Let's Play Twister, Let's Play Risk, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

I love to chop food. Crisp vegetables, chiffonades, rested meats, chocolate--having worked for a knife company somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, I have this fascination with pushing a knife blade through membrane.

This list includes one of my strangest forays yet--this morning I gave a try at nopales, or, as the white girl from the Midwest would call it, prickly pear cactus leaves. I've been experimenting with Latino cuisine lately, or trying to without creating as the movie "Tortilla Soup" would call the dishes, "mutts." I try to stay authentic. That belongs to Mexico. This belongs to Chile. That's Brazilian. I'm about as successful at it as my background will allow (to be fair, seven years ago I thought a burrito was a frozen tube about as big around as a hot dog with just beans and cheese, so I have made progress), but I'm making apologetic effort. I have to admit, I have had my culture mistaken before, so I try not to f up that of others'. (Despite popular belief, not everyone who hails from the Ozarks is a redneck and not everyone from rural Ohio is Amish. Just sayin'.) I've been making visits to a Mexican grocery lately for the freshest ceviche ever--come to find out that nearly all Latinos are practicing Catholics and the freshest ceviche can be found on Fridays during Lent in Mexican groceries. (I told my brother the agnostic fisherman this and there was a pause followed by "Huh. Never woulda guessed." This is what happens when you're among the heathen, like my brother and myself. Completely out of my radar as a Unitarian as well.) While visiting said grocery, I have been studying a culture in a language I can't speak, which is sort of like reading the Tao Te Ching--I'm calmed by something my soul understands but my ears don't. And part of that calm is embracing the strange.

Strange to me, I must clarify.

We don't cook with cactus in the Midwest, in case you didn't know or don't have a way of knowing. The closest I've come to chopping cactus was slicing off leaves of an aloe plant in my mother's living room, a plant that was roughly the size and reach of a baby octopus, for treatment of burns. You take a paring knife and take a piece without getting pricked by the edges and smear the clear, cool goo from the wounded plant on the angry welt on your skin. Sticky, soothing. Then chuck the severed remainder of aloe in the compost and watch the shortened leaf left on the plant heal over like an amputee. It's an intriguing process. The last time I went to the Mexican grocery and I was in the produce section and paused over the nopales, remembering that monster in my mother's living room. I was with a Latino friend at the time. "What's that taste like?" I asked, with my newly developed pointing technique perfected as one surrounded by a language she can't speak. He didn't really answer, he sold me instead. "They're good. You boil them, a little salt, a little oil. Or put them with scrambled eggs. You want some?" Are you kidding? This is me we speaketh of, the girl who's tried turtle, elk, and nine kinds of wine. Hell, yes, let's do this. Except, um, how do you clean 'em?

I should mention that you can buy nopales pre-cleaned, which is probably what I'll do if I don't invest in gloves. There was even someone cleaning and chopping them there at the grocery, but what is the fun of that? I wanted to get my hands dirty, or injured, in this case, so we loaded me up with three leaves and with our ceviche hit the road. I planned on cooking them yesterday, but suffered stage fright--what kind of hubris makes a white girl think she can make Mexican food?

This morning I got up and visited our neighborhood Farmer's Market in the rain, looking for onions, tomatoes, and cilantro to made a salad, which was also suggested for the nopales. No tomatoes. I should have known better--cold winter. No matter, I thought, let's try it with eggs. I came home and started in on the cleaning, which is roughly on par with scaling fish; I felt like I was getting thorns everywhere. Then they were cleaned and it came time to chop them, at which point the aloe memories returned with the clear ooze. I thought nothing of it, nothing that is until I had boiled them and discovered the water didn't cook out the ooze. I probably did something wrong in the preparation, but they do have a great flavor: a mixture of mild and sharp, like a string bean crossed with an onion. I had about three bites and had to give up though--every bite felt like it was coated in dish soap. This is gonna take practice.

*****

I'm not limiting myself to culinary or vintner risks lately. For those of you who have ever lived in a mountainous locale, this analogy will make sense. There are times when you drive through mountains with multiple options for backroads and you see the one you should have taken--you can either backtrack and try again (depending on how far you've traveled), you can make do with the one you're on until it becomes impassable, or you can look below you on the slope and see the road you wanted and, well, jump.

I'm four years into backtracking.

