sage, sweet potato, and ricotta spaghetti with a side of brussels sprouts

Being on spring break means that I get to pretend I’m a real person for one whole week. By “real,” I mean I make a point of doing all of the following:

• Accepting invitations for social events I know I’ll hate, like playing Risk, just because I have that kind of time.
• Getting a shower at 9am so that I can go to a 10am yoga class, which I also know I’ll hate.
• Drinking. Excessively. Around people. Voluntarily, on days like St. Patrick’s, when everyone sane in New York has stayed inside. (These last three qualifications bear distinction from my typical, solitary, weekday sipping.)
• Relishing ordinary chores, like cleaning the entire apartment, depositing my paycheck, bathing Penny, and doing my taxes, which are otherwise entirely out of reach for me during the school year.

Another extraordinary privilege that sometimes falls into the final category involves filling my prescriptions, at my leisure. If you weren’t jealous of my life before, I bet you are now.

This year, my refills fell a week short, and I found myself in a 24-hour Duane Reade in Union Square at 10pm on a Saturday, with K and a very spindly pharmacist. Let’s call him Vlad.

So, K and I have just seen Warm Bodies, which was pretty excellent. I get the bright idea to duck into the Duane Reade before hopping on the subway, because my refills are already six days overdue, and it’s just a matter of time until I’ve been off them long enough to finally see however much more horrible life is without them. I am pleased with this spontaneity (it’s sadly about as spontaneous as my life gets); I can also buy Easter candy and a new comb, having just recently cleaved my last comb in the tangled rat’s nest that I call my hair.

One thing I really hate about having a rare autoimmune condition is the extent to which pseudo medical professionals, like pharmacists, think they have a right to ask me about it. Even so, no one has been so appallingly nosy as Vlad.

Maybe I should mention at this point that I’m dressed like something of a fashionable junkie shredding guitar in Alabama. Each of my pant legs is a different color (pink and red). My high-heeled boots are shiny with what me-of-four-years-ago thought was a tasteful snakeskin print. I’m wearing a studded vest that is so punk that I bought at Forever 21. Marilyn Monroe, looking like Courtney Love, blows cigarette smoke from my over-washed tank top. In short, I look like a disaster– albeit, I’d like to think, an intriguing one– and so maybe the assumptions Vlad ends up insinuating aren’t so out of nowhere.

At first, I’m grateful to Vlad for filling my scripts without any fuss at the late hour. I disappear momentarily to locate a comb and get sidetracked for entirely too long deciding what color Peeps to buy.

When I return, it is clear that Vlad has been reconsidering his easygoing attitude. He gives me a cockeyed look and asks, clearly as casually as he can manage, “Do you mind if I ask, why are you on this hydroxychloroquine?”

This isn’t the rude part. No one understands why a twenty-five-year-old woman from New Jersey would be taking an antimalarial drug every day to survive. Not even I do.

So, I give him my usual response, which is nothing exciting: “It’s for a dryness condition.” I deliberately avoid mentioning the disease itself, because no one ever recognizes it, and jargon usually only prolongs these interactions.

But then he holds the bag back at the edge of the counter and asks, “What is this ‘condition’ called?”

The tone in his voice says I’m trying to hassle him for just one extra box of pseudoephedrine for my easy-bake meth lab at home. Should you ever receive a diagnosis of any kind, you will learn that it fosters great patience, especially in the face of immense idiocy. So I answer, “Sjögren’s syndrome,” and I pointedly tap my credit card on the counter.

“And how do you spell it?”

Now I’m pissed. Had I said, “pancreatic cancer,” no one would have challenged me to “spell it.”

But because my existence is doomed to encounter this kind of willful indiscretion time and again, I oblige Vlad. “S-j-o-g-r-e-n.” I stop short of mentioning that there’s an umlaut, because apparently unlike Vlad, I am aware of what a bitch move it would be to suggest that he doesn’t know what an umlaut is.

“And what does it do to you?”

It’s becoming kind of a stand-off at this point. I clearly hate Vlad. I know the only reason I’m putting up with this is because I’m a girl with a medical need facing a guy who’s still clutching my medicine in his hoary hands. “Dryness, you know? Dry eyes, dry mouth, skin, whatever else. [I consider saying "vagina" here, to make him as horrifically uncomfortable as possible, but I am merciful.] Can you ring the rest of this up now?”

This whole interaction has only taken five minutes, and he gives in without any bitching. He also fails to get the scanner to register the barcode on the Cadbury eggs. He doesn’t realize he can type in the UPC. I enjoy watching him flail. Even more, I enjoy watching him enter the price manually under “miscellaneous grocery item;” he gives them to me for thirty cents less than they’re priced in a flurry of emasculated haste. He does not do this out of embarrassment or kindness but because I have chosen not to correct him when he assumes the wrong price.

I still don’t even know what he imagined I was going to do with the hydroxy; I’ve googled it since and can’t find anything fun about it in the narcotics underworld. But I could do without people like Vlad making me wonder whether there is anything “real” even wrong with me. It always makes me feel like the crazy one, even though he’s the conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe a doctor’s signature with his own eyes.

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I like to think that being on break means that I’m cooking extravagant foods more often than usual, but really, it just means I’m spending too much money going out. It’s my gift to myself for not having gone anywhere more exciting. In the middle of all that gallivanting, I sometimes like something as easy on my wallet as it is on my body.

