger, sea salt and pepper, dance around gently in a cast iron skillet until cooked… Some hot peppers can seriously be painful to work with. I use a separate board just for them. I avoid touching this li’l dynamo by using a chunk of discarded onion skin, and then washing the knife and my hands very thoroughly afterward… Rub the eggplant generously w/ olive oil, stuff it with the ingredients from the skillet, top w/ some cheese if desired, and bake it! I’m just doing half an eggplant here, so a small Pyrex dish in a toaster oven is my plan… Into the Cadillac-of-toaster-ovens it …