The road is too rough and is beating the crap out of my transport.

But I can see the road I want. You know what this means.

It means I have to jump. I may crash and burn getting to the right road. I may make it to the right road and take a wrong turn in two miles and end up back on this one. But I never thought I would see that road again.

If you believe they put a man on the moon...

Well, I have to.

Shortly I am taking a risk bigger than sharp thorns, bigger than the mild wine, bigger than a blind date. I was thinking about that on the way out of the grocery, the friend with me talking about the decisions we make to make sense, why some choices are made and some choices are forfeited. I forfeited a trip to graduate school in the event of a terminally-ill parent. I forfeited 31 years without lamb because I believed my father when he said I wouldn't like it (yes, he was wrong). I forfeited a car for a friend who said the trip to New York wouldn't cost anything more than food and airfare. I forfeited a pet for San Francisco.

Water under the Golden Gate Bridge, but here's the rub.

I'm still single.

I still live in my favorite City.

And I still think God is trying to tell me something. There's a road below me. Time to jump.

Onward, dear reader. Hang on.

Fix You

115 mg.

When I haven't had a tall eggnog latte from Starbucks or Peet's, that's how much cholesterol I'm leaving off. (The last one I had prior to today was a week and a half ago.) On a daily basis, a person is supposed to have 213 mg or less of cholesterol. I know this number very well these days.

There is no number for how many ounces/mg/percentage of stress you're supposed to have. For that number, you're on your own.

So here's what I've been eating each day:

• Breakfast: no fat yogurt, large oatmeal with dried cranberries and a teaspoon of brown sugar
• Snacks: a palmful of nuts, usually almonds
• Lunch: Spinach salad with avocado, tomato, onion, and hard-boiled egg whites
• Dinner: One of the following whole grain muffins--apple/cranberry, oatmeal/banana, pumpkin/walnut, or zucchini/wheat bran

And here's what causes me stress:

• Work
• Not being healthy enough to have a baby
• Not having time to have a routine to get healthy, because of...
• Work

This morning, God gave me a day without rain and a warm day without rain, at that. Yes, I know he has better things to do, but it feels good to know that I get these days as gifts, and that I have someone to thank for them. I took the gift and pried myself out of my flannel-inticed and lethargic bed and went for a fast, heart-starting walk to the ocean.

If you never try, you'll never know...just what you're worth.

After the walk I had lunch of chicken barley soup with Triskets, and a gingerbread ninja, and then drifted off into a nap, and then picked up my laundry and realized THE GIFT WAS STILL THERE, so I headed down the hill again, and got that drink that is 38% poison, according to chemistry, and did it with a smile on my face. The air was warm, the light was pink, the world slower and without a soundtrack, just breathing around me and CPR-ing me slower too. I drifted to the Park, I watched the fountains in the Music Concourse, I said "thank you" to no one in particular and someone I loved. I loved on that latte, and my shoulders fell in place, my body filled with that other part of chemistry, with the element named O, and I couldn't stop grinning.

NO STRESS.

Yes, that's an EGG NOG LATTE. And I'm willing to bet you if you took a blood test right now it would read in 100's, where it's supposed to be.

Lights will guide you home...and ignite your bones...and I will try...to fix you.

Onward.

Assassin

I behaved myself for most of the morning and fell into the proper intellectual role, but this afternoon the podcasts were done and the playlist fell on "Assassin" by John Mayer. I know, he's not an artist obscure, but there's something about that song today, while I picked up the makeup of beef bourguignon, a prescription, and grabbed a bowl of creamy hot chocolate at La Boulange de Cole that spoke to me. Deep drums, intended mischief turned, and I hit the back button to hear it again.

You get in, you get done and then you get gone...

Last night was awful. The kind of awful where you have a drink at your fourth choice of a bar only to find out it's cash only for something that probably isn't Don Julio Anejo, as asked for. Then the solution was tried of getting a small pizza with extra basil and taking it back home to enjoy with a glass of wine.

That just made things worse.

Should have turned around and left before the sun came up again...

But the sun came up again. And I left the phone off and dressed in misfit colors of orange and black and went to the ocean. I listened to the stories and classrooms of my MP3 and lifted my face to a curtain of fog. Ah, sweet fog. Like snow, drizzle, a brumisateur, fine gray sunshine. The sky clouded over and I took off my cap, wind running through my scalp. Slopes and grass, tall trees and reasons for green.

