Green Chili Ratatouille

Okay, someone asked me for the recipe so I did the art real fast, and then I remembered what my day's been like, and I started to giggle. Now aren't you sorry you asked? Jesus, I'm the goddamned king of too much information.

Okay, here's the deal. Since I'm not the kind of person who cooks by measuring and following recipes, I won't tell you how to cook anything until after you've cooked it. But I will tell you how I cooked it, and it is on that basis that I once wrote a recipe. I am starting to suspect I may have more of these in me.

And so...

Green Chili Ratatouille
for the Missus, my beloved Karen,
who puts up with me

So when you're shopping, the missus will ask you what vegetables you'd be interested in cooking. You've been struggling with a roasted zucchini, yellow summer squash, eggplant, and pepper salad, so you get eggplant, yellow summer squash, and zucchini.

When you get back to the cart, the missus is holding up a sack of ultrasoft tomatoes from the used vegetable section, where the produce is cheap and rotting. She asks if you would be willing to do something with the tomatoes and basil. Inspect the bag; cringe at the condensed droplets of fetid moisture on the inside surface; decide enough are salvageable to make a tomato sauce a possibility. Impulsively agree out of mingled culinary curiosity and the pliability induced by a waxing libido.

While in line, avoid staring at the young woman in the blue blouse and blue jeans two lines over by staring into the cart. Think about the idea that Mrs. Popeyehead is a sort of a Greek Chorus while Mr. Popeyehead is a Threshold Guardian. Wonder where the living fuck your copy of The Writer's Journey is; it seemed kinda shitty when you looked at it before, but Nancy Kress gave it kudos, and she's Nancy motherfucking Kress and all.

Looking at the eggplant, zucchini, yellow summer squash, tomatoes and basil, you suddenly remember MFK Fisher (oh, man. Back in the day... and she liked men. She liked artists and intellectuals, but the bit she did about that butcher meant that she also had at least an aesthetic appreciation of sweaty loudmouthed brutally masculine basically offensive types... Jesus. MFK Fisher. What would it be like to be with someone who could cook?)

The Missus will lean against you and ask you if you would want to be with someone who was really tall. Explain that as long as the woman is substantial enough so that it doesn't make you feel as though you're with a child, height is no issue. Remind her of the ex, who is exactly the same height as the missus. (Jesus, she was strong. You were stronger, heh heh heh, but it was always fun wrazzlin' around with her. Felt like you were accomplishing something. She always started it, and she always got mad when she lost. What is it in me that takes such delight in pissing off my objects of desire?) Look down at the Missus -- yep. Still the one you fell in love with. Give her a hug; yeah, we're in line at the grocery. Fuck you all. Go on; try me out, motherfucker. Ha!

Someone comes up and takes over bagging the groceries. Stare at the Missus. Yep, yep, yep. Stare around the store in general.

Oh, my lord. Does she even understand what that means, or is she just trying shit out? You're not complaining, just... Jesus. Fucking college kids look like they're twelve; briefly feel like the lowest, most bestial lecher on the planet.

Wheel the cart out to the car. Some motherfucker in a car just keep coming at you. Push the cart right into his fucking car -- his window's open, so you can grab his fucking head, pull it out, and lean on the motherfucker...

Jesus motherfucking christ, dude. Don't do that. That's horrible! You're a horrible fucking vicious animal and if they're smart they'll pin you down in a steel net and systematically blow you apart with a shotgun. Anyway, it would piss the Missus off and you want to stay on her good side.

What was that about MFK Fisher?

Eggplant, zucchini, yellow summer squash. Soft, ripe red tomatoes. Oh, yeah -- she had a recipe for something called Minorcan Stew, sort of a ratatouille thing with red peppers in it. You know who was hot? The Willendorf Venus. Don't kid yourself.

... it would be easier to just cut that shit up and put it in a crock pot than do the roast vegetable salad. And it would use up those tomatoes, and if you threw some of that fresh basil down on it when you serve it up...

