Dining out and small town life

I will admit that I get irritated when I hear folks complaining about a Starbucks on every block or saying that Thai food is everywhere now. I'd love to have one real Starbucks and a Thai restaurant opening here would bring tears to my eyes. I live in Teenytown.

So here on the Upper East Side of Texas (I stole that from a community newspaper), we can eat Mexican food, mediocre Italian, "country cookin', or burgers--or cook at home.

At one point, after our one Italian restaurant added a bar, I had to stop going because people I didn't know were talking about me and my consumption of martinis. Apparently there was just one of me because complete strangers wanted to know how many I'd had the night before. Let me just say, I did NOT drink huge numbers of martinis.

I'm fortunate that M loves to cook and is gifted and creative--a natural talent. I enjoy cooking myself, so it's not the problem it would be if we both hated to cook and were poor cooks to boot. But, still, sometimes I want to have a good dinner, and I don't want to drive an hour or so to get it.

I go into my favorite of the two Mexican restaurants, and by the time I've unwrapped my napkin my Diet Pepsi with lemon is on the table. The waitress sees me and says, "Number 12 with pico and Ranch." I say, "Yes."

Right now, M and I are thinking about a weekend restaurant--a subscription kind of deal where he'd know beforehand how many people would be there. He's been writing menus, and I've been scoping the area for a house to use. I think the house/restaurant idea could fly here a la the East Side Cafe in Austin or the Phoenix in Grinnell, Iowa. Check this one out:

It belongs to a man in town who's trying to do some cool stuff. He boarded up the windows after kids broke them out one night a year or so ago. I think there'd be plenty of parking space, but the neighborhood isn't zoned for business, and I think the neighbors would squawk loudly.

At any rate, we're both dreaming of a place where M could serve appetizers that include duck confit right here in Teenytown.

Angry men

So several weeks ago I whined a wee bit about reading guy lit (AKA dick lit)--specifically Chuck Paluhniuk and Bret Easton Ellis.

I'm sort of baffled by why these guys are so angry. I assume I have a little to do with it, being a feminist and all. I mean, I guess I'm pretty scary when it comes down to it. But why can't I turn my power into something that would bring in big money???? I don't see CEO's of big corporations exactly quaking in their boots at the thought of my awesome power.

So, yeah, Fight Club seems to be about men angry about being removed from an existence that would require them to exert their physical superiority and know how to take a punch then get up and go on about their business. And, yes, I'm sympathetic with the theme that our possessions come to own us and make us put up with great huge amounts of crap to keep them and get even more. (I didn't read Marx for nothing.) But I'm also aware that I depend on civilization to keep me alive. Women used to have shorter life spans than men because they literally worked themselves to death--and looked like hell to boot.

And my next question is where are the angry women's novels? I can't think of any--and I've read a LOT of novels. Years ago, we read Marilyn French's Women's Room and that was angry, but I wouldn't say it's on many people's reading lists these days--even other angry women. Maybe Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" counts, but jeez, it's really old. I can easily think of some angry essays, but that's not what I'm looking for here.

Are angry women too scary to publish? Is there no market? I can sort of imagine guys imagining what they'd do if they were on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but that just doesn't seem to me like something too many women would be contemplating. Most who've read it agree with me that we'd be like the main guy's wife who killed herself rather than deal with dodging cannibals or being kept in a pen to be eaten later or pushing a grocery cart through the rest of her bleak existence.

A colleague suggested that perhaps women channel their anger into satire. Maybe so. This is a question I'm going to keep gnawing.

A new semester

Today was a day of back to school meetings--some good, some tedious, none overtly bad.

Teaching is a great gig, and I'm teaching two courses that I love, but it's still hard to give up summer.

I'm spoiled. I know. And I know that if I worked a "real" job, I'd see myself as a whiner, but still...it's lovely to have time to read and think and tangle with books. Even Martin Amis.

I need to do some cooking.

Pig condo

The new semester is just days away. I'm sorry to see the summer go, but resigned to it.

I haven't been cooking lately but my thoughts turn to pork on a regular basis. We had BLTs with friends who returned from their summer away, and the sandwiches were sublime. It's a good thing that bacon takes so long to prepare well and makes such a mess, or I'd be eating it all day long every day.

Above is a little building I spied in San Antonio. I made M turn around and stop so I could take a picture. I love this pig. I want to live in him in a perfect cartoon world where anvils can fall on you and you still walk away and you don't fall until you realize you've stepped off the cliff and are standing in thin air.

Exploding bitter melon

In the previous post, I mentioned buying a surprise bag of veggies from one of our graduate students. In the bag was a bitter melon, a veggie I've only read about in cooking magazines and cookbooks. I know it's used to make soup, but that's the extent of my knowledge.

So M and I looked at it in amazement and then set it on the counter. Perhaps we were both waiting for it to tell us what to do with it. But then Thursday morning I got up and found this:

It looks like some kind of crazy, scary lily. Disturbing and beautiful at the same time.

And now it's in the compost container waiting for it's burial in the plot that passes for a garden in our yard.

Pickles

I just haven't made any remoulade lately.

But I just made pickles.

I bought some surprise bags of veggies from a graduate student. What I got included tomatoes, bitter melon, cilantro, sun-dried tomatoes, chives, cucumbers, and dill. It was serendipitous because I had just come across a recipe for Claussen-style refrigerator pickles, and we don't grow dill.

So this is my experiment: only two jars to see how it goes.

I went through a canning phase back a few decades ago. (I'm not kidding; it was in the late seventies.) I used a pressure canner and canned tomatoes, soups, and all kinds of stuff. I've started thinking about canning again because I just read a recipe in the latest Saveur about home-canned tuna, canned in olive oil. That would make a heck of a salade nicoise. But, of course, getting tuna here in Teenytown would be the challenge.

Our garden this year is a disaster, and I confess that I did absolutely nothing to contribute to its success. But now, maybe because it actually rained this morning, I'm thinking about being a better garden-doobie and doing some work for next year's garden once it gets cooler.

This is a dull post--but I'm a pretty dull gal these days. Dull but happy.