Bonus Recipe: Ginger Salmon

This is not a new recipe this month, but it is a new recipe in the grand scheme of my eating history. And it’s one that’s become one of my regulars.

I’m not sure what it was growing up, but I was sure I hated salmon. In reality, I had it rarely — maybe because I didn’t like it when I did — and then always made by my grandmother. (This is not a slam on Grandma’s cooking skills in general; she was fabulous. Her salmon and I, however, did not agree.) So I had salmon cooked in a single style, didn’t like it — and concluded that it was the base food product rather than how it was prepared.

I mean, I was, like, five. This seems like age-appropriate flawed logic. And to be fair, a number of other salmon dishes — or rather, the description of a number of other salmon dishes — did not appeal in the many years since.

Until I first tried sushi. While I appreciate that sushi grade salmon is probably overall a better quality of fish than whatever my Grandma bought, I was floored by how much it tasted like an entirely different food. Even then, the evolution was slow in progressing.

I thought I liked raw salmon but only raw salmon. Not cooked. At all. But I wanted to.

I really like fish in general, and oily fish are some of my favorites. Among them, salmon tends to be one of the more widely available, both in restaurants and grocery stores, at least in my area. If I could learn to like salmon, it would give me a lot of new options for fish food.

And so I wanted to try. Not to force myself into anything, but to experiment.

It started when I ordered something called ginger salmon for lunch at a local restaurant. The picture showed it breaded, deep fried, and covered in sauce — so I figured that even if I wasn’t thrilled with the salmon specifically, the other flavors there would cover it up.

Turns out I was right and wrong. The sauce was flavorful and fabulous. It was the predominant feature of the dish rather than the fish. And the salmon itself was sort of dry and not as… salmon-y as I’d remembered. What surprised me the most, however, was that I did not mind the salmon-y flavor I did taste.

Overall, I liked the taste effect so much I started working out how I could replicate the taste at home, except maybe minus the batter and sticky sauce (which are not my favorite things for eating on a regular basis). This is what I came up with:

Ingredient Note: Fairly obviously, a recipe with “salmon” in the title is neither vegetarian nor vegan. However, it is dairy and gluten free and, to the best of my knowledge, contains no other common allergens.

Ginger Salmon:
salmon fillets — I like sockeye, but I can’t think of any reason this wouldn’t work with another variety.
garlic powder
white pepper, finely ground
ground ginger
brown sugar — apx. 1 tbsp. for every 1/3lb. portion
oil for pan frying

Directions:

1. Cut the salmon fillets into the appropriate size portions for your eating needs and preferences. Lay them out in a single layer on a plate or tray.
2. Sprinkle the non-skin side of each portion with a light dusting of garlic and an even lighter dusting of white pepper. If I had to estimate, I’m using maybe 1/4 teaspoon of garlic per portion — and less than that of the white pepper. Also, when I haven’t had any white pepper on hand, I’ve tried substituting black pepper but haven’t been completely satisfied. I remain torn on whether it’s better to substitute black pepper or to just skip the pepper entirely if I’m out of white pepper.
3. Sprinkle a little more ginger — maybe 1/2 teaspoon — on top of that. Press the spices into the skin and let stand for about 10 minutes.
4. Have another go with the same amount of ginger. Then sprinkle the brown sugar on top. There should be enough brown sugar to make a sort of thin crust on top.
5. Heat the oil in a skillet large enough for your salmon portions.
6. Cook over medium high heat to your desired degree of doneness (maybe 3-5 minutes on a side, depending on thickness), flipping the salmon over halfway through the process. Flipping is pretty important here since it will allow the brown sugar to melt — and then become all crackly and good when you remove the salmon from the pan.
7. Serve immediately.

My current preference is to serve with a dark green veggie — maybe kale or turnip greens or broccoli. I am a fan of the savoriness of the vegetables combined with the sweet and spiciness of this salmon preparation.

I keep thinking that these would work wrapped in tinfoil and thrown on the grill, too. However, we also keep using them to fill in our “we need something that can be prepared quickly” menu days. Those days are generally not compatible with “wait 45 minutes for the charcoal grill to heat up” days, so. Maybe I’ll try that one day this summer, but a gas range and a skillet works for now.

Anyone else have any good ways to eat cooked salmon? At this point, I am feeling experiementy again!

[Not my fish -- By Jorge Díaz from Madrid, Spain (salmón a la plancha) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons]

I am busy.

Writing some other things, both for this and other online spaces. Also writing final project rubrics and exams.

Even though it’s not my birthday, have this cake decoration clip as a placeholder:

April Recipe: Tilapia & Cucumber Salsa

We’d discussed selling them — free condom included! — as organic dildo kits. Facetiously, of course. Being on the pointier end, English cucumbers do not strike me as a particularly good choice for vaginal penetration (no flared base, so anal is right out) — though my opinions are entirely theoretical regarding this sort of thing.

Which is why, bottom line, we were looking for culinary uses for the two dozen cucumbers we overzealously purchased at our local “obtain large quantities of produce” thingie. (It’s neither really a farmer’s market nor a CSA, but we get lots of veggies for small monies. I do not mind.)

We did cut up a number to eat raw. They were nice.

We did try sliced cucumbers to flavor a pitcher or water. I am not a particular fan.

We will not discuss pickles on this blog.

Then, through the wonder, awe, and horror that is Reddit, a kind soul pointed me toward this recipe (note: link contains calorie counts). Since our previous zucchini salsa — also borne of the same necessity — had turned out so well, we decided to try a modified version of this one.

And pair it with tilapia. Because whitefish and a salsa fresca equals awesome.

Ingredient note: The salsa recipe on its own should be vegan and gluten free. To the best of my knowledge it is also free of other high frequency allergens. Serving it with the tilapia, while I think it is yummy, would obviously affect its overall veg*n status.

Cucumber Salsa:

2 cups diced cucumber — I de-seeded but did not peel
1/2 cup cored, diced tomato
1/2 finely chopped red onion
2 jalapenos, diced very fine
6, maybe, cloves of garlic, minced
cilantro — two good sized fistfuls* of leaves, minced
a few good squirts from the squeezy container of lime juice — I like to think about 4 tbps, but I could be significantly off

Directions:

1. Chop All the Things. Except the lime juice of course.
2. Put it in a big bowl.
3. Mix it up.
4. If desired, leave in the fridge overnight for the flavors to mingle.

I served it with a pan fried tilapia seasoned with salt, black pepper, and lemon. That said, I imagine a fair range of mildly flavored whitefish would work as well.

