Two Jambalayas and a Pepper Burn

I de-seeded a jalapeño pepper with my fingernails last night, and it is now morning, and I am in my 30s but I am sucking my thumb like a confused baby because there is STILL capsaicin under my nail and mashed into my fingerprint. Even though it's been 14 hours since the de-seeding. The tip of my tongue is unable to detect flavor anymore, and it's either stinging or numb, but I can't tell which. It's a very high-pitched (like sounds are high-pitched) sensation (like a terrible whistling?), and also like a blotch of bright white light with a neon red border around it, which means almost nothing to anyone but me, because even other people with synesthesia have different colors and shapes for stuff.

So...

Last night, I noticed that the tip of my left thumb and the tip of my left index finger both felt like they'd been burnt by steam, but no actual burn was visible. No blisters, not even that glossy, flat sheen that burnt skin gets. It was an invisible burn. A mystery burn. I suspected that it had been the peppers. But the burning only intensified when I ran my hands under running water, just like I feel when I have a temperature burn. So I concluded that if it didn't wash off with soap and water, it must be a temperature burn that I'd forgotten about. I steeled my will, and accepted that I would just need to wait it out.

But then, when I was finishing up my dinner, I started eating with my hands (as people do), and I realized that the "burn" was horribly spicy. So I started a marathon of trying to clean those fingertips cat-style, with saliva. I helped nurture my shocked tongue by nibbling ice cream. After a while, I fell asleep.

When I awoke and checked my hand, it was still burning, and it made my tongue feel weird, and GODDAMMIT, WILL IT NEVER STOP?!?!? IT STILL BURNS!!! 

While reduced to a tingle, it is still FUCKING THERE. For fuck's sake, what's up with that? The jalapeño peppers in American grocery stores are typically super-mild. This isn't my usual reaction to cooking with jalapeño peppers. My usual reaction is to forget that there's any capsaicin on my fingers, and to rub one or more of my eyes, and to then immediately run into the bathroom while squealing, to run my head under the tap with my eyes open. This pepper burned my fingers so much that I didn't forget about it. I only rubbed my eyes with clean tissue when I needed to rub them (which was a lot, because I'd also chopped onions), and I didn't get any capsaicin in them at all.

But in good news, I made two pots of jambalaya last night--one vegetarian and one with meat--and they both turned out delicious!

I don't believe that my Blogger app will facilitate adding hyperlinks, but whatever. Here's the address of the recipe that I used for the meat jambeliah, which is also what I adapted for the vegetarian jambalaya. You're clever. If you don't get a hyperlink to clock on...well...you can copy/paste the address into your browser's address bar. I BELIEVE IN YOU.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1167651/chicken-and-chorizo-jambalaya

For the meat dish, just do what that link tells you to do. More or less. As it suits you.

I couldn't find "Cajun seasoning" in the local grocery store, so I bought some "Creole seasoning" instead, and hoped for the best. I used it more sparingly than what the recipe calls for, because it was pretty spicy, and the peppers were spicy, and the chorizo was spicy, and because it wasn't even the seasoning that the recipe calls for, so, like, whatever.

I also had no idea which red peppers to use for "red peppers," so I used one jalapeño pepper and 1/2 of an orange bell pepper for each pot of jambalaya. Why not, right?

For the vegetarian version, I mixed Worcestershire sauce, Old Bay seasoning, Johnny's Seasoning Salt, water, and about 3 1/2 tablespoons of melted butter for the broth, because fuck it, right? I'll eat that. It was mostly Worcestershire and butter.

I used a brick of tofu instead of chicken, which I chopped up with a spatula while cooking. Tofu pretty much just does what it's told, so I trust it to do its thing.

For the vegetarian alternative to chorizo, I cooked and roughly diced two MorningStar Farms vegetarian "original sausage patties." These are amazing.

I know that my taste in tastes is untrustworthy at best, but goddamn. I genuinely made human-style food this time, and I feel really smug about it. Like, it's genuinely GOOD. I appear to have made two versions of right and proper jambalaya. 

Okay, here's a photo of the meat jambalaya:

Poorly lit, inaccurate color, and the spoon looks gross in the photo, but just COPE WITH IT!!! This ain't your MOM'S food blog, unless you are one of my cats. In which case, yes, this kinda is your mom's food blog.

Here's a photo of the vegetarian jambalaya:

The phone's shadow is visible in both photos. It adds to the charm. So much charm!!!

But if you want to, you can pretend that the tofu in the picture is actually feta cheese, or tonsil stones!

