notageek

• Finding out that “throat scratchiness from eating fried things” is a recognised phenomenon, and has a name (yeet hee).
• knowing which box of tea to make.

So, because I’m only half Chinese, I only have to clean half my house for the New Year, right?

Right?

Actually I rarely clean more than half my house at a time anyway, and that’s usually the half that people coming over are going to see. Sometimes, when I am a Really Good Wife, I shut the bedroom floor, shovel all the laundry into the hamper and vacuum every surface in sight, including the tops and spines of shelved books, because my husband is asthmatic and allergic to dust mites.

Anyway, before this week’s dishwasher debacle (the drain “opener” is still sitting in there), the kitchen WAS nice and clean; now all of my carefully wiped-down counters are covered with dishes again, and not helping things is the fact that it’s Chinese New Years’ Eve and I feel like cooking a billion things.

For dinner, I made the traditional Chinese corned beef and cabbage. I had half of an experimentally cured brisket hanging around in the fridge, and a bunch of winter vegetables to use up. But. But! I also made yau gok, my favourite New Year’s goodie from when I was a kid, and holy crap, they are actually better than I remember. These are the sweet fried coconut crescents, and I can’t believe I waited this long to make them.

I also can’t believe how many of them the BH and I ate tonight. Hopefully it will be extremely wealth-making, along with the pudge-making.

Yau Gok (makes 40 or so)

• 0.5 cup roasted peanuts
• 2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
• 1.25 cup sugar
• 0.5 cup lard (I used coconut oil)
• 1.25 cup flaked coconut, unsweetened
• Round wonton/gyoza wrappers, >=50
• 1 egg, beaten

Chop peanuts on board or in food processor. Add sugar, sesame seeds, lard and coconut and mix until uniform. Place 1 tsp filling in centre of each wrapper; brush just over half of edge with beaten egg and seal. Drop into singing-hot oil and fry ’til golden and bubbly.

I, uh, I gotta go check on my yau gok. Gotta make sure they’re still safe.

It has been an interesting day here at Casa de Fruta, and though by “interesting” I don’t mean “Oh god oh god, we’re all going to die”, I do mean “oh god, that is the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my kitchen, and I once made a weird fruitcake dough I forgot about for a week and then hoped it would crawl away by itself”. Perhaps you never took your dishwasher apart for kicks when it was fully functional; I know I didn’t.

No, the BH and I waited until the dishes started coming out of the dishwasher actually dirtier than when they went in, and then we discovered that in order to take the debris-catching device out, we would have to reach through an inch of scungy water that refused to drain. Oh, and that the screw on the debris-catching device was one of those stupid hex-head bolts, and actually there were two of them. Uphill. Both ways, in the snow. Oh, my kingdom for a racheting socket wrench! Especially because my kingdom is two years’ worth of out-of-state professional program tuition debt.

Eventually we removed the catchment device to discover that its interior, supported by a number of plastic struts, had served as a nucleation site for the deposition of…something. We identified it as akin to some of the residue we had been wiping off the dishes for the last month; I am choosing to blame hard water and/or crappy dishwasher detergent rather than the quantity of grease on the dishes.

So the dishwasher is in pieces, and most of the pieces are clean, except for the actual dishwasher itself, into whose drain-hole I poured one-fifth bottle of standing-water-penetrating gel drain opener, per the package instructions. It claims to be safe for plastic pipes, so I hope it is also safe for plastic dishwasher interiors, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much. I am not getting my hopes up. I am also not getting my hopes up that the “on-site manager” who seems to have our phone number blocked is going to show up any time soon.

Although maybe if he does, he will refuse my kindly offer of a latex glove and stick his hand directly into the gel-filled drainhole. That might get something done.

Dear Guy in the Hat at the Lecture that Made me Cry:
Hey, can you just give the appearance of letting go of the political agenda for an hour or two while the good doc talks? Can you let the photos of the kids with lymphomas speak for themselves instead of you going on about Kurdistan near Uzbekistan being a dumping ground for whatever? Can you let the broadly supported apolitical agenda of health care as a human right for Iraqis and everyone else shine though instead of this BUSH LIED PEOPLE DIED stuff that makes really nice sensible conservatives shut their ears to stuff we might otherwise agree on? Please? Because the good doc is talking about her own family and stuff; things she knows for herself have happened, instead of your really irritating political speculations.

Dear Professor who Accused my Group of Plagarism:
Thanks for recanting. I really appreciate how gently you sprung that on us, and how you kept us informed of what was going on until you were “satisfied it was coincidental”.

Dear Boyfriend-Husband:
Thank you for putting up with my wanting to watch every single episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in existence. I realise what a sacrifice this is for you, except for Kira’s booty.

Dear Really Cute Girl doing Intake for the Blood Drive:
That’s how cute you are: you convinced me to let some other cute girl stick a needle in me and give me cookies. It was pretty rough, I tell ya.

