#we also didn’t add like cloves or whatever the fuck because one: we couldn’t find any and two we thought it would be weird

[deityofhearts]

I did not take pictures because I simply didn’t care to but my roommate and I made pumpkin chocolate chip muffins last night and they were so good

[ratthewrodent]

This fuck up has been set up perfectly for disaster over the past few months and is continuing to destroy my life. This is a long one, but every detail counts in portraying one of the worst weeks of my life.Let me preface this by saying I love my cat more than anything, and while he is currently not sleeping anywhere near me, he's still getting a lot of cautious love. I can't imagine being self-isolated alone without him right now. Truly, I love him too much - too much love got us here today.In January, I adopted an 11 yo, 19 lbs chonker. I fell in love instantly. His last family returned him after 6 months with a bad case of fleas. He had been defleaed but came home with a slew of other health issues. By end of January after a lot of vet visits, he seemed to be on the mend. I knew what I was signing up for when I adopted a senior cat, but just didn't realize the endless possibilities. Truly, I tell him every night before bed he's my ride or die, and that's about to be tested with this saga of the greatest love story ever told.Early February, he starts coughing and stops pooping in his litterbox, despite me cleaning it daily. He's still peeing in there, but seems cautious and runs out immediately. Even when he started pooping on the floor (thank God for wood floors), he'd run under my bed from it. That was the only time he'd go under my bed, otherwise he was cuddled up on or next to me. His medical chart from when I adopted him said he had issues with litterbox pooping- they suspected he was afraid of his last family's other cat and it was behavioral, but something didn't add up. He was fine with pooping in the litterbox for the first month after his kitty enema. I cleaned up his poop every other day and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He was starting to lose weight, which was good because as cute of a chonker as he is, it's NOT healthy, folks. I stopped free feeding him, started feeding him scheduled wet food meals, and we had daily playtime to get him to a healthy weight.I bring him into the vet in February for the 6th time in a month and a half. He had half of his teeth removed before I adopted him. This resulted in an incision infection and an enema due to opiod constipation. This visit was for his cough. I even ask if he could have worms. The vet tells me, "I know you're trying to be a good pet owner, but he likely has allergies and it's a behavioral issue. This might be something he has to live with. Come see me if his mucus turns brown". I had been right about every single Dr. Google diagnosis up until this point, but whatever. I buy an air purifier, vacuum and clean regularly, change the bedding weekly- I already have an obsessive cleaning schedule, and COVID/quarantine has only allowed that the time to thrive. Ask any of my previous roommates and I am the cleanest person you'll ever live with. Despite the cleaning, some coughing days were better than others.All of a sudden end of last week, he starts coughing a lot less, and I start feeling like absolute shit. My best friend even makes a joke that I caught whatever my cat had. Sick, sick foreshadowing.When I read the article about the tiger in the Bronx catching COVID19, I was convinced we both had it. My chest was tight, frequent bathroom runs, just pure exhaustion, losing weight rapidly despite being quarantined for a month in a tiny studio- malnourished to the point my hair is falling out. I'm a mess. I guess it's a good thing I got laid off 2 weeks ago, because the bathroom and I are very close friends these days.I wake up Monday morning to the pungent smell of my cat's usual poop surprise on the wood floor. He's such a kind cat to poop where it's easy cleanup. That's when I see them - worms crawling around EVERYWHERE. I'm gagging, take a little sample for the vet, and flush the rest. I Dr. Google the shit out of it and it is for SURE tapeworms. Then I read about the eggs. Let me remind you I change my sheets and wash my duvet cover weekly. I make my bed the second I get out of it and even vacuume my duvet cover. I RUN to inspect my bed- there are eggs EVERYWHERE. Little rice demons of hell that have been dropping from my poor cat's bum for 3 months. I'm dry heaving at this point. I live in an old studio apartment and my bed is against a brick wall, so I get little grout crumble patches that I have to vacuume up pretty regularly. I remember feeling little patches of what I assumed one night was grout in my sheets, but fell asleep wine drunk and ignored it. When I tell you they were everywhere, I mean they were everywhere. My pillow, under my pillow- my cat and I fall asleep cuddling every night. Again, I love this cat too damn much.I call the vet and it is undoubtedly tapeworm. We suspect he's had it since I adopted him. His prescription gets to me within a few hours. I also get flea medication and spray. I check him for flea dirt regularly and hadn't seen anything, but better to be cautious. I bag all of my bedding, throw out half of what I own, vacuum every inch of this place for an hour, I'm on the fucking floor with my flashlight and find a dead tapeworm under my couch, Swiffer, disinfect my couch, flip my mattress- like total mental breakdown. I give him his medication and his cough stops instantly. He hasn't coughed once since Monday.This has been one of my childhood phobias since I read that urban legend about the guy who starved himself then put a burger patty on his tongue and lured the tapeworm out until he could grab it from his mouth. I'm thinking about this story after giving my cat his meds when holy moly diarrhea. I look in the toilet bowl to 3 long strings floating on the sides that normally I would have flushed to sewage heaven without second thought, but they are undoubtedly