The Ides of March - Char Siu (Chinese Roast Pork)

Sunday - While all the mathematical whiz kids (how did I get so many math teachers in my family?) were jumping for joy over pi day - March 14, 2015, plus some specific hour, minutes, and seconds, stretching pi out to an additional line of significant figures - us wordy nerds have been looking forward to the Ides of March, if for no other reason than to flash back to those halcyon days of high school English. I do not know if Shakespeare is part of the high school curriculum - perhaps some ultra-liberal fanatic has decided that Shakespeare is a reactionary subversive, offensive to all minority groups, and should not even be made available in the high school library (media center).

But back in the day at Lawrence High School, we followed a precise schedule of Shakespeare, starting in freshman year with "Romeo and Juliet", then "Julius Caesar",  "Macbeth" and "Hamlet" (one of the senior English teachers went rogue and had the students read "King Lear" - show off).  Hamlet remains my favorite play, but having taken Shakespeare in college and having had the opportunity to read "King Lear", it's a close call. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I love Shakespeare and today is the Ides of March.  Beware.

Today was a family day of rest, and with no outside plans, I had time to watch two movies - "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "History of the World, Part I" - and to do some cooking.  We had a "real" breakfast, which means I made eggs, and then I worked on the pork belly and the hot German potato salad.  I also bathed Chelsea and Romeo, and around 10 at night I realized that I overdid.

I had two lovely pieces of pork belly, each a little over a pound.  The skin had already been removed. I cut each piece in half lengthwise, giving me a total of four pieces, each the width of the slices of roast pork you get in a Chinese take-out.  

The Whole Foods' butcher's wrapper paper assured me that this pig had been humanely raised and cared for.  No tail docking.  No growth hormones.  No animal by-products in the feed.  Same type of care was indicated for cows and chickens.  No beak-clipping or crowding for chickens, no tail docking or electric prods for the cows.  It was all very warm and fuzzy, but the bottom, line, which is not mentioned on the paper, is that all of these animals are going to be slaughtered.  Death be not proud.

I tried two different marinades, which I've given you hereunder (hee hee, gotta use those lawyer words now and then).  They are both good but different.  The second one included five-spice powder, and the bottle I opened today was overwhelmed by the star anise.  I used it anyway, and that flavor came out too much, almost to the point of spoiling an otherwise delicious piece of pork.  I am going to look for a different brand of five-spice powder for next time - or if I get ambitious, pick up a coffee grinder and make it myself.

Other than the different marinades, both types of pork were cooked for the same temperature and for the same amount of time.

Pork Marinade #1:

2/3 cup hoisin sauce

3 tablespoons orange blossom honey

1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons white wine

1 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

1 1/2 tablespoons Heinz ketchup

Whisk together the above ingredients and add to 1 pound pork belly in a plastic storage bag.

Pork Marinade #2 (adapted from The Chinese Takeout Cookbook, by Diana Kuan)
1/4 cup sherry
1/4 cup dark soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
1 teaspoon five-spice powder

Whisk together the above ingredients, and add to 1 pound of pork belly in a plastic storage bag.  

1/4 cup orange blossom honey, for brushing onto the meat

Marinate the pork for 3 to 4 hours in the refrigerator.  Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.  Place the pork, fat side up, on a rack over a baking pan, after letting excess marinade drip off.  Use the honey to brush the tops of the pork that was marinated in Marinade #2.  Roast the pork for 45 minutes; halfway through, turn the pork over.  Brush some honey on the #2 pork.  Brush on some of the remaining marinade onto the #1 pork.

At the end of 45 minutes, turn the pork over one more time, fat side up again, and brush with honey or marinade, respectively.  Finish the pork under the low broil setting.  

19th Nervous Breakdown

Saturday - Owwwww!  What a way to wake up!  Much too late (I have errands, damn it!), dizzy (still not adjusted to the glasses, which by the way are so strong they could stand in for the lenses in the Hubbell telescope), hurting like hell (duh), and plagued by an ear worm which is hitting just a little too close to home.  Come, walk this way so you can share it with me:

You're the kind of person you meet at certain dismal dull affairs.
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud running up and down the stairs.
Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years.
And though you've tried you just can't hide your eyes are edged with tears.

You better stop, look around, 
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. 
Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown.

Yeah, that's where I'm coming from today.

One of my favorite actors in the whole darn world is Mandy Patinkin. He has a talent for portraying neurotic, high-strung, shoulda-been-medicated characters, my favorite being Dr. Jeffrey Geiger on "Chicago Hope."  Yes, I know he has a reputation for being difficult on the set of whatever TV show he is filming, I still love him.  I also loved him as Jason Gideon on "Criminal Minds", and one of my favorite set of lines comes from the very first episode:

Morgan: Reid, are you good with this? We’ve got a woman who’s only got a few hours left to live, an incomplete profile, and a Unit Chief on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Gideon: [enters the room] They don’t call them nervous breakdowns anymore. Reid: It's called a major depressive episode.