Dear Landlord:
The double-pane windows are the high point of this apartment’s construction; it might be sturdier when the walls have a nice firm coat of interior mold like all the other buildings in the district. Perhaps if you stocked your building with appliances that actually functioned in the first place, the kid you call your “on-site manager” would be able to handle the service calls. Of course, picking up his phone in the first place would also have helped. I wonder if you are gouging the federal government for relief funds, as the family across the balcony from us says they were relocated from New Orleans. We are moving out in May.

Dear Hippie Hometown:
I miss you.

Dear Insurance Company:
It’s not very nice to send non-negotiable copies of benefit cheques to students surviving on loan money, but thank you for finally deciding that I am actually married to my husband and that he is eligible for the service we started paying for four months ago, and thank you for finally cutting those cheques before the Medical Center sent guys with axes after us.

Dear Large, Less-Evil Multinational Interviewing the Boyfriend-Husband for a Contract Job:
Trust me, he’s a good database monkey. Just hire him, please.

That line about alcoholics always being recovering? Yeah, I’m like that, except with my former veganism. There’s a lot of semi-vegetarians who will eat meat at a restaurant or other peoples’ homes, but won’t cook it themselves; I am almost the opposite. I can eat meat a lot more comfortably if I was involved in its prep.

The very first part of deveganising was easy: I quit worrying about the invisible ingredients and ate whatever veg-looking stuff I felt like. Then one week I picked up one of each colour of the bite-size cheesecakes at the dorm’s dining hall because they looked so cute, and realised in the pit of my stomach after the first bite that this process, this was going to have to go a lot more slowly. I doled the other three cheesecakes out to my baffled dorm-mates.

Cheese returned to my diet when I started dating the BH, who has been accused of being composed entirely of cheese. I will have you know that those rumors are false; he is at least twenty percent potato. But my mom did buy a 5-pound block of Tillamook cheddar and label it “wedding cheese” for us last year.

Eventually I was almost a normal lacto-ovo vegetarian again. I dropped out of school, dropped back in, moved back in with my parents and started eating microscopic portions of fish. Pharmacy school started and I started eating eggs and canned tuna. I still do not cook fish at home, because I am afraid of royally messing it up. Someday I will have to conquer both fish and piecrust, though hopefully not simultaneously. I kept getting sick one term, so I went to the store under the SEAFOOD AND POULTRY BLINK FIZZ BLINK BLINK sign and got a 5-pound sack of chicken necks and backs. I put on a set of nitrile gloves, held my breath, dumped the parts in the pot, covered them with water and backed away slowly. Nothing moved. The stock eventually came out smelling both appetizing and chickeny, and I took thermosfuls of it to school instead of tea while I recovered from bronchitis. While I hadn’t exactly mastered chicken broth, we came to a comfortable detente, a new equilibrium of lacto-ovo+fish+chicken broth.

But then the BH and I got married, and he moved in, and astonishingly enough my nice Mennonite boy likes him some meat. Atkins was the only diet he managed to stick to for any real length of time. I was either going to have to either eat his cooking often, or learn to cook meat.

I went to the farmers’ market and got a chicken; came home and stuck it in my new slow cooker. Several hours later, the BH grabbed it by a leg and wing and tried to hoist it onto a platter, but watched in horror as the meat slid down the leg-bone like a giant, delicious slug.

My BH could use a class with Barbara, but I am not going to force the point on him myself. I dissected the carcass thorougly myself after it cooled enough to quit burning my fingers, marvelling at the homology and analogy of its muscle tissues and bones to the mammalian ones I had tried so hard to avoid looking at in lab last year. Then I tossed the bones back in the slow-cooker and simmered them for 24 hours straight.

So my culinary avian fright was on the way out. That left arthropods, amphibians and mammals, for the major edible land-dwelling taxa, and there are no sellers of free-range, prepared amphibians at my farmer’s market. I got some beef shoulder and made pot roast. Repeatedly. It is one of the easiest ways to instill vegetables into my partner, and pot roast is a pretty low-anxiety dish, in contrast to some decidedly rubbery beef stews I’ve made in my time. (Yes, I know now that my heat was too high.)

Last week I walked up to my favourite farmer’s booth at the local farmer’s market, where I usually get eggs. “How big is a brisket?” I asked, squinting at the price sheet. “It varies,” she said, but pulled a 10-inch square, shrinkwrapped sheet of meat out of a cooler. I took it home, rubbed it in spices and salt, and stuck it in the fridge for a very long week. The time-dilation effects of school, you see, cause both the academic world and the outside world to move more slowly than they apparently should. Today I rinsed it off and stuck it in a pot of water, hoping I wouldn’t replicate my previous boiled-beef disaster.

I didn’t. I am figuring out how to cook the bovine, piece by piece. I think I might give the pancreas a miss, though.