I'm going to choose to see it as it really is, though, because tofu is a nice way to boost protein and mellow out some spice heat, without overpowering the flavors of the seasoning, and I like it.

And I like it.

Screw it, I like mayonnaise

I like mayonnaise. I do. Of the people I eat meals with, I'm the one who likes it the most. 

I know a few people who are grossed out by mayonnaise. I think that it's probably more cool, more fashionable, to snub it? Or maybe, folks just genuinely dislike when eggs are whisked into oil and vinegar, or whatever mayonnaise is made with, I dunno. And salt. There's probably still salt in it when it's homemade. I could look it up, but if you're reading this then you're already online, so look it up for yourself, why don't you?

Depicted in this photograph is a sandwich that has too much mayonnaise on it, too much cheese, and too much salt. The bread and tomato were overpowered, and the whole thing was a disappointment, particularly when I reflect on the sandwich that almost was; the sandwich that could have been. I tried to add more tomato, but then the cheese started falling out, and even then there was too much cheese, so I doused it in salt for reasons that I fail to remember right now, and what I'm trying to tell you is that the whole thing was a disaster. It just unraveled very quickly, was killed by the little details that went wrong.

But "the sandwich that could have been" would still, you know, have fairly generous mayonnaise.

Here is a picture of the bottle of mayonnaise I used:

Here is the ingredients list, and the nutritional information, from the back of the bottle. It's blurry, but that's just life sometimes.

Here is a screenshot, after Googling this subject:

Don't worry, though. Of all the white people out there, I am probably the most mayonnaise-inclined white person I've ever met, but I do not actually eat sandwiches that just consist of mayonnaise on bread. I'm pretty sure that whole idea was just a dramatic liberty taken in the movie Undercover Brother. Pretty sure.

...I hope so, anyway. God, I hope so.

Short Internet Poll

Ugh, my mouth tastes...metallic? Maybe?

INTERNET QUIZ

DID I ACCIDENTALLY BITE MY CHEEK?

(Please circle one.)

YES

NO

Achievement Unlocked: I'm Eating Food!

Check it out:

That's food made out of plants, mostly, right there. Also the 360 controller that's small enough to fit my hands. It's not food, and I can't play XBox one-handed or while eating, but it's pretty. Grimy, but pretty. So, I took it's picture.

Update:

My "holy moly, I feel horribly malnourished, I only crave sweets when I'm hungry, plants don't look like food anymore, and my clothes are too tight" problem is actually responding to the intervention that I've intervening into my own life with. The fresh-faced, well-nourished kid I once was, who substituted zucchini for pasta--just because zucchini is delicious and goes with everything--has all but faded away, and been replaced with some kinda moralistic casualty from a Roald Dahl children's novel.

Yesterday, as you will recall (or if not, you can just look at the last post), I started my day with a big package of garlicky, smelly, frozen, corporate-creamed spinach, straight out of the microwave. IT HAS BEGUUUUUN!

I don't remember what I ate in the middle of the day (cereal? frozen mac 'n' cheese?), but it was insufficient, and I felt dizzy and had a headache by 8:45pm. Failure of planning. 

But all was forgiven once I ate a salad in a bag for dinner. One of those huge, bacon/blue cheese/cabbage things. Dole brand? Probably? It was about as caloric as a few slices of pizza; pretty calorically dense stuff. But unlike most pizzas could have, it maxed out my daily cabbage nutrient requirements, whatever the fuck those are. (Is that even a thing?!?!? What IS cabbage, anyway?!?!?) 

Cabbage is crunchy, and it has stuff(?) in it, like, vitamin C probably, and whatever. Eating it balanced my blood sugar out, and took care of my urge to eat everything in the world at that time, because it was a very physically big meal. Just, like, the bigness of it all.

For dessert, I continued to push my ability to eat directly plant-based foods, by eating sweetened, dried cranberries and a slice or two of Dubliner cheese. I mean, yeah, it's pretty much been Dubliner and candy for a long time for me. But even though that box of Craisins had twice as much sugar as a Laffy Taffy rope has (20g vs 11g), at least I was getting essential cranberry nutrients (?) in me, now. Whatever the fuck those are. 

(Aww yeaaaaahr. Cheese and fruit. Dubliner is the best cheese, and I am going through a Craisins phase, because fuck you, that's why.)

So far, so good. It is no longer yesterday; it is now yesterday's tomorrow, today.

I feel like person whose body finally remembers that it can also eat things that aren't candy. 

My appetite's finally broad enough to include "real" food (I will probably eat grapes later!), instead of being dangerously limited and overspecific, like a goddamned one-food-ever koala bear. 'Cause, like, I'm not a koala bear. 

