last night, 273 south

moving for reals tomorrow. still not ready, but yet still posting on my various blogs.

why why why

I'm currently eating this sandwich. cuz it's almost 1am & I've moved four times in less than six months because my life is insane. damn, have to fix that. later. (back burner, large stove, ali). anyway, the sandwich was sriracha, swiss cheese, mayonaise, & roasted red pepper hummous. a feel good classic. with jalapeno kettle chips.

what my desk looks like, roughly eight hours before moving, not good.

& my dresser. oh dear lord, help.

dustry rose tries to help.

but isn't really helping.
although still adorable.

well, here's to to my life being more stable at the end of tomorrow. & let's hope jed & jono have some patience with the chaos of my objects.

It finally feels like summer, so I'm using the oven.

What happens when I'm really broke, moving AGAIN in three days & I haven't really packed, & it suddenly becomes really & delightfully hot out. & I'M HUNGRY.

free sunflowers from work are cool. I should so totally pack that vase, but whatever. beauty means something too. also cool is a shit ton of free summer squash. roasted in my beloved le cresuet baking dish with free shitake mushrooms, & thai basil & banana peppers & thyme from my garden. in olive oil & garlic & salt & pepper, of course.

dr taking advantage of the now empty record shelf. yeah I'm packing a little between drinking & cooking & blogging, etc.

even though having the oven on at 400 degrees was insane right now, it all smelled really good roasting & if DnD is really taking a road trip to new orleans in late august, I need to work on my heat tolerance. So far, after crap freezing rainy summer 2009, I'm really liking being sweaty & drinking chilled white wine in short shorts. over angel hair pasta. I think inspired by this post.

me, cooking & sweating & packing, july 2009.

dusty rose is also hot.

anyway, I think it's neat to cook yourself a really nice dinner in the middle of chaos. & last night I didn't pack at all but had an awesome time with a really good friend. & I'm about to embark on a road trip that I totally can't afford just for AWESOMENESS SAKE. & I'm going dancing right this minute.
Balance it's all about balance. & cooking & painting & adventure. That's it. oh, & dancing & friends & not killing yourself.

eating "exotic" squash & ignoring sadness

First, & most importantly, here's DR, helping me pack. thank jesus for kittens.



Yup, another late night dinner. this time "exotic" squash free from work (no idea why it's so exotic, it appears to be a round version of zucchini) & onions (also free from work) & avocado & thai basil & a banana pepper from my garden & whole grain udon noodles. no time to be doing this, this cooking meals & then contemplating them. really need to pack. but something else besides the general life chaos of me/financial crisis/moving/uncetainty about housemates/ thing that's been going on with me lately also happened & so there an undercurrent of sadness to everything I do. A very dear & trusted friend told me, "just give it some time & don't think about it for a couple of days" & that's right. but now it's been more than a couple of days & I find I still can't think about it or deal with it. it still hurts too much. & so now I find myself not packing but at least I am cooking mjyself a beautiful dinner & not sit on the floor crying. & I packed one box of vintage juice glasses & fabulous shot glasses that's gonna have to be enough for now.

noodles plus green things.

& then eaten over the rest of yesterday's lettuce. for freshness. five different green tastes: squash in butter (warm), avocado (meaty), lettuce (crisp), thai basil (sharp), banana pepper (hot).

I dealt with a lot of practical shit this week while ignoring my current emotional landscape. I'm doing the best I can. I still believe that people should try to communicate better, but they never ever do. Still I really learned this week that even though I feel kind of out of place a lot of the time, I do have some real true friends, even here, & they all came from unlikely places.

So I'm just gonna eat my green things & noodles & drink more wine at 1am & keep listening to all of the silver jews albums mixed on itunes shuffle & maybe pack another box or two. doing the best I can. that's all I've got. & if my heart is breaking under the surface, well, I find that it matters less & less.

& I'm gonna end on one of my favorite lyric quotes ever, "& if cars could run on teardrops I'd be long long gone. " thanks david berman. also, Drinking & Drawing road trip 09 to the deep south in august to look forward to. If we don't die, it will be awesome.

3am Dinners?

One element of the weird lifestyle I've been living lately is that my meal schedule (& my sleep schedule) are way way off. For instance, yesterday I worked, ate these things, went to the 11's for a night of "official" Drinking & Drawing, went to hugo's for more drinks & more drawing, & then we all went to the 11's to dance our asses off. Then I walked home all sweaty & realized I was starving & despite the late hour needed some real food. this has been my pattern lately, coming home from the bar to an extremely late night dinner, & finding myself really inspired to take pictures from my sketchbook & blog rather than sleep. Many of my finest blog posts are completed 2am or later, usually while I'm eating dinner.

last night I reheated cold ravioli from the previous night with tons of hot sauce & tomato sauce (I like food really spicy late at night).