tapeworms. My grown ass calls my mom and sobs while still sitting on the toilet in all of my wormy glory. I call and embarrassingly show the doctor, doctor undoubtedly tells me I too have tapeworm and writes me a prescription. He asks me if I want just tapeworm or a full deworming? I'm like wtf does that mean? He's like, "You'd be surprised how many parasites are living in you regularly. Just wait and see what you're about to poop out". I honestly just want to die at this point.My cat and I are prescribed the same medication, obviously just different doses and different pricetags. His was $13 for two doses. Mine? $130 for one dose, 2 pills. That's WITH my last month of insurance from my previous employer. I immediately receive a text that my prescription is on back order because of COVID. I'm trying to fall asleep that night on my couch without any blankets, when would you fucking guess it- my heat stops working. So now I'm just shivering on a small ass couch knowing there's worms crawling around inside of me and eggs everywhere. I don't sleep.I call the pharmacy when they open in tears asking when my meds are going to get there. Lucky me, they had just arrived. He asks me, "Did you know your prescription is $130?" I'm like, "Uh no I've never had tapeworm, but I guess the price is irrelevant". We both nervously laugh. I also haven't had an in-person human interaction in a month because I've been self isolating alone and laid off due to COVID, so this is trying on soooo many levels.I order delivery for a big ass meal from my favorite restaurant because 1. I have no appetite because the thought of feeding the worms makes me want to die and I was hoping ordering from my favorite restaurant would entice me to eat. 2. Medication has to be taken with food. 3. I realize this is the last day the calories don't matter. Might as well enjoy it.I pick up my prescription, light a candle, call my best friend, we have a little virtual funeral for my worms and try to make light of the situation. I play the song I want played at my funeral (Hamburg Song by Keane, it's beautiful). But it just keeps getting worse, y'all. My best friend hesitantly tells me he was telling his physical therapist about my worm saga. She recommended buying clove oil and rubbing it on my pink starfish. I'm like why? Apparently worms like to bite your butt on the way out, and clove oil prevents that. I hate everything at this moment. It's like the different levels of hell.I take the pills and am reading the prescription pamphlet. It notes that you'll experience random aches and pains while the worms are dying. Let me tell you- I felt every fucking worm dying as I lay blanketless on my couch in the fetal position. All of a sudden, I'm thinking about the worms and I can't breathe. My throat is kind of itchy, and I'm thinking there are worms dying in my tonsils at this point or I got COVID at the pharmacy. I'm laying there in the fetal position, telling myself it's just a panic attack. My cat decides to go pee at 2am, jumps out startled trailing pee all over the apartment. I know the medication says limit your alcoholic beverages, but I say fuck it and make a drink. I clean the pee and finally fall asleep for about 3 hours.I wake up bright and early to the smell of cat poop. Still half asleep, I searched his normal spots and couldn't find any poops. He left it in the tub for me- a new spot- thanks, cat. Easy cleanup and no worms- I take it as a win. I flush it down the toilet, bleach the tub, and obsessively wash my hands.Let me tell you- my hands are bleeding from the amount of times I wash them between COVID and wormageddon. I look at myself in the mirror while scrubbing my raw hands and holy shit. My face is is swollen to the point I'm still surprised I can see out of my eyes. My tongue is flopping all over the place. I am having a severe allergic reaction to the tapeworm medication. That panic attack while falling asleep was actually an allergic reaction.I immediately video chat my doctor, he tells me to go get Benadryl immediately and writes me a steroid prescription. I get a call from their finance department on the brief walk to the pharmacy: $140 for that 5 minute virtual visit. I try to dispute the charge- she can't do anything. I just flat out ask her: "Can I just tell you about my shitty life then for $140?". We talk for 5 minutes about how much my life sucks and she agrees. She was very nice about it, but still $140. She basically tells me that if I had waited a month to get tapeworm and almost die from the medication, the virtual visit would have been cheaper without insurance. Fucking love it and American healthcare.I cut my losses go back to the same pharmacy from the day before and they ask me what's wrong. I lift up my glasses and they were like "Ooooof- did you know you were allergic to this medication?". At this point, I'm like "WHY DO ANY OF YOU THINK I'VE HAD TAPEWORMS BEFORE?" Truly, complete mental breakdown. I buy my medication, a box of wine, and $20 worth of candy to ease the pain.So folks, here I am. Unemployed and alone during a pandemic, clenching my butt like never before, still haven't pooped because I'm terrified of worm kisses on the way out, face still swollen shut, but I'm breathing fine. My cat is a new cat, so for that? I am grateful. I am 100% sure I will have PTSD from this experience. It is going to be a long, long, time before my cat and I snuggle regularly again, but I know we'll get there and I still love him. Adopt senior pets regardless of this story, because 10/10- would still get worms again for him.Wormageddon 2020 will not soon be forgotten.TL;DR My recently adopted cat gave us both tapeworm, I almost died from the meds, and this is my hell.Edit: I'll come back and give more meaningful update, but I'm reading all of these comments over the phone, basking in the worst kind of Reddit fame with my best friend, and his smart ass says, "Your tapeworm is going to come out of your butt and ask DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?"But really, y'all are too kind. via /r/tifu