Overall, I think the citrus, spices, and heat from the jalapeno paired nicely with the fish. However, I might tweak it a bit for next time.

The cucumber mitigated some of the jalapenos’ heat, but it also got overwhelmed a bit by the red onion. It might not be bad to either increase the cuke or tomato — or else reduce the onion.

I’m also thinking maaaaybe about reducing the jalapeno by just a teeny bit. It’s right on the edge of how hot I’d want it to be for a substantive part of a main dish. I could see going a little milder, but I probably would not veer toward hotter for it. That said, if I knew I were serving it with something snackish rather than something mealish — or in a meal where salsa would be more of a small-amount condiment — I’d likely keep the proportions as listed.

Either way, I have plenty of cucumbers left for a second round of experimentation.

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* I tried typing “fistsful” because in my heart, I think that’s what the word should be. Spell check does not agree.

The Dangers of Cider Vinegar

It had been a day.

Specifically, it had been a day where the salmon fillets had not thawed out completely and were thus unsuitable for dinner, and it had been a day where that was just the last straw.

I went to the grocery store to grab a heat and serve something for dinner. My preferred local grocery store is one of the “natural foods” variety — good because it has more of the foods I like to eat, bad because it has significant overlap with people who like to view food in terms of moral superiority and deficiency.

Today has been a day, so my food choices would be characterized as the latter.

I show up in the checkout lane with a bag of coffee beans (light roast), a bottle of apple cider vinegar, and a frozen meat lovers’ pizza — the kind with pepperoni, sausage, and bacon on it.

In the lane, I try to grab a chocolate bar. The chocolate bar: milk chocolate, toffee, and sea salt. A happy rectangle of taste perfection. Only, there’s not enough clearance between the the bottom of the display box and the top of the shelf. I can’t get one of the bars out of the box, off of the shelf.

Today, this does not amuse me. Today, this is a big deal.

After a moment, I lift the entire box off the shelf, remove one chocolate bar, and replace the display. The chocolate is safe. Now I can pretend like everything is okay.

I am turned to face the woman in line behind me. I take in that she is approximately my own size and shape.

“It was almost a catastrophe,” I joke.

She grins widely in return.

The woman in front of me turns around, notices me, notices my items on the belt.

“You know, that’s just going to make you fatter.”

I am stunned. Did I hear right stunned. Did this woman just say that out loud and in public stunned. I’m scrambling to explain all the reasons why what I’m eating is okay — which, now that I think back on it, her comment would have been rude even if I ate bacon pizza and chocolate every fucking day — when the woman behind me speaks up.

“Yeah, I hear apple cider vinegar will do that to you.”

In the instant between that sentence and the start up of the conveyor belt, I laughed.

Did I just see this?

Robin Williams, Sesame Street, a shoe, and a banana.

Free Range Food Choices

When I stop to think about it, I make most of my food choices within a lot of constraints. During the week, breakfast is limited to what I can eat in the car or, failing that, what I can buy at school. Lunch is always what I can buy at school. While there’s significantly more flexibility with dinner, but it still involves balancing my tastes with my partner’s, as well as planning food that we have the time and resources (i.e., clean dishes) to cook on any given day. For me, there’s usually the added issue of limiting foods that are likely to trigger the hormonal and autoimmune issues that live in my guts. And as I’m sure is true for most everyone, there are the constraints of what’s available locally, what we can afford, and what we currently know how to cook.

Recently, a great many — though not all — of those constraints disappeared for me. That week, of course, was spring break. Five would-be school days of home alone.

Sure, some of the constraints — the ones about money and food available in my city, mostly — remained, but a lot of them went away temporarily. Even the one around triggery foods. I mean, no, I didn’t start looking at foods and saying, “Hey, this will give me intestinal cramps, gas, and fiery diarrhea! Neato!” On the other hand, if I did have a craving for, say, deep friend jalapeno poppers with cream cheese, the resulting bathroom adventures would be less disruptive to me now than they would either at school or on a night before school.

With reason, I could eat whatever I wanted.

And you know what? That was kind of scary.

I know I’ve had spring breaks in the past where I’ve had the same food choices, but this was the first time I examined those choices closely.

There was the spring break of eat the same culturally approved healthy food — in this case, dark green salad with no dressing and bowl of soup — every day. That was unsatisfying and unfun.

There was the break of the fast food spree — some type of fast food for lunch every day. Just because I could. That involved a whole buttload of guilt I don’t need again. Also, in all honesty? I can pretty easily cook food that I will find more sustaining and better tasting.

There was the spring break of sushi. Delicious but financially unmanageable. And again, if I’m being perfectly honest with myself, I’d rather splurge for really good sushi once in a while than to eat respectable but uninspired grocery store sushi every day for a week. Besides, they’ve since changed their sushi provider, so I can no longer vouch for the respectability.

There was the spring break where contemplating food on my own was just too overwhelming, so I consumed nothing but coffee for breakfast and lunch. Actual food only at dinner. Let’s not go there again.

When it comes to my free range food choices, I think it’s safe to say I have a history of both overdoing and underdoing. It’s easy to pick an eating theme and stick with it. It’s a lot harder to figure out what I want on a daily basis. Ironically, the big thing I discovered about myself is something I’ve known about and consciously applied to my students for some time.

The big thing is this: I have to give myself the freedom to make mistakes.

The mistake I make most frequently is that the food I eat on a “first pass” isn’t filling enough. I underestimate how hungry I am. The simple fix for that is to eat more, possibly choosing a food that’s a more substantive fat or protein source, and move on with my life. But emotionally, there’s a lot of baggage attached to that mistake. Because the fix is to eat more, and eating more is “bad,” right? It’s “wrong” to be so hungry. Because the fix is often to eat a more calorically dense food, and those foods are “bad,” right?

It shouldn’t be — but it is difficult to create a mindset that doesn’t produce guilt when what I really want is just to make myself a peanut butter sandwich already.

I’m tired. I’ll check out my search terms instead of writing for real.

