KIM CHI!

Straight into the cookbook! No explanation of where I've been!

    !!!!BOOM SHAKALAKA!!!! 

        KIM CHI EATS THE WORLD!     

This was an impulse buy, because KIM CHI BABY!!!!!!!

 

.....and also COOKBOOK. 

A shiny, sparkly cookbook!

 
My expectations were a sad reflection on the fact that I do not get out a lot; as, 'C'mon, that's going to be like an autograph thing, a promo item, not an actual 'recipes that you will use' kind of cookbook.'
I was sofa king wrong.

Look at all the tabs I have in here. Those are all recipes I'm going to try!  

Tony Bourdain didn't get this many tabs.*  

Rick Bayless didn't get this many tabs.

 

Many tabs!

Do you get to see the recipes?  No you do not.  You have to go BUY THE DAMN COOKBOOK to see the recipes.  DO IT NOW.

 

And you need to take a look at this. Dear God look at the way she did the indexes. This is so efficient!

Ms. Kim Chi is not screwing around. I haven't run into anything this adventurous and original in a very long time.  Why are you sitting there GO BUY IT LIKE I TOLD YOU TO GEEZE

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Fine OK where have I been. 

I have been 1. moving on, and  3. dealing with all the goddamn SMOKE.

Oh, and the high temperatures.

Lawd.

Oregon, right across the river from here, is on fire. Occasionally, so is Idaho. For the last four weeks we did not see blue sky.  The sun rose through a bar of yellow smog, and it was huge, the color of a neon maraschino cherry,

 ...and then the remainder of the day it was just a little silver circle in the brown sky. Sometimes ashes came floating down. There were days that we could not see the next block down, and there were days that the smoke was so bad stores closed and people were told to stay home from work - and stay indoors while they were at it. You could practically hear the Christian Nationalists meeping like Beaker. Grab the tithe box! it's Armageddon!

This morning and afternoon we finally saw a little relief. An overnight rainstorm blew in, and the difference it made was astounding. We were all like 'Wow, I forgot how blue the sky is!' and going from the front door to the back door and saying 'Look at how blue this is!' and shit, like a couple of nutbars.

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SCREW THAT LET'S LOOK AT MY TOMATOES

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Here is another picture I found as I was looking for tomato images:

 

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Fine fine fine here is a picture of The Hanging Gardens of Fruitland!

But first, this:

   This was my first harvest here in Idaho!  IT'S SO BITTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Devalued currency for scale. Also a spoon like the kind you eat with. For scale.   

NOW ON WITH THE SHEW!

Here it is! Spread across the rolling plains! Breaking several city ordinances and at least one rental regulation by rendering the meters out back difficult to read! YEE HAW!

You will note that The Hanging Gardens are protected by this prestigious association. 

Do not be screwing around in the Hanging Gardens. 

They'll send that farmer-stockman out to fuck you up.  

I have two cherry tomato plants growing in this container (this is only the front half) and they cannot be stopped. 

Here is the back half, lying on that sheet of white painted tin all the livelong day and flourishing.

 All these lovely cherry tomatoes want is to drink water, to bask in the deadly radiation given off by the merciless, murderous sun, and to put out boatloads of fruit. Utterly delicious. Just the basic '100' plant you can get at any grocery store. 

   Here is my pepper plant, growing ordinary green peppers which are not only small, but flavorless. Come to find out that this variety, 'Lady Pepper' is known for that.  Ah well. This is my learning year, I figure. And I figure I won't waste my time on this thing next year. 

   

   I grew Roma tomatoes. Here are some green ones. They, thank God, are DELICIOUS.  Ugly plant, puts out excellent fruit, loves that full sun. Next year I'll be choosing 'Roma' again! 

 

 

I snooked in some Golden Oregano, which, as it turns out, does not like the full nuclear force of the Idaho sun one single fucking bit.  Here it is flourishing in the shade of the Roma. It would be bigger but I keep cutting it off and using it.  If it survives the Winter, hey. Cool. If not, I spend a buck next year and grow it again.

The Roma and the 100's have been giving me tomatoes since last month.  I keep them picked off as soon as the fruit turns pink, because apparently this keeps the squirrels from becoming interested. The tomatoes ripen in a flash in the kitchen, and so far no signs of squirrel damage. To the tomatoes.

   SQUIRRELS SUCK

  

DO YOU  KNOW WHAT THOSE FUCKING SQUIRRELS DID OMG those little shits. I had a really nice set of oregano and thyme in a planter this Spring and they were flourishing. Until some prick of a squirrel came and dug them up and then PISSED ALL OVER THEM BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT. Why the fuck not piss all over innocent thyme and oregano plants THAT DID YOU NO HARM YOU HEARTLESS LITTLE BASTARDS

Watch out for squirrels, is the message I'm trying to get across. 

