Comfort food

After almost a week of not having a voice, I am almost fully recovered. I still am hoarse, but I took my phone at work off of "Do Not Disturb" which means I, begrudgingly, will start accepting phone calls again. BOO.

While I was in the throes of sickness, I ate some dee-lishus food. Last week before I left for Memphis, I made sinigang. I found a tamarind soup base at Central Market that I'd never used before, but I think I'll use exclusively when I make anything with tamarind. I purchased a block of tamarind pulp, seeds and pods included, from My Thanh and to use it, I had to dissolve the pulp in hot water and strain it a couple times. This soup base was just liquid and it was cheaper than buying the pulp block. I also used lamb knuckles as a couple chicken thighs for the meat in the soup. I usually use oxtail or just generic "soup bones" but the lamb knuckles looked meatier than the beef shanks they had, and they were also a little cheaper. It's weird how people charge so much for cuts of meat that shouldn't be expensive at all.

It was a Filipino food fest too when I was in Memphis, but since I didn't bring my camera, I don't have proof. Tasty cupcakes from Muddy's in East Memphis, dinuguan and those crunchy coconut casava things from Mekini, siopao that I brought back on the plane. YUM all over.


When I got back to Austin, Clinton had made Tom Kha-type soup with chicken and clear rice noodles. I love, love, LOVE kaffir lime leaves. I warmed some of it up last night and drank just the soup broth for dinner.



Then Yaz had made chicken pot pie and brought a serving for me on Monday morning. I debated for about twenty minutes at 9 in the morning as to whether I should save it for lunch or annihilate it for breakfast...at about 9:21 I ate that pot pie up like nobody's business. So rich, so creamy, yum yum yum. No picture of that one though. Just memories of a happy belly.

Sympathy pains

I think Lola's passing is giving me sympathy sickness. Out of nowhere, really, I started feeling very congested and weak and just generally sick to my stomach. I made sinigang yesterday to make myself feel better, and it helped a little bit, but not much. Mom called me just before midnight. I had just picked Clinton up from work and I was feeling really congested, and I was having a difficult time taking deep breaths. Mom told me that Lola passed, and then the congestion went away.

I have a small compact of solid perfume that I found years after she moved from Memphis to New Jersey. It smells exactly like her and I try not to open it too much, as if the smell will disappear. And on the dresser that Ronni has in her bedroom, I remember carving into the wood "Lola Nena" and some date when she first movd from Memphis back to New Jersey. I was so mad at her for leaving us, and I remember thinking years later how silly it was for me to deface furniture because Lola left. And then when she moved back to Memphis, I secretly was like "SCORE!! Take THAT, New Jersey!"

I remember in Jacksonville pretending I was a cat and crawling out of mom and dad's bedroom (really, it was mine and Rosanena's, haha, mom and dad!). I saw Lola doing her calisthenics: kicking her leg up midway and touching her hand to her toe, huffing "one, two, three." And that one time I was walking on those logs outside of the house and fell into an ant hill. I remember watching television with Lola later that night, and she had put Vicks all over me, so everything that I saw that night was tinted blue. Like someone had made reality black & white and then put a blue tint to it. Whenever I smell Vicks Vaporub I think of her.

I remember when we were in New Jersey and Rosanena, Claire, Cheeky, and I were en route to New York. We were in Hoboken and it was so frigid and windy, but right before we left, Lola made me put Vaseline on my face. Because of her, my skin wasn't chapped.

She totally got me hooked on coffee. A little bit of coffee, a lot of milk, and a ton of sugar. She said chocolate was okay to eat. Man, she had a sweet tooth. I remember buying those chocolate bars for her all the time from Walgreens, the kind with raisins and almonds (the label said fruit and nut, but it was just raisins and almonds), wrapped in that dark purple wrapping. She'd give me $20 and have me buy two, although it was something ridiculously cheap, like buy one at $1.99, get one free!

One of the first few months that Clinton and I lived in Austin, we went to the Erwin Center to see this type of kickboxing match which was kind of weak, but CHUCK NORRIS had started the league. I remember wanting to tell Lola "I saw JACK MORRIS in person!"

When we first got Phantom, she had so many fleas, and Lola would pick them out one by one, squish them with her nail, and then put the carcass in a shallow bowl of soapy water to make definitely sure they were dead. Phanny would always bite at her heels and her clothing since she always wore those long layers and Lola would spank her with the broom.

I'm not going to mourn our loss....that's selfish. I'm going to celebrate her life.

Foie Crinton

Best Wurst

As promised, pictures of Wurstfest down in New Braunfels.


One of the many polka bands we saw. There was one that I swear had Conor Oberst in it...
No, that's not a costume. It's on sale amid that awesome fringed denim dress and the George Michael printed shirt to the right.
Marketplatz = haven for all the fried goodies.


Possibly the scariest thing next to that drunk couple that kept dancing. Was that girl really with her boyfriend?!

The best picture is of
me and Yaz eating giant sausages on a stick. I was too busy eating the sausage to remember to take a picture of it. Heh.




Bread pudding with "butter sauce."




Sausage and cheese balls on a stick, fried olives and cheddar. The olives were actually chopped up olives and cheese, not cheese-stuffed olives like we'd hoped. But really...we weren't disappointed all that much.

A wider shot with fried dill pickle slices (we preferred spears, but they were still 'licious), and potato salad in the background.

Fried cheesecake.

He done heathcliffed that bone.



I'll only take full responsibility for two of those cups. I didn't want to fill up on beer. Needed to have enough room in there for the fried goodies.

Chiclet? Who you calling chiclet?

Caw-ca-caw-ca-caw!

Last night we whipped up some delicious chicken sandwiches that evolved into the ultimate club sandwich (take THAT, Tyler's Ultimate).



Seared then roasted chicken thighs and pulled the meat off the bones, made roasted spring onion mayo, then smushed it all together with avocado, tomato, greens, Muenster cheese, and bacon on sour dough. Mine actually was sans bacon in an effort to recover from the best weekend ever of sausage and polka: Wurstfest (photos to come).