My phone stayed off today. All day I was quiet. There are probably messages on there, and my employer probably needed something today and I didn't answer, but I needed a safety net last night where there was none and I knew the most important thing was just to do what they tell you to do in trapeze school--"shut off your mind and listen to the commands." What were the commands? Shut off the phone. Shut off Twitter, which is still rehashing a victory and several losses. Go on Facebook, sign off with some cryptic one-liner, and then go back to what I love, word-slaying. According to the world, I suck at this, but if people want to find it and read it, they can find it. The witty one-liners, the hope of network, the belief that there's still wonder--that will now all be found here.

I was a killer, I was the best they've ever seen, I'm an assassin...

Tonight's comfort is a bottle of chianti, a good book, and satisfaction that I created a kick-ass meal from a Julia Child cookbook tonight. My successes. What I can do.

I'm not a complete failure. I have a job to do. Little did I know that the rest of the world were assassins too.

Thanks, John. :)

Anejo

Part of the joy of moving from the Midwest to California is learning culturally about consumables that I never would have known in my former environment. I have experienced all kinds of food epiphanies since moving to California, from cultural dishes to certain kinds of foods all by themselves, like avocado and lamb. Lately, however, the epiphanies have been in the form of libations, and specifically, liquors.

I hesitate to write of this exploration for several reasons, not the least of which is that people will worry. My default mood is not generally known to be set to "happy," and in the past on particularly difficult workdays I have been known to lie on the floor of my bedroom and drain a fifth of Jack. One of the great gifts I possess is that I can down any amount of alcohol in any level proof and not get a hangover, and the only alcohol that makes me nauseous is beer, and usually in the first three swigs. I will never sample ales and will never be a connoisseur of them.

After a couple of off-the-cuff discussions with a peer and my brother, however, I have become picky in other forms of alcohol. I have always liked sweet white wines over reds of any kind, so there's the first process of elimination. I've learned that any gin tastes like baby oil--so martinis are out. I love vodka, but the affection is still pretty generalized--I don't know the difference between my vodkas yet. I've burnt myself out on whiskey thanks to that practice on the bedroom floor, just on sheer volume, and I've only had rum in mojitos. But I'm learning the finer points, and my lessons have began with tequila.

The extent of my tequila input in the past has been in margaritas, and weakly-concocted ones at that. Imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that there are different forms of tequila--I thought all of it was clear and had a worm in the bottom. (I was to find out even later that true tequila doesn't have a worm...and the sheepishness continues.) I discovered that the darker it is the better it is, and the darker it is the less likely you are to find it in a margarita.

The first time I was poured anejo tequila the bartender brought it to me in a low-ball glass, neat. The ribbons of sugar cried down the sides of the glass, and just to be fascinated I swirled the glass again like a brandy snifter and watched as the liquor clung like motor oil. I brought the glass to my nose and felt the fumes before I smelled them, a sensation not unlike that of applying astringent without a cotton pad. I pulled the glass back, smiled in pseudo-boldness, and brought it in for a sip. The warmth, the light...why would anyone drown this taste in a margarita? Delightedly, no one does, unless it's at home in a moment of insanity.

On the other hand, I recently received a gift of the blanco tequila due to an awareness of my schooling in finer liquors. I was told by others who know their liquor to brace myself and find the margarita fixins...blanco is pure, clear shit. My brother tried to take some of the sting out by sharing with me that it sometimes improves the taste of lesser alcohol to chill it, but the only thing that could improve the taste of the blanco would be, after giving it a chilled try, to deep-freeze it with fruit juice and triple sec.

For a girl who used to tip back cocktails as anesthesia, it's fascinating to me that I have discovered another reason for alcohol--the difference in a taste addressed straight up. I have cocktails that I have long adored--cosmos, cheesecakes, mojitos, margaritas, and mimosas--but to taste the difference in the straight shot, without even a crutch of ice to lean on, has moved my alcohol consumption from anesthesia to aesthetics. Would I have learned this art back in the states? Maybe, within enough time spent in a bar...but here it was absorbed, in the people and their experiences, like a wine infused with the fragrance of local herbs simply growing in proximity to the vine.

The best part of finally tasting my alcohol? I require so much less of it.

Salut.