Throwing Things Together and a New Faux Chicken

When it comes to cooking, I'm the queen of throwing stuff in a pan and having it taste good. What I lack in technique, I apparently make up for in instinct. Just as I am the designated pancake flipper in this house, I am the one who makes the impromptu meals when nothing in the kitchen seems to add up to one full dinner. I am the Macgyver of the pantry.

The routine is pretty set at this point in my employment. I come home and dinner is usually waiting or in the process of being finished. I do little, but there have been a few nights when the cupboards were on the bare side a la Mother Hubbard. At such times, I do what any superhero would do. I rip off my outer layer of clothing, revealing my secret identity. (Then, I put on a more sensible outfit because I'm messy.)

Here are two end-of-the-pantry meals I've cooked up lately:

Option 1:
This one is my vegetarian version of the chicken and mushroom rice my mom used to make when I was younger. It involved chicken stock, minute rice, chicken pieces, green beans, and canned mushrooms. The chicken stock contained a fair amount of MSG, which my mom can't tolerate very well, so she either avoided eating this particular meal like the plague or she suffered the inevitable MSG headache.

I cooked up some rice (2 cups, I'd wager. That's what I usually cook up.) Then I searched the cupboards. I needed the obvious ingredients. What was more, I needed something to use instead of the chicken and stock.

Butter and Green Bean Mushroom Stir Fry (no MSG required)

The ingredients for this will be rough because I didn't stop to make note of how much I threw in while I was throwing, but all of said ingredients come from cans. This means, if you put in one can and it doesn't seem to be enough, add another one.

Ingredients List

French Cut Green Beans

Rice

Mushrooms

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Butter Beans

Water Chestnuts

A pinch of miso

Stir fry it all together in a saute pan and hey presto! Dinner is served.

Option 2:

This is a variation on a recipe I learned a few years back, in which zucchini gets peeled lengthwise with a veggie peeler all the way around until you hit seeds. This leaves thin strips of zuke that resemble liguine. Then, you can stir fry them up and add your favorite pasta sauce. It's the no carb pasta of champs.

Of course, I like carbs and find that as a veggie, they are just plain necessary to provide me with adequate nutrition. So here's a few Italian 50/50 of faux pasta and regular.

Whole Grain and Zucchini Pasta Stir Fry

Ingredients

3 small zucchinis, peeled as indicated above

whole grain pasta (enough for two servings, give or take)

pasta sauce (about half a jar)

1 tomato, diced

a handful or two of kale (mine was frozen and crumbled)

Stir fry it all together in a saute pan and once again, food.

I served this one with Gardein's faux crispy chicken tenders. I have to say, not bad. The man tasted them too and said that he thought they tasted more like real chicken than any other veggie meat product I've tried to date. Unlike some brands, this one is a mix of soy protein and seitan. This, of course, makes me want to get my hands on some 100 percent seitan all the more. 

What's more, they have seven grains and are vegan-friendly (no eggs, no dairy). I'd recommend them, but they are a little pricey. I got mine on sale half off and that put them only slightly cheaper than a boca-type product. Overall, though, thumbs up.

Five Years in the Making

Five years ago, my friend Michelle called to tell me she was driving the turnpike back to Toledo from the Cleveland area. While driving, she saw an Amish girl sitting in the passenger seat of a passing car, and she wondered why. Then, she told me to write that story, the story of the Amish girl driving on the turnpike. I thought about that Amish girl for months. Who was she? What was she doing? Michelle had no idea what she had started up in my mind. It was the beginnings of what would become my first completed novel.

Of course, I wouldn't write a word of it for another year, when, upon finishing my Masters in Literature, I would find myself mostly unemployed, save for a part time adjuncting gig two to three times a week that was almost an hour away. I was not meant to have a literature degree. I loved reading and still do, but I didn't enjoy tearing a great work of literature apart to stare at possible meanings the writer likely never considered. I hated analyzing a poem one word at a time. I wanted to appreciate as a whole. I didn't want to examine and dissect like some literary surgeon.

More than that, I wanted to create. This was no small feat with a kindergartener to provide and care for, so I'd set small goals, writing between nine and noon, before he got home. My dear friend Andrea gave me prompts and I would have a day to a week to write up a story based on whatever came into her head and send it back to her. It was enough to keep me in practice and it gave me a small portfolio with which to apply for an MFA. In one of these prompts was the beginnings of the Amish turnpike rider. I got the first page or two of another two stories based on a prompt requesting me to write a story entitled "Escar-ago-go." Inspiration comes from many places.