[ecotone99]

[SP] Coruscant (the Psychic Wars)

I got hit by a psychic, hard, the next day. They must be able to track Dove, Lord knows he's not quiet. He was on the phone out on my couch, his feet tucked under him, blanket over, even though it was quite warm. I was combat trained, my third eye opened faster than most witches could focus the second I sensed something incoming. It's why no one ever caught me asleep, not if they were out to kill.

Whatever it was blasted through my shields. Fuck. That meant they had a ground nearby, someone wired through their cellular or actually trained, and I'd have to locate them to pry them out if they were hooked in like that. I didn't really smoke anymore, but after I patched my shields I'd have to go have a clove and root the bugger out. It didn't do to look like a madwoman, and heading out one too many times set people off. Dove's aura was pulsing madly, a nasty shade of green and red. The magic was beautiful. He punched mute on his phone.

"What the fuck was that?" He hissed, glancing around. He might not be able to see as well as I could, but he Life Neshed, so he'd just interpret the energy fields and run them. It bent reality, but it helped you survive. Pissed off everyone around you, and Life Neshers didn't care. Pros did.

"Fuck if I know, Dove, it blasted through my wards, enemy psychic it's... coruscant..." I slid a bit further into the other and stared. Shimmering Ice. It was beautiful. You wanted to stare until you fell asleep...

"That's not what I'm seeing," Danno spat, seeing my eyes unfocus, "What's CorScant?"

"It shimmers, like ice breaking light into a thousand rainbows, sliding instead of refracting..." I was fascinated.

"Fucking Russians," Danno said, "I'm tagged, I'll be able to get a psychic on the line and find out what's going on, hang tight."

"Uh huh," I nodded, sounding far stupider than I was. He still hadn't figured out my camo. Stupid and pretty, beautiful and dumb. I went into shock so I could tread water in Alpha. My circulation slowed down, breathing, everything. It was actually pretty close to real Neshing, the kind they were developing with machines. But I'd fought this sort of thing my whole life.