I can't just eat a finals week candy binge every day. That nasty habit's gotta be for all-nighters only, because somehow the sugar helps with that. Maybe because sugar gives quick energy, maybe because I find it comforting, or maybe because I know it's a vice and vices provide a little feeling of control in a bad situation. 

(Something a lot of people who quit smoking often get tripped up by, if they don't have a contingency plan for. You can't replace a bad habit with "good" habits only. There need to be some practiced, beloved, love/hated vices at the ready, for when shit gets shitty. Like, don't have a cigarette, instead carry a Sharpie with you and use it to vandalize a public bathroom stall, or write "FUCK" on the knuckles of your right hand and "OFF!" on the knuckles of your left hand, or write it on your toes if you gotta go to work later, or something. Just don't smoke, because fuck the tobacco industry. Fuck those guys, fuck 'em, fuck 'em all. But not "fuck" meaning "engage in hearty, friendly sexual congress." Instead, "fuck" meaning "use your dollars to vote for something better than the tobacco industry, like upbeat, pornographic comic books, and/or Etsy stuff." This is a massive digression, but I used to work for the best damn tobacco quit organization in the world, and even though I'm a grad student studying other things now, I still think about the cancer patients, diabetic amputees, pregnant smokers, and other folks who let me help them quit tobacco more easily/effectively/comfortably. They were exploited, injured, and sometimes killed by a shitty, addictive product that's available almost everywhere, and therefore, I'm perma-pissed at the tobacco industry, always and forever. I didn't endorse things like vandalism or unhealthy eating when working as an addiction counselor, of course. My personal and professional identities are two very different roles, and nothing I say in this blog should be taken as medical advice or role modeling. Obviously! Obviously? Obviously. Art and science occupy different philosophical spheres.)

But whatever. 

What I'm here to describe is that rght now, my ability to eat actual-actual, real-real food-food is coming around.

Today, I woke up and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast, because fuck if I'm gonna wash a goddamned spatula, for fuck's sake. I wanted to fry up a "toad in the hole," (an over-medium egg inside of a slice of toast), but grilled cheese sandwiches can be flipped with a fork, or even with your hands if you don't mind getting burned a little bit, whereas eggs require a spatula (at least in our skillet) to flip. So, grilled cheese is what I ate. Besides, the mustard and bread were already out, because I'd packed a ham sandwich lunch for my spouse, because it was morning.

ANYWAY!!!!!!!

Right now, I'm eating lunch, and I am LITERALLY eating hummus and pita chips. Literally. Literally! 

Look at the photo at the top of this bloated, overlong entry! That's one starch, whatever, but it's paired with chickpea purée, and I am eating it. I am eating a food that's made by taking bits of plant, like, something you can grow outside, and then mashing it up a little, with seasoning and oil and whatever. Badass!

I am also going to eat applesauce soon, too (see it in the picture?), and I am not going to feel weird about it. Not even one tiny bit.

(I'm aware that the foods depicted all use more packaging than is good, and I'm not a fan of doing that. But I'm choosing my battles, while I curse the limitations that DeQuervain's tenvynosis is currently putting on my hand usage. One thing at a time.)

Oh man. Frozen creamed spinach has a strong smell.

I'm weaning myself off of an all-starch-and-sweets academic crunch diet, and forcing my body to remember that produce exists in more than just "topping" formats. 

So, I've decided to eat this for breakfast, right now:

This is a photo of the bag that I took with my phone. Let's pretend that the glare and illegibility was intentional.

So, I microwave the bag, vents-up like the instructions said, while making my husband's breakfast. We have an egalitarian chore balance, and my husband is typically the main household cook. (Imagine that! I mean, you've read this blog. I don't see why anybody would prefer their own cooking to mine. Really!) However, because I'm a grad student and he's an associate producer for a game company, working on a project that is HUGELY TIME CONSUMING AND DOESN'T LEAVE HIM WITH AS MUCH TIME OUTSIDE OF WORK AS I HAVE OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, I wake up with him and pack him both his breakfast and his lunch, while he groggily showers and lurches to the car. I've also been making our dinners lately, despite both of us knowing better, because he's often working 13-hour days, or longer. (Curse you, games industry!)

I have, like, sleep superpowers. As adventurers should. I fall asleep quickly, and wake up from even wholly, dangerous inadequate sleep pretty easily. So I make a pretty good ally in the morning, just like I'm a good ally on red eye flights, and during up-all-night medical emergencies. Besides, on weekdays, I have the opportunity to go back to sleep if I need to, so waking up a few hours after we went to bed doesn't impact me as heartily as it impacts my perma-tired husband. Giving him that boost in the morning, to help him head into his marathon-paced working environment, suits us well.

