Anger Burger

Lately work has been sucking my will to cook, which isn’t surprising.  I’m on my feet for 7 hours — which includes running up and down the central staircase and/or pushing carts full of books and a combination of squatting and stretching to shelve them — and I walk to and from work for a grand total of 4 miles.  I bought a pedometer to try and track how much I really walk during the day, but I bought the cheap kind and it keeps stopping its count at 1650 steps¹.

Anyway, by the time I get home what used to be a calming, grounding activity instead is something I have to stand during.  Which makes me reach for the pack of turkey bologna, a bottle of wine and a relatively clean spot on the floor where I can curl up and suckle on each.

A few days ago I made what has turned out to be one of my all-time favorite comfort foods, chilaquiles.  It’s supposed to be a breakfast food that uses leftover tortillas, but like all great breakfast foods it tastes a little better at dinnertime.  I’ll be listing a more in-depth recipe in the next month or so (I sort of forgot to take photos of my last venture), which is no longer terribly Mexican, as I’m sure you can imagine a household with a Norwegian and an Irish Scottish-Melungeon would produce.

If you don’t want to wait for my walk-through, be advised that the frying of the chips isn’t as necessary as the recipes would make you believe.  Instead, I suggest using a pastry brush to lightly coat a stack of corn tortillas with canola oil, after which you can cut them up and toast them in a 350° oven for about 15 — but watch them closely!  They go from well-toasted to nearly-scorched in about a microsecond.  In a hung-over pinch, a bag of unsalted tortilla chips from the grocery store comes out nearly the same.  Not as tasty, but nearly the same.  The darker fried the chips, the better (again, avoiding the scorched level), as the whole thing gains a mature, nutty flavor.  Like me!   Minus the mature part.

Basically, chilaquiles are the lazy-man’s enchiladas, which is perfect because I’m lazy and I love enchiladas.  I poach some chicken, fire up a big pan of enchilada sauce, crush in a heap of crispy corn tortillas, stir in the shredded poached chicken and some monterey jack cheese and voila.  Well, almost, I’m leaving out some stuff.  You’ll just have to wait for it.

On another recent night I just wanted some bread and salami and while talking to Mike managed to hack the end of my thumb with the knife.  It was one of those moments where I had a freeze-frame sensation of the knife hitting something hard.  Mike, for his part, heard it hit, a sound that pretty thoroughly queased him out.  We both assumed I’d cut my thumb clean off.

Three days later and it looks like a paper cut.

After a minute of gripping it with my other hand I finally took at look at the damage … and saw that I’d basically barely nicked it.  Or rather, it was a lucky fucking hit: I indeed had pretty much ricocheted off the bone, but my thumb had been completely bent and provided a very thin, very healable level of tissue.  In other words, I’d barely cut myself.  To the bone, yes, but in a way that sounds about 1000% more dramatic than it really was.  And it smelled like salami.

¹Of course the best part is how many times it took me reading little piece of shit before it finally dawned on me that I was probably not walking coincidentally the exact same amount every day.