"Yeah, it's about to be sunset Here," Domhnal said, running a hand through crimson hair, unruly waves never tangling somehow. I wondered what kind of shampoo he used when he wasn't flopping at a mate's pad. He thumbed mute again and glared at me.

"Anne!" He hissed, "Could you find your way out of 'pretty color' land," I frowned. It was rare that I took the approach, mathematically, that 0 was actually equal to -1. It only works in symbolic logic and is the fastest way to interpret any sort of Quantum Life Neshing. Apparently I was supposed to just ditch second sight and sit there and calculate the hard way for dear sweet little Domhnal. All the work and none of the perks. Interpret data I Couldn't see, and translate it to someone who Didn't accept that 0 equals -1 by their accounting. All the while remembering that 0 technically equals 1 in the world of commerce and international interaction. (Money, friends, no matter what the rubric, dictates that 0 functionally equals 1).

He was probably right, I admitted reluctantly, it was probably a Russian Psychic. They sat around all damn day arguing whether you could add 1 to infinity. Their work would be coruscant.

"Mhmm," He hit mute again, "Anne! Quick, I've got a Canadian line, tell me something personal!"

"M...m...my aunt was a bearded lady," He was too savvy to think before he hit unmute and started hooting the way the English do when they're laughing way to fucking hard.

"You... fuck all...bollocks. Or your Auntie wasn't a bearded lady, Anne?" That one was coming out of his ass. That would cost a pretty penny and I had a funny joke called rape if he ever tried it again. I could have taken the Russians. It would take me forty seven hookers, three arms deals, four deals with the church, two additional trainees and a partridge in a pear fucking tree to scrub that one out of society.

"She just... fuck... said... or my..." He stopped laughing, "Well Bob's your fucking Uncle. You really had an aunt that's a bearded lady."

I cringed. There would be calls, real actual phone calls. He started rocking ever so slightly, and rape suddenly became an actually funny joke. I had no idea why the English reacted like that to laughter, but you sure couldn't rape the willing.

"Your Aunt." He stopped and started giggling, "I'll call you back."

Click. Mobiles should still make the clicking noise that rotaries used to. Bob WAS unfortunately, also my Uncle, so apparently enough Canucks swarmed that bit of fairie bread that whoever was after my stink lost the scent. He learned fast. Fools Gold. Don't know how he got that out of my story, he must count American better than I thought. I'd just keep calling it fairie bread and hopefully he would figure out what I'd thought for a split second, that that was...actually...

"Honey and tea?" Honey and iced tea if I'd have spoken my mind. His phone shattered, then fell to the floor. I'd like to say he dropped it first, he didn't. As I watched the colors spin I spat out...

"Принеси дракона домой Отдохни его под морем Восход грозовых облаков Вечер падает Освободи четвертое дыхание"

"You're fucking singing?" He shrieked. He still hadn't gotten the hang of Life Neshing, I didn't know if he ever would. He'd just loaded a line and the negative energy shot back at him.

"What did you make a fucking wish?" I hissed at him. He had. Fuck. No one was teaching these people, not out loud.

"You speak fucking RUSSIAN?" His eyes were sharp and angry.

Whoops.

I'd neglect to share that one. Let alone that I sang in it. I found out the hard way that I'd memorized the wrong things in Russian. I knew how to scream in every pitch of upper class girl. It was what I did when I got caught out and I wasn't looking like a boy. I just told them I was Russian. When I was older, they'd found out the second part, not the first. I still could disguise myself.

But a very nice Russian man, whose face I never saw told me that if he ever caught me screaming in Russian again he'd mark my face. And he meant it. So I taught myself to sing when I was scared. I needed to know the language to understand their space shit anyways, so during the war, being an industrious Pole (America had left her mark on those peoples, we worked like mad because we complained constantly- ask any Pole, worktime is the complaining Olympics), I learned.

"Um, Space Programme," I teased him lightly. He bared his teeth, losing control of his emotions, and picked up his phone. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks. We were hard on phones. They had a bad habit of expressing the reality of the other side, physically. The plasma was too good of a conductor, and switching to diodes hadn't helped, it only stopped the bleeding.

