I know that earlier I mentioned that I had arthritis in my hand and that I’m a verified wreck, but it was slightly in jest. Last week, anyway. This week… my GOD the fucking arthritis! Seriously, a few days after Christmas, I actually had an interesting conversation with my friend Phil about his gout. Phil is a grandfather and while still a very strapping and youngish grandfather (he plays in a blues band, so not too sweater-vesty, you know?) it is legitimate that a man old enough to be my own father might have concerns about gout but then I joined in and talked about MY hand (same hand as Phil’s gout hand! SEHR INTERESSANT!) and the things I’m taking and then I excused myself from the arthritis/gout conversation (almost the same problem but NOT!), dug a six foot hole in the ground, laid down and waited to die because seriously, the fuck?
Yeah, so the arthritis is still awful. I wore so many of the heaty pack things that we actually bought out the entire hand wrap stock of two Walgreens and I had to scout for a third. Then I gave myself a heat rash from wearing them continually so I stopped but now instead of my Ms. Pointy finger, it’s spread to the bookend finger (the Ms. Fuck Ya All finger) and my thumb, which is, quite frankly, a usual suspect when it comes to the A word so I’m not all that surprised there. Some days, it’s awesome and I can move my fingers around with wild abandon, doing Cirque du Soleil finger maneuvers, and then there are days like today when I physically cannot flatten Ms. Pointy against a flat surface without screaming. Instead, at work, I walk around with this weird claw hand. I now totally know why old people are so cranky. It’s because they can’t open their vacuum seal on their Mr. Bento. Either that or they are lefty wipers and suddenly switching hands makes bathroom alone time a fucking comedy of errors. Actually, my money is on that.
Also, f, g, t, r, b and v keys on the QWERTY keyboard? Fuck you very much.
Ok, enough boring physical ailments.
I have spent the entirety of two weeks scouring the city looking for things to make char siu bao and then got thwarted by lack of sweet rice flour, oyster sauce and yeast, all of which I had forgotten to pick up at the grocery store. I roasted the pork for the filling and then figured I’d just run out to the store for the missing bits, except, oh whorey hell, the local mega mart doesn’t have rice flour of any nature. I did manage to run into another grocery store while doing the liquor shopping for the Minicon and found some in an unexpected place (weird store that doesn’t carry very typical Casa Bix staples like Pirate’s Booty or pepitas or the Pork Magic from Chef Paul Prudhomme, which is the best damned spice mix for pork ever, and yet, apparently someone should set up a damned eBay store for it, because they only carry that variety in, like, one store in town (and of course I always forget which one it is)), but then I realized that hey, dumb ass, the pork is now like ten days old, which means that it’s five days past any chance of consumption. Meh, at least I now have the annoying ingredients. If there should be a char siu bao crisis in the near future, I am SO on that shit.
The universe, however, abhors a vacuum and as though to make up for this grievous injustice, I tried a recipe that looked damned tasty and easy on this food blog and it turned out to be the BEST fucking lunch meal ever! I skipped the part about the onions, because Esteban is Captain Onion Loather, and I also tossed the meat in flour before browning it, which in turn made a much thicker sauce. I also threw many more spices (and loads of garlic) into the mix, because somehow making something with only Lawry’s (or The Spice House’s version, more accurately) seems inherently wrong to me. Like, you need pepper or something, you know? And garlic. And cumin. And probably some other stuff too. Otherwise, it just seems a little too much like one of those recipes that involves a can of cream of mushroom soup. (Am I becoming my mother? Seriously, I am getting so anti-processed crap! Although I attribute this to my food snobbery rather than any overarching views on world sustenance and/or the man keeping us down with the pesticides and hormones, etc) Also, I put smoked provolone cheese on the resulting sandwiches and used a baguette instead of squishy mold-proof bread (really, am I turning into a Whole Foods snob? Should I be worried?). But seriously, DAMN that is one hell of a tasty sandwich. We both ate our sandwiches and then later, Esteban cleaned up the remaining filling by eating it, which is weird, because he’s very uninterested in leftovers the minute he reaches the point of satiety.
The yummy lunch was intended to be Esteban’s fuel for finishing the electrical stuff in the dining room cum den situation. Our light fixture finally arrived last week (a month after we ordered it, but I guess it’s custom or something) and we can’t do anything in there until we have electricity and at least some form of light. However, when Esteban got up there and started to work on the old, 1950’s cloth-covered wiring, he could hear the speakers on my computer in the next room making thump-thump noise as they cut in and out. My office is supposed to be on its own circuit, but clearly, it was not and something had a short in it in the attic somewhere. Which is only accessible by removing everything from the shelves in the pantry and climbing through a hole in the ceiling. Greeeaat. Verdict: the entire wiring for that room has to be removed, and perhaps even the entire house that wasn’t touched by the kitchen or office remodels (aka 75%), so his work for the day pretty much stopped and now we need to bribe someone light to crawl in the attic (the last time we had someone over 200 pounds in the attic, they cracked the plastic in the ceiling, so clearly this is not the job for Esteban or myself) and rewire and snake things down between the walls. Awesome. I guess the whole chair/seating conundrum can be put on hold for a few weeks, anyway.
I spent the rest of the day prepping a giant pan of lasagna (also inspired by that site, but mine was, well, not the same at all because I’m all about the buffalo mozzarella and portabello mushrooms) but by the time it got dark, we were still way too full from lunch to even think about eating a plate of lasagna. We threw it into the fridge and then decided to run the Minicon liquor over to my in-laws. We spent a few hours with my mom-in-rock June, then the late showing of The Golden Compass, where we dined on popcorn and caffeine free Diet Pepsi, which was, quite frankly, a pretty awesome dinner, even though it was carby as hell and I’m sure that I’ll be dead of scurvy by the time I’m 46. Which will be fine, because then I’ll have successfully avoided most of my prime Gout and Arthritis-bearing years. You have to look on the bright side.