& I had this beautiful head of lettuce that I brought home free from work hanging out in my fridge next to the banana peppers.

so I ate this, near dawn, while writing. that's goddess dressing on the lettuce.

then based on some late night text messages I left the house again, got to sleep as the sun was rising & the birds were going crazy (damn those birds), slept until around noon, got up in time to aquire my large iced coffee at the haymarket & some 3/$10 cds (stereolab, pavement, the smiths) at turn it up (my shopping contribution to the incredibly annoying noho tag sale), & head to work, where I just left, to come home, drink some wine, listen to the silver jews, & write on more blogs. & possible go out again to a party. & all I've had to eat all day is a bowl of soup at work, & I brought home a ton of free squash, so probably there's a late night dinner in my future. a typical day for me lately.
I worry that I'm turning into my dad with all my strange habits, I really do. He did, still does, the late night meal thing. I know this isn't normal, dinner at 3am, sleep at 5am, work at 1:30pm, I don't know.
I'm just so happy lately hanging out by myself, eating these crazy meals, & writing on the internet. although right now I REALLY need to be packing, since I am moving once again in six days. Having reasonable priorities has never been my strong point.

greens & wine & breathing

It's been the kind of week where on several occasions I've woken up with the panic attacks that used to hit me every morning this winter, i.e. winter 2009, greenfield, when whole foods & some people in my life caused me to have a nervous breakdown. I don't like it. This morning I woke up that way, managed to calm myself the fuck down, drove to shelbourne falls (coffee roasters on king street, not the town) (although going to the town would have been nice) for coffee & juice, & sat in the breakfast nook & proceeded to deal with the internal list of all the stuff I need to take care of that's making my head feel all crazy. lots of life transitions, of which moving in a week is maybe not the least. considering that at 10am this morning I really couldn't see getting out from under the covers, a lot was really accomplished today. as a reward for not dying of panic, after meeting a potential new roommate in town tonight I took myself to state street & bought a bottle of very cheap red wine & a giant bundle of local swiss chard.
& made this.

there's the swiss chard sauting with olive oil, butter, garlic, a banana pepper from my porch garden, & some dried chili peppers (from the free bulk stuff at work that I've been carrying around in my purse all week). just like me to have dried chili peppers in my giant orange vinyl purse with all the pens & glue. food & art, food & art.

then I added some jarred tomato sauce (cheating but I'm moving very soon so am using up my staples plus not really buying much new food) & sriracha. I really like my tomato/pasta things to be spicy. my homemade red sauce contains sriracha, & usually some sort of spicy sausage, & fuck it's delicious. tomatoes lend themselves really well to spiciness. so does cheese.

there it is, over pasta (sadly kind of crappy trader joes ravioli things that I inherited from a friend who moved, but whatever, I'm pretty broke) with sliced cherry tomatoes from the porch garden on top. The cherries are very fresh & sweet & lend something very delightful to the spicy greens & tomatoey mess underneath. (I ALSO have to add that because I'm moving & in the process of packing, that that is not my dish. I know I know, I'm an aesthetic snob, but I cannot bear for the internet to not know that MY dishes are vintage & pretty & NOT Pier One CRAP. Thank you.)(I know: liz, stop apologizing in parenthesis.)

so making myself good dinners in the midst of pure chaos helps, & so does when I have an impromptu dinner party with two of my favorite people on earth, one of whom I never ever get to see. having good people in my life & realizing it makes me want to pull myself together & deserve it, & also a few simple moments of pure joy sliding down a playground slide at 2am with people you love after sharing an amazing meal together is why we put up with crap jobs & tricky living situations & being broke & scared & confused & still keep getting up in the morning.
I was not mostly responsible for the brilliance of this meal, so all I'll say is, it was delicious & the company was better. & all the flowers were grown by me.
I sometimes lately think that I just went from one nervous breakdown to another, from total unemployed isolation in snowy greenfield to out very single freaking night social butterfly in summertime northampton, but I'm still trying to pull it together. having the person who saved my life by writing to me this winter randomly show up for 24 hours this week...well, these are the things I am reminding myself of when I slow down & breathe through it. there are wonderful people on this earth, & I can count at least five of them as my true friends. ok.
I hear thunder. & now it's pouring. winter of ice, summer of downpours. I was going to go out dancing tonight but maybe I'll just get into bed & read instead. I need words. maybe cooking myself dinner alone in my party dress with dustyrose is enough.

where have I been? oh, OUT. + a recipe.

long late spring/early summer for me. so so so long. in fact I should be sleeping right now. all I'm gonna say is the last night I stayed in for a single night was two wednesdays ago & that was just for one night. I left greenfield (in april, last time I posted here), & I guess I went crazy, from the shyest girl in the world to out every night. I don't know. I don't know. I still (theoretically) like staying in, I just also like being around people (also not a totally true statement), & the out option is always winning, at least at the moment. more time to do both in would be cool.
it's a lot to explain right now. it is 2:29am. although I also used to go to bed before 5am & now I also don't. but I'm always hopeful that "maybe tonight" I will. sorry for the long absence. I've also been doing these things: Drinking & Drawing & Eating & Drawing.
I moved back to northamopton. I found a new (soul crushingly horrible) job. I've met a lot of people, a few of them amazingly awesome. I've danced my fucking ass off. & plan on continuing to do so (although a small personal victory tonight was that I DID NOT go to the basement).
& life is still in turmoil.
I'm still working it out.
more details later but for now, what I ate tonight:

it was totally insane to cook myself dinner at 1:30am when I got home from melissa's tonight, but I was hungry & I had some very tempting purple scallions AND purple carrots waiting for me on the kitchen counter & I was hungry, so I sauted them in coconut oil with marsala curry powder...

& garlic & thai basil from my porch & a few red chili peppers. & randomly an egg, 'cause I was cooking all late night crazy like I do sometimes, & had just read a food article about singapore street food that made me insane with joy so I was thinking outside the box. then I added coconut milk...

& then the whole thing was served over white basmati rice & eaten at 2:26am while blogging. dinner shouldn't be eaten so late, but then again, why not?

hi again. I've been taking a lot of good/garden photos lately, so perhaps more of those later. XOXO
p.s. don't y'all think that being a vegetarian & especially a vegan is such an AMERICAN thing to do (still thinking about singapore street food, & by extension, street foods the world over).