"Come on," I took his hand and pulled him over to the corner of the living room where the cabinets that sometimes served as a cat playhouse and also as a storage unit for things I didn't want Normies to look at were stored. I had a surprising amount of jars and bottles, bits of curio. My Godmother had been a witch, and my mother's whole family was openly psychic. I was a Unitarian Priest, I'd memorized all of the old ways, nonewithstanding. We served a larger purpose, rather than a higher one. The mission received a mixed reception.

I walked Danno through setting the wards again, and cleansing. He wasn't happy, too used to the rush of being chased by psychics, and acting it out. And getting censured by society. We kept religion and all of it's trappings in our houses, or in marked areas in America. Everything else was contemplation or meditation, or commerce. Commerce can be included, it was a good neutral grounds.

"And when they come back, we'll just do this again?" He asked me, crossly. I smiled sadly. The answer was yes. It was more important than vaccuuming, or the useless habit we had of laundering our clothes every day instead airing them, when they weren't actually dirty. But almost no Westerners thought the way I did, despite the fact that they were playing and dying in the In Between. I just shrugged. I'd lost everyone I loved to that one stupid belief, that fitting in was more important than protecting your home. It wasn't. And I was still alive, and so was my son.

And so I'd just keep teaching it, until the world caught up with itself. Even if it was to a suddenly grouchy whore, who was the closest thing I had to a friend after my last mission.

📷

Previously in the Psychic Wars...

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[mealsforsquares]

New Year’s Day

After New Year’s Eve, of course, comes New Year’s Day, and with New Year’s Day comes one of the few times I actually get to host a giant meal. I love hosting a giant meal, actually, even though it stresses me right the heck out. Last year was the first year that we did it, in an attempt to spread around some of the effort of the holiday season. It was a fairly big hit, and it was nice to expose some more people to what it is I do in the kitchen*. Sinc eit worked out so well, and I had the operational business under my belt, it was time to move on and try to really knock it out of the park.

The crowd pleaser at last-year’s business was a serious eats-style all-belly porchetta. It was chosen for its relative simplicity - pork belly is a pretty hard thing to fuck up, as just about every restaurant in the world can tell you**, and wrapping it around some herbs and spices and slow roasting it is a pretty rock-solid thing to do. And I like things that are easy to do and impressive. They make me feel good about myself.

So I took a whole belly and laid it down, scored the skin deeply. I made a spice paste of juniper berries, allspice berries, coriander, cinnamon, and some sumac. I also made an herb paste of minced rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano and tarragon. I mixed the herb mince with the spice paste, oiled them up and ground them together a bit with a mortar and pestle. I mixed in some ground bay leaves and some brown sugar, and rubbed the whole mess into the pork belly. I rolled it up tight and covered the outside in salt into which I had mixed a bit of baking soda, then cut a bunch of lengths of twine which I used to tie it up. Instead of letting it sit with the raw herbs and spices overnight, I slow-roasted it first the day before, letting it go until it was a proper internal temperature, and then when it was done I pulled it and socked it away in the fridge until the next day when I would crisp it up. I threw it in a very hot oven about an hour before service, leaving it in there until the skin was hot enough to blister and turn brown, and then taking it out rest*** and then slicing it up, removing the string in the process

Last year I was further constrained by the two pickiest eaters (who are also members of my own family) being present for dinner, and having to make sure to include them in everything. This year, especially, R had to work, which meant that vinegar was much more on the table than it had been previously, so it was time to incorporate directly into the beans. Black eyed peas are traditional for New Year’s, which is pretty great, because it’s an excuse to make a mess of beans for a bunch of people to eat. In Jonathon Sawyer’s oft-aforementioned House of Vinegar, he mentions cooking lentils in red wine vinegar for a salad. I decided to run with that idea, except I would use black eyed peas. To preserve the color, and make them look less like brown glop on the plate, I decided to cook them in a mixture of white wine and white wine vinegar, so that I could more-readily play with colors and textures.

