Dinner for Parents

Tonight I made dinner for three. (Wish you were here, Leigh!)

THE MENU:

1. Black bean burgers.

2. Zucchini and summer squash fried with onion.

3. Chocolate avocado cake. (Thanks, Izzy Darby!)

The recipe called for 2 c. sugar; I used a little more than 1 c. I also recommend sticking the frosting in the freezer. Or adding some sort of thickener. (Ground flax seed? A bit of flour? Melted chocolate? Yes, next time I think I'll make ganache instead of avocado-based frosting.)

Looks like I haven't posted a recipe for black bean patties yet, so here it is. I forgot to make rice, but lately I've been using 1/4 c. rice in my patties.

makes 4 large patties

INGREDIENTS:

1 15-oz. can black beans, rinsed

1/2 green bell pepper, diced

1/2 yellow onion, diced

1 jalapeño, diced
3 cloves garlic, diced
soy sauce
olive oil
apple cider vinegar
1/3 c. bread crumbs
1/2 c. wheat gluten
1 Tbsp. ground flax seed
2 Tbsp. water
cumin
chipotle chili powder
coriander
dried cilantro

DIRECTIONS:
1. Mash the beans in a large bowl.
2. Sauté the onion, peppers, and garlic in a pan over medium heat. Wait to add the garlic or it might burn.
3. Stir the ground flax seed and water in a small bowl.
4. Mix the contents of the pan into the mashed beans. Pour in some soy sauce and apple cider vinegar (approx. 3 Tbsp. and 1 Tbsp., respectively) and olive oil (something like 1/4 c.). Add the flax seed and water mixture (i.e., a flax egg... I think). Season to taste and mix it all together.
5. Add the breadcrumbs and wheat gluten. Stir with a wooden spoon or whatever you used to mash the beans, then knead until gluten strings form.
6. Fry in some oil in a large pan on medium-high for 10 or so, or as long as it takes to get each side browned and crispy.

An Address to Albert C. on the Essay as Form

[I'm tutoring the son of one of my dad's old colleagues in writing. In preparation, I got overenthusiastic and wrote this little lesson, totally inappropriate for a freshman in high school.] 

Let's consider two domains that are typically considered distinct, content and form. If you'll allow me to be a bit free and easy with some mathematical terms, I would like to suggest that writing should operate primarily on or at the intersection of content and form, and strive as far as possible to make them coextensive. The essayistic aspiration is a unity of form and content, not a disjunction. 

To collapse these terms is to expand the scope of analysis. To bring the essay into view we need to step back, to introduce (at least initially) some distance. To this end, let's begin with an allegory: the essay as a sort of literary investigative report. First and foremost, the essay is the construction of a case, or an argument, which draws evidence from an archive. The OED defines essay as "[t]he action or process of trying or testing," as in "[a] trial, testing, proof; experiment." One builds a case with respect to an open question, a question which demands an answer. But writing is neither properly forensic nor scientific. While the best questions demand answers, they do not admit them. However it unfolds, the essay remains always in process as ein prozeß. "Case closed" is not something a writer can produce in good faith. 

The primary value of the essay, then, is in openness. But where does it begin? It is important to remember that the essay as form is historically determined. Whether you are aware of precedents or not, the field of your writing is always already circumscribed by the work which has come before. If you pretend to write in a vacuum, your writing will amount to a sum of reactions to unarticulated stimuli, whereas if you take careful account of the essay as an historical form, you will be able to write in response to your forebears. Openness is a positive disposition toward the possibility of dialogic exchange. If you close your subject [I use this word to indicate an opposition between subject and object. Never forget that you are not perceptually privileged. Anything that you can see can see you in turn.], you foreclose the future. The work of the essay is as much in posing new questions as in positing answers.

You should always take care to do justice to your subject and in the name of your subject. You sign your writing, and it is as important to recognize the debt of your signature as it to recognize your debt to language. You have received language; it is a system that you work within. While your signature is somehow unique, it has value only in relation to what it is not, who you are not. This is another way of expressing the imperative do not pretend to write in a vacuum: it is impossible in any case. The essay is a form of address, and as such requires addressees as well as addressors. Consider well who and what you call, who and what calls you.

[Apologies to Theodor Adorno for cribbing the title of "The Essay as Form," which you can download in PDF here.]

Minimum Wage Peanut Butter & Strawberry Sandwich

Ninety-nine years ago, Massachusetts became the first state to set a minimum wage (for women and children only). I couldn't find a reference to the cent amount, but I did learn that the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1923. Pesky livelihoods!

The idea for this sandwich comes from my mother, who found inspiration in a magazine while waiting in an office. She can't remember which magazine or what was in it, exactly, only that there was fresh fruit where there normally isn't. Straight line from that revelation to replacing strawberry jam with strawberries from a local farm. Of course I use bananas all the time, but it never occurred to me to use berries because bananas don't replace anything, you know?

This was lunch. Dinner is a Chinese place. Hold the fish sauce, please.

INGREDIENTS:

2 slices of bread

peanut butter

strawberries

DIRECTIONS:

1. Spread peanut butter thickly on one slice of bread and thinly on the other.

2. Slice strawberries in half if small, in thirds if large. Arrange on heavily peanut-buttered slice. Close sandwich.

P. T. Barnum Black Beans, Collards, and Quinoa

  

P. T. Barnum and his circus started their first tour in 1835. May it one day be infamous. I watched a documentary about a circus elephant and her well-meaning owner last night. Review coming soon, and it's not gonna be pretty.

