Thursday, April 03, 2008

My kind of fast food

I had huge craving for chicken curry one day and only half an hour to spare...so here it is. It won't look like this, but it's going to be GOOD, and you'll have time to watch half a Battlestar Galactica episode, shave your legs, and play fifteen games of Scrabulous (bastards!).



Speedy Chicken Curry

2 chicken thighs, boneless and skinless, and *organic, chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 small onion, unevenly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed or minced
2 tsps of canola oil
1/4 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp coriander powder
1/4 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Saute onion over medium high heat for a few minutes, add garlic, give it about 30 seconds, add meat bits and stir! let cook until pieces are no longer pink, then add all spices, stir for a few minutes, lower heat a bit, cover and cook for about 10 minutes. It's done! I stirred in day-old millet into this (so I wouldn't lose any delicious gravy) and ate it like I was being chased by ravenous wolves. Enjoy.






*This was going to be a posting about how I found chicken feather quills in my boneless organic chicken thighs, but instead, I'm going to recommend that you read
this. Then you'll be able to spin a lovely story about how the chicken got to live a long happy life eating grain, poking around in cow poop (there are lovely worms in there), and sprouting tough, well-fed, adventuring feathers that followed him to his death. Otherwise, you'll probably imagine that undocumented worker #4549, whose job it was to pluck out the chicken feather quills, fell into the deboning machine, and then lou dobbs and the Minute Men danced on his bloody, illegal corpse.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Rebrand!

Or face irrelevance.

The black sheep will be queen!











I was crossing Park Ave. today on 22nd street and I saw me at age 14. She was tall (the only difference) and wearing awkwardly tight (and unflattering) jeans that cut into her babyfat waist with a too-short but not skanky t-shirt (the kind you're always yanking down because you just realized it shrank that morning and nothing else was clean or you unwisely thought it would be fine and it would only ride up when you were standing, and who stands nowadays?) with a mouth full of braces and long, lank, flatly curly hair with frizzy bangs. I don't think I ever looked like that, but I felt like that every day. I felt a visceral pang of recognition and I wanted to swoop over her like a clucking mother hen and protect her from mockery and the waves of low self-esteem. But instead of being gangling and friendless, she was walking with a bunch of other kids who looked like her and looked like they
liked her. Brand new world, what?

It's too bad the American Apparel dude didn't try harder to tap into this awkward-is-hot because normal-is-hot ethos. I suppose the the urge to put a tiny girl into a boring lollipop/kneesock/bubblegum bareass pose must be impossible to resist, so they've done one smart ad and the rest is all boring, softcore dreck.

It's taken me until my 30s to feel comfortable enough to wear whatever I wanted and to really not give a shit what anyone thought (most of my life has been blustering bravado, fashion-wise), so I felt proud when I saw that inelegant girl on the street. Even if she was cutting herself and daydreaming of some blond highschool jock in her bedroom every night, she looked great and embraced her weirdness. Hoorah for the modern woman!