I found out I got into my MFA program a few months after a lot of heartache and grief entered my life. As a teacher, I became afraid of my own students. The world stopped making sense. It seemed hostile suddenly and I wrote to find some sort of answer. I wrote to keep the world at bay, and so, we moved. I started my program, took the bits that seemed to be leading somewhere, and fleshed them out into stories, connected with one common thread. A novel but without having to write it as a whole. I wrote it in segments, separate but somehow they started to connect, all of them circling the same themes: my fears, my confusion, and oddly, a lot of snails.

I finished one draft of each story, twelve in all. Then I revised them once, twice, a third time. I presented them as my thesis, got approved for graduation. I revised them again. And then again. Last night, exactly 17 hours ago, I finished it. My book is done, and all the heartache that went into making it, well, it might be healed a little. The world is still a scary place, but there's good in it too.

Did I need to write a novel to understand that? I'm not sure, but it feels pretty great, accomplishing it. It might never amount to more, and that might be okay. Of course, if it ends up published, all the better.

I just finished reading a novel-in-stories that one of my professors said reminded her of my book. She thought I'd benefit from reading it and I think she was right. The book is "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout. Ms. Strout actually visited my school a year ago and I'm sorry now that I was not able to attend (parental obligations come first). I got out of Olive that same feeling that I have now post-book, that the world doesn't make sense but is no less wonderful because of this. Horrible things happen. Life gets in the way and runs out before you notice it's passing you by. But the little moments, they matter. The triumphs matter. Five years ago, I thought about writing a story and this morning, I had a finished novel.

"It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet."

Yarn Clearance!

Jo-Ann's is moving locations. What that means: store-wide yarn clearance. Not that I need any yarn. I have an overabundance, though much of it is also clearanced, mostly acrylic, from my days of grad student poverty (they seem so long ago already). This clearance, I was a bit more picky. I was out for wool (or wool blends).

My first want: some good sock yarn. I have yet to knit a pair of socks and I really want to try my hand at it. I stumbled upon this variegated skein of sock ease:

Also, these pretty skeins of sensations, two of a pinky variegated bamboo and ewe and two of a blue/green variegated wool and nylon blend:

Finally, my son picked out a collection of brightly colored chunky wool blend skeins for a scarf he's been wanting. It took a lot of coaxing, but I finally talked him out of the variegated acrylic yarn whose colorway was aptly entitled "circus."

I already got some cotton on clearance from Herrschners, whose catalogues began showing up in my mailbox a few months ago.

As for works in progress, the veil is almost complete. I love the look of it, but I'm losing my patience with how much attention it requires. I pay attention to five words in a conversation and soon enough, I'm frogging back a row from some simple error at the beginning. If I'm lucky, I notice the error before I finish the row.

I started in on the scarf tonight, because I needed a mindless knit to counteract the weeks of veil knitting. I'm using a broken rib and so far, it's looking good. The gage is 9 stitches to an inch, so it moves a lot faster than the sport weight I've been working with this week.

Chunky weight yarn is a thing of magic.

The Ever-Elusive Tempeh goes Mexican (and Italian)

Tempeh. It sometimes feels like the holy grail of vegetarian cuisine. At least to me it does. You see, I have tried to sample tempeh on three separate occasions, only to be thwarted by circumstance.

Attempt 1:

In a rather ho-hum Asian cookbook, I came across what seemed like the perfect recipe. I wanted this recipe so bad, I could almost taste it in my mouth already, except that I had no real idea of what it should taste like, having never sampled half of its ingredients. Among those ingredients, the elusive tempeh, though I had yet to learn of its fickle temptress ways. As I read the ingredients, I recalled that Trader Joes sells Tempeh. I had seen it not three months ago sitting in a refrigerated section between vegetarian burgers and chorizo.

At my earliest convenience, I high-tailed it to the Traders. Walking down that same aisle, I spotted chorizo, veggie burgers, and other assorted meat or meatlike substitutes. Then, I hit the cheese section. Something was horribly wrong. I worked my way back in reverse: cheese, veggie burgers, chorizo. No tempeh. It seemed the Trader had plum run out.

Attempt 2:

Wandering through the produce department of a Toledo Meijer, I happened upon it. Tempeh. What was more, it was ON SALE. It was like winning the lottery twice in the same week (which you’d think was impossible but the world finds ways of proving the impossible real). I threw it happily into the cart and proceeded to the checkout with my fiancé and his mom. (We were visiting). We drove back to her place, happy as clams and went to bed.

It wasn’t until lunchtime the next day that I realized the magnitude of my error. I opened the frig, eager for tempeh. I pilfered through the plastic sacks of our refrigerating-required groceries. No tempeh. My horror rising with every step, I walked out to the car. There, among the nonperishable foodstuffs, was my tempeh, left overnight in the summer heat, spoiled.

Attempt 3:

This time Trader Joe came through like gangbusters. I packed my prize into the car and headed home. Once there, I took the bag into the house, checking twice along the way to make sure my Tempeh was snug in its bag. I plopped it into the frig, safe.