In fairness to myself, I have written a lot in this past couple of days — keeping in mind that there’s a time delay between when I write something and when it’s scheduled. It’s a good way of amusing myself to avoid burnout.

low creativity — Well, yes. That is why I am doing this at the moment.

i’m tired of being a teacher — If you truly no longer enjoy teaching students, then perhaps it is time to consider a different career. It’s not good for teacher or students to be part of resentful learning. If what you’re tired of is all the extraneous bullshit that gets pressured onto teachers and teaching — Well, I think no one will judge you if you still decide it’s time to transition careers. But I think it’s shit when so many teachers get driven out of teaching for reasons that are not the actual teaching.

quad stretch — You know, I could use some good suggestions on this myself. The ones I know are either very gentle or very intense (hi and welcome to my tight quads); I don’t know of good in-betweenies.

svaly pánevního dna — I do not even know what this means… Okay, a few seconds later, I surmise this is a pelvic floor search in an Eastern European language.

everyday yoga grilled cheese — I think this sounds like a fabulous idea. Mine favorite is either plain Swiss or else cream cheese and arugula. What’s yours?

Confession

When I was in high school — when my dad was still driving me to school, so age 14 or 15 — my mom found diet pills in one of my dresser drawers.

“Are you using these to stay awake?”

I flushed and nodded, going along with the answer she provided.

She bought me some No Doz, telling me that the straight caffeine was safer.

I kept the No Doz and bought more of the first pills.

Because what she could not — or would not — fathom was that I was using these diet pills to diet.

Bonus Recipe: Zucchini Salsa

Today, we bought way too much zucchini. It was at a community produce “thing” — not really a farmer’s market, not actually a CSA endeavor, but it got us lots of produce for cheap and helped out a local school club. In terms of price, it was worth it for the bell peppers alone.

But it did leave me with a plethora of zucchini. The students manning that station had enthusiastically heaped them into our box before we could quite say no. I understand this about zucchini.

So I spent a little while looking up and soliciting zucchini recipes. I’m fond of cooked zucchini as a steamed vegetable side, but we have too much for that use to be sufficient. I’m fond of a good zucchini bread, but I am not fond of baking the good zucchini bread myself. This holds largely true for other baked goods as well. (I can put time and effort into a savory dish and at the end of it, still want to eat said savory dish. If I put time and effort into making a sweet baked good — for this purpose, zucchini bread counts — some visceral reaction kicks in partway through, and my body and brain decide, “ZOMG! Anything sweeter than horseradish is now officially disgusting!” So, yeah, I’m not a regular baker for a reason.)

After a bit, I stumbled upon a recipe for zucchini salsa. I though, “Huh. I like salsa. Husband likes salsa. Could we like zucchini salsa?” My dad had tried zucchini salsa when I was a kid, so I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with it. However, he made it in such a way that zucchini was a minor ingredient in an otherwise traditional salsa. Which is fine in its own right but felt a little like trying to “hide” the zucchini amid other ingredients. But I recently read this post at The Fat Nutritionist. Several comments discussed the idea of either disguising foods (usually vegetables) in other foods or some foods acting as “healthy stand-ins” for other foods — instead of appreciating (or not) all of those foods for exactly what they are. So I was interested in a zucchini salsa recipe that featured zucchini as a main ingredient.

I found several, including a few that were tailored to small (experimental!) quantities. However, none of the ingredient lists looked quite right, so I compiled and tried one of my own:

Zucchini Salsa:

2 cups diced zucchini
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced tomatoes
1 cup chopped cilantro*
2 jalapenos, more or less to taste, diced fine
6 tbsp lime juice
some garlic
some dried red chile, if it turns out you really wanted more jalapeno, like I did

1. Heat it all up in a saucepan or whatever until the onion and zucchini are soft.
2. At the beginning, some stirring may be required to make sure everything gets mixed evenly.
3. I always recommend adding hot pepper gradually and tasting at various points. Being surprised by too-bland salsa is not exactly the highlight of my day, but it is a damn sight easier to deal with than suddenly finding my mouth on fire.
4. Let cool enough to mix everything up in a blender.

When I taste this, the flavor is fairly similar to that of a tomato- or tomatillo-based salsa though there’s a hint of bitterness from the zucchini peel. As you might be able to guess by my descriptions of sweet, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest; however, other people might want to either add more lime or to peel the zucchini before starting.

The texture, though, interests me. Due to the composition of the zucchini, I’m sure, it’s thicker than the average salsa. I am hoping this means it will stay better on a corn chip — but alas! — I have not yet bought corn chips.

[Not a picture of my actual food. But it looks more or less like this.]

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* If you’re one of the people who likes cilantro. I am. Also, 1 cup of it just sitting, fluffy-like, in the measuring container — not packed down. Unless you really like cilantro.

March Recipe: Stout-Battered Cod

Another month, another recipe to try new things with food.

It started out when cod went on sale at our local grocery store. We like fish, but fish trends toward expensive, so we especially like sale fish. At first, I was just going to bread it and pan fry it, but then I couldn’t find the bread crumbs in the store — and no, did not want to make my own. Then I thought, “Hey! Flour + beer = beer battered cod!” Which seemed eminently doable as they’ve not yet made the grocery store where I can’t find the beer.

In the beer section — because my grocery store is too cool to limit its beer to a single aisle — I bought stout, purely on whim. And also because it was on sale.

(Do you sense a theme in my grocery purchases yet?)

Then I got to listen to the competing voices in my head for the next day or so:

“OMG, you’re really going to make something fried? How can you go and ruin a perfectly healthy meal like fish like that?”

“OMG, beer battered cod!”

“Dude–” because the voices in my head call me dude — “can you even make beer batter with stout?”

The answer to the last one at least is a resounding, “Yes!” Though the recipe requires some additions to a standard beer batter. What I used is as follows:

Dietary Note: This recipe contains meat (fish), eggs, and wheat gluten. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how substituting any of those ingredients would affect the overall recipe, so I can’t make recommendations there. If, however, you try it with a substitution, I’d be interested in hearing what you did and how it went.