So when you get home, you start off by taking the tomatoes -- oh, those are soft -- and sorting and rinsing them. The missus comes up and says she forgot to get tomatoes for her salad. Invite her to take her pick of those you've cleaned; damn. There's this and there's that and she's still fucking got it...

You're got two long Chinese eggplants, seven tiny zucchini, and six medium yellow summer squash. But you didn't get any fucking red peppers. Ratatouille? Minorcan stew? Oh, fuck, you need peppers, dude, or the whole flavor profile will be fucked. Maybe there's a jar of roasted red peppers in the pantry...

No.

But there are those canned Hatch chilis from Trader Joe's. Hmmm... Hmmm...

You know who's hot? That lady on Modern Family, Sophia Vergera or something. She seems like she's got a sense of humor, too. Someone you could actually fucking stand to be around... Ruben's wife was hella cute but she was probably a total dope. Fucking a stupid person is the crassest form of bestiality... no matter how big her ass is.

Right. Right. Back to work.

Drizzle a bit of olive oil over the tomatoes. Rub it in until they're coated and slippery all over. Put 'em in the oven at 550 -- as hot as it gets.

Dude, get a fucking grip. Maybe you should think about pulling Nixon's face apart jowl by jowl. They'd stick together like Velcro...

Heh, heh, heh. You really are a sick fucker, you know? What a visual imagination -- 's like watching a movie. That paranoid fuck taught America to expect and accept criminal behavior from its presidents, and that legacy led directly to the horrors of the Bush regime. Bastards...

The missus comes in and asks if she can cook beets in the oven with the tomatoes. Sure, sure... Huh. This is okay; usually she just kind of barges in and gets in the way but this time it seems like she's got the dance, where both can work continuously without making each other get out of the way... Cool. You're not gonna expect it to happen again, but hey. She's got the dance.

If your hands weren't so greasy... She'd fucking kill you if you got greasy handprints all over...

Okay, chop up one yellow onion, and one Vidalia onion. Heat up the big skillet, then add a drizzle of olive oil and throw in the onions. Chop up two big shallots -- jesus, the shallots you bought today were pathetic, when they're that small they aren't worth fucking with. Wait until the big ones come back in season, dude.

Throw the shallots in with the onion; stir, scraping up the caramelized juices from the bottom. Hmmm... Add a little water and deglaze the pan. Let it brown again; deglaze again.

Thinly slice six cloves of garlic. Chuck 'em in the pan, stir, deglaze, caramelize.

Take the tomatoes out of the oven. The missus will come in and offer to peel them. "The peels come off the way skin skin comes off," she says.

You say, "Well, then, just imagine they're boils." She laughs. Some people appreciate a sick fuck, thank god.

Slice the vegetables. Remove cores from the tomatoes and squeeze the juice into the pan with the bouquet of stinking lilies, using it to deglaze. Damn, those are still hot. Ow, ow, ow -- pain is good for you, you fucking... Ow. Don't be a pussy, dude.

Crush the tomatoes. Use them to scrub up the traces of caramelized tomato juice from the bottom of the pan.

Get out the big crockpot. You were going to make beans today, but there's no way to fit all this crap in the small crockpot. Put down a layer of caramelized onions, etc. Put down one can of Hatch green chilis. You'll eat Ortega if that's what there is, but still. Fuck Ortega.

Put down a layer of squashes and eggplant. Put down a layer of tomatoes. Salt heavily. Repeat. Pour all the various deglazings and juices over the top and shit that smells good already. Put the top on the crockpot and put it on high.

You know who's hot?

Four hours later, it's the fucking green chili ratatouille that's hot. Oh, man. That's actually way better than the salad would have been, and the green chilis really work. Oh, man, that is sweet...

Is it you or did spring come late this year?

People Who Rocked My World When I Needed It

Behold the mighty meat from Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue.

I don't mean everybody. If I tried to give credit to everyone who's helped keep me on this Planet of the Dopes, I'd wind up forgetting a bunch of important ones. But when I was gripped in the jaws of melancholy this winter/spring, I had a couple of very nice things happen, and I'd like to give credit where credit is due. First off, Catherine Schaff-Stump of Writer Tamago and Viable Paradise XIII did a really nifty profile of me.