So!

This morning, I peeled him an orange, made him a little snack pack of frozen blueberries, filled the travel mug with fresh, sweetened and lightened coffee (French press, what?!?), and buttered two slices of blueberry bread. As we do. 

With my partner's breakfast accomplished, I sat down on the couch to play video games and wait for my experimental spinach to cook. It was at this point that the cats snuck into the kitchen.

(When stalking our food, Leonard will walk slowly. If he catches us watching him, he'll pause to sniff the cookbooks and floor, and maybe curl up and shut his eyes, to make it look like he's just standing around aimlessly. It's really cute! Hard to stay mad at someone so keen to demonstrate that some nonhuman animals use hunting strategies that appear to utilize metacognition. It's like, he knows. He knows what's up.)

Once the cats had snuck into the kitchen, I heard a rustling sound, stood up, and shouted "Caaaaaaaats!!!" like I was shouting "Flintstoooone!!!" from, like, the old cartoons. Leonard and Greg (cats) ran out of the kitchen, through the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom as fast as healthy cats can go. Which is pretty fucking fast.

I scramble after them at a sprint, shouting and flailing, because we live in a house, and shouting at 6am is a luxury that comes free with rent. The cats bolt back out of the bedroom, past my feet, almost tripping me. Neither had the blueberry bread with them. Instead, I found it on the bedroom floor, still protected in its lunchbox packaging, unharmed but in need of new packaging.

...Unfortunately, being raided by small, fast animals who love a good chase was not the WORST thing that happened to breakfast this morning. The worst part was the goddamned garlicky smell coming out of the microwave as my corporate spinach cooked.

I'm eating it right now, and it actually tastes pretty good. Smells bad. Smells so bad. I don't know that a culinary purist could get it down without growling, because it's prepackaged artificial whathaveyou. But it's a decent way to start easing myself back into vegetable use, if I don't want to mess up the kitchen by making a homemade white sauce. I CAN cook, I have the skills and the education, but I am not good at dishwashing. So...y'know...I'll eat whatever makes the smallest mess.

Oh man, the smell, though. The smell! The smell is not the sort of thing to smell when trying to appreciate blueberries, early in the morning. My husband was so grossed out that the smell (it saturated the whole house) almost put him off of breakfast. "Luckily," he'll eat breakfast in the office, because I don't think that he could have done it at home.

I'd say that I learned my lesson this morning, but I really haven't. Like, at ALL.

Update: I've finished the spinach and I'm still hungry, so I'm probably going to have some cereal. Leonard is stalking the bowl that the spinach was in, because he likes cream sauces. I'm like, YEAH I SEE YOU, "falling asleep" a few feet closer to the spinach bowl whenever I look away for a second. Fuzzy little bastard. 

HE IS A BIG FAKER.

Update: LOOK AT THAT. I TOLD YOU HE'S A BIG FAKER! Look at that!!!!! Sleep-reaching for my bowl. Bastard.

Tortillas: Eggcellent Save!

Oh man, what a morning for breakfasts.

After looking at a lot of recorded footage of myself for Communication & Counseling Skills class (therapist training), I realized that I need to focus on nutrient-dense foods for a while. I've been living on ice cream, as y'do sometimes, y'know, and my face from side profile looked undernourished, yet overfed, and overall just not what my face had planned for itself. The world is not kind to people who look like women, yet eat like sitcom bachelors. So I microwave myself a big bowl of frozen blueberries, pour a little milk on those berries, peel myself an orange, and fry myself a couple of eggs. (Protein, fiber, and vegetarian fat are my best friends when I need to cut back on processed sweets. Going to use public transit to school, too, to force myself to walk a few miles.)

Unfortunately, my breakfast plans faltered when the eggs overcooked juuuuust enough to solidify the yolks. Oh no! And when I went to season them, the "shaker" opening on the tin of Old Bay seasoning dumped out a heaping teaspoon of ground spices all over those eggs in one big, confusing lump. Like, how did that even happen?!? But it DID happen, is what I'm saying. So, I dusted off the powder as best I could with a paper towel (not very well) and used my little fork to flinchingly lift one tiny, little, cynical test bite out of a hard-cooked yolk before throwing them out. 

The eggs...were not bad. Surprisingly. Not good, either, but not bad enough to throw out. Just overseasoned and disappointing. (I'm too cheap to toss out viable foods.)