I originally made this spaghetti using a Real Simple recipe, which, while okay, made creepy suggestions, like, “keep 1/4 cup of starchy water from the boiled pasta to thin out the olive oil for a sauce.” Maybe that starchy water wouldn’t taste like the runoff from a pumice stone if you’re eating real pasta, but I’m not up for fucking around with my second-class alternatives. Since counting calories is something I will probably never have to do, I prefer using real olive oil and bulking this meal up with a few other ingredients.

In this version, I sauteed the sweet potato in olive oil over medium heat, with a lid on for about eight minutes, being sure to turn the slices every few. About two minutes before they were finished, I added the shallots and sage leaves.

Meanwhile in a separate pan, I heated up the brussels sprouts in some olive oil, lemon, and garlic at the same time, making sure to flip them at least once.

Then I combined the pasta with more olive oil, parmesan, the vegetable mix, and ricotta.

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sage, sweet potato, and ricotta spaghetti with a side of brussels sprouts

serves two
prep time: 5 minutes
cooking time: 15 minutes

for the pasta:
1/2 lb. gluten-free corn spaghetti
2 tbsp. + 1/4 cup olive oil
1 large sweet potato, peeled, sliced, and halved
1 shallot, minced
18 fresh sage leaves
1/4 cup grated parmesan
1/3 cup ricotta
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1. Put a pot of salted water on the stove to boil. Cook spaghetti according to package directions (7 minutes in a rolling boil).
2. Meanwhile, heat 2 tbsp. olive oil in a large pan. Add sweet potatoes and cook on medium heat, covered but stirring every two minutes or so, for about 8 minutes or until tender.
3. Add shallots and sage leaves to the potatoes. Also add more olive oil, if necessary (no more than 1 tbsp.). Cook two more minutes, or until shallots have softened.
4. Combine with drained pasta, another 1/4 cup olive oil, parmesan, ricotta, and salt and pepper to taste. Eat with brussels sprouts on the side.

for the brussels sprouts:
2 tbsp. oil
8 brussels sprouts, halved
2 cloves garlic, chopped
juice of 1/2 lemon
sea salt and pepper, to taste

1. Heat olive oil, then add brussels sprouts and garlic. Cook, flipping at least once, for 6 minutes, or until tender but still crispy. Be careful not to let the outer leaves burn.
2. Spritz with juice from half a lemon while cooking. Sprinkle with sea salt and pepper to taste. Serve alongside pasta.

16-bean and 7-vegetable soup

When K and I were driving across country nearly two years ago now, we almost bought a Saab. To make a long story short, my station wagon met its fatal end at the commencement of day two. We drove that hot mess from Tonopah, Nevada to Cedar City, Utah in about ten or eleven hours (unhindered, the drive would have been seven). The next day, after a restless night’s sleep on an unfulfilling dinner of pasty Domino’s pizza (in hindsight, it now seems ironic that pizza has accompanied many horrible things that have happened to me), we had to figure out what we were going to do.

I had one feeling about the situation, which I stated quite plainly: “Flying is for quitters.” National car rental companies, we learned, also did not rent their vehicles for the purposes of actually crossing the nation. The only alternative was to gamble on a cheap used car and hope we didn’t blow up inside of it (there was no way I was paying to have that shit inspected).

The shiny, toothy car dealer at the legit Ford dealership in Cedar “City” quickly redirected us to a “friend” of his who sold cars that we could afford and that might not kill us in another lot down the street. That friend, I kid you not, wore a Hawaiian shirt and kept his aviators on inside his office, which was decorated with license plates from states around the country. (Ask yourself: just how does one acquire authentic license plates from states all over the country? It’s a riddle I’ve never cared to solve.) Let’s say his name, for the sake of convenience, was Gene.

He eagerly took us onto the lot and showed us our periscope of options. An SUV we still couldn’t afford, a gold Chrysler, and a Saab that he pointedly avoided, which of course intrigued us.

It was noticeably the cheapest car on the lot (by at least $1,000). Its matte gray finish seemed to suggest that at least one of its doors had probably flown off somewhere and been replaced and repainted. It reminded me of something from Back to the Future. Not sleek and leonine like a modern Saab but boxy, short, and ominous, the sort of corduroy backseat where aliens might rape Gene, if only they had the chance.

“What about the Saab?” we asked.

Gene’s eyes were impossible to read behind those dark glasses. “You don’t want the Saab,” he replied dismissively. Skipping a beat, he added something unconvincingly logical, like, “It’s so impossible to get spare parts for old foreign cars; it just wouldn’t make sense for you girls to buy.”

K and I logically came to the conclusion that somebody had definitely died in that wheezy foreigner of a car, that feat of early ’90s Swedish ingenuity that was now only a morbid shadow of its former self.

Normally, knowledge of that sort of thing wouldn’t have dissuaded me from the knockout price cut. After all, my massacred station wagon had had burgundy (I still think, blood) stains hiding under the mats in the backseat. I’m the sort of weirdo who thinks that lends a character and history to a personal possession. It was the fact that Crooked Gene wouldn’t let us take it that was the ultimate wake-up call (we went with the Chrysler instead).

What does this anecdote have to do with my recent musings on life? I’ve been reflecting a lot on how shitty my health has gotten. No one ever writes about sneezing and coughing and snotting all over everything, but my body has pretty nearly failed to do much else in the last nine weeks (yes, I am currently sick for the fifth time now). More and more people look at me with consternation that dovetails into pity and then seems to settle into a serene acceptance of my inevitable death by adenovirus. Signs are showing all over my exterior– sandpapery patches on my arms, sallow bags under my eyes from the sleep I can’t quite get. Calluses will no doubt start spreading around my nostrils any day now. Highfalutin cultural studies work aside, I am quite literally a lowly mouth-breather. For the first time this morning, I noticed that skeins of gray are sweeping through the hair at my temples, whether through stress or yet another privilege of my unique genetics.

