Sandwiches You Will Like

Friday night there's nothing more perfect than a ninety minute PBS documentary about meaty sandwiches dripping au jus. The footage is wonderfully quirky. Only a few minutes in, you hear an alien computer voice praises tripe sandwiches. It's some dude with a tracheotomy. Sandwich makers discourse quite fondly about their creations just like a family member, "beef on weck", "muffalettas". Tomorrow I am going to make my mini-"Elvis", peanut butter,banana, bacon beauty grilled with tablespoons of butter.

Pleasure of Waiting

Even when the nights are chilly and the summer stone fruits long gone, autumn is not without it's bounty of jewels. Chestnuts and persimmons, pomegranates and bright skinned citrus. But truly autumn is not autumn until I spoon my first ripened persimmon, a pulpy pleasure which cannot be rushed.

These orange beauties sit rock hard making you doubt if they're ever going to give it up. I don't like to bring them home already ripened; I want to wait together, the fruit and me. You have long days and hard days when you snap at your dog or your husband. Too many of them pass and voila the persimmons yield to your thumb.

Great grandma Cho who use to eat her apples scraped with a spoon was particularly fond of these as is Hugo who still has most of his teeth.

Proud to be a Californian

Today I finally had cause to jump up and down just like I practiced last month after watching Deal or No Deal commerical. The Californian women(Nancy and Diane and Barbara B) did us proud, voters did me proud. It was one of the few elections where I felt individual voting counted. No amount of Republican fund raising money was going to sucker anybody. Actually tobacco millions did bust Prop 86 .

3 Day Leftover Soup

What's nice about cooking for yourself is you can do things that would cause your husband to protest and take arms. So when Clees left on Thursday morning, I promptly started a pot of garlic, potato, quinoa soup. To cap it off, I threw in my left over chile verde pork burrito. Hehehe. To add fresh flavor, chives and handful of nasturtium leaves go in at the last minute. It was fantastic. Add to that, I didn't have to share with anybody.

For Thursday dinner, I added a tired but still serviceable red cabbage, left over spare ribs and sausage from my Thai grill Wednesday dinner from Jimmy Bean, more shallots. The flavor profile gets deeper by the meal. Serve with handfuls of arugula, nasturtiums and chives, and you have one happy girl.

Since Saturday lunch I sadly finished of my friend the soup, I had to come up with a new zinger. I started making apricot lentil soup trying to follow a recipe. While I was stirring I could not resist my creative self. I threw in chopped walnuts, then green tomatoes and the good part of a worm eaten Sierra Beauty. Served with lemon juice and dollop of yogurt, my head and belly puff up with pride. I guess Clees can deflate me when he returns.