Stout-Battered Cod

1-2 lbs. cod — I made this recipe with 1lb. but discovered that the amount of batter could easily coat closer to 2lbs.
1 cup flour
1 egg
1 bottle good stout
1 tbsp. garlic powder
1 tbsp. onion powder
1/2-1 tsp. salt
few shakes black pepper
few good shakes of a nice hot sauce — e.g., Tabasco, Frank’s, Tapatio (I used Tapatio)
cooking oil

1. I started by cutting the cod across the width of the fillet into strips about as wide as my 2 fingers. The upshot is that I ended up with pieces between fish nuggets and fish sticks. It sounds funny, but I actually found this size very helpful — both for easy flipping and for making sure the fish was cooked through by the time the batter was crispified.
2. Then I combined the flour, egg, and 1 cup of the stout in a bowl. When I make a beer batter, I’m looking for something slightly thinner than pancake batter, but not much. It should be thin enough to coat the fish but thick enough to stick to it. If the batter looks too thick as is — mine was — add more beer little by little. If the batter looks thin enough, drink the rest of the beer.
3. After I have the consistency I want, I start adding spices. I added the solid spices in the quantities described and added the hot sauce after that, a few shakes at a time until I got the tanginess I wanted. It is possible that I used several more than a “few shakes,” all told.
4. I heated a large skillet with vertical sides on high, adding about 1/4 inch of cooking oil along the bottom. I coated each cod piece (pun intended) in the batter and set it in the oil, cooking 2-3 minutes on a side. In retrospect, I probably should have dried off the cod before coating it in the batter; I had some pieces where the beer batter sort of slipped off. It was still crispy and crunchy and tasty; it just wasn’t in the right spot.
5. When each piece was done, I laid it on a plate lined with paper plates (we were out of paper towels) to drain a bit. Then serve.

Observations we noticed as we were eating:

1. That thing about drying the cod.
2. Stout batter is perhaps more flavorful than is standard beer better. There’s a sweetness-savoriness-spiciness combo in this, which is fabulous but serious food.
3. Also that thing about more batter than fish. I ended up making hush puppies out of the rest — which, along with the fish, turned out to be too much heavy, fried food all at once for our tastes. We ended up serving the fish with sides of hush puppies and wilted kale and arugula. Next time, we decided, we might do just the fish and a fresh green salad.
4. Finally, we were in sore want of some malt vinegar. That we did not have any was the greatest tragedy of the evening.

Trail Mix

The Children — you know, my teenaged students — are working in groups today. Rather raucous groups, given their project. And they are bickering with one another.

One particular pair of boys is relentless, each finding fault with every solitary word of the other’s work. Finally, one turns to me.

“Miss, I’m hungry.”

“Hungry?” I echo, switching into standard response mode. “You just came from lunch.”

“I didn’t eat,” he tells me. “I have to pay.”

Which is code for the knowledge that he’s on reduced lunch instead of free and did not, for whatever reason, have his forty cents come lunchtime. Maybe he left it at home; maybe there wasn’t any at home. Maybe he bought school breakfast; maybe he bought chips for breakfast.

As a pressing matter, however, why he didn’t have lunch is less important than that he didn’t have lunch.

“I have trail mix,” I offered, holding up a half filled plastic bag. I make some up weekly and keep it in my backpack for prepacked breakfast and intermittent snacks.

He took it. He and his friend, the student with whom he had been arguing, ate. And started to write. Productively. While they certainly still talked, the strains of sniping left their conversation altogether.

“Miss,” a nearby student looked at them, then over to me. “Did you give them that just so they’d be quiet?”

Well, no. Not really.

Though, just the same, I’d be lying if I said I did not appreciate that as a secondary result.

Scarcity & Cream Cheese Frosting

As I may have mentioned here before, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. Sure, I enjoy the occasional sugary food, but I don’t spend brain cells thinking repetitive, lustful thoughts about them — no, not even when I’m PMSing.

In fact, there is one sugar product that I find — not gross, exactly, but definitely personally unappealing in amounts as it’s conventionally used. That is buttercream frosting. It’s just too much Bam!, in-my-face, single-note sweetness for my taste. And yet, it’s the frosting that’s on everything. (Because the entire world does not operate according to my personal preference, or something silly like that.)

In grocery stores — even in the crunchier, more granola grocery stores where I tend to shop — there are always baked goods with buttercream frosting (or maybe shortening-cream frosting). And almost all of the frosted baked goods have this frosting. In potlucks or shared meals or friends or coworkers stopping by with treats, brightly colored buttercream abounds.

I think, in my head, this has been transformed into feeling like a certain type of scarcity.

Because what I really love is cream cheese frosting.

I realize, yes, that the ingredients are actually quite similar to those in buttercream frosting, but for me, the addition of the cream cheese makes a huge difference to my palate.

In a world where cream cheese frosting was more readily available on ready to eat items — or a world where I did more baking for myself — this would be a mild to moderate preference. I’d see something with cream cheese frosting, and I’d make a calm but quick calculation to determine whether I was physically hungry, whether I found the food psychologically appealing, whether I was prepared to deal with the energy consequences of s sugary food item, and whether I was prepared to deal with the digestive consequences of dairy (which, no, the dairy in a single item’s worth of cream cheese frosting should not upset my GI tract, but I also don’t limit dairy as strictly as my guts would prefer, either).

In reality, though, what happens is this –

A coworker brings cream cheese frosted cupcakes for a school event. The next day in the faculty cafeteria, there are leftover cupcakes.

There is leftover cream cheese frosting.

I mean, there is a leftover plastic container filled with cream cheese frosting. I am a little puzzled as to how this made it to school, but I am not complaining.

She offers us cupcakes.

My entire iffy foods calculation process is obliterated by the mere presence of cream cheese frosting.

I joke, “What I really want is the cream cheese frosting and a spoon.”

I’m not surprised when she laughs. I am surprised when she gets a spoon. “Go ahead.”

And now I’m facing a dilemma. I don’t actually want to eat the entire container of cream cheese frosting — even in my frosting-obliterated brain, I know this — but I do actually want to dig in with a spoon. I’d be over it by the third or fourth spoonful, but with the rest of my school day to get through, even this would be ungood in terms of the inevitable sugar crash.

I consider that I should actually do that — eat cream cheese frosting by the spoonful — someday, just to get over my preoccupation with it. But today is not that day.

I eat a cupcake — already topped with a portion of cream cheese frosting — love it, and head back to class wanting more.

February Recipe: Lentil-Stuffed Acorn Squash

In the interests of full disclosure, I did not invent this recipe. One of my friends made a version of it (I think without the mushrooms, certainly without the red pepper) for this past Thanksgiving dinner. Since then, I’ve played around with the basic concept, experimenting with the stuffing — both in terms of main ingredients and in terms of seasoning. I’m not sure if I’m posting this particular version because I like it best — though I do like it — or because pre-packaged ingredients render it more manageable for times like weekday dinners.

Dietary note: To my knowledge, this doesn’t contain anything that’s ungood for folks with common dietary allergens or other restrictions.

Lentil Filling:

1 lb. cooked lentils — I used a 17.6 oz. package of steamed lentils from Trader Joe’s for this one, though in the past I’ve made my own.
2 cups chopped mushrooms — I use fresh, but I expect canned stems and pieces would work too.
thyme — I used 2 tbsp. fresh, but have had success with dried before — I just don’t remember the dried amount.
garlic powder — I always use it and never measure it anymore. To taste.
splash of oil
splash of red pepper flakes — If spicy isn’t your thing, you could substitute black pepper, white pepper, or no pepper.