I feel busted; like clockwork, the hope I have of feeling good again dissipates at the end of each week, the longest I’ve felt healthy since December. I feel like I just keep spackling myself together and doing what I’m supposed to do, but there will no doubt be casualties, whether amongst my own work or my students. And then I realized, I am the Saab. (The homonymic resonance– “sob”– is purely coincidental.)

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Boo hoo. Go make yourself some soup, even if you’re never hungry enough to eat it anyway. AT LEAST YOU HAVE SOUP. Jesus.

So, for the soup, make life easy on yourself and swap the vegetables I’ve listed for whatever comes in one of those overpriced “soup mix” arrangements at your local grocery store. The parsnip may be unacceptably tender, and the package may turn out to hold mostly celery, but fuck it, you can’t taste anything anyway. These vegetables and herbs are just what happened to be in my grocery grab-bag, as well as some fennel that I just happened to have in the fridge (yes, you can ask, what kind of person just “happens to have fennel” in their fridge?).

Overnight, soak your colorful and exciting bean mix in a lot of water. MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY OF THE NATURAL PACKAGED WORLD.

The part where you tenderize the onions, celery, and fennel in the base of the stockpot is really boring.

Then the part where you wait over a half hour for the soup to boil AND cook is… possibly worse.

But then you have enough vegetable soup to feed a garrison, and along with vegetable soup, you have the fictional reassurance that this extra step you’re taking towards better health will make a difference. Yay.

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16-bean and 7-vegetable soup
serves 6-8

prep time: 20 minutes
cook time: 45 minutes

1 tbsp. olive oil
1 small onion, diced
4 stalks celery, diced
1/2 bulb of fennel (anise), with fronds separated, diced
2 large carrots, peeled and diced
1 red potato, peeled and diced
1 parsnip, peeled and diced
1 turnip, peeled and diced
fresh dill, parsley, fennel fronds, and thyme to taste, chopped (about  1 cup total)
1 pkg. Goya 16-bean soup mix (or comparably exciting bean mix), soaked overnight
1 carton (approx. 4 cups) gluten-free vegetable stock
4 cups water
2 tsp. salt (more to taste)
1/2 tsp. black pepper

1. Soak the beans in a large mixing bowl of water the night before you plan to cook the soup.
2. In the bottom of a large stockpot, heat the olive oil. Once shimmery, saute the onion, celery, and anise until translucent.
3. Add the carrots, potato, parsnip, and turnip, along with the broth and water, and the chopped herbs last.
4. Rinse the beans thoroughly and add them to the pot, along with the salt and black pepper.
5. Bring to a boil (roughly 10-15 minutes).
6. Once boiling, reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, 30-35 more minutes (or until the carrots are tender). Serves up to eight dinner portions.

blueberry banana pineapple immunity smoothie

A comedy that I saw in 2009 radically altered my outlook on life. That life-changing film was– you’ll never guess it– Jim Carrey’s Yes Man.

For those of you who didn’t stop reading after that previous line, it could be argued that I took the film’s moral way too seriously. Carrey’s character starts out as a cynical, lifeless bank officer who denies loan requests all day long. He is similarly jaded and irascible in his personal life. A curse– or God, or something like that– decrees that he is hereby compelled to say yes to everything that comes his way, no matter the consequences. Saying yes doesn’t always have positive results, but it does enable him to fall in love with one of Zooey Deschanel’s her earlier manic pixie dream girl personae. Once the spell has lifted, he realizes how much he’s missed out on by being a sourpuss.

2009– like 2008, 2007, 2004, and to some extent 2012– was something like the worst year of my life. I felt trapped in a relationship and a domestic space that nothing less than an atom bomb would be able to tear down. As senior year of college was weighing in, I was resentfully starting to realize that my parents were right– I’d missed out. I felt lonely as an outlier at school, but in my apartment, I started developing the sort of relationship with my oven that Sylvia Plath had with hers.

That stupid movie caused me to think about the number of times I’d pushed friends, family, and professors away, automatically saying no to this or that shindig because I wanted to believe that I was “needed” at home. What would happen if I started saying yes to every opportunity, instead of malingering in the stoic, introverted personality that I’d always hated assuming anyway?

I decided to try it, and it served me quite fantastically– until my health issues became unavoidable. Before being diagnosed with celiac, I believed I had no reason to “give myself a break” whenever a chance for some fun rolled around. I knew I had fibromyalgia, but if anything, I only ever rebelled against that, out of spite. Some people didn’t even believe fibromyalgia was “real” anyway, so why should I let it hold me back from having a good time?

Celiac, however, was definitely real. Every wakeful “unhealthy” decision would hereby have its consequences. Take the suppressed immune system I have as a result of my autoimmune deficiencies as an example. I’ve found that I am no longer able to fool myself into believing that I could party until 3am with a massive head cold and not wake up the worse for it the next day. I can’t will fevers into a state of sublimation with mind-power alone (yes, I believed I could do this before). I can’t even eat the complimentary saltines at department parties.

My mind-over-matter thinking has upended itself. Now the demands my body makes always supersede whatever misguided claims my mind might make to the contrary.

