I will figure this title nonsense out later

I am still unemployed, and reality has hit, and it turns out that a single person eating paleo can blow an entire month's grocery budget in two weeks. I won't comment on what percentage of those groceries has included non-paleo items like diet fizzy caffeinated beverages ("to make sure I concentrate!") and the occasional (okay, more than occasional) Snickers bar, but I am attempting to teach myself a lesson by using up all the crap in my freezer and fridge before I venture out to Safeway again, which has actually led to some pretty decent meals. Also no more soda, which is a blessing, because caffeine fucks you up. And by "you" I mean "me". Anyway, I sat down the other day and went through everything in my freezer and came up with this glorious recipe, which I love so much I'll probably eat it for a week straight and then crash and burn and never want to look at it again. Onward!

1 lb chuck roast, sliced thinly

1 yellow or red onion, sliced into wedges

1 green or red bell pepper, sliced (I used frozen pre-cut, which is why you see two colors in there)

5 cloves garlic, sliced and crushed with the side of a knife

3 Thai chilis, deseeded (sub Trader Joe's jalapeño hot sauce or non-smoky hot sauce of your choice)

3 Tbsp fish sauce

3 Tbsp oyster sauce (be careful if you're gluten-free, more brands than not have wheat ingredients)

3 Tbsp crushed, chopped basil leaves

Fry the bell peppers, garlic and onion wedges in cooking fat over medium-low heat until onions are translucent.

Add fish sauce to deglaze pan, and immediately after, add beef, oyster sauce and chilis. Fry until beef arrives at desired doneness -- I eat it rare, and usually it's in the pan on medium-low heat for about five minutes.

Add basil and stir to combine. DON'T OVERCOOK THE BASIL. The longer it's in the pan, the more flavor it will lose.

Serve immediately. This is also great reheated.

So one of the activities I have chosen to fill my sudden and copious amounts of free time involves me hanging around lots of cops, and one of their favorite things to do is talk about how easy it is to break into someone's house and some of the various techniques for doing so. Apparently there's the old "knock on the door during working hours and if no one answers, go 'round the back" technique that is being used all over the bay area, the great "wait until summer and then see whose newspapers and door flyers are piling up on their front porch" technique, and my favorite, the "quietly break into your house and rape and kill you while you are trying to sleep" trick.

As has been previously established, I am small, I am unlikely to win in a knife fight and though I am evidently a dead shot given a rather generous amount of time under ideal conditions to line up my target and press the trigger (see below), I do not actually own a gun, so until I take some classes in rudimentary hammer-throwing, it's probably fair to say that I won't be doing much more than expiring gracelessly in the event of an actual home invasion.

Which is, uh, what went through my mind when I woke up not long ago at one o'clock in the morning to the noise of someone trying to come in through my back door.

Now, my apartment has a somewhat unique layout. I live on the bottom floor of a house built a little over a hundred years ago, which seems ancient to me, but everyone on the east coast/UK/everywhere else on the planet is probably laughing. At some point the house was converted into two apartments and acquired a garage, and while the top has a pretty normal layout, the garage was placed right in the middle of the bottom apartment, so the space I inhabit is U-shaped and includes both a long, thin galley kitchen with the longest, blankest wall you've ever seen (periodically interrupted by a row of electrical outlets inexplicably placed at chest-level at five-foot intervals) and, my favorite, a tiny room with no windows that is just about big enough to comfortably hold a queen bed and a chest of drawers. Technically I have two bedrooms at my disposal, but the second one has windows on both walls, and the neighbors have a flood light, so in the interest of diplomacy, I don't sleep in there. But what this means is that in a fire or an earthquake or a home invasion, I have a high chance of being trapped in this room.

So I'm lying in bed, a little freaked out because someone's trying to get into my house, and since I know from talking to so many cops that the only reason anyone would want to get into my house in the middle of the night would be to fuck my shit up old-school, I am pretty sure that this could be it for me. I debate the likelihood of navigating through my phone's contact list to find the number for dispatch in time for them to do anything about it (911 calls from cells go to CHP and it can take a long time to get transferred). In the end I get out of bed, grab the hammer I'd been using earlier in the day to hang pictures (that was conveniently waiting for me in the hallway) and wait, holding my breath, by the back door. It's definitely someone trying to get in.

Eventually I run out of breath to hold. I debate calling 911 or running upstairs to my landlord's apartment or booking it out the front door, but something occurs to me. Why are they being so quiet? They could just smash the glass over the doorknob, unlock the deadbolt and they're in. Something's fishy. So in my infinite wisdom I reach out and very, very slowly pull the curtain away from the window.

There's no one there. The scratching continues.

I've had enough of being close to pissing myself, so I unlock the deadbolt and throw the door open, ready to put the fear of god into whoever is fucking with me, and internet, looking up at me are three gigantic gangsters of my acquaintance who have terrorized this side of the island for as long as I've lived here.

I can only imagine that they had met with a measure of success during previous cat door investigations and ransacked a number of kitchens, and I just happened to be next on the list. The raccoons sat and listened attentively as I described in exhaustive and inarticulate detail their various shortcomings and then ended with WHAT THE FUCK GET OUT OF MY YARD, at which point they did the raccoon equivalent of the one-finger salute and turned around and went onto the next house, no doubt on a mission to see how many people they could put in the hospital via heart attack by the time the sun came up again.

We all managed to escape with our respective lives, although some of us (me) left our dignity on the back doormat, and about a million years later, I went back to sleep. And the hammer found a place of honor under my pillow.

I don't eat grains. Mostly. I went off wheat for a long time and now it makes me ache when I have it in any substantial way. If I eat a small pizza I'm instantly congested and it starts a sneezing fit. I don't even know, it's bizarre.  Maybe it's the cheese. Anyway, this presents special problems when I've got a meal I really really love, except for what goes around it -- bread, flatbread, tortilla, taco shell.