Acorn Squash:

I am quite sure the lentil and mushroom filling will fill 3 acorn squash halves (so 1.5 acorn squash). I think it should fill 4 halves (so 2 squash), but my confidence level on that isn’t high enough to guarantee it.

Procedure:

1. Slice the acorn squash in half, scoop out the seeds and stringy goop, and set them in whatever baking pan you prefer. I’ve done them face down in an open dish in a half inch of water; I’ve done them face up in a closed dish. It all pretty well works. If you have a preference for baking acorn squash, you do you.
2. Cook the squash until it’s just getting ready to be soft enough, about half its total cooking time. If you’re looking for numbers and such, 30 minutes at 350 is not a bad guideline.
3. While the squash is in its first phase of cooking, cook up the lentil stuffing. (This will probably not take the whole 30 minutes. It’s fine to get the stuffing set, then let it sit on the stove for a few.)
4. Stick a skillet over medium heat; add the splash of oil. If using fresh mushrooms, add the mushrooms first and heat until they’re cooked through. There will need to be some stirring in this part. If using canned mushrooms — make sure they’re drained, toss them in, and proceed directly to the next step.
5. When the mushrooms are not raw anymore, add in the lentils. More stirring.
6. And the spices — thyme, garlic, and black and/or red pepper — more stirring.
7. Turn the heat down to simmer until the acorn squash have been in the oven for ~30 minutes. Done with the stirring; I promise.
8. Pull the acorn squash out of the oven and situate them so they’re “face up” — that is, so the hole that the stuffing will go in is visible. Spoon stuffing mixture into the hollow where the seeds and stringy goop used to be. I am a fan of gently pressing with the back of the spoon to get a good, dense amount of stuffing in each squash half.
9. Stick the stuffed squash back in the oven and cook uncovered for another 30 minutes.
10. Squash is done when the squash is soft enough and the filling is hot all the way through. I think I probably cook longer than is strictly necessary, but I think it helps get some of the spicy filling flavor into the sweetness of the squash. Anyway, let these sit out of the oven for just a minute or two before serving — because they will be hot.

I am a fan of the concept of stuffed squash in general. And though, as I mentioned, I’ve tried a lot of different filling components, I think I find this one the most workable. And I think that is because I’m relying on at least one convenience food — the pre-packaged lentils — to make the prep time more manageable.

I mean, an hour of cooking time is already kind of tricky to mange, particularly on nights that are “school nights” for both of us. I would not want to add significant active prep time — say, making a filling that required more than 10 minutes of being at the stove — because that would render the recipe impractical for use in regular weekday rotation.

Still, I had to get over myself a bit for using the ready-steamed lentils. Because, you know — ZOMG, processed! ZOMG, sodium! And stuff. Which — another recipe that illustrates some of my personal food morality baggage.

Guest Author: On Apples and Abdominal Adipositivity

Laura is a twenty-something fatshionista. She enjoys cupcakes, climbing trees, contra dancing, and smashing the kyriarchy.

She currently blogs at Tutus and Tiny Hats, where this post originally appeared. It is cross posted here with permission.
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As an apple-shaped lady,* I was really glad to see this post about the protective properties of belly fat.

There’s so much noise about the evils of abdominal fat–it eats puppies and kittens for breakfast, steals purses from old ladies, and makes the baby Jesus cry. These breathless reports are almost always accompanied by headless fatty pictures, as if to say, “If you look like this, you’re doomed! Also, too ugly to show your face.”

It’s good to finally see evidence that belly fat–just like almost any other physical characteristic–has positive as well as negative associations (none of which, btw, are destiny).

My stomach, for so long my nemesis, has been the hardest part of my body to stop hating. The part of my body I used to try so hard to shrink, doing crunches every day in eighth grade.

All the scare-articles about abominable abdominal adiposity booga booga didn’t help. They just gave me the excuse that I wanted a flat stomach for health reasons–not so I could look like Gwen Stefani or find pants that fit. They gave my body hatred a veneer of scientific rationality.

Even in my dieting years, though, it annoyed me that a waist under 35 inches was considered ideal for all women. First of all, men were given a 40-inch allowance, but as (mostly) non-child-bearers, they have less stomach fat to begin with. Second, even if you accept the evils of a large belly, it doesn’t make much sense to have one waist-size standard for people of all heights.

These days, I’ve managed to reach a fragile detente with my stomach. But with my family history of heart disease, I still find it hard not to see my belly as a betrayal, a symbol of future ill health.

It’s likely that my tendency to gain weight in the stomach rather than hips or thighs does stem from the same metabolic makeup that puts me at risk of heart disease.

You know what else is correlated with heart disease? Stress. Like the stress of constantly being told your body is toxic, unhealthy, wrong.

What can I do but accept that I’m at a higher risk for some problems and a lower risk for others, then do my best to mitigate my risks and let my weight fall where it will? Even the most pro-dieting people will tell you it’s impossible to spot-reduce. And considering that 95% of diets fail, overall-reducing doesn’t seem like a great plan either.

What can I do but see my belly as part of me–part of this amazing body that breathes, laughs, carries me around?

*I know the whole fruit-identification thing is silly, but apples are frickin’ delicious. I can’t wait for apple-picking season. (These pictures are from two years ago, when I went apple-picking with a group of friends. Highlight of the trip: finding a “fallen empire” — i.e, an empire apple sign that was lying on the ground.)

Donut of Defiance

[Discussion of diets, weight loss, and eating.]

Before the semester break, my employer’s human resources department sent out an email advertising a district-wide New Year’s weight loss initiative. Now, it’s totally voluntary, and not connected to our health care insurance in any way (though I know better than to believe it’s anything close to confidential). And I know from experience over the years that not many people — at my school, at least — actually participate.

Still, I know that reading about what is essentially short-term (8 weeks) competitive weight loss (i.e., the person who loses the highest percentage of their starting body weight gets some kind of cash or gift card prize) is not a good idea for me. So I emailed HR and asked if there was a way employees could opt out of receiving these specific messages.

I received no answer.

Now, this could easily have been that by the time I sent my email, people were heading off toward Christmas and semester break.

So when I found a second advertisement about this in my inbox, I contacted HR again. Still no answer.

