Comfort Food
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Okay, maybe I'm not all *that* desperate, but I sure was frustrated this afternoon. It's pretty hard getting a not-quite-three-year-old to understand that if she can just shut up and leave me the hell alone for 15 minutes, I will probably be able to get her little sister to sleep and then I will be at her individual mercy for a while at least. It's even harder to maintain your cool when the baby finally does go to sleep, but wakes up 20 minutes later and when I'm trying to quickly soothe her back down for the rest of her nap by quietly stroking her eyebrow (go figure, it works!) the toddler comes up and starts jumping around and talking loudly, thus ensuring that baby's naptime is completely and totally over even though she's still exhausted from practicing rolling over all morning.
This, dear readers, is just the tip of the iceberg of my frustrations today. There are some other stressful things going on that I will disclose later, but for security reasons I need to play my cards close till sometime next week. Don't worry, it's nothing Bad, just something I don't want to talk about till it's over. Oh, the suspense!
So, to self-medicate with food despite the fact that I'm still avoiding most of my favorite poisons, I dredged up a childhood comfort food memory and did my best to replicate it for tonight's dinner. It wasn't a perfect match, but it tasted great nonetheless and Joe cleaned his plate and Julie at least didn't complain. Brace yourselves, it's a truly decadent recipe. So decadent that it involves frying half a pound of bacon and not pouring off the grease.
Start with half a pound of bacon. Fry it up nice and crispy. Set the bacon aside, but keep that pan hot 'cause you're going to put about 5 thinly-sliced potatoes in it. Stir 'em around so they all get nice and coated with the grease, then cook them, flipping carefully every so often, till they're cooked through and have nice crunchy brown bits throughout. Slice up a Vidalia onion fairly thin, and in a separate pan cook it slowly with some olive oil till the pieces are limp and a bit caramelized. I think if you had a big enough pan, you could probably do the onions with the potatoes, but I didn't. Thaw out some frozen okra in the microwave, then add it to the onions to heat it up some more. The version in my distant past involved garden-fresh okra, but that wasn't available today. Crumble up the bacon and toss it and the onion mixture in with the potatoes and cook for a couple minutes more. That's it. Really good eats. Not exactly the dish I had when I was a kid, but close. In a perfect world, it would be served with a big plate of sliced, salt and peppered garden-fresh tomatoes and a dish of cucumbers and onions in vinegar. Maybe even some wilted-lettuce salad. Tonight we just had some fresh spinach salad with the random grocery-store veggies from the fridge sliced up on top.
It would have been perfect if I hadn't had to give up eating my dinner halfway through to soothe an overtired baby. I finally just got her to sleep and laid her down in the crib at 10:15. God help me, I'm going to go unwind with my knitting needles in front of the TV for a while.
This, dear readers, is just the tip of the iceberg of my frustrations today. There are some other stressful things going on that I will disclose later, but for security reasons I need to play my cards close till sometime next week. Don't worry, it's nothing Bad, just something I don't want to talk about till it's over. Oh, the suspense!
So, to self-medicate with food despite the fact that I'm still avoiding most of my favorite poisons, I dredged up a childhood comfort food memory and did my best to replicate it for tonight's dinner. It wasn't a perfect match, but it tasted great nonetheless and Joe cleaned his plate and Julie at least didn't complain. Brace yourselves, it's a truly decadent recipe. So decadent that it involves frying half a pound of bacon and not pouring off the grease.
Start with half a pound of bacon. Fry it up nice and crispy. Set the bacon aside, but keep that pan hot 'cause you're going to put about 5 thinly-sliced potatoes in it. Stir 'em around so they all get nice and coated with the grease, then cook them, flipping carefully every so often, till they're cooked through and have nice crunchy brown bits throughout. Slice up a Vidalia onion fairly thin, and in a separate pan cook it slowly with some olive oil till the pieces are limp and a bit caramelized. I think if you had a big enough pan, you could probably do the onions with the potatoes, but I didn't. Thaw out some frozen okra in the microwave, then add it to the onions to heat it up some more. The version in my distant past involved garden-fresh okra, but that wasn't available today. Crumble up the bacon and toss it and the onion mixture in with the potatoes and cook for a couple minutes more. That's it. Really good eats. Not exactly the dish I had when I was a kid, but close. In a perfect world, it would be served with a big plate of sliced, salt and peppered garden-fresh tomatoes and a dish of cucumbers and onions in vinegar. Maybe even some wilted-lettuce salad. Tonight we just had some fresh spinach salad with the random grocery-store veggies from the fridge sliced up on top.
It would have been perfect if I hadn't had to give up eating my dinner halfway through to soothe an overtired baby. I finally just got her to sleep and laid her down in the crib at 10:15. God help me, I'm going to go unwind with my knitting needles in front of the TV for a while.
posted by Shelly Kang at 10:26 PM
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