Category: ‘Personal’ · TangleBones

One Year

I wish I had some­thing pro­found, or even rea­son­ably intel­li­gent to say. Bar­ring that, an ade­quate state­ment of how I feel about it all would be nice. But I really don’t.

I hope you’re doing all right.

Season to Taste

They opened this awe­some gro­cery store, “Fresh World Inter­na­tional Market/El Grande Supermercado,” around the corner from me that has more foods I haven’t seen than ones I have. “International” evi­dently means Japan­ese, Chi­nese, Korean, Viet­namese and Mex­i­can, with a few Cen­tral Amer­i­can foods like pupusas, but since that covers almost all of my favorites, I’m not com­plain­ing. My favorite finds so far:

• Mex­i­can Coke: Made with pure cane sugar instead of high fruc­tose corn syrup, it packs much more sweet­ness for the same number of calo­ries, and in glass bot­tles tastes crisper and brighter than that swill in plas­tic ever could.
• Stir-​fried fish cake: The store has its own Korean restau­rant inside, and there’s always a woman in the back making fresh kimchi and other ban­chan good­ies that are spicy and deli­cious. I’m so glad the lady at Nam Kang the other day pointed out that what I’ve been loving is fish cake, because I never would have guessed.
• Better spices: Yeah, I like chili powder as much as the next guy, but the stuff they carry is like a chipo­tle ver­sion - smoky and deli­cious. No, they don’t have McCormick, which I feel bad about since it’s a local Bal­ti­more brand, but what they do have seems punchier.
• Veg­eta­bles that look like veg­eta­bles: No wax on the apples, no sprayers hosing down the greens, and almost every­thing reminds me of what veg­gies looked like when I was a kid instead of the franken-​plants I see at Safeway.
• A world of Goya: So far no huit­la­coche (meaning “raven shit,” a.k.a. “corn smut“), but every kind of canned, dried or liq­ue­fied Mex­i­can ingre­di­ent I could desire from pineap­ple juice to eigh­teen kinds of kidney beans is for sale.
• Crazy Asian junk food: For instance, “Soda Drink (Pineap­ple Flavor),” which con­tains, “water, sugar, citric acid, sodium acid, fruit cloudy, straw­berry flavor, lemon flavor.” But it does taste like pineap­ple. Did I men­tion that it’s blue? Or that the bottle looks like a panda? Of course it does.
• The rest of the animal: Have you noticed that your local mega­mart no longer has things like chuck roasts, flank steaks or skirt steaks? What hap­pened?  What are they doing with the rest of the ani­mals? I don’t think I want to know, but they have all the pork belly, chicken necks and assorted offal you could want at this place. As a guy who craves tripe and ten­dons when he gets a cold, this place is going to pay off this winter.
• Some­thing inter­est­ing done with the animal: Chorizo? Sev­eral kinds of chorizo? Made on the premises? Sign me up.
• Kimchi refrig­er­a­tors: $800-$1,700 will get you a fridge ded­i­cated to making rotten cab­bage. Isn’t that what they’re sup­posed to prevent? 
• Things I want to try but am a little con­fused by: Spicy mango pick­les? Instant Pho? Cut­tle­fish? Mulle? Some crazy thistle-​looking fruit whose name escapes me? I’m gonna need a recipe or a rec­om­men­da­tion before get­ting into the weird stuff.

Prob­a­bly my favorite thing is that unlike the Super­Fresh where I’m sur­rounded by white people (you folks smell like bologna, did you know that?), this place is like a school-​house rock vision of what Amer­ica ought to be. There’s obviously-​former-​military white guys with their asian wives. Mex­i­can cooks stock­ing up on masa. Japan­ese fam­i­lies going ape-​shit about some­thing in the “Asian Powders” aisle (!?). Today I saw a tall black man, a young Asian guy and his Latina girl­friend talk­ing in sign lan­guage. I love shop­ping at places that make me thing all this post-​racial Obama-​era hooey is real.

All of which is a long way of get­ting to: I decided to make some chili. I don’t have a recipe or any­thing, just the con­fi­dence that if you put any quan­tity of tomato prod­ucts, onions, meat, spices and beans together and cook it on low for an hour, you get chili. So I got some cheap stew­ing meat, chorizo, a selec­tion of beans, and a couple kinds of canned chiles and cooked it up with some chili powder and what­not. And it turned out great. I’d have to say that this is not only the best batch of chili I’ve ever made, but it’s my favorite chili I’ve ever eaten.

That’s not saying a lot though - from what I can tell, the magic of the stuff is that any­body can make a decent pot of chili with what­ever hap­pens to be in the pantry and freezer, and the less time you spend wor­ry­ing about fresh­ness of ingre­di­ents or qual­ity of meat, the better. My prob­lem is that I didn’t have any idea how spicy the chorizo was - and it’s not a good idea to taste pork before you cook it. So I used my normal quan­ti­ties of chili powder and jalapenos and sriracha (I told you I put it in every­thing), and ended up with some­thing just slightly too hot. This, dear friends, is the down-​side to that fresh-​made chorizo. When you find your­self snack­ing on spicy Korean fish cakes as a palate cleanser, you’ve gone too far. 

The Price of Fame

There are things you might forget to think about when you imag­ine get­ting your first acting job. Like, are you get­ting this job because of your skill, your talent, your good looks? Or because your dad is named Gary Cole. You know - as in the guy who played Lum­bergh. Well, we can’t all be heroes:

Make sure to let Chad know how you feel.