The Impulse Itself

October 30, 2008

Good Eats

So here, thought i'd switch it up a little today cuz i am really in to eating and lately not too in to writing. which means i've been cooking a lot, channeling my creative energy last night in to, for example, chicken pot pie with a cornmeal lid, a recipe i got off operah and wasn't crazy about cuz of how thick and bready the crust turned out. the pot part with the thick del-ish-ous chicken and veg was sooo good and hearty tho

or, like last weekend, i did a whole slow-cooked goose (upside down bc this way the fat rolls in to and integrates and flavors the breast meat) in nice fresh apple cider, with fresh chopped honeycrisps in cinnamon and powdered red chili pepper, stuffed with diced celery, onions and more honeycrips, with a bit of salt, pepper and also honey drizzled all around. mmmmmmmm.

this is typical of me in the fall, usually a couple good recipes come out of my heart when the season turns cold and the day goes early to dark--it's the way i stay warm and also connected in heart and soul to the changing tides taking us

so i liked it when i was blog-rolling tonite and found the following on Confessions of a Young Woman--The Omnivore's Hundred. Originally it comes from Very Good Taste, a food blog out of the UK. From Very Good Taste:

"Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

So in the spirit of coziness and cooking for the season, I give you Kelly's version of The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison--though 25 years of grandma and papaw offering never budged me, a cute long-haired brown-eyed Eastern Shore boy got me to try it finally w-out a second guess. My favorite: Venison Osso Bucco, served wintertime at The Wild Orchid Cafe, Annapolis.
2. Nettle tea--this would be from a biodynamic permaculture women at Floyd Fest, Virginia. Too much cayene in hers made me sneeze
3. Huevos rancheros--Cali does it best
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile--also Cali, some restaraunt off the boards in Huntington Beach
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue--mmmmm
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari--actually the best ever was at Szabo's, that roadhouse bar/steak joint i waited and bartended in at Oregon
12. Pho--never even heard of
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart--mmm this i associate w manhattan's smell and being 13 and wearing too much make-up and dad taking me from his apartment for the weekend to see Cat's and the Macy's Day Parade
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle--did chef abby let me try these at the Hotel when i worked under her or am i making that up?
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes--apple. blueberry. pear. and does dandelion count?
19. Steamed pork buns--huh?
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries--grow wild all over our farm!
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans--which, according to Katie, I make the best
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters--hands down the best way is smoked in a fire that's keeping you and all your friends warm and at once bringing out the primal beast in you, prying apart the shells and sucking the hot juice while your hairs stand on end and you, you know, beat at your chest
29. Baklava--thoughts of mom and the Greek Fests at Lexington when we were kids
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut--yuck smells like old shoes
35. Root beer float--yummmm Downies at Chestertown makes the best
36. Cognac with a fat cigar--would you believe, an old favorite at Applehell when i used to work there way back when
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat--well, not curried. but slow-cooked over low heat for four days for Reyna's birthday celebration para su amor, Joel. and they had it fresh-slaughtered for the event.
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut--i mean come on i grew up minutes from the bakery in glen burnie, you haven'thad um til you've had um fresh out the oven...
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear--in tacos, in Santa Cruz, at Russel's favorite taco joint. my fave werethese unreal artichoke enchilladas
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal--believe it or not, never. though to this day i love their fries. still my favorite. i wont lie.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini--MMMMMM mMMMm good ma fave, i mean, besides wine for medicinal purposes this is the drink i miss the most
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips--dont come close to the real thing. nothing like true, dark chocolate chips
61. S’mores--my aunt linda makes the best
62. Sweetbreads--blughghhgghgh i can't cross things out cuz i dont know how but this, these, are the only thing i would not eat. they smell so damn good but it all comes down to seeing them raw come out of the walk-in and watching Eugene one of the chefs at the Blue Heron seperate them. Ughghghg gross.
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake--naw-lins, right?
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho--okay, again with the Blue Heron, Jeff makes the best i've ever had
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill--maybe? depends on what Perry stocked our fridge with, I think that one deer he did in fact hit
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini--no too bad too late cuz they seem good
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky--do those American versions in the canister in the coffee aisle or candy aisle at the grocery store count?
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.--huh what does this mean?
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers--dandelion tea is extremely healing. drink regularly from your yard, if you dont spray!! in the springtime
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam--still associate this with Great Aunt Janet and Great Uncle Dave
92. Soft shell crab--dont really like, does that mean i am not a true marylander?
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish--my spicy fried recipe is the best around
95. Mole poblano--Reyna Reyna Reyna, all i can say
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

October 25, 2008

The Many, Many Masks...

It's almost Halloween

Feel it?

Get

weird.

October 24, 2008

Legends

I'm so lucky cuz for some reason Chestertown has this totally epic cult-like epicenter for crazy talented-ass musicians. I dont know why, or what it is that draws us all in our antic-questing to encounter and run in to each other out here in the middle of colonial drudgery under-your-thumb-imprinted-capitalistic-ruin perfect pinpoint micro image of the macro which is Chestertown out amid the middle of the farmfields, maybe it is as Tai-Chi way-out Wayne says there must be an aquafir or something...