So normally I make this thing with cabbage leaves, but cabbage was a dollar a pound at Safeway tonight, and the smallest cabbage on offer weighed three pounds. Mostly I stay away from dairy too, so no butter-braised cabbage for me, and I can't eat that much borscht or coleslaw, so. Bell peppers, on the other hand, were a dollar each, and I picked up this gigantic gnarly yellow thing that looked like it would make a good carnitas receptacle, and this happened.

NOTE:  If you've got leftover cactus from that desert stir-fry recipe, now is a great time to use them -- toss them in with the jalapeños and onions!

1 lb cheap lean beef (not ground), thinly-sliced

¼ yellow onion, sliced into strips

2 jalapeños, diced

2 large bell peppers, normal-shaped is best

8 oz tomato paste

½ Tbsp cumin

3 Tbsp lard, tallow or olive oil (not extra-virgin)

Get out your crock pot, and put in all the beef, along with 1 cup of water. Turn it on high and cook six hours, or until the beef falls apart when you grab it with tongs.

When beef is ready, heat some cooking oil in a pan and fry the jalapeños and onions together, until onions are translucent.

Quarter the peppers, and remove the white insides, and any seeds. Set aside.

Add the beef, tomato paste and cumin, and any additional oil you need to prevent the beef from sticking to the pan. When everything is warm and mixed together, turn off the heat and fill the bell pepper "shells" with the taco filling. Top with any normal taco sauces or toppings.

So first I got laid off, then my computer died, then I didn't get the job I really wanted, and then I had no way to edit photos and had to sit on the floor in front of the TV because the senile old laptop required a peripheral keyboard and wouldn't recognize the network I had set up in the back of the house, and internet, it has been one hell of a spring. Have some photos.

 

This started off as a very simple recipe made up of a rabbit and a young nopale or prickly pear cactus pad, the sort of thing you could conceivably make given a cooking surface and a pellet gun or a rabbit snare if you were lost in the American southwest. But internet, we are hopefully not lost in the American southwest, and as-was, this recipe was kind of boring -- rabbit is as lean and dry as chicken breast (and tastes a lot like it too), and frankly, it kind of needed something to spice it up.

In celebration of yesterday's 80° weather, I give you my favorite photo I've ever taken.  I am extremely sad that this is the biggest-resolution copy I have.

I got laid off last Friday and plan to continue to be in a funk over it for another week or two.  See you with some awesome recipes and a harrowing break-in story then.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to San Francisco a few times a year. We only ever made it out to Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli Square, though, and while most of those place had pretty good views of Alcatraz, it took me until yesterday to actually commit to a ferry ride.

I have to admit I love the Alcatraz show more than I can possibly say. It has a strong female lead who's treated with respect by both the characters and the writers, a strong male Latino lead whose weight is not played for laughs, and deals so well with so many real-life topics -- experimentation on prisoners, horrific violence, race issues. I love Sam Niell and Parminder Nagra. This show was practically made for me.

They do get some things wrong; Rebecca should be Inspector Madsen, not Detective Madsen. The series is mostly filmed in Vancouver except for a few aerial scene-establishing shots, and while they're great about setting things in Bay Area cities that have real names, like Oakland and Walnut Creek and Daly City, they fictionalize the names of parks and hardware stores and racecourses. In the mine episode, I got excited because I got some of the clues, only to find out that "Sunset" did not mean "The Sunset District", but the fictional Sunset Beach, which is actually called Fort Funston. Oh, well.  The show is amazing, and I hope they renew it.

And directly opposite the steps in the recreation area, where much of the 1960s parts of the show are set, a little treat, all for me:

Originally I had assumed I'd be posting this as a failure, but I was shocked when that, in fact, was not entirely the case. I was shopping on Marin Sun Farms's website for a nice rib-eye steak (my favorite cut), and noticed that there were two options -- dry-aged and not dry-aged. The dry-aged was considerably more expensive.

I went and looked up dry-aging, and it turns out that beef benefits from a prolonged (7 days or less) period of near-freezing refrigeration in order to remove and concentrate the beefy flavor. I didn't know that I'd tried anything dry-aged before, but I didn't want to pay the hefty price tag on the good stuff, so I looked up some how-tos online. Most of them said it was possible to dry-age beef in the fridge, but seemed to assume that you had an entire rib-eye roast at your disposal. I was tempted, but 1) my fridge, bless it, has been known to turn out moldy guanciale and I wasn't going to risk $250 worth of nice meat, 2) would it even fit? and 3) would it be possible for me to cut up? I thought the loss of a single rib-eye steak would be acceptable, so I went ahead and ordered two, and stuck one in the fridge on a cooling rack, on top of some cheesecloth, and waited a week.

Ew.

I'd watched it worriedly all week and imagined the worst, and even took it out a day early because I just couldn't see how this entire cut of meat wasn't crusted through and totally inedible. I thought it would be cat food. But if I poked it, I could feel some give further down in the steak, and when I finally started trimming it:

Huh! Look at that deep red. I'm not sure what the brown bits are, but I went ahead and seared it on both sides in a cast-iron pan, and then baked it in the oven with some cauliflower, and it came out rare and delicious, and tasting strongly of grass-fed beef. And I didn't die!

Likely not an experiment I'd repeat with a single steak, given that I lost a lot of tissue, plus the fat layer around the outside. I didn't take a picture of the pile of trimmings, and while it doesn't look like the steak is much smaller in this picture, it really is. It would be worth it on an entire ribeye, I think -- maybe that's my next experiment. Anyone want to loan me $250?