Fish Wednesday: Manic Depressive Edition

In spite of the fact that there is some excellent news to be had around the NEV HQ, it’s tempered with some rather less than excellent sides. The dominant household trauma is around a new furnace, a must fix now situation that will empty the coffers of my hard earned dollars, money I had hoped to spend on something rather more romantic than than a large appliance that will ensure I do not see my breath when I stumble out of bed on those cold February mornings. Along with the unanticipated investment in my home, there’s some more personal stuff that has left me with a big heavy suitcase full of sadness, and not the wheelie kind of suitcase that you can toss in the overhead.

You’d think that things both excellent and awful would cancel each other out, leaving me with a sort of manageable stasis, but instead, it is a roller coaster ride of high places with vast views and stomach wrenching plunges to unexpected depths. This is all a lot of metaphorical smoke blowing, what I ‘m saying is that things are 17 kinds of crazy lately. And in order to manage that without completely losing my mind, I have been back in the kitchen.

There has been quite the array of cooking lately. There was a luscious chili with cilantro pesto — man, that was good — followed by an excellent cauliflower curry. There was a nutty mushroom and green bean pilaf made from quinoa and sunflower seeds that I toasted myself in a cast iron skillet. There were several bbqed sausages, spicy chicken, if you are wondering, and some black bean and kale tacos with red salsa. There were two loaves of home made bread, one failed, the other, more successful following some research about the fail — too much liquid, probably. And there was a generous serving of grilled salmon, just the other side of pink, served with peas from the garden sauteed in a little too much sesame oil. There has also been a lot of fresh fruit — bananas, strawberries, and melon — all eaten in a totally unscientific plan to make up for drinking too much coffee and eating too much chocolate. Have I used the term manic-depressive yet?

“Are you eating okay?” These are the words of a friend who was expressing her concern when I told her of the mania ruling my stars these days. I had to laugh. Am I eating okay?! I haven’t eaten this well since, well, actually, I almost always eat this well, I am inclined towards the kind of diet that wholesome California raised hippies like, only with a thick icing of pastry and coffee. But I had been in kind of a lazy phase about cooking until this recent shift. There’s a certain frenzy to my aggressively excellent diet right now — if I could use that power for good, or better yet, to will myself away from caffeine and cocoa solids, well, tall buildings in a single bound and all that.

You should cook more often, I say to you. Though I understand that you do not have the kind of time I do, nor the freedom from the dietary whims of others, perhaps. You do not have the fattest pink fleshed salmon on sale — fresh, no less — at your local supermarket, maybe, or an abundance of peas in your back yard. Here’s hoping you also do not have an immigrant’s worth of emotional baggage cluttering up your kitchen table.If someone could roll that stuff out of here, that would be awesome.

The degree of stress — and I am by no means implying that it is all bad, only that there is a LOT of it — I am carrying seems nearly impossible and in order to deal with it, I have decided to do a little cooking. You should totally come to dinner.