I cooked well last weekend. That’s the takeaway. I cooked very well.
I went into it with no idea what or even if I was going to cook, but I had a completely open weekend. No editing, no shoot, nothing. Just me and the wife and the stupid little dog, my only real responsibility, watering the front lawn before sunrise.
We’re doing the drought thing again here in the swamp. The temperature is still in the 90’s and with no rain, the lawn is drying out fairly quickly. Lawns just consume - water, time, fertilizer, and they serve no real purpose. Just a throw back to 18th century European landscaping symbolizing refinement and prosperity.
Hmm… my lawn is circling the drain, barely on life support, with neighbors who treat it like public property. Yeah, that is reasonably symbolic of my current level of prosperity, come to think of it.
I was up by 3:30 AM as per my usual. I wake up several times a night and usually by the 3:30 waking, I give up and go do something. On less ambitious days, I just watch whatever is on TV at the time, usually reruns of Highlander or this show from the early 90’s called “Renegade” staring Lorenzo Lamas, a dazzling array of hair care products, and tropes so hypermasculine they border on homoerotic.
Being night blind, the irony is never lost on me, getting up in the night and needing to take care of stuff outside.
In the dark.
Where I can’t see.
Good fun. I did finally manage to locate the sprinkler, which wasn’t where I expected it to be, but I did find it…
In the dark.
Where I can’t see.
I looked for it in the garage, where I do have lights, not finding the sprinkler head, but noticing the now defunct sprinkler system control box. Again, the irony. It hangs on the wall, dormant, as another yard related symbol of my prosperity.
It’s Saturday morning, pushing 05:30 and I’m looking for something fun to cook on the innerwebs while waiting to move the sprinkler to the next zone. I look to my right and notice the snail mail bills are piling up. I hang on to paper bills for about 3 months and then I scan them all into network storage. It’s been about 4 months since the last round. Turns out my nice Xerox scanner has gone tit’s up. It was a really nice (expensive) duplexing, sheet fed scanner I bought back when I still had money. I found a cheap replacement, but I am dubious about it. We’ll see how it works out.
Incidentally, that’s something that happens when you’re broke that helps you stay broke. If you need something and you can only afford to spend so much on something you don’t know will work instead of spending what you need to on something that will, you’ll usually wind up doing both. Even knowing that, I still went for the cheaper gamble instead of the pricey certainty.
So now I’m getting down about not being able to afford to repair my sprinkler system to demonstrate my prosperity in a proper 18th century European fashion and I’m down $166 bucks on a discount sheet fed scanner. Yes, I could have had a flatbed for less, but those have to be replaced frequently down here on account of the glass fogging and explaining it fucks up the narrative.
Damnit!
I’m not really sure what led me there, but I decided to make naan. I think I was thinking about a friend I haven’t seen in a while who makes the shit out of shepherd’s pie and was considering making one myself. I had bought a bag of russets the night before at the grocery, in defiance of any kind of dietary restriction and potatoes are a good way to start the recipe ball rolling for shepherd’s pie. I start making the list of things I have and things I’ll need to get.
“I’m going to need peas. And some tomato paste. I’m out. I have ground beef, I ground it myself in the grinder attachment for my KitchenAid my son bought me. That’s such a nice tool to have. Beats the hell out of making counterbread. Wasn’t I going to work on my naan recipe? I think I was, and with ground beef and peas, I could try my hand a keema. White people keema. I know it should be lamb, but I own the beef. And I ground it myself. Shit I need yogurt. The wife asked me last night if I needed any and I said no. Oh, well. I need peas, anyhow.”
Upon reflection, this weekend’s kitchen adventure may have been spawned by disappointing tacos earlier in the week. I wouldn’t realize that until after the cooking was done. My subconscious also cooks, apparently.
The hastily prepared plan was to make a test batch of naan to determine if I needed to make any final adjustments. Good thing, too, otherwise someone might have noticed that missing .63 grams of Kosher salt in their giant ass-bread disk and wouldn’t that have been embarrassing?
It was cleaning up after the trial run of naan I noticed the problem with my KitchenAid. I accidently moved the power switch instead of the locking lever and I heard a grinding noise. I turned it off immediately and then pretended nothing happened. I’m sure this happens all the time to 25 year old KitchenAids. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. I slowly turned it on again. The noise was gone. But so was all motion in the bit that spins and does the mixing.
So, with the sprinkler system, the scanner, and my KitchenAid, it was Entropy 3, GenXBurnout 0. Fine.
My initial thought was, “That’s OK. I wanted to upgrade to the one with the larger, lifting bowl. This will be a good time.” Sometimes I forget I no longer have money beyond my bills. It really didn’t help when I looked at the price of these bad boys on Amazon. Fuckit. I’ve made counterbread before, I can do it again.
And so I did. The second batch of naan was 2.5 grams per recipe of kosher salt better. And the keema turned out fairly well, too. I added potatoes so I think technically it was “keema matar aloo”. At least until I realized it was actually curry flavored picadillo with peas. Served with IndoPak tortillas. I fucking made tacos again. Just like with Chalupa Cabra.
But they were damn good.
Ya’ll go cook something. Like naan. Or White People Keema.
Update: This is Betty. She’s a KitchenAid factory refurbished 2023 Professional 5 Plus stand mixer. While she wasn’t free, I got her at a really good price instead of the .22 rifle I wanted for dispatching some of the local fur-bearing varmints.