And most people would probably say this is for the better, that no one should be pushing their bodies past a limit, especially if they’ve got a real illness to manage. I’m not so sure, though. Would I really be so much worse off if I just sucked it up and went ahead with my plans, in spite of whatever my body’s whining for? Am I really willing to miss out on things I’ve looked forward to just to stay at home and play nurse to myself?

I’m sick today for the fourth time in eight weeks– three sinus colds and one flu. This has happened in spite of getting a flu shot, eating well, and taking thousands of milligrams of vitamins a day. The flu caused me to miss out on New Year’s Eve, my favorite holiday. Today’s chills, body aches, and congestion prompted me to cancel showing up to an advisor’s book “celebration” that I’ve had on my calendar for a month. Do you know how often the opportunity to build professional relationships during a “celebration” (read: complimentary wine and cheese reception) comes up in the academic community? Far less often than invitations to “office hours” and “conference talks”– that’s for sure.

It’s probably a moot point, though. I’m certainly not presentable enough to schmooze with any future-makers right now. My nose is so red that it looks like I’ve spent the day huffing cayenne pepper, my eyes are quite visibly (ha!) deciding whether or not to embrace full-fledged conjunctivitis, and the only remarkable piece of clothing I’m wearing right now is a blanket that I’m sharing with Penny.

In any case, here’s a recipe for the only thing I’ve been able to digest so far today, besides Ariyele Ressler’s delicious sweet potato and fried banana breakfast, which I shared with K this morning.

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I’ve called this an “immunity” smoothie, which is a misnomer for two reasons: 1) anything “immunity”-oriented certainly won’t help me now that I’m already sick; 2) I think I heard somewhere that blueberries are a superfruit, but I could be totally mixing them up with açai. The main thing is to avoid anything yogurt-based when you’re sick, since dairy increases phlegm production (I bet you feel like eating now).

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blueberry banana pineapple immunity smoothie
prep time: 3 minutes

1 cup extra pulp orange juice
1/3 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen
1 banana, halved
8-10 pieces frozen pineapple
4 ice cubes
1/2 tbsp. honey
1 tbsp. gluten-free vanilla protein powder (optional)

1. Add the ingredients to a blender in the order that they appear. Blend on high/smoothie setting for 3 minutes. Add extra ice if you’d like it thicker. Can serve two (about 5-6 oz. each) or one (around 10 oz.).

monday mayhem, coconut macaroons, and a random vanilla sauce

Some days are truly horrible. So are some lives. The latter, I think, are generally more abundant in New York City than they might be in some other places.

I woke up, ate granola, and almost immediately started reading Jose Saramago’s Blindness, a book I’ve been assigned for class. You know what happens in Blindness? The entire world goes blind except for one woman, and people start shitting in the streets, and guns continue to determine leadership qualities. Hello, Monday.

Then I headed out on the subway to a totally productive day of errands and office hours in Morningside Heights that I’d scheduled on my calendar three days ago. My train took thirty minutes to reach Atlantic Terminal. In fifteen more, I could have reached it on foot. So I transferred to an express on a different line. Only to realize after three stops that I was heading to the wrong island (Coney).

After an hour and a half on the train, I arrived on campus having missed one appointment and fifteen minutes late for another. Meetings went smoothly enough– if you count forcing diplomacy in one, staring at one another in silence in between talking at the same time in the second, and then finally babbling incoherently in the third as successful attempts at human contact and interlocution.

On the way home, I had a brilliant idea. I would rescue this day with scotch and the gluten-free apple pie leftover from Christmas that I’ve been squirreling away in the fridge. I would be the crazy bitch picking up a quart of vanilla ice cream in this frosty weather to eat it with. And I’d snatch up a packet of chili spices to make dinner even easier, since it’s yet another (by now, possibly countless?) evening that I’m spending cooking for myself, in a dark apartment with a snoozing dog while my partner works.

By this stage, I was thrilled about the easy turkey chili recipe I was going to offer you all. It only involved browning some ground turkey (conveniently forgetting all I’ve learned about “pink slime” since September) and pouring two cans of black beans, one of diced tomatoes, a carton of chicken broth, half a bag of frozen corn, and a packet of spices into the saucepan. The hardest part would have been chopping the onion, which I didn’t have to do since I’d apparently fictionalized owning an onion.

But then, literally as soon as I doused the slab of turkey in a McCormick’s spice pack, it occurs to me that I should have read the label. Why wouldn’t I read the label? Why would I ever take for granted that an American company would waste precious spices when it could camouflage those powders in all kinds of worthless wheat byproduct?

Sure enough, in bold on the ingredients list, it says WHEAT FLOUR. I try to console myself with the idea that there might not be that much wheat in proportion after all. I remember that rule about ingredients lists– they descend by quantity, from most to least. Nope, it still comes up third, before onion and garlic, even.

So, what now? Trash a pound of turkey and go hungry? Condemn the only person in the household who isn’t gluten-bereaved to eight servings’ worth of turkey chili? Shred up the aluminum-lined McCormick’s packet of undeniable proof and eat it anyway?

It’s been the kind of day where option number three is definitely going to win. I’m trying to put it into perspective: the packet as a whole only weighs 1.25 ounces. That 1.25 ounces will disperse over all eight servings of chili. Which means, even if that pulp were all powder (which it isn’t), I would theoretically be consuming no more than four grams of wheat in a single meal.

I know it’s self-destructive, and needlessly reckless, and if there was anyone in this apartment with a voice to stop me, maybe I’d listen to them, but my stubbornness will win out this time: I refuse to cave to this nightmare of a day. I will drink my scotch, aggravate my system with a giant sundae while I’m at it, and whine tomorrow.

