A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I now have curtains, and I've hung some art. Sorry for the dark lighting - the house isn't actually dark, but the light outside the windows was very bright.

My bedroom and under-the-bed reading nook, with bonus Erin.

My loft reading nook, with bonus Erin.

My Zoom office and living room (doubles as a reading nook), with bonus Alex.

I posted an egg glamour shot to the Crestline Facebook group, and offered to trade fresh-laid eggs for home-made goodies. So far I've received pomegranate jelly and peach preserves, and am arranging to get homemade jerky, a caramel-apple pie, and a cinnamon-Nutella babka.

Let me put it this way: my chickens are laying five eggs per day. Sometimes six.

It's a lovely, cold, rainy, misty day. Just right for cooking! And hopefully using up some eggs. I haven't had lunch yet, let alone dinner, so I can make more than one thing. The leftover stir-fry already exists. So do four cartons of eggs. I have all the ingredients for everything I've mentioned.

I am back in LA, tanned and happy and in possession of several dozen farm-fresh eggs, some of which I have already distributed to friends and neighbors. I then spent two hours madly watering and pruning.

Some garden shots. The lavender flowers are from a potato. Some of my potatoes died in a heat wave, alas. I am hoping to salvage the cucumbers, which were badly affected. When I pulled up a dead potato plant, though, I found two baby potatoes! A harvest!

Harvest. The "crystal melon" is also known as a lemon cucumber. I ate the cucumber and carrot raw, sautéed the potatoes and chard (sequentially in the same pan), and ate them with a fried double-yolked egg from the chooks.

This is everything I wanted.

It feels strange and insensitive to say that I'm happy, considering everything going on. But I am, in between periods of panic and rage and stir-craziness and numbness and so forth. I'm in such a better place than my three years of absolute personal hell. Even if I do end up dying of covid-19 (I'm high-risk), I feel that I'd be much more OK with that than I would if I'd died then, which would have essentially been because I couldn't get doctors to believe that I was actually sick.

At this point, I have the world's best cats, a beautiful garden that's already starting to feed me and others, an eager audience for my writing, and a business that's providing financial stability to me and others... self-publishing my id-tastic romance novels about traumatized shapeshifters and their pet flying kittens.

And those flying kittens bring me enough money that I can do some good with it, from donating to organizations like OutRight to helping out some individuals. Other people helped me so much, in so many ways, from paying for my medication to letting me live with them for months to finding a treatment to simply believing in me, when I was in no shape to give anything to anyone else, literally or emotionally. It feels really good to be in a place where I can give some of that back.

A garden symbolizes hope. It symbolizes the possibility of new life. It symbolizes persistence. But it's not just a symbol. It's a real thing. Put a seed in dirt, water it and tend it, and a sprout may grow. If it doesn't, try again, or somewhere else. When you get a sprout, keep watering (but not too much) and pick off the bugs, but don't be surprised if one morning you wake up and bugs ate the entire thing, or someone pulled it up. Try again, maybe in a different place. Use some bug spray, or maybe try a different plant. If you don't give up, eventually you'll learn how to tend your seeds, and one day you'll have a harvest that will feed you and others.

1. It's a zeder (Zoom seder).

2. Everybody's video worked but mine.

I have no idea why that happened. My Zoom was fine the day before. We tried using different browsers, different invites, even different computers - I tried on both of mine. No matter what, Zoom said my video was working, but my camera light didn't turn on and I appeared as an audio-only black square. Very frustrating.

On the plus side, I really leveled up my cooking skills. I made matzah, matzah balls from my matzah, crisp-skinned braised duck with root vegetables, huevos haminados, and improvised charoset from what I had (pistachios, apples, brown sugar, cinnamon, red wine).

Everything came out good, and the duck and charoset came out GREAT. A+, will definitely make again. You can see pics on Instagram.

Next year in Jerusalem. Or better yet, in person.

Out of everything that's going on, what's hitting me hardest is all the small restaurants that are closing down or struggling desperately to survive. In LA, a lot of them are beloved family-owned, people of color-owned, and/or woman-owned places. I love them and their food and their owners and workers, and I'm doing my best to support them.

So! Want to get a taste of LA's deliciousness while supporting people who could really use a break? Order by mail! They are shipping nationwide, though I would check in advance if you're in Hawaii.

Ninong's Cafe is selling pastries, cookie butter, coffee, and mugs. This is one of my absolute favorite LA restaurants, a Filipino place best-known for its pancake flight and devotion to all things ube. I especially recommend their ube coffee cake and other ube treats. You can order now and they'll ship everything fresh on Saturday. You get 20% off with the code FLATTENTHECURVE. (Ube is purple sweet potato. It has a delicate and delectable flavor. I hate yams and I love ube.)

If there's anything you want that's listed as out of stock, just email the Cafe. They'll respond promptly. Nothing is really out of stock as they're baking it fresh, it just sometimes sells out and gets listed that way.

Cookies and coffee cake can be frozen, so you can order extras for later. ;)

Porto's is selling frozen bake-at-home stuff. They're a Cuban bakery notorious for their extremely long lines, and famous for their addictiveness. I am especially in love with the potato balls and guava pastries, both of which are available to bake at home.

Bhan Kanom Thai is selling all sorts of Thai treats. They are a wonderful Thai dessert and grocery shop in the heart of Thai Town, selling unusual cupcakes and other delicious things. A lot of what's available for mail order is non-perishable groceries; if you don't live in LA, I'd use their contact form to check on whether it's practical for them to ship their fresh desserts and cupcakes. They respond very promptly.