When she talks about my oscillation, I have to admit that I've wondered if people noticed when I did that... Basically, I can only focus on one thing at a time, and a lot of the time that one thing is inside my head. So I'm either hyper-grounded in reality or completely lost in the ozone, and the shift frequently happens in social situations. Ah, well. It could be worse.

To tell you the truth, I actually like green beans. I cooked these by putting salt into my big enamel skillet and dry-frying/steaming them -- the salt brings out the juices, which steam the beans. 's good, easy, and digestible.

And Brent Bowen, another Viable Paradise XIII veteran, sent his VP roomie good ol' Christopher Cornell and I a care package from the heartland. Real barbecue, my friends. I try my hand at smoking meat from time to time, but alas, skill and resources are limited. It's nice to get a notion of the standards of the field.

The ribs were the best. Tender rather than stringy, the fat perfectly melted into the meat, which clung to the bone before pulling off cleanly. The smoke ring was about three-eighths of an inch of ruby red goodness. Ahhh...

The burnt ends were dense and tasty nubbins that went particularly nicely with the sauce.

The beans really rocked -- I've done a similar style myself. Sort of smokey baked beans with shreds of beef.

And the corn casserole with ham and cheese? Chris described it as, "Macaroni and cheese, but with corn instead of macaroni." I've got to say that a) it tasted really, really weird to me and b) I wound up licking the pot clean.

So thank you, Brent and Catherine. Sorry to have been such a slug about this, but it's been all I can do not to go on a multi-state crime spree of a magnitude that would render the concept of punishment meaningless. Alas, simple human courtesies were beyond my feeble capacities.

So. Y'all can expect another post tomorrow. And I suspect you may be surprised...

Back On Track

I'm starting to experiment with the illustrations for the next issue of Swill -- I've got to have it done by the start of July...

As I mentioned before, I'm going to be taking samples from the print series I'm doing and rendering them as black-and-white images suitable for xerography. Here's the source of the above image.

Well, the missus is out of town for the next few days. Her mother fell and wound up in the hospital for a while; it's a worrisome situation but so far things seem to be going as well as possible.

Before the missus left we patched things up. I got two days of a serious cold freeze -- I tried to kiss her goodnight on Wednesday and the look she gave me convinced me that I should keep my face away from her mouth for a while -- but Friday morning she yelled me down from my studio and huffily told me that she needed me now so I couldn't be distant and sulky. I have to admit, two nights of going to sleep hated had, in fact, put me in the mood to be distant and sulky but I hadn't gotten the opportunity to act on the impulse.

(And in a neat about-face she went from pissed-off to overly-solicitous -- she realized that my transgression indicated that I've been unhappy lately. No shit, Sherlock.)

Being good meant attending some social functions associated with her daughter's graduation (a doctorate in biology from UC Berkeley is indeed worth celebrating) and making a nice dish to bring to one of them. Normally hanging out with that crowd leaves me emotionally strip-mined for days -- they're perfectly nice people and some of them are working scientists, but they're...

Well, not the kinda folks I hang out with. They talk about things like sports and stereos and awesome snowboarding. I feel as though I have nothing to say to them, no subjects of conversation. I withdraw and start hating myself for being a loathsome pariah. As I said, the emotional hangover from this usually lasts a few days.

But it didn't turn out that way. I was bored as hell, I didn't do a lot of talking -- but the self-confidence I've developed over the last year or so seems to have had an effect on me. I got out of there with my mood no worse than it was when I came in. Nice progress, oafboy. Keep it up.

And the food I brought seemed to go over quite well. It was a strata, a dish I think of as a savory bread pudding. Usually I use it as a vehicle for leftovers. Since it has dairy in it, the missus hadn't eaten any until this Christmas. (Dairy is one of her innumerable imaginary allergies. She's got personal definition of 'allergy' that doesn't have much to do with the medical condition.) I'd brought one to the celebrations at my sisters and it was the hit of the season and she's been fixated on it ever since.