Let this be our Uncomfortable Truthasaurus lesson for the day: You can always whine tomorrow.

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Since I’ve hardly delved into trying out other bloggers’ gluten-free recipes– and I wasn’t bold enough to strike out and try making macaroons on my own this weekend– I tested a recipe on Elana’s Pantry, a dedicated gluten-free recipe blog that has helped me tremendously in figuring out the implacable world that is gluten-free baking. I had a party to go to, and several recommendation-writers to thank, so I wanted to make sure that they were edible (a requirement that my earlier, completely failed attempts at gluten-free baking– as yet undisclosed in this blog, though maybe I’ll shamefully share them someday–tragically ignored).

The first thing you must know how to do is how to separate an egg yolk from an egg white. I learned from my mother how to do it this way (though if you search YouTube for these instructions, a billion methods involving plastic water bottles come up, which are entirely too technologically advanced for me to understand):

Once that’s done, it’s necessary to whisk the egg whites with the salt and cinnamon until they “stiffen,” or turn solid white and kind of sudsy, like soap. Since I have the luxury of a standing mixer, I should have just allowed it to do a much better job of whipping the egg whites into shape than my emaciated arm ever could. Ironically, I was too lazy to pull it out.

Elana’s recipe calls for “folding” the coconut into the stiffened whites. Possibly because I didn’t stiffen them well enough, I found that the agave syrup kept sinking and separating the batter, so instead of being delicate, I whipped the whole thing back into shape every few minutes.

Although the original recipe suggests it makes four dozen macaroons, I found that it only made three for me; I might have made the first batch too large, but I was still using a tablespoon to measure. In any case, it didn’t matter; I’d also swiped out unsweetened coconut for sweetened, in addition to sprinkling in that cinnamon, and they have been a crowd-pleaser with everyone they’ve met so far.

The last question was, what to do with the half dozen leftover yolks? I didn’t want to see them go to waste, so I quickly pulled together a vanilla custard that will pair nicely with my apple pie a la mode tonight.

 

I fashioned a makeshift double-boiler by hovering a smaller saucepan, containing the milk, yolks, vanilla, and white sugar, over a medium saucepan of rapidly boiling water.

 

I also adapted that recipe from a somewhat sketchy looking webpage, which I located through this blog post, a running list of recipes specifically meant to use up spare egg yolks. All the recipes listed, by and large, are not gluten-free, but it’s a good place to start if you don’t like wasting food. Below, I’ve included the measurements I used, in case the metric is as foreign for you as it is for me.

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gluten-free coconut macaroons
adapted from elana’s pantry

yields 36
prep time: 10 min.
cooking time: 36 min.

6 egg whites
1/4 tsp. sea salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup agave nectar
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
3 cups sweetened shredded coconut

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Separate the egg whites into a medium mixing bowl. Whisk in the sea salt and cinnamon vigorously, until stiffened.
3. Fold in the agave, vanilla, and then the shredded coconut.
4. Line a baking sheet with wax paper. Drop the macaroon batter, in dollops approximately a half-tablespoon large, onto the wax paper.
5. Bake, on average, for twelve minutes. Should yield 36-48, depending on how large you make them.

vanilla dessert sauce
adapted from cooks united.co.uk

yields two cups
prep time: 2 min.
cooking time: 20 min.

6 egg yolks
1/2 cup white sugar, divided
1 3/4 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Put a medium saucepan of water on the stove to boil.
2. Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks with 1/4 cup sugar until combined.
3. Over medium heat, bring the milk and the rest of the sugar (without stirring) to a boil in a small saucepan.
4. Once boiling, turn off heat. Slowly pour the sugared yolks into the milk mixture, stirring until smooth.
5. Finish cooking by hovering the small saucepan over the larger saucepan of boiling water. Stir consistently and cook until the sauce is thick enough to coat a wooden spoon (about 10-12 minutes). Serve over pie (or whatever other kind of dessert you can eat, being gluten-free/doomed.)

beef and vegetable potjie

One of the ordinary events in traveling to other countries that never ceases to surprise me is how amazed Americans are by how fresh or wholesome or “real” food is virtually anywhere else. Even in territories as frightening and strange as Canada, their standards are still significantly higher.

K and I spent a few days in Montreal the week before last (the mere eleven days since our departure feel like they carried the passage of an entire decade, what with the triumphant start of my last first semester of classes, ever, this past Tuesday). The trip feels like old news now, but it’s on my mind since I just finished the last square of a generic banana-and-peanut-butter milk chocolate bar I’d bought in the only mega-massive, fluorescent-flushed, product-saturated (read: normal) supermarket that we could find. All I could think was that this chocolate bar, tantamount to whatever a Walgreens-brand chocolate bar should be like (if Walgreens manufactured those– instead, the equivalent is probably Nestle’s), tasted like good chocolate. Not chalk, or pink neon nougat, or hard-bitten plastic. Just really good chocolate.

And now it’s gone, like anything good in a disposable wrapper that happens to anybody. And yes, I know, I’m basically confusing an absence of obvious chemical composites as evidence of a “food” that’s “good for you.” A chocolate bar is a chocolate bar, no matter how quickly its ingredients might coagulate the blood around your most fragile of heart valves. We all know I lie in wait for diabetes, like an inbred panther does a lion that it mistakes for a gazelle.