Please comment with any beloved local places that are also shipping. And please share this post widely, if you so desire, or make your own!

Yesterday I got caught up in some neighborhood drama (spent 4 hours helping a neighbor pack up for a last-minute move, or rather a move he'd left till the last minute) and I have no idea what I ate, though I have a distinct memory of being annoyed that I had neither bread nor time to bake it. I remedied that today.

I grilled a hangar steak on a no-stick pan with just a tiny bit of butter, plus salt and pepper. I am very good at making steak if I do say so myself, and that was an extremely fine steak. I had it with mashed sweet potato and the inevitable pickled daikon.

Click for photos! ( Read more... )

I had a lot of stuff going on the last couple days, so no photos.

I squeezed passion fruit juice/pulp through a colander on to my apricot kefir. It was divine, but the kefir is also divine all by itself. Will not buy passion fruit again unless I have a specific plan for them.

I baked the wonderful bread again, this time with 3/4 flour, 1/4 cornmeal. It is delicious but less versatile; not a good pairing with black sesame, for instance, which is obviously a problem. It goes well with honey, brown sugar, and apricot preserves. I gave some away to neighbors (not because I disliked it, but because people are so thrilled to receive homebred bread) and will go back to all flour for my next try. I will also invest in two one-quart oven-safe bowls so I can do one loaf plain and one flavored, perhaps with the Kalamata olives I have on hand.

The California macadamia nuts are absolutely fantastic: sweet, nutty, slightly chewy, less rich than the ones I've had before, and perfect without roasting or added salt. I love them so much that I am going to either make special trips to that market just for them or, if possible, order them by mail.

Yesterday I had this for dinner:



It's scallops, Chinese sausage, pea greens, and rice, from this Yotam Ottolenghi recipe, freely adapted as I didn't have all the ingredients. That was a mistake. His recipes are very precise and come out delicious if you do them exactly as written, which I didn't do. And while I can perfectly sear a scallop (yes, even a tiny bay scallop) normally I cook scallops extremely simply so I can focus my entire attention on getting the sear right. Instead, I was juggling multiple steps, and the sear suffered along with everything else. It wasn't terrible but it was nowhere near as delicious as you'd expect from the ingredients.

While I was at the Japanese grocery buying the ginger and pea greens for the scallops, I spotted the first sakura mochi of spring! Naturally I had to buy them. If rules would stop you from eating sakura mochi, you must break the rules.

Today I went to my usual farmers market in Mar Vista. I'm going to give you the list of what I bought/already have and am looking to use, and you can suggest things for me to make.

You can assume that anything I can eat as is, I will also eat as is; I'm looking for suggestions for actual recipes, even if they're as simple as "roast beets, slice, drizzle with garlic olive oil, top with crumbled goat cheese." In fact I generally prefer simple.

You can assume I already have unmentioned basics like rice, eggs, onions/garlic, etc.

I now have in my possession...

Acini de Pepe (YES STILL)
Beef, ground
Black lentils
Blueberries
Bread (homemade country white, go me)
Burrata
Calamari (pre-pounded steak)
Chinese sweet sausage (lop cheung)
Coconut (fresh; I do NOT have coconut milk)
Cod (ling)
Goat cheese
Hangar steak
Kalamata olives
Khorasan wheat (never used this before, but was encouraged by pastina experiment)
Kale
Lemons
Mandarin oranges
Oaxacan cheese (like string cheese but round)
Parsley (fresh)
Passion fruit (bought on whim - would really like suggestions)
Raspberries
Scallops
Sweet potatos
Thyme (fresh)

Foods I do not like; please don't suggest them as ingredients: avocado, bananas, cilantro, squash except acorn, tomato in giant chunks (sauce or little bits is fine), zucchini.

I did not get to the farmer's market yesterday, for the same reason I did not get to the gym the night before: we had a rainstorm. Last night was a very dramatic lightning storm, with visible bolts splitting the sky and brilliant flashes turning the whole sky white. I decided I did not want to drive in that, even for five minutes, and I wanted to walk in it even less. So I stayed in and ate what I already had.

For breakfast, I had apricot kefir from the farmer's market. It's not a drink, it's the texture of very thick yogurt, only the most delicious yogurt you've ever had, flecked with bits of apricot. I tried a sample at the market, then asked the seller what the difference was between kefir and yogurt.

"Kefir is much healthier!" she exclaimed. "It's full of probiotics, nutrients, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin X, Y, and Z!" (Not an exact quote - my brain turned off at some point. She might have said it prevents or possibly cures cancer, I'm not sure.)

Me, interrupting because I had to: "I meant, literally how is it different from yogurt? Not in terms of healthiness, in terms of how it's made."

With a "Son, I am disappoint" look, she said, "Yogurt is made by heating milk. Kefir uses cold fermentation."

A+ cold-fermented cancer cure, would eat again.

For lunch, I had a slice of cider bread toasted with butter and honey, and a slice toasted with melted farmers market garlic jack. While eating, I roasted some beautiful farmers market golden beets according to this recipe. They were so lovely straight out of the oven, glistening and caramelized and sweet-smelling, that I sliced one up on the spot and ate it with some chèvre and a drizzle of garlic olive oil, both from the farmers market. It was absolutely delicious.



For dinner, beef soboro from this recipe. Beef and pickled daikon from farmer's market, rice from pantry. Very tasty and satisfying on a dark and rainy night, especially since it was post-gym and weightlifting.