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hey I love you LOOK AT THIS

From the prestigious Culinary Institute of America!

This book here! It's a textbook! A COLLEGE TEXT BOOK PEOPLE

WE GIVE YOU A RECIPE FOR

Kind of gives you an idea what kind of a three-star hotel kitchen job they're setting you up for, doesn't it? 

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Now you should go around with a baseball bat and check for SQUIRRELS

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*Hint of things to come

OK I'm back again PART DEAUX

 Ok that's enough, that's not why I'm here.

I'm here to

   HANG OUT WITH SWEATY PEOPLE IN THEIR UNDERWEAR and take photographs of them apparently    

  i know what you're thinking. you're thinking "wow i bet this would make a lot of Soylent Green." i know it because that's what i'm thinking too. 

Soylent Green is made of people, you know.   

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I am going to tell you a story about a spider. This spiders name was Irving, don't ask me why, I know most spiders you see hanging around are female, this one was, but it's name is Irving so I'll just go on.

This is a picture I took of Irving:

wrong picture.  

right picture.  

this is a Phiddipus johnsonii, also called the Bold Jumping Spider.  

  here is Irving on my front window, grooving on the twinkle lights.   

  

That single little spider absolutely took care of the problem my plants were having with fungus gnats. I mean that spider wiped them out.

I found Irving in the back entryway and brought her inside, and dumped her into the middle of my houseplants.  A few days later I found a spider midden loaded with little gnatty carcasses. I even mentioned it here at Steve.  I thought 'Well done, Irving. Go on with your bad fuzzy self" and Irving did.

I would find her marching all over the front room and kitchen, walls and ceiling. When she caught sight of me, she'd stand there for a few moments in astonishment, and then start shaking her spider fists at me. 'You want to go? You want some? Yeah you don't. I'll beat your ass.'  

Other times I'd find her while I was dusting, chilling in the front window, sucking the life forces out of a fly, and she'd brandish that fly at me. 'See this? This could be you. Yeah it could.'  

Mostly she hangs out just around the corner of picture frames, drapes and heat register covers. She builds little filmy webs anywhere there is a slight draft and catches flies and gnats by the hundreds, and just does her rounds of each trap. 

Irving got really fat. Far from body shaming her choices, I wishher all the best. My plants are happy, I am happy, and the flies are nervous.

BEHOLD: PLANT PICTURES THAT SHOW SUPER HAPPY PLANTS THAT ARE GNAT FREE

This spider really does jump, too. It's an ambush predator, and a really efficient one. She'd leap for a fly from straight off the window and catch it mid-flight, and just fall with it and lay there on the windowsill, little spider fangs sunk into its neck. The most fascinating thing to watch.  I mean, I have a life, but I'm also sitting right here in the front window where the spider likes to hang out, right next to my plant tower, and things happen, like spider murder. And I see it.

Anyway that is the story of Irving: Bringer of Death, Terror of Idaho.  Long may she sail.

Hello, I'm Back. Again.

 It isn't always the parent's fault. Sometimes people change. Sometimes their genetics play dirty tricks. It's horrible because you love your kid. You want their problems to be your fault. If it was your fault, you could do something about it. You could fix it.

In the beginning, my daughter knew there was a problem. There would be a very definite shift. Sometimes, even in mid - sentence, she'd go from being her typical self, just chatting, to a completely different person - one who was all snarling hate. It was scary to see. She eventually shrugged it off though. 'I just get how I get!' she said, as though it were a charming foible.   

Now, I am not the only person she's tried to curb stomp, not by a long shot. She became the kind of person that cannot help but attack the wounded.   That means anyone in her life.  Me, she perceived as wounded. After all, I've got clinical depression. But I kept on being not wounded, and I kept on refusing to tolerate her bullshit. I mean Jesus Christ I'm her mother, and it's not as though I walk around dressed in black being all suicidal and useless; what the fuck? But something would trip her switch and suddenly she'd be spoiling for a fight! Using any ammunition she thought she had! Trying her best to provoke me into a rage! And I kept not being provoked into a rage, and being confused, and telling her to grow up. Of course, ignoring a bully only pisses them off and makes them try harder. She did a few things, finally, that were way over the top, too alarming to ignore. I had to admit that she was different, had changed, and it was real, and I didn't know her anymore, and meanwhile she got meaner, and more destructive, and I kept on not tolerating it; and this shit went.  On.  For.  Years.  

I was not believed. 