This is when I realized that I needed to put the eggs into one or more tortillas, to balance out the flavors. Virtually everything tastes better in a tortilla, because tortillas are from heaven.

We have corn tortillas in my kitchen right now, which I PERSONALLY think should only be eaten after they've been cooked. So I pan-fried two tortillas in the same skillet in which I'd cooked the eggs, put an overcooked, over-spiced egg in each tortilla, and gave myself some smug self-congratulation while eating breakfast like a Breakfast Champ (TM).*

CHAMPION

* I just made up "Breakfast Champ (TM)" right now. Pretty clever, if I ask me. Pretty damn clever.

So these Otter pops and vodka walk into a blender...

As if often goes, if you're me, then you are quite nearly, quite possibly the cheapest person in the world, and yet you volunteered to provide alcoholic drinks and nonalcoholic snacks to a fabulous, queer-themed birthday party for a darling close friend.

Pride (as in "Seattle Pride Parade") might be over a month away, but it's never the wrong season to rainbow things the fuck up.
I have a freezer full of otter pops year-round, and I found a 1.75 liter bottle of adequate vodka in a grocery store clearance shelf, going for $14.94. I also have soda water and a Magic Bullet blender.

Good Idea: Blend the otter pops and vodka together, and add soda water to taste after blending. It doesn't result in the margarita texture that I was aiming for, but if you put one otter pop in the blender with the vodka and blend them into sugarbooze, and crunch up another otter pop of the same flavor into a couple of chunks and put it in as ice, the result is wonderful once watered down sufficiently with maybe 5oz of club soda. If you want to ingest a lot of sugar with your vodka, this is one highly sugary way to do it, and I am very pleased with the results. The purple otter pops taste like grape soda.

Bad Idea: Putting the club soda into the blender. Oh man, that expanded FAST and got everywhere. It was funny, though.




I want to say that this cheapass cocktail recipe puts the pronounciation "gee!" as in "golly gee whiz, that's a good idea!" in "LGBTQ," but despite being both the B and the Q* in that acronym--making me TWO SWEET COLORS OF THE RAINBOW AT ONCE--I feel like that joke would make the "good taste joke police" track me down, put on some Margaret Cho or Louis CK or some of those Reggie Watts sketches from Comedy Bang Bang, or something else with better jokes than I have, and then shush me. As they (the joke police) should. As they really, really should. Those comedians are excellent, and at least 1/3 of them can do cool accents while also making cool non-speech sound-effects, which is pretty much a comedic end game, right there. I'm like, whoa. You win. We both win. Everybody wins.

*Here, the "Q" is implied to mean "queer" as in "catchall word for a gender rebel" or "genderqueer" or "Xena," rather than using "Q" to mean "questioning," or to mean "that space Q who kept messing with Captain Jean-Luc Picard." But "questioning"-labeled folks, as well as space Qs, are also welcome, of course.




Bonus: Never ever, ever, ever do this yourself, ever, ever...but a modest cocktail on one's day off can help numb the symptoms of de Quervain's Tenosynovitis long enough to endure disobeying one's occupational therapist's advice long enough to handwash a few dishes. Just don't do that to yourself. Just because it can be done, it doesn't meant that it should be done. 

REMEMBER JURASSIC PARK!!!!! "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." But this scientist knows that you should not. Not ever, ever, ever. Not ever. 

...Unless you need to test out a cocktail recipe anyway before debuting it at a friend's birthday party, right? In which case, you use that buzz to get some handwash-only dishes caught up before your partner comes home (except don't), because wahoo! Love is wonderful! (Occupational therapy is also wonderful. Tendon recovery is also wonderful. Be smart with your "gamer's thumb" injury, if/when you develop it.) But love is also wonderful.

DISCLAIMERS:
(Because I don't normally write about alcohol, and want to make sure that I do this right.)

• DRINK RESPONSIBLY
• DON'T DRIVE AFTER DRINKING
• OBEY THE LAW AND THE SAFETY RULES
• HERE IS A LINK TO PROVIDE YOU WITH COOL INFORMATION ABOUT ALCOHOL SCIENCE BECAUSE SCIENCE IS THE BEST: http://www.niaaa.nih.gov

I love you, National Institute of Health. I've loved you since I first met you, even though I sided with the rats when reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, because you gave those rats the capacity for electrical engineering and empirical research! But as an adult, I also love you for PubMed, which is maybe my all-time scientific research article database, and for all the science, and also for the science. You...you...you just keep being you, NIH. You make me proud. So proud of you.