But anyhow all the musicians at right are ones who wnadered past here, Kent County, good ol Eastern Shore. Some have stayed on if not for good at least for now and Marc Dykeman from Plans Plans is one of those cats. Turns out we used to not know each other but know those or know of those who knew each other back in my purple booted punk-rock riot grrrl days of dark firehalls garage bands and flannel shirts, outside Balitmore, USA.

He's kept that loud thing up. I sweat him for it. A hella lot. Also, his wife is a fairy princess and I think she's so rad and they throw the best parties, too.

Go check out his rock band Plans Plans tonite, in Baldamore, 1700 N Charles the Metro Gallery. It'll be worth it I know.

ps i just figured out how to copy soemthing off YouTube I stole that video above off of PlansPlans, I'm so proud of me!

October 22, 2008

Brandon

In the fall of 2002 this was what my life looked like. I was 25 and about to be two years sober. It was mid-October. I was four months a college grad, my mom was in the process of selling the house I grew up in from 12 on and my dad had just quit his corporate-American lifestyle, sold his condo in Ruston "Sillicon Valley of the East" Virginia and moved back to the beach, prompted all at once by the slow, then final loss of one of two of his best friends to cancer. Dad stood by, and took care of his friend Richard who he'd known from Brooklyn, Bmore, since they were in their twenties, every day those last months until August when they said goodbye. Richard died right about the time that it became clear that Chuck, Dad and Rich's other best friend from that same early-twenties hellion-time, was also going to die. Cancer took to him with a vengeance, too. A week after Richard died my dad completely left his own life. He went to the beach so he could, for a while, hide. And heal.

It was the most courageous thing I'd ever seen him do.

I mention this because I was there, at the beach, for part of that time. I was confused, caught in that horrible juxtaposition of blindness: complete inexperience at adulthood coupled with vague awareness of my glorious, terrifying Independence. It was far too real, and raw and wide-open, to really see! It took me 7 years to get through college and during that time I think my total monthly bills were, maybe, $400. Maybe. Suddenly I was a college grad, with a writing fricken degree?? Paying rent to a lovely girl in Chestertown for a room in her sweet Victorian house, and my student loans no longer covered my monthly needs. In fact, in addition to rent I now had to start to pay back my student loans! So I was barista-ing at the local coffee shop, waitering in a tux-button down at the local white linen, and the other three days a week I pulled double-shifts at a high-volume seafood joint on the Northern-most edge of Ocean City. And I watched my dad, during that time, emotionally fall down.

It sucked. For all of us, my mom selling our home, my lost and desolate dad who up til then had physically been absent for most of my "adult" life, and my brother Sean, who also had just graduated and who also was living at the beach waitering at the same seafood joint(which, during a lot of those day-shifts during that slow and sunny September meant keeping his eye on the fishing rod propped off the back deck of the restaurant and in to the Bay), it sucked. I think we were all in that place that us humans hate to be in: the in-between place. Or better, how I like to call it: Through. As in the only way out....

So yeah, I was working weekend days at the coffee shop, weekend nights at the Hotel in my button-down, and then driving to the beach to stay with dad, immobile on the couch, and go pull doubles in town. I had very little sense of what I wanted my future to be like. I knew one thing for sure, had decided it, just as sure as if I decided to drive to the post office or to make my bed, I was going to be a writer. I was on my bed in the lovely girl in Chestertown's Victorian home, the bed had high cold metal posts that were meant to look brass but the paint was thin and instead they were chipped white so they just looked old and even black in some places too, and I had scarves tied around them and blankets over the ornate curled cold metal at the foot and the head. And I was on the bed and I was writing in a journal and it was this very week six years ago because I was writing about my baby Amy who was just about to turn, back then, one-sober-year-old. (Happy 7 years Amy!) And the writing about/to her became very poetic and the candles and the incense that had prompted the boyfriend of the lovely girl in Chestertown in whose home I was living to think I was a witch were burning with the warm orange light and the warm orange smells and I all of a sudden, just like that, understood deep and real: I am going to be a writer. And I understood: this means nothing, nothing at all other than the commitment, unabashed and unafraid, to follow the inner impulse. To follow it, whenever, and to wherever, it meant to take me.

Oh, I was sad. I was sad, for my dad, my mom and her empty-nest, for my life that had no semblance or order to it, for my old life of partying that no more offered solace or an answer. The friends I had lost to all that. I was confused, disoriented, working like a dog, and, like I said, I was pretty damn sad. But mostly, cuz it was the best I could do, I was numb to all that sadness. And so I began to write. To write my way through....

And then not a week later, in he came. This young guy with these big, I mean big brown eyes. With these lashes that reminded me of honey. And this river, this river that he did to my heart.

Brandon worked at the coffee shop with me and I always used to flirt with him. Tell him if only he were old enough, how I'd rock his world. He was 20. A baby to me then! And so, so cute.

The lovely girl with the Victorian house also worked with me, she set us up after getting tired of seeing us swoon. She invited him over, made us dinner, her boyfriend built a fire, rented us a movie, and then together they quietly and with sneaky smiles and smarmy charm left us alone for the rest of the night...After that first night it felt like a linebacker socked in to my heart: I never knew it could open, and take flight, like that before. It's like I never even knew that love existed. And then, after just one moment, I suddenly did.

It is six years since, this week. We are, so to speak, going "through" some things right now. I know how now, I've learned better how to do it, the making your way through thing. But it's hard, it's not easy, it plain sucks. Especially cuz I still so love those precious honey eyes.