If the great Jason Gideon can have a major depressive episode, so can I. And in the course of a long and sometimes overdramatic life, I have, perhaps not 19 times, but often enough to know, having started at the tender age of five, and after dusting off my B.A. in psychology, that I have a problem.  Okay, this isn't news to me nor anyone who knows me well.  Depression is a disease, and while I have made a million jokes about it at my own expense, I take it very seriously when someone else is reporting depressive symptoms.  It seems I may have been in denial regarding this current episode and I don't know how or if it is tied in with the fibromyalgia symptoms.

Well.  More of this another time.  The day ended much better than it started, with dinner at Kobe's to celebrate the 18th birthday of the daughter of very dear friends.  I had a drink and a lovely dinner with shrimp and scallops and my son will most certainly enjoy the plentitude of leftovers. Tomorrow I have cooking plans focussing on the pork belly and hot German potato salad. The Magic are playing the Cleveland Cavaliers. The weather has been rather nice.  I do not have to go back to work Monday morning; right now, the stress from court would shatter this fragile facade of calm.  Knowing, then, that I do not have to appear in court has kept my chi from being skewed too badly. And the beat goes on.

Living in a White Bread World -The Best Damn Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Friday, Day 8 - My house smells wonderful!  No, it's not a new air freshener scent, it's BACON.  In the oven, lovely, sizzling, getting-near-crispy bacon.

Robert and I had been talking about making bacon, tomato and cheese sandwiches on the panini grill, so I picked up these gorgeous heirloom tomatoes at Whole Foods, cooked the bacon, checked the cheese drawer for the extra sharp cheddar, and ... the bread.  Oh.  Well yes, we've got perfectly good Pepperidge Farm sandwich bread in the house, but maybe perfectly good isn't good enough.

So before I have to head out for yet another appointment - this one to the dentist - I am going to ready the bread machine to bake up a white bread.  Let's see how the panini grill does with that.

My CT scan got cancelled this morning because the insurance authorization did not come through as of yet.  This has me a little pissed off at AvMed, but just a little. Things happen, and besides, their prescription drug program rocks.  So we reset for next week, and God willing and the crick don't rise, there won't be any more delays.

My head is still scrambled and I am loathe to tackle the ADA and FMLA paperwork because of that.  It is difficult for me to break down and understand instructions and when I try to read explanations or just plain blocks of information, my brain "shorts out" and my eyes (even with my new glasses) start to skitter across the page.  Perfect example - I want to leave the bread machine on time delay, so that it will be ready close to dinner.  I go to read the instructions for using the time delay feature and I get confused by the reference to adding hours to arrive at a certain time.  I have to calm down and re-read the instructions twice before I can perform this simple task.  Once upon a time I passed the Florida bar exam ... the good news is that I haven't misplaced my coffee cup lately.

Made it to the dentist.  Driving with my new glasses was awesome.  I felt so empowered by my new specs, I headed over to the Asian market on my way home, in search of dark soy sauce.  Got the soy sauce, found the five-spice powder (I am certain the bottle I have been using has been open since George W's first term of office), thus putting me in position for tomorrow's experiments in cooking.  Two nice pieces of pork belly ... two different marinades, both Asian.  My little Asian market also saved me a trip to Walmart in search of frozen mussels, which will form the basis of the sauce to be poured over Cory's squid ink pasta.  Yeah, I'm not going to eat the squid ink pasta either, but my son loves it.  Hopefully the finished dish will be at least as good as the one he had in Miami, maybe even as good as what he ate in Bologna, Italy.

Since I can now see the world around me, I noticed a big, honking billboard on John Young Parkway, while driving to the dentist, which annoyed me.  It has annoyed me in the past, but then when I started driving in a fog, I avoided driving distances and thus forgot about it.  Big sign, advertising a church for "real" people.  What do they mean by "real" people?  "Real" people as opposed to what?  Artificial people? Cyborgs? Robots? Wookies? Other Christians?  Bah!

I'm here to tell you that the best damn grilled cheese sandwich started with the best damn white bread.  Nothing quite that delicious had ever come out of my bread machine, and after using it to make these sammies, I may never eat packaged bread again.

The white bread recipe is easy.  Even an Uptown Girl can make it.

This is the order in which my bread machine manufacturer recommends adding the ingredients.  The water should be warm, between 105 and 110 degrees.  Baby bottle temperature.  All other ingredients should be room temperature.

