I’ve never been a huge okra fan for some reason. But it was time to change all that.

I bought a small amount for myself, 8 pieces. As usual, my phone-in chef helped me find a simple recipe. (Yay, girlfriends!)

I had a couple of green onions and a clove of garlic. Slice slice slice. Olive oil in a non-stick pan. Saute those 2 ingredients on medium heat while I sliced the okra. After a couple of minutes, I dropped the okra into the pan and added more oil. I spiced it with salt, garam masala and a little cayenne powder. I let all of it cook for a couple of minutes, then stirred everything, adding more oil as the okra soaked it up. I let it cook for about 10 minutes, until the okra was no longer slimy.

I overcooked it a little — when I took it out of the pan, the onion and garlic were burnt some. Oops. I had a few slices of fresh rosemary bread with it. (Rice would probably have been better, but I was lazy.)

To recap: 2 onions, 1 clove of garlic, 8 pieces of okra, salt, a pinch of cayenne pepper and a generous amount of garam masala. Made a small meal for 1, a small side for 2.

Prognosis?
Delicious. In fact, I bought about twice the amount of okra this week so I could make it again. A simple meal that took less than 15 minutes to prepare and 2/3 of that was stirring the fry. A highly recommended experience.

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1. MST3K episodes are showing up on Hulu. There are only 5 right now, but maybe that’s enough. (Also, there are quite a number already on Netflix if you do the whole Netflix streaming thing.)
2. 6 of the weirdest, scariest processed foods. Um. Yes.
3. Finally, the scariest thing I have seen in a while: a guy in NYC had a homeless woman living in his crawl space for weeks without knowing it. She came out while he slept. Do watch, this is nutty.

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Last night

I dreamt of trees

of alien trees

a towering stand

in a forest of white

I dreamt of trees

last night

growing like hardened

cotton candy

with their roots

in the air

though you would not

want to eat

I dreamt of trees

that came apart

like fractured styrofoam

I dreamt of trees in whom

tiny blue worms called home

I dreamt of strange trees

last night

I dreamt of trees

all around me

who’s job it was to tend

each tug or bump

a dusting of white would send

Perhaps

brownies and strawberries and ice cream

wasn’t the best idea

before bed

last night

I dreamt of trees.

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Am I disgusting (wait, let me finish the question before you answer) for eating, for breakfast, 3 slices of pizza, cold, leftover from a Friday lunch here in the office?

Regardless of your answer, here is an insane Golden Girls tattoo, via pop hangover:

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So I forgot what I did last Friday. I blocked it out. And it isn’t even that grand of a story, but worth mentioning, I suppose:

We went over to Hima and Matt’s for a little cookout. It was like or 10 people total.

And I ate so much food I almost threw up.

I had 3 servings of food and 2 helpings of dessert. I hurt myself badly, became a total lump at the party and seriously thought I was going to throw up.

I am rarely a glutton (and on those rare times, it’s usually over Shanghai style dumplings). this was unprecedented.

And gross.

But I guess that’s why I’m an American.

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It is close to an end.

Earlier this week, I went, for some unknown reason, mad for an apple fritter. I know they are death — the quality of the food, the combination of it all — I know. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about having one.

The little stand at the CalTrain station in Mountain View sells them in the morning. But I resisted. On Monday. On Tuesday. Except on Tuesday, I made Lauren walk with me from Starbucks to Panero Bread to Safeway to Specialities before going into the office — just for an apple fritter.

None of them had one.

Yesterday I once again resisted at the train station. I was determined to find something a little better. Or destroy the craving.

And then, this morning, after turning the train stand down again, after looking in Safeway “just out of curiosity,” I go to write in Starbucks. And damn if they don’t have a roll line of them staring at me.

Crap.

I might have to give in today. I’d say I could wait until tomorrow, but why bother?

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Lying in his bed tonight, Reed asked me to tell him about when I was a kid. I told him about spending days with my Grandfather. I used to ride on the back of his old tractor as he plowed furrows in his field. His ‘garden’ was a bit bigger than a simple garden, but not quite a farm; an acre of food ready each year. I’d ride on the tractor with him as he plowed. Then we’d set seeds in the field. I remember squatting down over the fresh dirt and poking little seeds into the soil with a finger. He told me I had just the right size fingers for that. 

The field was irrigated with a pump that drew water from the creek which ran across one corner of the land. On summer days, we’d sit on the bank of that creek and fish. Which in hindsight was more a matter of sitting and playing with worms than ever actually catching anything. I remember once the splashing as a great catfish got reeled in, but otherwise it was simply little perch and the like that got tossed back. 

I recall when the plants had grown, seeing the cabbage and the okra, the corn and the beets. I know he grew snaps, too, but can only remember them–not in the field–on the porch at the house as my Grandmother showed me how to snap the ends off just so before she canned them. It was a simple little screen porch, just off the kitchen of their house, with a door that always slammed unless you were extra careful and slowly put it back just so, but I remember it seemed that a lot of work went on within it. I remember canning up lots and lots of food in mason jars that would again be emptied back out over the course of the winter. There was, I think, a basin of water, but I’m not sure what it was for. I wish I knew the process Grandmother used to can the food. It seems like the sort of very useful knowledge that nobody seems to have anymore. Instead we just drive to some store and get food there, never really thinking about what it takes to grow food, raise it, cultivate it and preserve it. 

Thirty years later, my Grandmother still makes the effort to can up little jars of preserves for us at Christmastime. It’s the sort of gift you can look at and simply say “Thank you” or you can stop a moment, consider what it took to actually make something for someone, and the love that goes into that gesture. It’s the sort of thing that makes me wistfully pine for a time in the seventies, before the internet and cell phones, when battery-operated toys were still a rarity (Batteries are for flashlights!). I used to climb trees; my kids climb playgrounds. I used to play with ants and honeysuckle and marbles, not bubble guns or video game systems.

And my Grandmother’s phone? It had a really, really long cord.

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