I admit, I was probably holding a bit of low level resentment in my back brain about this, less for the initial mass email and more for the two times I said something, and my response seems to have been ignored. Like, even to have been told that my request was unworkable or otherwise just not going to happen would at least have acknowledged that I make the fucking request.

Fast forward to our department meeting during the second week of school. It’s rare that our department — or even, all our site teachers — are left alone — that is, without administrative influence (often interference) — to Get Shit Done. So when we are, we rather relish the opportunity.

A department coworker brought donuts, enough for the group. “Help yourself,” she said at the beginning of the meeting, then let the subject drop. No one took a donut right away.

I didn’t particularly want one myself. I don’t dislike donuts or anything, but I have come to discover that very sweet — and especially, very one-note, simply sweet — foods are not my thing. They still seem appealing from time to time, but once I removed them from my mental “bad and therefore forbidden” category, I discovered that more often than not, I do not actually want them very often.

And so, for a long portion of our meeting, I was content to let the donuts sit and instead to concentrate on getting shit done.

Until that voice came over the PA system.

“Anyone participating in the [Cutesy Name] Weight Loss Challenge, please come to the [School Name] library. And for anyone who hasn’t signed up, this is your last chance to join! I repeat, anyone participating in the [Cutesy Name] Weight Loss Challenge, please come to the [School Name] library. And for anyone who hasn’t signed up, this is your last chance to join!”

We all stared at the PA speaker, which had interrupted some good discussion. And a lot of us glared and rolled our eyes. I think, based on my knowledge of these folks, that the degree of the reaction was not only from it being an interruption but from the specific nature of this interruption.

There was an air of peevedness in the room.

And, I couldn’t help but notice as the announcement was dying out, two unopened boxes of donuts just sitting there.

I stood up, crossed the room, and opened a box. I considered my choices, selected a cinnamon roll, and walked back to my seat with it.

The comments were telling.

Laughter.

Good laughter.

“About time someone opened that box!”

“I wanted one too; I just didn’t want to be first.”

“Hey, that’s right! There are donuts!”

I walked back to my seat and pulled of pieces of cinnamon roll, bit by bit, in its spiral layers.

In that moment, I still don’t even know that I wanted the donut. In fact, I think I didn’t — at least not for the taste of the fried pastry itself. What I did want, however was for that voice on the PA system to shut up. I couldn’t do that, of course, but I could at least send a message to the people around me that that is what the voice on the PA should do.

Within a minute or two of my cinnamon roll defiance, at least three other people in the room had claimed donuts of their own — and from the comments, it seems that at least a couple of folks had been anticipating a donut claiming move for a while.

I won’t say that this is a step in the direction of making food my friend. Because what it feels like to me is the somewhat familiar, somewhat ambivalent territory of wielding food as a public tool, a sign post for specific ends. That is not, in a perfect world, what I want food to be for me.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. And what I do know is this —

In this world — the world where people in or out of authority constantly tell me I need to or should want to drop clothing sizes and/or lose weight — that message on the PA system is more my enemy than any cinnamon roll could ever be.

January New Recipe: Gouda Mac and Cheese

As people sometimes do, my partner and I spent New Year’s Eve at a friend’s house. As is customary, we showed up with a bottle of carbonated alcoholic beverage product (in other words, Sonoma County, California’s approximation of champagne). And as luck would have it — or because old age and early bedtimes have snuck up on us out of nowhere — there was more wine purchased, by host and by guests, than was actually imbibed. Our host encouraged us to take our already chilled bottle home.

So we did, stashing it in the fridge until we could figure out what to do with it.

I’m reasonably knowledgeable about pairing wines to food, but less so about pairing food to wine. (And champagne-type wines are ones I’m particularly used to drinking without food.) My faith in the Internet being absolute, I got out my Google and went to town.

Google directed me to a couple of sites that suggested my now white elephant wine might go well with something like chicken in a butter sauce or anything in a cream sauce.

Now, I have to admit, I don’t recall exactly how I accomplished the mental meandering between “cream sauce” and “white cheese mac and cheese,” but I know that my partner and I finalized the recipe (ingredients, at least, if not amounts) in a few conversations together. As we were putting it together, I noted amounts, and this is what it turned out like.

Dietary note: This recipe contains meat, dairy, and wheat gluten. The meat here is pretty optional: easily omittable or substitute-able. From what I know of gluten-free pasta, it should also be workable to substitute that for the pasta listed here, if you so desire. The only thing I’m not sure about is the dairy, since it involves not only just using but also heating milk and cheese, and I’m not sure if non-dairy substitutes behave the same way chemically. If anyone knows about this sort of thing, I’d welcome the information — but I do not have it myself.

Gouda Mac and Cheese

What We Used:
5 cups cooked or 2.5 cups dry whole wheat pasta (we used rotini, but elbow, bowtie, or other short pasta would work fine)
4 oz. pancetta, sliced or diced small
2 cups shredded Gouda cheese*
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese*
1/4 cup plus a little butter or margarine
1 cup milk
1-2 tablespoons corn starch
enough water to liquefy the corn starch
black pepper to taste

How We Put It Together:

1. Preheat oven to 350F. (Our oven takes a while to heat up. Plus it is winter here, and we don’t mind the extra house heat. If your situation is different, you might want to do this a bit later.)
2. Make and drain the pasta.
3. Use the “plus a little” butter or margarine to grease the bottom and sides of a square baking dish. (I do not remember if ours is 8″ by 8″ or 9″ by 9″.)
4. Toss the pancetta with the pasta and lay the mixture in the pan.
5. In a saucepan, melt the 1/4 cup of butter. While the butter is melting, mix the corn starch with enough cold water to liquefy it.
6. Add the milk. Once the milk is warm, add about 1/2 the cornstarch mixture, keeping the rest close by.
7. At this point, the directions on the mixture include the unspoken “while stirring constantly” additive. I normally hate “stir constantly” recipes, but I promise this does not last too very long and also is worth it.
8. Slowly, small handful by small handful, add a generous 3 cups of the shredded cheese mixture to the milk and butter. If you’re using 2 different cheeses, it’s nice to go half and half, but this is not strictly necessary.
9. If at any point, the cheese sauce is starting to get clumpy, even with constant stirring, you may wish to add a bit more of the cornstarch mixture.
10. Once ~3 cups of the cheese is dissolved into cheese sauce, add black pepper to taste, and then pour the cheese sauce over the noodles and pancetta in the pan.
11. Bake at 350F for approximately 20 minutes. (When we did this, our noodles were still hot. You may need to bake longer if your noodles start out cold.)
12. Briefly remove the mac and cheese from the oven. Sprinkle the remaining shredded cheese on top. Continue baking for another 10-15 minutes.
13. You know it’s done when the cheese is turning all brown and bubbly at the top.
14. Allow to cool a few minutes. It will be tempting, but trust me — this is for the best. That shit is hot. (Guess who burned her tongue tonight?)