1 cup water
1 extra-large egg
3 1/2 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I use kosher)
1/3 cup dry whole milk (I use Nestle brand "Nido" or you can use nonfat)
2 teaspoons bread machine yeast
3 tablespoons butter

Add everything in the order given, through and including the dry milk.  Very gently and carefully stir the dry ingredients just to combine.  Do not go too deep or you will expose the wet ingredients, which you do not want to do. Tap the bread pan against the counter once or twice to even out the ingredients, and then with a wooden spoon, form a shallow well in the center, and add the yeast.  Divide the butter into four even pieces, and place one on each corner around the pan.  Bake on the basic or white setting.  Let the bread cool a bit before removing it from the pan.

Each sandwich uses two thick-cut slices of the white bread, Hellman's mayonnaise, three slices of your favorite cheese, two slices from a gorgeous heirloom tomato, three pieces of crispy bacon, and some coarse salt.  Spread some mayonnaise on each slice of bread.  On one of the slices begin stacking two slices of cheese, the tomato, some salt on each slice of tomato, the bacon, and the last slice of cheese.  Finish by putting the second piece of bread on top of everything.

Spread a little more mayonnaise on the outside of each slice of bread, and cook according to your panini grill's instructions, or in preheated nonstick skillet.

Look at that gorgeous sandwich!  Tomato soup?  You don't need no stinking tomato soup with this baby!  Add a pickle and you've got your green vegetable, if you are that kind of person.  Or just go naked, and be the envy of every puppy on your living room couch.

Walk This Way - Peace, Love, Pork Belly

Thursday, Day 7 - Today's ear worm is courtesy of Steven Tyler and Aerosmith.  The full lyrics are a bit naughty, and have nothing to do with today's post, but the "walk this way" joke has been around since vaudeville.

Walk this way, talk this way
Walk this way, talk this way
Ah, just give me a kiss ...

The best part of this song, besides the opening guitar, is the story behind the inspiration for the song title and lyrics.

This may be an urban legend, but the story goes that the band had the music, but no lyrics to go with it.  They took a break, went to the movie theatre and saw Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein", found this scene beyond hilarious, and the rest is Aerosmith history.

So glad it only took me a week to figure out that I have to get up and out each day.  You know, walk - the only exercise I can still do - so that I don't become one with the couch.  Some day I hope to try tai chi, which is actually recommended for folks with chronic pain, but for now, it's walking, with or without my cane.  Even though I had to give up tae kwon do, at least while I was working I was moving.  Back and forth, up and down.  I always got up and walked to the copy machine each time I printed out a few pages, even called it my cardio.  

While I'm on leave, sitting around the house, if I am not careful I'll end up sitting around the house (a very bad Orson Welles joke).  I don't want to lose anymore weight, and it seems to have finally stopped its precipitous slide down, but I don't want to start gaining again either.  So walk I will, making a conscious effort to do so.

Part of the problem is that my dogs don't hunt - nor do they walk.  Not one of them is leash-trained, which is why we spend a small fortune for paper towels and pee pee pads. I have a fairly new baby stroller put aside, which I originally bought to take walks with Athene.  Because I suffer tremendous Jewish guilt at the thought of treating one dog better than the other, I also tried shlepping the two (and later three) other dogs along, on leashes.  How many ways can you express disaster?  I like to think I learned from that experience, and will restrict myself to one dog-at-a-time accompanying me on my strolls.  Or more likely, I will plug in my iPhone, set it to music, and boogie on down the road.

At this very moment, I am a bit of a nervous wreck.  For one thing, I have to drive a distance, and I haven't picked up my new glasses yet.  For two things, I am headed to one of a multitude of appointments, but this one is special.  I wasn't certain whether I should mention it here, as it is rather personal (no, not the gynecologist - that's next week), but I suppose it is integral to my story.

Driving to my appointment was a hoot.  A bad hoot, as I was as near-sighted as Mr. Magoo, and I had to drive on the turnpike as well as I-4.  Oy.  But I made it there, and the meeting was productive.  There will be further meetings, once a week for as long as it takes.  Last time, it took ten years.

After the appointment I headed straight to Whole Foods in Dr. Phillips.  I wanted pork belly, peace and tranquility, and I knew I could get all three there.  I spent a marvelous time shopping; let's face it, I always feel better after a couple of hours walking around a food market.  I picked up stuff I can only get there - a certain brand of kimchee for Cory, good smoked whitefish salad, fresh pasta, aged Gouda for Rob, quinoa salad for me.  Keep your kale, I'm into quinoa this season.  I'm so juiced about fresh pork belly that I don't have to soak for three days to remove the salt, I can't wait to cook it.  I want Asian flavors, and I remember seeing the perfect recipe - somewhere.  I'll find it, and if I can't find it, I'll invent it.