The theory was good, but in practice I forgot that cooking beans in acid is really hard. This is probably why the original recipe uses lentils and not a bean that requires more hydration. So I soaked the beans overnight, then poured in equal parts white wine and white wine vinegar, and let the beans simmer until they were soft. Or at least, I let them simmer for seven hours. They were softening (slowly), but they weren’t finishing. I had the idea that if I raised the pH a little bit they might find it easier to accept water into their skins, so I added a healthy pinch of baking soda. A couple of hours later, the beans were the perfect texture - the acid had enabled them to hold together pretty well without mushing out, and they did eventually hydrate fully to be tender. If I wanted a creamier bean, it might not be the way to go, but if I wanted a creamier bean, it wouldn’t be the sort of thing you’d want to make sour anyway.

The beans were actually pretty astringent, so the rest of the job of the salad was to mitigate the business. I cut some homemade bacon into cubes (I give away bacon as part of everyone’s Christmas basket), and got them working in a cold pan. As the pan heated up and the bacon started to brown, I would occasionally deglaze the pan with a shot of apple cider, which made a nice sort of apple-y glaze on the bacon cubes, which I thought would be nice for the salad, even as it did at another kind of pork to the proceedings. I made some bread crumbs out of some homemade tomato bread (not mine, but homemade in someone else’s home) by drying the bread out in the oven and then running it through the food processor, for a crunch and some texture. I diced the leaves off of a head of bitter endive or chicory or whatever you want to call it and mixed them in, then added a minced onion.

The question of dressing was an important one - it needed to augment the beans, but it couldn’t be too acidic or the whole thign would lose its balance. I kept it fairly simple. I poured out a generous half cup or so of olive oil, added a little less than a third as much vinegar, and a very generous dollop of dijon mustard, which can take the acidity and really add somethign to it. I also added a generous glug of pomegranate molasses, an ingredient that I’m relatively new to actually owning, but have wanted to start using for a long time. The end result was that the salad was magnificent, although I made entirely too much of it, ultimately.

Greens are also a standard-issue inclusion for New Years, so I decided to make some. . Into the dutch oven went a huge bunch of olive oil - this is an oil-intensive preparation****. I added one big onion and two small onions to the oil and let them cook while I did the rest of the thing. I mixed together a whole can of tomato paste with some cayenne and six or so cloves of minced garlic, which I then smooshed into the oil. I had  bought a holy firestorm of greens - a pound or so of collards formed the backbone, but also the rest of the head of chicory, some kale, some adult spinach, a head of dandelion greens, and a head of broccoli raab. I de-stemmed and washed all of these greens, then got them into the oil/tomato paste/garlic sofrito and let them get friendly. I added a healthy splash of water and covered them, letting them steam down for awhile.

When they had shrunk down a bit I added a couple of handfuls of adult spinach and gave everything a good hard stir. I salted them some more, and then added a huge glob of peanut butter and stirred them again to coat them in the peanut. I let them get friendly and salted and peppered them again. When they were tender, I squeezed the juice of a couple of lemons onto them to brighten them up. The effect is incredible - the effect is a bit like the greens in ground nut soup or peanut stew, only it’s a whole mess of them. It seems like an insane thing to enjoy, but it’s an utterly fantastic dish. IT was a big hit also, and it was designed to have a sort of savory, spicy richness that was there to compete a little with the pork and give everyone a break from pork fat, and also the astringency of the beans. It didn’t compete, in the savory slash unctuous flavor of the pork, but it augmented it, making it a nice little component.

Deciding that the bean salad would be lightly dressed and therefore that there might need to be a serious condiment, I made some cranberry mostarda. The day before new years I soaked a bunch of mustard seeds in some sweet wine. On the day of I heated up a bunch of fresh cranberries with a great load of sugar and a apple cider, to which I added the mustard seeds and their wine, some dry mustard, some red chili flakes, and a sachet made of some cinnamon, some cloves and some bay leaves. I simmered it until the cranberries were softened, at which point I smooshed them up and socked the whole thing away in the fridge. It set up more than I intended it to - there’s a tonne of pectin in cranberries - and made a kind of a jam rather than a sauce, but it did its job anyway, providing a nice sweet-tart condiment for the fatty, deeply-spiced porchetta.