So when the missus's older daughter commanded her to make a contribution to the party, she decided that her contribution was going to be having me pay for and make the damned strata. It wound using sixteen eggs, a very nice sourdough baguette, a half-pint each of heavy cream and milk, fresh sage, fresh ground pepper, shallots, roast red and yellow peppers, cauliflower, brocolinni, garlic, mustard powder, bacon, ham, breakfast sausage, Canadian white cheddar, Swiss Gruyere, and shiitaki and crimini mushrooms.

Everything that could be sauteed first was sauteed first so I could make use of the fond. (For those not in the know, the carmalized crispy bits that form a sort of crust in a cooking pan are called the fond. It is the mother and father of flavors. Go google Maillard reaction and prepare to have your world rocked, you ignorant scullion.) All the dry ingredients were mixed in a bowl, dumped in a pan, covered with the custard, and left overnight so the bread could totally absorb the custard.

Then yesterday part-way through the cooking process a little voice in my head said that this dish wasn't going to be worth a shit without a crispy cheesy crust, so I mixed up some cracker crumbs with some more aged chedder, some fresh-grated parmagianno reggianno, and a bit of havarti to make the whole thing melt together, then laid the resulting gratin down on top of my symphony of pork.

When someone at the party asked me what was in it I cut to the chase and said it was death on a plate.

I'm of the opinion that if food doesn't elicit little involuntary noises of pleasure it isn't worth eating. This is probably why the missus puts up with me.

Anyway, I got two good moments of abject pleasure from the whole debacle. One was when the missus was at the computer going over snapshots and she made a squeal indicative of hysteria. She called me over to look at the family photo. Since most of them are either Ashkenazi Jews, Phillipino, southern Italian, or some mix of the above they are a thumb-sized people. As result, the photo made me look like Gulliver in Lilliputia.

The second occured when the missus was complaining that her younger daughter was bullying her the same way her older daughter did. She did not appreciate my pointing out that they'd gotten that trait from her. She liked it even less when I started giving a point-by-point lecture on how she does the exact same thing to me but the evidence I presented was both detailed and overwhelming. A good overwhelming every once in a while is good for her, though. It's also kind of fun.

But the real reason I'm feeling as if I'm back on track is that I've gotten back to work on the novel. I've revised the single most problematic area, the start of the thing. I've clarified the lead character's mental illness and if what I've done works, the result is that his motivation -- what he thinks he wants and what the reader knows he needs -- is a hell of a lot clearer. I've also layered in a bit more backstory so hopefully he won't seem as mysterious/confusing.

And by rigorously getting rid of everything that isn't absolutely necessary I was able to combine the second and third chapters into one much shorter chapter.

The result is a much more direct narrative flow, but the emotional tone is a hell of a lot grimmer and much of the humor wound up being cut. I may need to go back and see if there's any way to funny it up. I've submitted it to both of my writer's groups and am now on tenterhooks waiting for reactions.

So today I'm going to at least start, and hopefully finish, going over the whole manuscript with multicolored hi-lighters and Post-it notes and so on, getting all the continuity lined up, figuring out where to beef up the protagonist's crazy, figuring out what foreshadowing is there and shouldn't be vs. the foreshadowing that should be there and isn't.

I'm really anxious to start my search for an agent.

And I'm gonna spend some time with my brother-in-law this evening. In an expression of her newfound concern for my emotional state, the missus made me promise to find some company while she was gone and I haven't seen ol' Aubrey in way too long. So when I get to quitting time I'm going to walk up to Telegraph and hang out with him during the last hour or so of his T-shirt sales, then who knows what'll happen. I'm gonna prep some pizza ingredients in advance (I'm thinking a bacon/gorgonzola pizza with buffalo mozerella and an herb & ricotta mix instead of tomato sauce) in case he's into coming here for dinner.

Heh. I may be a miserable bastard, but when I can get myself to eat at least I eat well.