Three unrelated food bulletins
Look at these purple radishes. Look at how goddamn beautiful they are. I got them at the Monday Plummer Park farmer's market. My radish hookup brings these as well as my other favorite radish, the watermelon radish. Normal radishes are also fine, but they're boring to look at. I like a radish with a secret psychedelic interior.
I snack on them. Sometimes just by themselves. Sometimes with salted butter, because I read about that once in a food magazine a long time ago. I think it was Bon Appetit. If that sounds unappealing to you it's because you have not yet scooped a chunk of radish into salted butter and eaten it. In my home, when radishes are on the dinner table to add to salads, or on a platter of vegetable snacks, very few people choose to enjoy them. I'm not offended by this because then I get to eat all the radishes.
**
I'm making chicken stock today. It's overcast and cool, which is the weather you want for making chicken stock on an 80-year-old gas stove that warms up your apartment's smallish kitchen. You have to get it done in the spring because summer is out of the question.
I realized, while prepping all of it, that I have a stupid and unwieldy amount of chicken parts in my freezer. They are obtrusive. Yet I still went to one of the two poultry dudes at the 3rd St. Farmer's Market and bought extra chicken backs and chicken feet. If you've never made chicken stock at home, backs and feet break down over the long simmer, and when your stock is done you'll be able to stand a spoon upright in it. When I tell certain friends facts like this they look at me like I'm insane, as though I should just be out buying some bullshit in a box from College Inn.
Anyway, I have too many frozen chicken pieces and I'm going to have to pick another cool, overcast day in the coming weeks to do this all over again. If you're lucky, maybe I'll give you some homemade chicken stock on your birthday or sober anniversary.
**
I saw a goofy old movie last week with Alonso. What's So Bad About Feeling Good? It was playing at the New Beverly. They have chilled Junior Mints, and that's why one should support one's local independent cinema. Nicole Kidman's AMC does not do this, and that's a candy infraction. Going in, I had no idea what the movie was about. I knew that it starred Mary Tyler Moore in that lull between Dick Van Dyke and Sue Ann Nivens. It's about a crew of grimy post-Beatniks who get infected by a tropical toucan carrying a virus, and the primary symptoms are unexplained euphoria and becoming a conformist dullard. It makes hippies cut their hair and get advertising jobs. You see this film for Mary Tyler Moore, and you cannot wait for her to change out of the greasy Arte Povera sweatshirt and into some smart-looking Courrèges. The communal apartment the antisocials share is one of those punkhouse antecedents where no one cooks or washes dishes, and that's what was on my mind anytime the film landed back in their hovel: who makes food for you assholes? My other thought was that if this was the last film I got to see before another lockdown I would be extremely pissed off.
**
I bought a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake for Alonso's birthday. His birthday is May 18. Mark your calendar and celebrate. It's coming very soon. And now that the freezer chicken pile up has been reduced by 50%, the cake can hang out until Alonso wants to jam.
I didn't know when I walked into the weird little shoebox-sized B-R location on Western that I didn't have to special-order the cake. They already had the one he wanted, waiting in the freezer case. The Dubai Chocolate "Inspired" Cake in a Box.
This Baskin-Robbins location is north of Hollywood Boulevard. Parking is not easy. I parked almost three blocks away in a residential area where this one dude was just sitting on a curb drinking a tall boy. It was a warm day and because I was not anticipating walking out with a readymade cake, I also didn't stop to consider that I would need to walk fast to get it back to the car, something that never happens with me, even though the internet has decided that all queers do this as a matter of course.
But if I can't make my body go fast, I could temporarily entertain the possibility of driving like a typical Los Angeles jerk. I became aggressive, or as aggressive as I was willing to be within the confines of speed limits and courtesy, which means not at all aggressive, just anxious, and that disqualifies me from spinning Smokey and the Bandit/Audrey Tautou driving backwards stories. I did, however, take every dog-leg turn necessary down residential streets instead of waiting in endless slow-moving traffic on Sunset or Santa Monica. I also called Alonso ten minutes from home – safely at a stop light – and said, "Get ready to come down to the street and swoop this thing up to the freezer or it's gonna be a ten-days-early birthday milkshake."
Anyway, it's fine. It has pistachios and that was the point of it all. He will eat it this coming weekend and I won't have to bake a birthday cake for him.
[Were you counting and getting annoyed that there were four sections involved in this promised three bulletins? Well, I call that MTM/Junior Mints moment a digression and you'll have to live with my way of thinking.]