Certainly, our other culinary decisions on that trip proved as much. At Au Pied de Cochon, an upscale, carnivorously French restaurant, we shared the canard en conserve, or duck in a can, one of three (we were told) gluten-free options on a fairly extensive menu. It consisted of a regular aluminum can hiding the most decadent of campfire cuisine: a whole duck breast saturated in foie gras with potatoes, mushrooms, and probably some other by-then unidentifiable vegetables. As I sheared a shoehorn of fat from that pressure-cooked duck, I felt no remorse.

Somehow this meal didn’t seem as hedonistic to me as the hoards of everyday people at La Banquise, a diner where every patron (many bibbed and middle-aged, for whatever reason) was faced with his/her own ceramic boat of poutine– traditionally, French fries dredged in gravy and cheese curds. I was revolted, but as usual, not revolted enough to abstain from the local tradition. (The only time I have ever been too horrified to go on happened in Zambia, when what we’d misjudged for fat in the criminally cheap ground beef we’d bought at the Shop Rite in Livingstone turned out to be tiny fragments of unidentifiable animal bone. Do you know what it’s like to chew teeth? You don’t want to. And you’d think American college students sojourning in a country where one of their dollars equals 5,195 Zambian kwacha would splurge on something like dinner, but no.)

Yet, despite all of this adventurous eating on my part, I didn’t misstep with my gluten-free diet until an hour before our ten-hour train ride home. I’m saddest to say it wasn’t even a matter of my own volition. The adorable but admittedly spacey host at the gay bed and breakfast where we were staying accidentally mismatched halves of my gluten-free, corn English muffin with K’s plain bagel in the breakfast sandwiches he made for us. I didn’t realize that the underside of my sandwich was poisonous until I woke up enough to see the donut hole gleefully gaping with its evil emptiness between my thumbs.

People often ask me what happens if I eat gluten. Sometimes in a “So why does this matter?” way, other times in a, “I’d like to imagine you in pain” way, other times because they actually care to know. I don’t like going into details because it’s like divulging a horribly sensual secret that everyone will associate with you if its red flags should ever start popping up in their presence. But suffice it to say that if you sit strategically next to someone who everyone would expect to blatantly disrespect everyone else’s desires for comfort on the train by putting his bodily functions first (like the grumpy Canadian octogenarian who curtly told the customs officer he’s going to a hospital in Poughkeepsie), very few will suspect what you’re going through. If you, a twenty-four-year-old woman who gay men have described as “handsome,” pair this strategy with one that will aurally or visually distract from any other queer sounds or smells that might manifest in a public space– like reading selections from the grisly case files of women’s murders in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 out loud– you will be even better off.

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Now that the semester is back, my unceasing hangover headache and need to locate easy dinner recipes have both returned. Last semester, I made a potjie, a South African stew traditionally boiled in cauldron (seriously, you can buy these really cute cauldrons in Cape Town like you might buy tea kettles in Turkey). But since I made it in a slow-cooker and skipped a lot of the more “authentic” ingredients (like kidney), it is, like most of my attempts at ethnic cuisine, a thin impersonation of foreign dish that most people I know have no referent for anyway.

The first step is to amass your vegetables! Feel good about the sheer quantity of them. Hopefully this will reduce the stress of rinsing, peeling, and slicing most of them that will surface shortly.

Next, I dredged my beef in cornstarch, pepper, and garlic salt and sauteed it with the onions. They’re the first thing to go into the crock-pot once done.

I deglazed the pan with the liquid ingredients that would constitute the gravy in the potjie. But the photo was pretty lame, and storage space is precious, so let your imagination work.

The most important part of a potjie is the order in which you layer the vegetables. Densest ones always go on the bottom, immediately above the beef, and less starchy ones, like zucchini and cabbage, huddle at the top. Unfortunately, since a slow-cooker, being a metaphor for the inescapable mundanity that is everyday life, is opaque and practically impenetrable, I can’t show you the layers in action.

Once it’s done (after no more than eight hours– six to seven, on high, is probably ideal), it’s best served over white or basmati rice.

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beef and vegetable potjie
serves 4-6

prep time: 20-25 minutes
cook time: 6-7 hours

2 lbs. stew beef cubes
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 tbsp. garlic salt
1 tsp. pepper
2 tbsp. olive oil

2 medium yellow onions, sliced
1/2 cup dried apricots, halved
4 carrots, peeled and sliced
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced
4 white or yellow potatoes, peeled and halved
2 zucchini, sliced
1 yellow squash, sliced
1 cup cabbage, chopped
1 vine-ripe tomato, diced
2 tsp. dried parsley

3/4 cup cooking sherry
1/3 cup gluten-free soy sauce
1 1/2 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. dried rosemary
1 tsp. dried thyme
2 cubes beef bouillon
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/4 cups water
1 cup frozen corn
1 cup basmati rice, cooked to package directions

1. In a Ziploc or paper bag, dredge the beef in cornstarch, garlic salt, and one teaspoon of pepper. Saute in the olive oil, with the onions, until browned, about 6-8 minutes.
2. Transfer the pan contents to the bottom of the slow-cooker, preheated on high. Deglaze the pan with the sherry, soy sauce, 1 and a half teaspoons of pepper, dry mustard, rosemary, thyme, beef bouillon, a half teaspoon of salt, and two and a quarter cups of water. Over medium heat, stir until the bouillon cubes disintegrate completely. Remove from heat.
3. In single layers, stack the vegetables, in the order listed (apricots on the bottom, ending with the cabbage, tomato, and parsley on top), inside the crock-pot. Pour the gravy mixture over the contents of the crock-pot. Top with cracked black pepper, to taste.
4. Cook on high for 6-7 hours (dig and check the potatoes or carrots for tenderness with a fork at 6 hours).
5. Forty-five minutes before the final hour, cook the rice according to package directions and add the frozen corn to the potjie.
6. Serve over rice.

winter break beer tasting spectacular

I had the idea awhile ago to stage my own GF beer tasting with K. It was inspired by the number of Oktoberfest daily deals that my Living Social and Groupon queues were advertising and that I could never participate in. The fact that GF beer costs up to double the amount of a regular beer ($9-13) at virtually all of Brooklyn’s hipster beer gardens further reinforced my conviction that I couldn’t afford making such uninformed decisions.

