alien love.

Above: yesterday's Vietnamese basil rolls, concocted by Moop, foto by Moop.

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Hmm, I wanted to say something, forgot what it was, totally distracted by trying to determine the gender of my androgynous neighbor across the street who I've never seen before but is totally acting like (OK I've reached a tentative conclusion) she lives there.

My evidence to support this theory (that she lives there) is that she just came to the open window (hers, not mine) carrying a plate of food and a chair, looking very "at home" and is now enjoying the early evening sun while dangling her legs over the windowsill and having dinner.

I'm not normally much of a voyeur really, but at the moment I happen to be sitting at the "dining room" table facing the window and so she is directly in my line of sight. So I can't help noticing that whatever she is eating is posing a real challenge to traditional table manners (although since she's not at a table maybe this is moot): after she sat down, the first time I happened to look up again, she had something roughly the size and shape of a tennis shoe precariously balanced on her fork and was semi-frantically nibbling at the edges of it (I imagine the idea was to reduce its size and thus increase its manageability).

Then when I looked up again two minutes later she was (I'm not kidding) literally putting the plate up to her face and bulldozing the mystery something into her mouth with her fork, for like a minute straight, with not the slightest hint of acknowledgement or awareness that she was in a very visible place. The whole thing was kind of an anti-voyeurism PSA actually.

In the absence of anything else to say, here's a better version of the classic Japanese-American steakhouse salad dressing. Better than this one I mean.

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benihana salad dressing #2.

1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup rice vinegar or 1/4 cup apple vinegar
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp raw sugar
1 tbsp fresh ginger
1 medium carrot, peeled and roughly chopped
1/4 sweet yellow onion, roughly chopped
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

iceberg lettuce, trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces, for serving

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