Here We Are, Now. Entertain Us.

I've been entertaining a lot this past week, having folks over for dinner and drinks out on my back porch. I had forgotten how much I enjoy having folks over for dinner. Living in a small place and on a limited budget means that dinner parties are more or less out of the question, and since I don't have a proper table to sit at and eat in doors, even small parties are fairly impossible in the winter. The upshot of that is that I don't cook as much as I would like. Cooking for one is distinctly different than cooking for lots of people. I tend to make myself simple, small meals--like pastas and rice dishes--that I can eat in a sitting without too many leftovers. If I make larger, more complicated recipes, I can't eat it fast enough, so I end up wasting food. I hate wasting food.

So with all of the people coming by this week, I decided to take the opportunity to cook a couple of feasts. I'm particularly proud of the mushroom-spinach burgers I made on Thursday, so here's the recipe for any of you folks who want to try it out.

Mushroom-Spinach Burgers
Inspired by the Asheville Brew and View (and particularly by a failed attempt to find the same in Chicago when Amanda was visiting a couple of years back)

2 lbs portabello mushrooms
1 bag of baby spinach
1 medium onion (in truth, this was half a large onion and some leftover of another onion, but I estimate it came out to roughly as much as one medium onion)
2 eggs
Bread crumbs
Garlic, thyme, basil, and other herbs to taste

I washed the portabellos and spinach, then chopped the portabellos until they were coarse. Just enough to get them into manageable pieces to sautee. Sauteed the portabellos in a large skillet, then added a good portion of white wine. Enough to essentially boil the shrooms for a bit. After that cooked for a while, I slowly added the spinach--putting the lid on the skillet when I did, so that the spinach would wilt and cook into the mushrooms--until I had added the whole bag of spinach and cooked everything until the liquid portion was gone. After that, I tossed the whole mess of mushrooms and spinach into a food processor and blended until it was good and pureed. I'd rather have had them a bit chunkier, but my food processor doesn't do that very well.

I also ran the onion through the processor, then tossed everything into a bowl and mixed it well. Added the two eggs and the bread crumbs until the mixture was firm. Then I formed it into patties and broiled them.

They were a little mushy, but all in all, they were really good, especially for a first attempt at a burger clone. The next time I try it, I'm going to leave about a third to one half of the mushrooms out of the puree and simply chop them up so that there's a bit more of a meaty feeling. Also going to add more egg and use either matzoh meal or oats instead of bread crumbs. The ultimate goal being to have a burger pattie that's firmer than the ones I had. I've also found that they firm up pretty nicely when I reheat them the next day, so I might give them more time to set before I broil them.

In the mean time, if anyone wants to come over my place for a bite to eat, let me know. The oven's all fired up and ready for you.

Speaking of Suburbia

I was exploring Jay is Games today and found the interactive work of art, Blue Suburbia. Explore the surreal environments, the haunting collage of sounds and words, the strange imagery. Blue Suburbia is what I think we'd see if we could walk around inside other people's dream lives. Enjoy, but be careful...there's a couple of dead ends.

Edit: As I've explored this further, I've found some portions of it are fairly disturbing. I know a few of you will find this genuinely creepy and that it will resonate with a couple of you in ways you might not like. Personally, I think it's a worthwhile thing to go through, but just so I'm playing fair, be warned.

Strange Dreams Come True

Gosh, I'm bad at self promotion. I can't believed this almost slipped my mind, but The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular opens tonight. This represents the culmination of two-years of gestation and workshop, and I'm really proud of what this show has become. I think it has a real sense of warmth and welcoming to it, and it really captures a lot of what I wanted it to. It has a real sense of the simplest magic of theatre: that of telling a story.



Come join us for this wonderful show.

Blog Reading

I spent the last couple of days at work reading Mr. B's blog, catching myself up on his hijinx. If you haven't read it, I recommend it highly. It's a really good mix of essays and storytelling, journals and jokes, memes and personal observations. He's got a balance there that makes it a real joy to read, and when I read it, I get a really good sense of where Mr. B is at that particular moment. It's a good way of catching up with him if my schedule's too busy to permit me to walk the block and a half to his apartment and say hi.