Then, we left to visit family for the holidays. When we got home, I opened the frig and instantly knew something wasn’t right. I waved my hand back and forth in the depths of the frig. It wasn’t cold. A glimpse at the plug in its blacked outlet confirmed it, there has been severe electrical anarchy in our absence. We got a new frig the next day (thankfully the apartment did not burn down), but the perishables weren’t salvageable. The frig had been slowly frying the outlet for days and the food had long since soured. The tempeh went in the trash for a second time.

Attempt 4:
When I found the stuff again, I took a more lax approach. I figured, if fate had deemed me unworthy of tempeh, who was I to fight it? The tempeh sat in the frig for a couple weeks without a care in the world. I was too busy to cook and it would just have to wait. The wait came to an end when the expiration date drew near.

We planned for tacos. The man bought three colors of bell pepper and fresh romaine. We cooked up 2 cups of long brown rice in the cooker. While that cooked, he chopped while I sauted tempeh.

Stir Fried Tempeh

1 package tempeh, cut into inch thick strips
Soy sauce
Teriyaki

1.      Steam the tempeh for 15 minutes in whatever steamer you like. Mine fits inside the rim of my smallest saucepan. (It rocks.) Then, heat up the sauté pan.

2.      Understanding that tempeh is Asian in decent, I decided it would be best to use Asian flavors in the cooking of it, at least for this first effort. I drizzled on an amount I deemed appropriate of both soy sauce and teriyaki. When both sides of the tempeh were brown, I transferred them to a plate.

Upon assembling my taco, I placed a straight row of happy tempeh lengthwise across the soft shell, right over top of the refried beans and rice. I wrapped it up with a little pepper, lettuce, and a dash of enchilada sauce. It tasted good. Very very good. Tempeh, as it turns out, takes a lot like tofu only stronger with a slight bitterness reminiscent of miso, which makes sense, as it’s a fermented soy product.

Despite our best efforts and gluttony, there were leftovers. The next day was a Wednesday, which just so happens to be my son’s “picking day.” In other words, dinner is of his design, within reason. Of late, he’s partial to pizza, which we, as always, make from scratch. The boys made a meat-filled pizza any man would envy. I make a veggie one and throw on whatever vegetables happen to be available. A few weeks ago, this resulted in beet pizza that was very sweet but had to be eaten with a fork to avoid staining fingers red. (It oozed purple.)

This past week, it meant I threw on the tempeh. And what a genius idea it was. The tomato sauce combined with the usual veggies (peppers, escarole, tomatoes, etc) and the cheese was marked with a slight touch of salt that just worked.

I would ask tempeh where it has been all my life, but it would only dodge the question.

How does it end?

I'm a speed reader. I get impatient waiting around to sound out syllables and the words just take too long. That's when my brain takes over. Before I know it, I've gone three chapters with no idea how I got there that fast. At such times, I can only hope that I didn't skip paragraphs at a time. It's my reading autopilot and I can slip into it without warning.

It's like when you've made that same drive to work so many times, you can get in the car. Then, suddenly you're at work and you can't for the life of you remember if you stopped at any red lights along the way. You can only assume you obeyed general traffic laws because your car is intact and you aren't holding a speeding ticket.

In order to read every word of a book, I have to read it aloud. This works well when you have a very dense article on post colonial literary criticism to read, a mother who can't stand when boring articles are read aloud, and you live with your parents. I've noticed, though, that for most books, reading every word is overrated anyway. I can get the plot-points, the character, even the musicality of the language skipping roughly every third word. I tend to think that this is the sole reason I have developed a minimalistic approach to writing, though, admittedly, I can skim my own writing in this same way and the only thing I miss is my typos.

Maybe what this says about me is that ultimately I am about the product. In knitting, there are two types, the process knitters and the product knitters. Process knitters are about the journey. They could care less if they actually finish anything they cast on. Product knitters are about the end result. It's about gifting that sweater, wearing that scarf. It's about binding off and seeing the thing that your hands made. I'm a product reader. I like the journey sure, but really, I want to know how it ends. At least in a first read. If I like a book enough to read it twice, then I focus on the journey. I take apart the language, search for connections, for meaning. Most books only get the first read. Very few make it through to a second or third time at bat.