I have to admit, when I was planning out the ingredients and also preparing this, I had some serious self-food-policing anxiety. I mean, it has something like a pound of cheese the way I did it, plus butter, plus a salty, not-so-lean meat. So there’s some insight to foods I code as “bad.” Whether it was a good idea or not, I did spend some time internally justifying this recipe to myself as a special dish for an anomalous occasion. (Because while I wouldn’t call “finding an excuse to drink the New Year’s wine” a special occasion, it is not one that is likely to repeat itself regularly.)

Upon tasting it, however, a lot of my food guilt went away. It tasted fabulous, creamy and just enough salty and savory. While it did feel rich, it didn’t feel heavy; the cheese sauce and pancetta were balanced out by what I can only describe as the “whole grain-iness” of the pasta. And of course, it paired quite well with the wine.

If I had it to do again — and I certainly might at some point — I’d consider adding a bit of garlic powder and just a smidgen of thyme into the cheese sauce to enhance the savory aspect of this mac and cheese. I probably won’t do it again for a while, though. Not because foods with so much cheese are “bad” — but they are a bit more than my budget can afford to work into the regular food rotation.

Finally, I had taken a picture of our mac and cheese dish on my phone. But alas, my husband informed me that the only way to transfer it from our phone was as a pay-per-use data transfer. Which, it was good mac and cheese and all, but I am just not interested in going there with my phone company. So have a happy Wiki Commons picture instead:

[Due to the lighter cheeses, our mac and cheese was paler than this. But IN SPIRIT, this is what it looked like.]

* We made it this way with a smoked Gouda from our local deli case. If I were using a non-flavored Gouda, I might shift the ratio more toward the Gouda and away from the mozz.

Got Recipes?

I’ve been thinking about my resolution to like food this year and how to make that more concrete. One way, maybe, is to try new foods — or foods prepared in new ways or foods prepared in ways that I haven’t tried in a long while — to give myself the chance to experience them with a minimum of preconceived notions.

To that end, I’m thinking of trying maybe one new recipe per month — recipes that contain ingredients and/or cooking methods that spark my interest. (And, you know, that don’t have any definite “no”s for me. This will not be the time I try out, say, mayonnaise-covered dill pickles.) Probably mostly dinner-type recipes, on account of that is when I have the most time to cook.

I know I can just Google up some recipes — and I certainly will — but I’m also curious as to whether any readers have suggestions. These can be suggestions for recipes you’ve already tried and like or suggestions for recipes you haven’t tried but might like to sooner or later. (Please no recipes where you’re like, “I’ve tried this, and I think it is gross!” though. Because, why would anyone even do that?) What kinds of recipes are you curious about?

I Resolve to Like Food

[Notes for talk of food policing, disordered eating.]

Openly and without apology.

In the context of my personal life, this is a fairly big deal. I have a pretty strong history of policing my own food intake, both in terms of amounts — calories, carbs, fat grams, sodium, sugar, fiber — and in terms of types. That is, not allowing myself certain foods that hold stigma as being “bad,” regardless of what my nutritional needs were at the moment.

Especially, though, this self-food-policing manifested in me refusing to allow myself to cultivate emotional attachment to food. For a long time, I didn’t let myself take any joy in eating, with rare exceptions, like the best spinach artichoke dip in the world. Generally, I tried to limit myself to “good” foods in prescribed quantities; “bad” foods were met with disdain. There was no room for liking a food — regardless of the nutritional content or societal coding of said food — for reasons of comfort, stability, tradition, satiety, sociability, or taste.

In practice, this meant allowing myself a second helping of something, but only if I rationalized it — to someone else or to myself — by saying that I was running a calorie deficit for the day. Or eating fast food or pre-packaged food out of necessity, if time or other circumstances rendered it such, but only if I both expressed and felt disgust for eating such food. Or, on rare occasions, allowing myself a portion of a food coded as “bad” — for instance, a dessert or the aforementioned spinach and artichoke dip — if I engaged in enough fat talk before and during and felt enough guilt for days thereafter.

And yeah, that’s my mom’s influence on me talking. Mom has been concerned about “good” foods, “bad” foods, and body size for as long as I’ve known her, and certainly since before I was old enough to step back and analyze how her concerns affected me.

But there’s also my dad. And I feel conflicted about saying this, because there were definitely societal food and body image pressures that didn’t impact my dad in the same way they did my mom. The result of this allowed Dad to have a different set of priorities when it came to food.

Not that my dad paid zero attention to caloric and other nutrient contents of food, but that attention was decidedly more balanced with attention to food that was filling, food that was relatively accessible in terms of cost and prep time, and food that tasted good. Still, foods that met these criteria weren’t morally “good” any more than foods that failed to meet the criteria were morally “bad.” People had preferences, but food was just food — except for mustard, which Dad did categorize as wholly and objectively evil. (What can I say? No one is perfect in their tastes. Mustard is freaking delicious.)

See there? There’s a part of me that wants to take joy in a food that I find freaking delicious simply because I find it freaking delicious.

There is a part of me that wants to take joy in food.

(Seriously, a hot horseradish mustard? Makes my mouth happy.)

Beyond that, I believe that actively liking food is a radical act — particularly for people who refuse to justify or rationalize the types of food they like, particularly for people whose bodies society marks as public property, who are then deemed not entitled to just like anything of their own accord, anything beyond what is socially prescribed for them to like.

(Or a nice dijon for a more delicate flavor? Pretty fabulous.)

But it’s still kind of a big deal to decide that I will feel free to find joy in eating foods like kale or broccoli, nuts or beans, fruit in place of more “decadent” desserts — without trying to rationalize that it’s okay to like these foods because they are “good.”

It’s maybe even more of a big deal to decide that I will feel free to find joy in eating French fries, cold pizza for breakfast, chocolate covered pretzels, or sea salt caramel — without feeling guilt that I didn’t somehow “earn” them by saving puppies, curing cancer, or eating other “good” foods — or better yet, not eating! — earlier in the day.

(My grocery store carries this one type of mustard that has Tabasco in it. Can we talk about this?)