Beans and greens aside, an actual salad-type vegetable with some actual salad-type flavor was also necessary. The Chinese believe that eating long food at new years brings good luck, and as it happens, I recently found myself in possession of a spiralizer. So the way through was clear: the way to go forward was to make the longest salad possible, out of a bunch of hard vegetables. It started with carrots - carrots are great with peanut butter, fantastic with pork, and enormously successful with vinegar*****, so it seemed it would be a slam-dunk to pair with the rest of the plate. To go with it was a daikon radish, which would be there for its spicy character but for also not being as funky and oppressive as other radishes can be (I like radishes, but they’re not a vegetable to spring on an unsuspcting someone). An asian pear was noodlefied and added to the thing to give it some crisp sweetness, and a cucumber was thrown in there for freshness and to help with the liquid content. It was finished with some parsley. For dressing some yogurt was compounded with some tahini and flavored with honey, then finished with some lemon juice and very lightly tossed with the mixed-vegetable salad.

Sauerkraut is also de rigeur with new years, and as it happens I had already made some suaerkraut traditionally in the leadup as part of the Christmas present. To make it a little more regular for the meal, I decided to church it up a little bit. I made both red and white sauerkraut. The white sauerkraut needed some real help - it was salty and crunchy and good, but it wasn’t great. So I poured the white out into a pan and added a little allspice, a few peppercorns, a couple of healthy glugs of prosecco vinegar, and a little bit of sugar to help balance it out. I let it get a little bit warm and loosen up a bit. It helped a lot. For the red I dumped that out and just added a bit of sherry vinegar and some red pepper flakes.

Other folks had provided some dolmades, white bread and beer bread (these all came from A’s dad) and also mashed potatoes (from A’s brother, who is a champion eater of mashed potatoes), and they were all pretty good. The rest of the food came out exactly as I wanted, and I was pretty happy with the way things turned out such that you could eat  abit here and a bit there from the various and sundry sources and end up with a non-exhausting plate of food. As feasts go, I was pretty happy with the way that things came together. Everything that had been a crowd pleaser remained a crowd pleaser, and the whole thing was filling and plenty feast-like without being overwhelming - I was full without being uncomfortably so, which I’m willing ot chalk up to it being mostly food that is actually not that bad for us. It’s entirely possible that I may do some more working with the sour beans to make them something that cooks even slightly quicker.

Oh, and I’ll have to work on quantity, because digging out from under the impossible, tremendous amount of leftovers was pretty oppressive. I will say this: a sandwich made of toasted bread, mustard, peanut greens, pickles and a slice of porchetta is a pretty incredible way to use up a leftover, all told.

Just eating the beans as a leftover was also pretty great, but it does seem to require that you like beans at least as much as I do to get through that many. I hope I can remember the next time I do it to make them into a croquette - fried pickled things are awesome, and I bet the fried sour beans would be equally incredible.

Or at least more interesting than other regular croquettes. But this is all turning into a digression for another time. So stay tuned. Maybe you’ll get to hear about it.

* I cook for the same three people, counting myself, most of the time, so it’s not common for people outside my household to eat my food - I’m not much of a host-er and prefer restaurants for socializing purposes, mainly because I don’t go to them that often - I’m cheap, and also I’m a better judge of how I want something to taste than someone I’m paying to do it. I’m generally a do-it-myself sort of person, and I tend to go out only for things that I don’t make often - organ meats are a tough sell for my housemates, and fish is expensive enough that I’m usually pretty happy to let someone with more experience do it for me, to name two examples - or where people want to go or whatever.

** restaurants, and especially mid-range ones, are sort of the silent partners in the pork belly explosion of a decade ago. That explosion has mostly died, and that’s great, because I was tired of being surprised and worn down by the constant baconification of everything, and it also means that pork belly prices are coming down a bit. I’ve been making my own bacon for a very long time, as well as my own pancetta, and obviously there’s a porchetta every year, and it’s great to not have to pay through the nose for it.

*** It probably didn’t have to rest, as the few minutes of very high heat wasn’t enough to stir up the interior juices, and so it probably wasn’t in any danger of that, but hey, it didn’t hurt anyway.

**** it’s also, weirdly, one of R’s favorite preparations, which is strange, considering his usual relationship to greens.

***** carrots are an all-time champion pickle.