I just finished a book that I already have plans of reading again. It's called "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa. I've read with abandon since I learned the alphabet, but I've never enjoyed math. I also am particularly loathe to even discuss baseball (I spent a healthy t-ball career picking dandelions that I was allergic too, which seemed preferable to actually playing the game). How odd that this book about a math professor would grip me, a professor with a disabled short-term memory and a love of baseball. In this simple but powerful tale, a housekeeper and her son become the companions of the aforementioned math professor, who remembers nothing past 1970s except the 80 minutes intervals of the present. Each day the professor uses his knowledge of numbers to understand and interact with a world that has passed him by. As the woman and the child come to know well the man who must relearn them each day, it reveals the nature of love and friendship, of the limitations caused by the professor's disability and the bonds that form in spite of it. All of this is weaved in around the concept of numbers and what they mean, their perfection and mysteriousness.

I rushed to the end, and when I got there, the quiet matter-of-factness of that end satisfied me. I immediately found myself wanting to go back and linger over passages I remember loving but not writing down in my haste. I need to know how it ends in order to focus on how it gets there.

When I write a story, I usually get inspiration from knowing the end already. Then I don't have to rush to get there. I can watch the journey unfold and be patient and surprised by how the characters get to the end. This is a fact of my personality, unchangeable. I can work on my nail-biting or my tendency toward silence on long car rides. I can't change about me that my brain is always rushing, always thinking about what is about to come. I do not have a naturally slow internal pace. My autopilot fast-forwards.

Attack of the killer sterilized cat

Over the Easter weekend, I had a bit of time to make headway on the veil. Because I was at my parents' house, carless, and in a position to kick my son outside to play in the fenced-in yard, I spent quite a bit of the weekend sitting in a chair in the sun on the enclosed back porch, knitting.

They have a new cat, who was found out back in a nest with her four siblings over six months ago. She had a brother go to my brother and another brother went off to live with my sister. Her two sisters were adopted by a cat-loving couple who are good friends of my brother-in-law. At the six month mark, she became eligible for reproductive part and claw removal (my dad makes his own woodwork from scratch so it was either declaw the cat or put it down), so for the past three weeks now, my mother has been very adamant that we need to keep the cat calm, rather than allowing her to play in the rough-and-tumble way that kittens do. The cat, of course, wants no part in calm anything and promptly makes her way into as much mischief as she can.

Apparently, this goes double when mohair is involved. There I sat, yarning over and counting my stitches while watching my son jump on the newly erected trampoline. Suddenly, my knitting was pulled from my grasp. Alarmed I looked down and there was a cat with the long tail from the cast-on end dangling in her mouth. She managed to separate a few strains of mohair before I disentangled her from the veil. From then on, every ten stitches or so, she would leap at my right-hand needle with enthusiasm before falling to the floor, having no claws to catch her footing on my nice neat stockinette. I eventually gave up after finishing my row and used the free needle to swing in the kitten's general direction so that she could pounce in earnest. When she tired of the game, I shut her in the porch with the slider's screen door and sat at the table to start the next row.

She attacked my mohair twice on Easter morning as well, but at least I was better prepared. I have seen many a cartoon featuring a fluffy kitten and a ball of yarn, but it never really occurred to me to be on the watch for fiber-munching felines. My cat is more than content to sit just beyond arm's length on the couch from where I am knitting and fall asleep. He only gets bite-y if you decide to reach out that arm to pet him if he's not in the mood for human interaction. Never has my Kitkat attacked my yarn without very consistent provocation. And for that, I am now very grateful. My cat is fiber-considerate. And he plays a mean game of billiards.

The Perfect Pancake

For Christmas, my best friend/cousin bought us this ridiculously amazing gift basket from Godiva. It was a breakfast gift basket (or bowl rather, as it was all inside a mixing bowl) that included fancy blueberry jam, Godiva chocolates, Govida chocolate chips, scone mix, and pancake mix from someplace called Bette's Oceanview Diner.

It was seriously the best pancake mix I have ever had, so we looked up more on this Bette's place. What do you know, they have a cookbook. An amazing cookbook of pancake portions. Sure enough, that mix we received has a from-scratch recipe equivalent. The book is called, oddly enough, "The Pancake Handbok: Specialties from Bette's Oceanview Diner."

When my man was mixing the batter for those same pancakes (only better because they were fresher), he read that one should try individualizing each pancake with a variety of ingredients you might have on hand: chips of various flavors, grains, dried fruit, even veggies. He started gathering materials. By the time I got there, everything was set for me to get started. (I am the master pancake flipper in this house. The pancakes are unanimously voted as my job.) To create each pancake as an individual thing, instead of adding the extras into the batter, you pour the batter on the griddle and add the extras to the top of the cooking cake. 

I used bittersweet chips, butterscotch chips, mint chips, dried cherries, oats, wheat bran, peanuts, strawberry slices, banana slices, and one solitary candy corn pumpkin. Each pancake was its own thing. No two ended up the same, and that amounted to quite a bit of variety at the dinner table.

So simple, but such a good idea. Pancakes will never be the same at this house again. To think it all began with one generous christmas present and Godiva chocolate.