Dinner tonight was just for me and Mom. Dad's in Dallas. I need to change the name of the blog, because my dinners these days are rarely for one. If anyone's got suggestions, please air them! [Update: Hope you like Vegetal Voracity.]

makes 3-4 servings

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 c. quinoa

1 15-oz. can black beans

bundle collard greens, stems chopped and leaves torn

1 c. frozen corn

1/2 c. frozen peas

1 yellow onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

soy sauce

cumin

coriander

dried cilantro

red pepper flakes

black pepper

DIRECTIONS:

1. Simmer quinoa 15 min.

2. Sauté onion in oil in pan over medium-high heat. Toss in collard stems and garlic. Once onion is translucent, add collard leaves. Drizzle with soy sauce.

3. After 6 min. or so, add black beans and seasoning. After another few minutes, add corn and peas. Heat through.

Current reading:

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am

Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors

Can't wait to start working on a paper about cats, ticks, elephants, hamsters, personhood, and biopower. Both Derrida's book and Giorgio Agamben's The Open deal heavily with Genesis. I hope I can avoid biblical entanglement, but I won't hold my breath.

John Dewey Curry Chili

John Dewey died June 1, 1952. Haven't read much of his work, but now that I've looked around for things to post, at some point I'd like to read Art as Experience. There's a nice summary of it over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I made this dinner for me and my parents last night. And this post ends a months-long hiatus throughout which I'm sure you were forlorn at the loss of new historically and gastronomically educational postings. I'm going to post tonight dinner, too, so I'll keep this one snappy.

makes approx. 6 servings

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/2 c. short grain brown rice (you'll need more than this, probably)

1/2 c. red lentils

1 15-oz. can red kidney beans

1 small eggplant, peeled and cubed

1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed

1 large red onion, diced

1 16-oz. can diced tomatoes

1 c. cashews

3 c. water

3 cloves garlic

1 jalapeño, diced

2 spoonfuls chili paste with garlic

curry powder

juice of 1/2 lemon

DIRECTIONS

1. Soak cashews in 1 c. water overnight.

2. Simmer rice 45 min.

3. In a large pot, sauté onion in oil for a few minutes over medium-high heat. Add eggplant and sweet potato.

4. In a blender, pureé cashews with water, garlic, and lemon juice.

5. Add 2 c. water, diced tomatoes, chili paste, and curry powder to pot. Cover and simmer for 15 min.

6. Add cashew pureé, jalapeño, and red lentils. After 10 min., add kidney beans. After another 5 min., cut heat.

If you run out of rice it might be nice to have this with some pita bread and an arugula/spinach mix.

three brief paragraphs on conceptual poetry

Conceptual poetry might be less regressive with respect to visual art than mainstream or avant-garde poetry, but it appears to have traveled back to the future and straight into futurism. The “importance of… innovation”; the text “begs to be seen blankly for the novelty of its concept” (Bök); “words were almost always found imprisoned on a page”; now, “the possibilities are endless” (Goldsmith). Moving forward. Marching forward. Charging forward. Is this poetry or industry or war? What is the importance of innovation? What good are liberated words if we’re still asked to see blankly? What good is novelty if our problems are older than our archive? The possibilities are endless, but the necessities are always limited.

Capitalism is a metastatic system. It’s premised on the manufacture of consent to un-ask questions about justification. Sweep telos under the rug while teleology remains displayed on the mantle. Conceptual poetry, like capitalism, grows because it can and seemingly only—necessarily—because it can. It sounds like it might foster an anti-demotic elite in the way that competition infects social environments with the terroristic impulse to eliminate one’s rivals. I don’t want liberated words any more than I want liberated capital. I want both words and capital to remain circumscribed by the needs of people. I want them to service just usage, not to attain freedom of injustice.

“if socrates was a poet / ill consider it” (Goldsmith). Socrates was a prick who insisted on the wrong questions out of patrician disdain for people and politics. What sort of essentialism does conceptual poetry endorse if it takes the identity-obsessions of Socrates as respectable? The metaphysical pretensions of the individual. Pretend self-effacement but never forget to publish your name.

[Citations: Christian Bök, "Two Dots Over a Vowel"; Katherine Elaine Sanders, "So What Exactly Is Conceptual Writing?: An Interview With Kenneth Goldsmith"]

April Fools' Day Meal

April Fools' Day is obnoxious. There's no joke here.

Tonight's meal didn't know what it wanted to be. I had tofu, potatoes, kale, and mushrooms. I was going to make scrambled tofu with a red jalapeño and maybe some quinoa, then I was going to use soy sauce and maybe make some rice. What I settled on was balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, sherry, sage, oregano, and parsley. Sort of weird with tofu (and a jalapeño), but I liked it. I baked the kale until crispy.

I'm not posting a recipe because it's straightforward and I've done it many times before. Maybe it's a function of the season (root vegetables ad nauseum), but I've been making the same half-dozen or so meals on rotation. Which doesn't make for interesting reading, I'm sure. Hence the following announcement:

Indefinite hiatus due to lack of inspiration.