One reason was that she was always certain that the two of us were alone when she decided to fuck with me.  It was calculated. She was purposefully sneaky, she was purposefully hurtful, and she did it for fun. 

Now for the second reason. And here I will pause to tell you a useful bit of advice.

 Never, EVER tell anyone that you have a mental illness. Not strangers, not the ones you love. Nobody. You will never be taken seriously again. 

  My husband, like most men, took the 'Ah, it's just women's stuff' track and removed himself entirely from the situation. Didn't want to see it, didn't want to hear about it, didn't want to know about it. And of course, I'm crazy, right? so there's that. Of course I was overreacting. Of course I was just taking things the wrong way. "Have you taken your meds?" he'd ask in a humorous tone. And there I was stranded. I had to deal with her alone, which I did really, really badly. And all the time, she's getting worse.  

 It caused all kinds of disruption in our marriage. And still, he did not want to hear about it, he would not listen - right up until she started treating him the same way, for the same reason. He got older, he developed some health problems, and she started up with the petty meanness. 

Then he had a heart attack.  

First she threw a tantrum. An epic tantrum.
Then she cut him off. 

The day after he came home from the hospital.

So this is the ugly, icky, tawdry bullshit that I've had to navigate since last we were together, kids. I'm still recovering from neck surgery. The Biker is still recovering from his heart attack. We're both still trying to get used to living in a different climate, in a different culture, far away from what we're used to, and now we're both dealing with issues that should have been put to bed years ago, and mourning the loss of a child. 

 Yes, I'm in therapy fuckin' again, and getting my medications adjusted again, and fucking with what our insurance will cover and what it won't.  It sucks.

I am disgusted, I am hurt, I want to scream and punch things.

 

Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll

 Holy shit - did King Charles just abdicate?  We got the news five minutes ago (5 - 28 - 26  8:50AM). 

If so, and if this isn't just AI bullshit, then somewhere out in the real world, Vicus Scurra is dancing a jig. 

Miss you, buddy.

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Dementia

I keep thinking I see celebrities driving past here.  Once it was someone who was the absolute spitting image of Guy Fieri, hair and all, in a black Durango.  Another time it was The Rock.  

The other day I could have sworn I'd seen Caitlyn Doughty go by. 

It's been very puzzling. Kind of like when you have a dream, and in it there's some third-tier celebrity from the Seventies, and you wake up wondering "What on Earth brought Jeff Conaway to mind, of all people?" and it's weird.  "Why would The Rock be visiting Fruitland Idaho?" is what you have to think at times like that.  Although people should wonder that a lot more often than they probably do. 

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OO! Take a Look at My Stuff!

Check out the working!!! blender wot I got for $10.00 at a recycled building material store:

OMG it's so awesome and no, you can't see me in the reflection.     

Looky at this toaster I got from the original owners elderly grandson, way out in the sagebrush at a garage sale, for $5.00:

does it work? there's no effin' way I'm plugging the thing in, so we'll never know.    

Honestly, Idaho is a TRIP.  What I run across out here just at garage sales, just, like, lying on a sheet in someone's driveway, or digging through boxes in someone's garage, is mind boggling. And the prices - even in a retail antique place -are just wham, plotz, game over, ding ding ding WOW fade to the '70's unbelievable.  I could go so broke here. SO broke.

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Nothing so poignant as evidence of decades - long economic decline

There are few things quite as bleak as a dying small town in Idaho. Most of the old town centers nearby -  Weiser, New Plymouth, Nyssa, Parma, Emmet - are cored out and grim. The soaring Gothic banks, the Deco diners, the old fraternal lodges, 

here's one in Weiser. Knights of Pythias, Myrtle Lodge No. 26   

all empty now, boarded up, or filled with the hulks of rusty stripped cars and broken farm equipment. Grand Victorian homes, long gone to seed, have been added onto over the decades in increasingly eccentric segments until they resemble favelas (which describes Parma to a T, as long as I'm being all lyrical and shit.) Many of the narrow streets are so old that what began as a dirt track back in the Pre-Clovis is once again becoming a dirt track, not because the paving is broken, but because it has worn away.

All the old visual Western movie cliches are alive and well. It feels like deja vu, driving down some unnaturally quiet main street made up of Old West buildings, a line of vultures sunning themselves on a fence rail, a tumbleweed drifting across your path on a dusty wind. But then, as is inevitable here, you'll run into the local Stinker Station, 

get gas at the stinker!  geddit? geddit?     

bringing that perfect touch of class to Idaho's roadsides since 1936

...and yep, you're back to the future, and there's a skunk.