On occasion, I don't particularly care if I write in this blog, because everytime I sit down to write something, I think, "Eh...nobody really reads this thing anyway." Reading Mr. B's blog was a good reminder that, in fact, people do read this thing and for a lot of folks I know, it's how they keep track of where I am. So I'm going to try to update more often from now on.

Sub-Urbia

I've been watching Strange Dreams... run throughs most of this week and have thoroughly enjoyed listening to the direction that the stories have gone in. Many of them are vastly different than when I wrote them, having been told back and forth and changed with each telling. It's been fascinating to watch.

The other day before the run began, Danielle and I were walking around Water's School Gardens collecting kindling for the campfire. Water's School Gardens, for anyone who hasn't seen it, is a wonderfully overgrown and rugged piece of land, fenced off from the city by an overgrowth of brush and grass. Tall trees block your view of the skyline and fences of fallen branches separate paths from garden plots. Walking through it feels less like walking through a community garden in a major metropolitan area than it does like walking through someone's backyard deep in Appalachia. As Danielle and I gathered dried wood (not from the fences), I commented to her that I could be very content living in that space and she agreed, adding that she really was a country girl, even though she grew up in the suburbs.

I thought about that. I grew up in the suburbs, too. Lower Makefield Township. If you go there today, you see housing developments made of row upon row of identical townhouses occupied by a strange mixture of elderly retirees and young parents or miniature mansions owned by folks living out of credit cards. The same folks who used to tell me they didn't have any money, back in my canvassing days. If you go there now, it's exactly what you expect a suburb to be. It's plastic communities, it's minimalls, it's conformity. But it wasn't that way back when.

When my family first moved there, LMT was still more farms and forest than anything else. We moved into a good-sized grey/blue house on Hollow Branch Lane in one of the newly developing subdivsions in the area. What I remember is that, if you walked to the end of my street, you were at the edge of the woods. It wasn't like living in colonial America or anything--I'm pretty sure the colonists were without malls--but the woods were pretty extensive, and my brother and I spent many afternoons walking up and down the mud paths buldozers were carving through them, mucking about in streams and drainage ditches, generally ruining our good sneakers and pants. My first book collection was a collection of Golden Guides. I had almost every Golden Guide to different kinds of animals and when my brother and I would go out on an expedition, we would come back with animals a plenty and explain what they were in great detail to my mother.

Gradually, my subdivision grew, as did the subdivisions around it. Local farms where my family bought our fresh produce were sold off as the farmers got old and developers offered them a healthy retirement package. Those bulldozers whose tracks made such good hiking slowly tore down the woods and leveled the dirt and dug foundations and laid down asphalt. As the subdivisions grew, they eventually overlapped, and it wasn't long before what had been woods and farm turned into a subdivision megalopolis with munchkin box houses as far as the eye can see.

Most of the woods around my house are gone now. Now it's subdivisions and strip malls, and the drainage ditches are festering and stale and nothing lives in them. Most of my childhood stomping grounds have been stomped. Sad as that is, it always makes me happy when I find a place like Waters School Gardens, a little bastion of overgrowth and nature that has somehow managed to keep itself cut off from all the clutter of a city like Chicago.

Back in Real Life

I spent the last week or so catching up with all of the people and things I neglected during the run of The Prometheus Myth. I spent some time with my uncle here and had a long phone conversation with someone very far away and very near to my heart. I bought a book to help me study for the GRE and made flash cards to study vocabulary and started a batch of a new kind of mead (a hibiscus/apple mead that I think will be divine served cold on a summer evening). But what I've really wanted to do is to go away into the mountains and recharge for a while.

The exact feeling I want is the feeling you get when you wake up in a tent in the middle of nowhere. It's early--earlier than you'd usually wake up--and you've been sleeping on the ground and you're a little groggy, but you're rested and the morning is full of possibilities. You walk barefoot across wet, dewy grass to the remnants of your fire the night before where there are people already cooking breakfast and pouring coffee from a tin kettle (or maybe you slept next to the remnants of your fire the night before and you walk across the grass down to the spring for some water). And someone's got a guitar or folks are talking, but the key is everyone's there together.

I think I'll get that in a couple of months when I head off to Rochester for a couple of days, and I'll get it in spades in the fall when I head back down to Asheville. But for the time being, I'm here in real life and I've got this city and all of the people in it to enjoy. Life seems suddenly full of possibility, as it always does in the summer. It's a good feeling.