rumaroma.

Wellllllll....a lot happened in 2013. We laughed. We cried. We took cat tranquilizers and ate cereal in our sleep. Today: a new day dawns, or it did do some hours ago. And mere moments from now, I shall go crashing noisily out into the spent-firework-littered, empty-streeted wilderness of 2014, my brain steely-eyed (?) and my mettle pre-tested (actually my mettle pre-tested out of 2014 and just skipped up to 2015, totally unexpected), and the whole of my being fortified with an impenetrable (?) combination of a mystic's deluded optimism, the gentle cynicism of the elderly, and the near-silence of the socially fatigued.

Oh right, above is an awesome pho from a couple days ago, and below is the (pre-saucing) Christmas Day continuation of our plan to "have a nice meal together": this is warm-smoked salmon with caraway sauerkraut, leftover mashed potatoes, leftover brown butter, and a little dab of strong mustard on the side. It sure didn't taste like leftover anything: this is what we should be doing with salmon and sauerkraut from now on. The only thing missing was a fresh-baked loaf of pumpernickel.

casting our feelings into words.

This is an actual photo Mara took last week.

+++

I'm trying one of my flaky, rarely-successful health experiments this summer, and maybe I'll even write seriously about what the motivations for it are.

But probably not, as VDuck is not really a platform for that kind of writing. It might seem like it could be, I mean we talk about some personal stuff here, right? Not really. VDuck is a tightly-controlled and meticulously-obscured representation of life here at 100M that is almost never as serious as real life is. It's like The Matrix of Amsterdam food blogs.

But what if we wrote a truly serious sentence, like this: I'm discovering that this relationship between 1) allowing people social access to me/us, and 2) my firm control of that access is turning out to be one of the defining influences/issues in my adult life, and the entire process of denying that access is getting to be exhausting in its boringness, or possibly vice versa.

Serious questions abound. Does it have to be this difficult? Do I really need to obscure everything I say out here? What would happen if I didn't? It's not just the blog, I'm pretty difficult to get at in real life as well. But what am I gaining from this? Mystery? Scarcity? Am I afraid the real shit's not interesting enough? Am I afraid to be disappointed in people I think I like?

Huh. We'll just let that sit there for a while and see if it survives The Deletion Process. Up next: My Flaky Summer Diet XIV.

P.S.: I'm so hilarious. The next thing I did after this public moment of existential angst was to completely un-ironically turn on comment moderation, essentially controlling people's access to me, etc. Seek help!

+++

expiring, mine.

I think my cooking might be getting better, I don't remember this ever being as good as it just was. Plus, the way I did it tonight was simpler and easier than the Bayona recipe. Secrets: longer cooking times for onions and kraut (20 minutes?), lots of black pepper, beer instead of wine, and the only spices involved are generous amounts of thyme, juniper, and caraway. Salmon sauteed in butter then placed on already-caramelized onions and beer-soaked kraut. Skillet into the oven for 10 minutes.

Or...maybe it wasn't the recipe changes. My sauerkraut expired a month ago. Which raises the question exactly when does "expired" sauerkraut become inedible or dangerous.

+++