Like most of my ideas for liquor-fueled adventures, this one also quickly expanded into a certainly excessive, possibly catastrophic extravaganza of glut and booze. Why not spend a whole Friday “tasting” $60-worth of gluten-free beer from Whole Foods? Why not start that day at 11am? Why not spend it in bed with K, the American Movie Channel, and a gluten-free frozen pizza? And especially, why not live-blog the entire experience?

I’m sad to say that the draft (the textual one, that is; of all the beers, only the Green’s brand foamed) hasn’t turned out to be as riotous as possible. It turns out that being a scotch regular has already strongly coated my liver in cirrhotic armor. In plain English, beer has hardly any effect on my constitution. But hopefully my observations, however novice, will help you find something you like, too.

New Planet Off-Grid Pale Ale
5.0% ABV

Gorgeous scarlet hue, surprisingly hoppy for a wheat-free beer. Slightly bitter aftertaste, but not unpleasant. Think raw espresso beans. Cinnamon? It doesn’t have much of an aroma, and the taste mellows dramatically after a few sips, which shows that it isn’t as dark as its look or initial bite imply. But it doesn’t leave my mouth feeling stale or dehydrated, as beer often does, so that’s nice.

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Green’s Tripel Blonde Ale
8.5% ABV

The label is dark, but I like the view of Penny and K manhandling each other in the background.

Lunchtime with a gluten-free forty and a fake salad niçoise = winning. (I took this recipe for salad niçoise, subbed canned yellow fin for the grilled, fancy stuff, forgot the tarragon, and swapped niçoise olives for kalamata, because who can afford authentic French olives.) I have never felt more sophisticated. This tripel blonde (yes, it’s actually spelled like that) is smoother and lighter tasting than the last, even though the alcohol content is almost double. K described it as “buttery,” while I likened it to honey. It’s becoming clear that I just base my opinions of the way beers taste on the color they are. It reminds me of snickerdoodles. Which is kind of a sadistic thing for a gluten-free beer to do.

Penny eyeing my salad niçoise.

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New Grist Beer
5.7% ABV

Bleh. It’s fine. Perfectly fine, really. But much more like cider than beer, somehow (notice it doesn’t even bother identifying itself as what kind of beer, it just is beer). It doesn’t foam, hop, or linger. It’s a pale Chardonnay color and a bit lemony. It’s not offensive, and it’s encouraging me to drink it expediently and get on to the next thing. It’s like the Corona of rice and sorghum beer, but with a slightly less humiliating alcohol volume. It doesn’t make me hate myself.

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Bard’s Gold
4.6% ABV

“The Original Sorghum Malt Beer.” It’s like the Red Stripe of gluten-free beers. The sort of bottle you’d find in a Fort Greene Mexican restaurant that advertises itself as gluten-free (even though 95% of Mexican food is already gluten-free). In other words, it kind of tastes like an imitation, to the extent that it’s not very unique or interesting, but it’s also convincing as far as any amber, middlebrow ale might go. If it’s your fourth beer (as it is for us), you might even be fooled into thinking you’re drinking the “real” thing.

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Redbridge Beer
4.0% ABV

K and I made the educated decision to drink the remaining beers in the order of their alcohol content (from highest to lowest). This is the lowest. In every possible sense. It’s made by Anheuser-Busch; it is indeed the Bud of sorghum beer. It tastes like dirty water and looks like iced tea. Iced tea is more appealing, even for a dilettante alcoholic.

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Green’s Dubbel Dark Ale
7% ABV

Very dark, nutty, and spicy. This might actually be my favorite one, which is strange since I never liked regular dark brews back when I was a normal twenty-four-year-old. We saved it for last so that we’d have something good to drink with the likely disappointing GF frozen pepperoni pizza. Which I’m glad to say was no more disappointing than I remember regular GF pizza being.

homemade oatmeal with dried figs and raisins

Every so often, there will be days when you emerge from a subway station in Manhattan, and it seems like every storefront is named something like “Bread and Company,” or “Bagel Express,” or “Crumbs.” Maybe a well-meaning barista at the cafe where you’ve cozied up with your 900-page novel will offer you a free cider donut that day; he will be perplexed when you decline, especially since the donuts are still warm.

He doesn’t know that you’ve spent the duration of your visit bartering your soul over the Rice Krispies treat in the dessert case (it’s technically gluten-free, but not really, because there’s like zero chance they used the certified gluten-free Rice Krispies, and anything else risks being contaminated with gluten filth). Really, you just want layer cake, which is a safe craving, because no layer cakes exist in this establishment.

Once you get home, your mail will involve only mean-spirited trash: an application for a GM credit card (since when do bankrupt car companies finance personal credit?) and a Fairytale Brownies catalogue (you once bought your sister a birthday basket of brownies from there, and they have never stopped haunting you). You might wince as you stuff the latter into the recycling bin.