Because there is a lot of emotional satisfaction to be had from food — joy, comfort, sociability, tradition. A lot of this is emotional satisfaction I want to have, at various moments in my life, without experiencing the irrelevant and undue anxiety that is equating any given food choice with total moral worth.

I’ve spent a number of years viewing food as an enemy. I’ve more recently spent a few years viewing food as an acquaintance that was useful but still not completely trustworthy. I am at the beginning of my fourth decade of life, and it would be nice to finally make friends with food.

Not Playing

I went to yoga class on Christmas Eve. As I mentioned on Facebook, after class, the instructor gave us candy. Specifically, they were small squares of dark chocolate. And specifically, the instructor laid them out on top of the cubby rack and said, “I’m setting out some chocolates here. Feel free to take one on your way out if you’d like.”

Which:

1. As far as I’m concerned, yoga and chocolate is a winning combination.
2. It was a relatively low pressure situation. That is, for anyone who didn’t want to take a piece of chocolate, there was pretty much zero external pressure on them to do so.

So I was surprised when the woman in front of me turned around and said to me, “Just what we need — more calories!”

Now, I had just had an awesome practice, and I was looking forward to ending it with chocolate, so I really, really did not want to have to engage and come out of my happy place. I kind of stared for a few seconds, then said, “I’m not sure what you mean.” Then I walked to the other side of the room to put my props away.

[Sadly, our chocolates did not have Jesus on them.]

I know, I know. Lying is not actually a good thing. But in a way, “more calories” are what we need. I mean, I’m sure most, if not all, of us did not need the caloric content of that chocolate piece at precisely that moment. But all of us — even people trying to lose weight or slim down or whatever — do require caloric intake on a fairly regular basis.

Okay, okay. That’s not what she meant, and I know it.

What she meant was something more like, “The ‘bad’ of eating those chocolate calories will somehow negate the ‘good’ of me exercising this morning!” Moreover, because she felt she could say this to me — a stranger — with no additional context, she expected me to know what she was talking about. She expected that this type of remark — food policing — was so ubiquitous that I’d both understand what she was getting at and respond in kind.

Not playing that game.

To be clear, I don’t feel like she was trying to police my food intake. I don’t think she noticed if I took a chocolate or not — and I don’t think she would have noticed, really, no matter what I’d said.

I do, however, think she was thinking about her own food intake in terms of calories out being “good” and calories in being “bad.” I do think she was looking for some feedback that started from that same framework. Maybe my eyes would widen, and I’d exclaim, “I can’t; it goes straight to my hips!” Maybe I would roll my eyes and go, “Chocolate! It defeats us at every turn!” Maybe I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Whatever, we just worked out: we earned it!” They’re all different responses, but they’re all responses that operate under a framework that assumes food — especially certain kinds of food — requires penance, either before or after the fact.

Certainly, people are welcome to choose or not choose whichever foods they like or don’t like, for reasons that are entirely their own. But that’s the thing. People don’t have to seek approval for their eating choices from others, and I do not like being recruited to be the curator of someone else’s food baggage. Certainly, food choices and feelings are a person’s own — but then they need to own them. Don’t ask me to be complicit in your choice to eat or not eat any given thing.

Because as far as I’m concerned, that is a twisted, tangly emotional game, and I am not playing.

Pizza

Thanks to Melissa McEwan at Shakesville for inspiring the memory.

There was this pizza place around the corner from the house where I grew up. I know it existed before we moved into that house, when my grandparents lived there. It may have existed all my life; it may have existed longer.

It was an independent place, run primarily by a father and son, with a rotating staff of teenagers. By “rotating,” I don’t mean that the turnover rate was high, but I am thinking back on something like twenty-five years. Most people don’t plan to work at taking pizza orders for that long, and no one stays a teenager for that many years.

Funny thing is, we didn’t even order pizza that frequently.

When I was a little kid, I only remember it for larger family gatherings. Say, for the two weeks in the summer when my aunt and cousins flew in or the every other spring break when my brother visited.

When I was a little older and my sister and I were both doing the “impossible adolescent” stage, we spent our summers showing horses on our local 4-H circuit. We could never be counted on for dinners on the evenings before each monthly summer show — we would have lived at the barn if we could have, and actually did on one occasion — so I don’t know what my parents ate on those nights. I don’t actually remember what we ate on those days, either. Hose water, and… I don’t know. What I do remember is that on the evenings after the shows, we’d unpack at the barn, call for pizza, and pick it up on the way home — sweaty breeches, helmet hair, manure aroma, and all.

It was okay. By then, I already knew the number. And the pizza guy already knew me. If that sounds creepy, I apologize for my un-gift with words tonight. I honestly didn’t intend it to be. I mean “knew me” in the sense of “longtime and rather predictable customer.”

It started, I’m sure, as connecting a particular order — large square with pepperoni and mushrooms — with a particular last name. Then maybe came phones with caller ID, and he’d recognize our home phone number. Later, he started recognizing at least my voice (I did the majority of pizza-ordering in the family): Even when I was calling from a different phone, he’d supply the name to go with the order before I did.

Occasionally, we’d change up our standard order — maybe a salad, maybe my sister’s beloved ham and pineapple — and he’d gasp in mock horror on the other end of the line. “Are you sure it’s really you? You haven’t been abducted by aliens or anything?”

It was lighthearted teasing, directed at the change in the now-longstanding protocol, rather than judgment about what any one person was or wasn’t eating, so it didn’t bother me.

When I went away to college and was coming home a few times a year, he remembered. When I moved across the continental United States and was coming home once a year or once every other year, he remembered. And by that time, this whole pizza thing had become a pretty big deal to me. I mean, yes, physically, it still represented my unmatched ideal of what every pizza should taste like. But it also represented — home, all of us being together, the place where I’d grown up, a place that had worked its way into my character. A place where I wasn’t anymore, and a place that would never be “home” for me in the same way again.

I was the only one of us who’d gone away. And each time I return, I feel just a little bit more the outsider in my old neighborhood, with my own family.

The last time I went back, the corner pizza place was gone. I called the number — still from memory — and no one answered. Well, not gone, exactly, but replaced by another (non-chain) pizza place that always seemed to be closed during the hours we wanted pizza. For the first time in twenty five years, we looked for a different place for carry out pizza. And of course, physically, we managed. We certainly didn’t go hungry, and when we did find a pizza place, it was tasty, and we enjoyed it.

But it wasn’t the same, couldn’t be, and I still miss the place that I’ll never see again.