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Now you should go to WalMart and buy a box of these:

Eat a big ol' bowl and get back to me.

OO Wall O' Text Time!

 

I've written about the weirdness between my mother and food any number of times. Thing is, it was due to that state of affairs that I developed an interest in food, and found that cooking was something I liked and was fairly good at.

Yes, my mom waved around a copy of The Good Housekeeping Family Cookbook. It was always lying open on the dining room table. What was written in those pages, though, bore very, very little resemblance to what came off the stove in our house. Very little. I mean very, very, super, way not anything like anything that resembled food. 

It was like that, and often it was deliberate, and punitive. Or just not there at all. "Do it yaself!" she'd say one day. And she'd go on strike. 

So yeah, OK.  I did it myself.* 

OOO, did that steam her socks!

This did nothing to lessen the weirdness around food in our house, of course. But I did get fed.

So you see, that's why it was such a THING for me to finally confront The Good Housekeeping Family Cookbook irl.

It's sitting here right now. I still feel very, very weird about having it in my house. I'll probably donate it, unless one of you wants the thing.* 
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My Mother's Weirdness

The memory of things like famine, starvation on the plains, horrendous conditions in Europe, battles, poverty and privation in general were not long ago in people's minds back in the 1960's, in my part of the world. Shit, my parents and all the older people I knew had living memories of that stuff. They learned to cook according to the rules of poverty and want. What little you had you made into stew in order to stretch it, and whatever you had went in the pot, no matter what it was. What you were able to get was usually not the best, so you boiled it to death to 'kill the germs', which fit in nicely with the Everything Stew mindset. You ate what was thrown at you and didn't complain.

 
And honestly, all those old-time things we used to get yelled at us - "Ya never complained! They'd whip ya! Whip ya and throw you outside! You never thought to complain! You didn't think nothin' about how it tasted 'cause it was what ya had! You didn't want it? It went to the pigs and you lost out, and ta hell witcha!' and et cetera; you heard it often enough and came to realize that those people didn't want to let go of that mindset. Not at all. Maybe they couldn't, because plenty was a new and untrustworthy concept to them. It describes my parents, and my grandparents. Not even living in their own clean, quiet home in the suburbs, with more than enough money to get everything they needed, with a grocery store less than half a mile away, could quiet the terror.

There was also that 'culture of poverty' thing to sort out, too. Oh, those 'Good Old Days' I got so sick of hearing about.  They weren't good at all.  The flipside of that jolly 'Aw, we didn't realize we were poor when I was growing up!' bullshit was a squalid, grinding, abusive way of life where everyone was keeping everyone equally miserable and unable to imagine anything better, that went all the way back to the fucking Stone Age.  Kids were whipped for admiring things in store windows. People were called out in church, and mocked and ridiculed by their neighbors for buying any new thing. They learned early on that they were not worthy of better. 

My dad eventually got over it.

My mom did not.

My mom did not, I suspect, because in addition to being born Irish and poor in the worst slum in New York, she spent more than half of her childhood there in a Catholic orphanage.

Let that sink in. 

I mean just imagine that shit. She had all these insane, grotesque attitudes concerning sin, punishment, fasting and worthiness in addition to all of the previously mentioned poverty horseshit.

I think someone gave her The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook when she got married. By the time I came along, it looked like it had been kicked for ten miles down a mud road. When I got my copy, I was shocked to find that it had yellow divider cards, and a plastic thingie that makes turning the pages easier. It's in pretty good condition. I don't think it was used much. Truthfully, I don't think my mothers' copy was used much either. It lay open at hand, at all times, but I don't remember her actually consulting the pages. 

 Like I said in a previous post, bringing that thing into my house has brought up a lot of stuff for me. I was absolutely not expecting that.

Last week I found it an estate sale over in Ontario Oregon, way out in the weeds in a storage place.  I thought 'You know what, I'm 66. I think I'm over this now' and bought it for a buck. Maybe I'd get a few laughs out of it.

The instant I put that thing in the car I started feeling really, really weird, and it just kept getting worse. Fuck; maybe it was the ghost of my mom. More likely it was the ghost of my moms' overboiled sauerkraut made with big blubbery pieces of mystery fat, raisins and caraway. But I fought through, and I read the whole thing cover to cover. And here we are!  Look at us! We survived!

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So that is the story of What The Fuck Is My Problem With The Better Homes and Gardens Family Cookbook. It is a tangled tale full of armchair anthropology, bad memories, and way too much caraway. I hope it has cleared up things for you.

If not, you should go put your car up on a lift.

Don't forget to wear your socks.

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*We can discuss shipping here:  redace1960ATgmailDOTcom