The earlier half of Wednesday was one of those days for me. I was killing time in Cobble Hill with a book at the Tazza Cafe while Penny was being beautified at Petsmart. The Tazza Cafe  at no point outwardly advertises itself as a bakery, except apparently on Foursquare, where I received this malicious badge for checking in:

(I didn’t buy the Rice Krispies treat.)

Then I went to Trader Joe’s because I’d ran out of gluten-free granola. I had also wanted to buy me and K snacks for our long train ride to Montreal next week. I got so unbelievably excited when a sign for TJ’s revamped, still problematically named “Oriental Rice Crackers” proclaimed that the “best part about them is that they’re naturally gluten-free!”

Could it really be? Could this medley of exotically shaped and colorful crackers actually be safe for me? I used to love snack mixes when I was a kid. You know, the kind that your grandmother probably bought from the dollar store and always seemed to have on hand for Wheel of Fortune. Those “party” mixes often came in salty cylinders of cholesterol-laden goodness; I used to pick through the pretzels for the completely unidentifiable snowballs of “garlic puffs.” This is the stuff of my fantasies.

So while I incredulously stared at the bag, I found myself being swayed by logic. Why would a diet-conscious company like TJ’s make a “rice” cracker with unnecessary wheat ingredients anyway? Logically, the only thing that would keep rice crackers from being gluten-free would be the soy sauce used to flavor them. And soy sauce used to be gluten-free (a.k.a., filler-free) anyway.

Then I got in line and pored through the ingredients list. Sure enough, the bag listed “soy sauce (wheat, water, soy, salt).” I was dismayed. I was stricken. Halfway through an ordinary New York line that wrapped around the grocery store, my hope kneeled down and died for maybe the umpteenth time.

Or, well, more accurately, it stumbled. My hope stumbled under its giant cross of gluten grief, but it didn’t die. Instead it insisted that I clarify the subject with the cashier. Maybe, just maybe, millions of bags of Oriental Rice Crackers were riddled with misprints across the country, and that sign, in its happy-go-lucky, dumb shit cursive that all TJ’s employees seem obligated to learn, was tantamount in historical truth to a stone tablet in a pharaoh’s tomb.

The cashier, kind woman that she was, took me seriously. The manager who she sent to check the sign (a more rational, visibly less compassionate creature) stopped short and disdainfully affirmed, “It is far more likely that there is a mistake on the sign than on the bag.” To which I promptly rejoined, “Well, you really should take that sign down immediately, then” (and added in my head, “before you terrorize more hopeless people”). He seemed to resent the implication that his store had led unsuspecting hundreds to intestinal disintegration, and I didn’t realize that I’d forgotten the granola until I got home.

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Whenever I run out of granola, I get up the energy to make oatmeal, especially during the winter. I’m lucky not to be so sensitive to grains that oatmeal bothers me. Mostly I’m just too lazy to make it the way I like it, which is why the kind of creepy mix of instant quinoa/flax “oatmeal” gruel that my mom bought for me has been really convenient these last weeks.

I’ve also never succeeded in making homemade oatmeal as successfully as I had when I first started eating it– while studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. One of my housemates had convinced me to try it. (In a land of ostrich burgers and kudu, yes, I needed to be convinced to try oatmeal.) I made it every day with a particular brand of steel-cut oats only found in South Africa. Since I made it so often (and it only too ten minutes each time), I assumed I’d remember once I got home. But as soon as I tried to recreate my oatmeal masterpiece in Bryn Mawr, all memories of how to do it properly had been swept away, along with most of the rejuvenated outlook and uncharacteristic optimism that had dominated my time abroad.

As I’ve failed time and again to make it well, I’ve blamed American oats. I don’t know what about them is different, but nothing I do results in quite the same consistency. This recipe is the closest I’ve come to basics. I always add a handful of dried fruit to my oatmeal (in this case, raisins and chopped figs).

I wait to add the dried fruit until the oatmeal only needs a minute more on the stove. I boil half parts milk and water together with one dry serving of oatmeal until it’s rolling, about five minutes. Then I minimize the heat to a simmer and stir it constantly, until the oatmeal starts to thicken and stick. My secret trick is adding more water (or milk, if you want it creamier) at that point, forcing it to boil and thicken all over again. I’ve found that this helps settle the oats into a porridge in the minimum amount of time.

Only once the porridge has begun to thicken and clump a second time do I add the dried fruit, some brown sugar (in South Africa, I used this amazing raw sugar called “caramel sugar”), and cinnamon. Sometimes honey or peanut butter, if I’m in the mood.

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homemade oatmeal with dried figs and raisins

serves one
prep time: 3 minutes
cooking time: 25-35 minutes

1/2 cup gluten-free rolled oats
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup + 3/4 cup water
tiny pinch of salt
1/4 cup mixed raisins
1/4 cup dried figs, chopped
1 tsp. light brown sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1. In a small saucepan, bring oats, milk, 1/4 cup water, and salt to a boil over high heat.
2. Bring to a simmer; cook, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes.
3. Once the oatmeal has started to stick and clump, add another cup of water. Return to a boil, then simmer on medium-low heat another 15 minutes. Stir occasionally.
4. As soon as most of the liquid has thickened, add raisins and figs, so that they tenderize in the heat. Simmer another 5 minutes.
5. Once the oatmeal has reached your desired texture (ranging from wet to sticky, but should never be soupy), remove it from the heat, and cover it for 1 minute.
6. Mix in the sugar, honey, and any other desired add-ins. Serves one, can be doubled to serve two.