Soundbite of the Day: Never underestimate the intelligence of your family pets.  As you may know, my Yorkie boy Woody can talk.  He has a knowledge and understanding of English that is rather impressive.  Just today, when I told him he was going to have a shower, he replied "don't want."  When I repeated myself, he gave me a dirty look, turned his back on me, and walked upstairs.  He can say things like Mama, Raba (Robert) and Ira.  Smart dog.

But the real story here has to do with Ira's "spot", the place on my left side where he slept glued to me for many years.  In my blog post from just this week, I wrote about how none of my furry kids would occupy that spot, even though I had repeatedly invited them to do so.

Well ... last night, I began to suspect that Anakin might be reading my blog ... tonight, I was utterly convinced that Anakin and Chelsea have been reading the blog together, and decided to gaslight me.  Make me think I'm losing my mind (not a far leap these days) by each doing exactly what I said they had never done.  I don't know what's weirder - that they know how to read, or that they gained access to a computer.

Incidentally, the Mel Brooks movie with the most great lines is "History of the World, Part I", including my favorite "walk this way" sight joke.  He recycles the joke in two other movies, "Robin Hood - Men in Tights", and the second "Producers" movie (the one based on the Broadway play).

My favorite Mel Brooks movie?  Whichever one I happen to be watching at the time.  Mel Brooks is a comedic genius, the greatest stand-up philosopher of modern times.  It's good to be the King.  Long may he reign.

Uptight, Out of Sight - Beef Empanadas, Part 2

Wednesday, Day 6 - Did not sleep most of last night.  Insane itching takes its toll.  I am as crabby as Baltimore with none of the charm.  Instead of relaxing, this time out of the office is making me feel like an old Stevie Wonder song.  I still have a bunch of medical appointments coming up and there is no comfort in that.  Who knows what they will find?  Or not find? How long will I need to be on leave? Will I ever be able to go back to work? What if I can't go back?

Okay, enough of this spit.  Things could be a lot worse.  I could live and work in Ferguson, Missouri for instance, instead of within easy driving distance of The Happiest Place on Earth.

I could be undergoing chemotherapy, like too many of my friends are having to do.

Very bad news this morning out of Eglin Air Force Base, in the Florida Panhandle, where 11 Marines were killed in a helicopter crash.  Yesterday, more terrible news created by ISIS, yet another beheading, where the knife-wielding militant was a child.  There's something to put on his resume.

And it's a good thing I'm not running for President, because like Hillary, I delete personal emails.  Hello, who doesn't?  If you don't periodically delete emails, you get a nastygram from your carrier, and no one can get hold of you and you end up missing a lot of important messages.

I could be a Republican.  Or I could be a Democrat.  Either way, it's bad news.

Despite a slow start, there was some good news today.  I finished the beef empanadas, and according to my husband, they are "the best."   I also gave Chelsea that bath she so badly needed.  A nice, long soak in warm, medicated suds; conditioning for her hair, and I trimmed her bangs; and a blow dry which left her looking pretty, if I say so myself.

Beef Empanadas, Part 2

When last we met to cook, we had finished preparing the filling for the empanadas.  I then refrigerated the filling for two days, but an overnight would also work to let the flavors fully develop, and the temperature and texture come together for easy scooping.

This will fill 14 discs. Each package of Goya Discos has 10 pastry discs. So you can have leftover filling or leftover discs. This time I voted for leftover filling, which will not go to waste.  Next time I may opt for leftover discs, and then will fill them with apple pie filling or leftover mashed potatoes and fried onions.  You get the idea.

So to finish this recipe, you will need:

1 - 14 oz. package frozen Goya Discos (white, not yellow), defrosted

Wondra flour

canola oil, for frying

Place each disc on wax paper that has been lightly sprinkled with Wondra flour in the center of the paper.

Sprinkle a light dusting of Wondra over the disc, and then place the second piece of wax paper on top of that.

Gently roll the disc out so that it is slightly larger and pliable.

Place 2 tablespoons of filling in the center of the disc. Use your finger, dipped in a small dish of water, to dampen the edge of the bottom half of the disc. Fold the top half over the filling so that the edges of the disc meet neatly, and with a small amount of pressure seal the edges shut.  Use the tines of a fork to press down around the entire edge, sealing the empanada.

Heat about an inch of oil in a large skillet and fry the empanadas in batches, until golden brown on both sides. Remove with a slotted spoon to paper towels and drain the empanadas.

We ate these "as is" but ideally there would be sour cream and homemade guacamole and maybe salsa, and a side of refried beans "with everything", another on my list of recipes to be tried.  Corn and black bean salad?  With jicama.  Working on it.