Quinoa? More like qui-YES-a!

It has finally begun to get a bit warmer here in the city. Central Park is abloom with magnolias and cherry blossoms and dandelions, and the air is filled with possibility. In rereading that old classic, The Great Gatsby (yes, in preparation for the movie, ha), I happened upon a passage that matched this mood to a T.

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air."

—The Great Gatsby

Well put, Fitzgerald. All this spring business makes me think, what foods embody that notion of possibility and renewal? Seeds and grains and eggs are some that come to mind. I happen to like all three. Quinoa is one of the seeds I recently learned how to cook. And I discovered that it tastes darn good with eggs and hummus. Add a poached salmon fillet and it's a light yet hearty dinner.

Quinoa, tomatoes, and eggs

1/4 onion, minced

3/4 cup water

1/2 cup white quinoa

1 large tomato, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

2 extra-large eggs

1-2 stalks of scallions

Salt and/or sugar, to taste

1 tbsp hummus

Find a pot that has a lid and drizzle it with olive oil. Add the onion and saute over medium heat until translucent, about 5 minutes. Then add in the water and bring to a boil, then add the quinoa and bring to a boil again, and cover. Turn down the heat slightly and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat, but don't lift the lid just yet. Let it sit for about 5-10 minutes. Alas, fluffy quinoa requires patience, young grasshopper. Meanwhile, let us distract ourselves from hunger by preparing the eggs.

Set a nonstick skillet over high heat and a drizzle a bit of olive oil inside. Add in the tomato and garlic. Let cook for a about 5 minutes (I like to smash the tomato a bit with a wooden spoon to get all the juices out) until the tomato is really broken down. Add a bit of water if it looks too dry; the consistency should be slightly watery. 

Crack in the eggs and beat with a wooden spoon until the yolk is broken up. Let cook a bit before flipping the eggs and breaking them up a bit more. Add in the scallions and season with salt (and a pinch of sugar, if you like) when the eggs are just about solidified. 

Lift the lid of your quinoa (if you haven't already), and spoon about half into your bowl. Spoon as much egg as you like over the top and add the dollop of hummus* on the side. This recipe makes about two servings of quinoa and 1 serving of eggs, if you're an egg lover, and 2 servings of eggs if you're not a big egg eater.

*This tastes surprisingly delicious with hummus! I also imagine it would be good with a bit of corn or chopped bell pepper.

Yay for seeds that taste like grains! Quinoa, my dear, you are not only fun to pronounce, but also fun to eat.

zhajiang mian, franny & zooey

Lately I've been addicted to two things: rooibos tea and noodles. OK, so noodles are kind of a lifelong thing, but the rooibos tea is a recent obsession. It's so good. If you haven't had it, I implore you to try it. I love everything about it, from the color, to the fragrance, to the fact that it's caffeine-free (translation for the non-old ladies out there: I can drink it anytime). Actually, my favorite thing about it is the fragrance. Definitely herbal jelly-esque.

I've been in somewhat of a book rut lately. Too much working, perhaps. So I picked up the smallest book I could find—the only thing I had time to read last week: J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey stories, which I had read some years past but couldn't remember very well. This time around, I couldn't help noticing just how negatively it all begins. How mocking it is of college preppies who are self-absorbed and trying to be all deep about life and everything. The part I did remember from last time was the fact that Franny orders a chicken sandwich because she doesn't have much of an appetite.

"'All I want's a chicken sandwich. And maybe a glass of milk. ... You order what you want and all, though. I mean, take snails and octopuses and things. Octopi. I'm really not at all hungry.'
Lane looked at her, then exhaled a thin, over expressive stream of smoke down at his plate. 'This is going to be a real little doll of a weekend,' he said. 'A chicken sandwich, for God's sake.'"

It's so true. I would totally order a chicken sandwich if I didn't really feel like eating anything. It's just so boring. I know a lot of people really love chicken to death, but I am most definitely not one of them.

But anyway, going back to my obsession with noodles. If Franny had ordered noodles instead of a chicken sandwich, I think the story would have turned out differently. But I guess not everyone likes noodles all that much, so maybe I'm all wrong about that. Anyway, I made noodles for dinner. And I have to say they were much, much tastier than a chicken sandwich, even though they ended up tasting differently from what I had envisioned.

I wasn't really sure what sauce to buy, you see. I don't have a Chinese supermarket right around the corner...but I do have a Korean one. So I ended up with a Korean sauce that I couldn't really read (I think it was this). It certainly didn't turn out like the Chinese version I'm used to (which is saltier, rather than sweet), and I forgot the cucumbers (rookie mistake), but I wouldn't be averse to trying this again in the future with a few tweaks! Consider the recipe below Version 1.0.

vegetarian zhajiang mian (fried sauce noodle)

1/2 onion, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

2 squares of baked tofu, cut into small cubes

2 tsp seasoned soybean paste

dash of soy sauce

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

About a bowl's worth of noodles, cooked, drained, and rinsed

drizzle of sesame oil

2 scallions, sliced

Saute the onion, garlic, and tofu over high heat for about 5 minutes.

Add the soybean paste, soy sauce, and cilantro and continue to cook over medium heat. Add water if it becomes too thick. Throw in the noodles and stir fry until the noodles have taken on the flavor of the sauce. Sprinkle with sesame oil and scallions and enjoy!

home is a mystery

"There is something false and perverse in my playing the observer, I who have lived here as long as anyone. Still these bright streets do not belong to me and I feel, not like someone who chose to move away, but as if I had been, as the expression goes, 'run out of town.' I can remember only one person to whom that disgrace actually happened and he was a dapper, fastidious little man who spoke in what we used to call a 'cultured' voice and spent the long, beautiful afternoons in the park beside the wading pond in which the children under five played. No doubt he too went to New York, the exile for those with evil thoughts."

—"Evenings at Home," Elizabeth Hardwick

I had forgotten all about this story until last night. The narrator goes back to her hometown but doesn't feel like she belongs there. Even though she technically moved away by choice, she doesn't feel like it was really a choice at all; she just never really belonged. I guess I can identify with that.

I feel like I will always be an observer here in New York. Look at that picture, for gosh sakes. This grand city will never feel like it's mine. The closest I can come to possessing it is when I'm annoyed at passersby. Or when I've lost power in the hurricane...or when I'm cursing the snow and wishing I was somewhere warmer. In other words, it only really feels like home when I'm complaining about it like an old lady complains about being stuck with her husband. I'm stuck with it, but it couldn't give a damn about me. And that's ok by me.

time well spent

Memory is a tricky beast. I want to treat it like a pet, letting it warm my lap and stroking its fur on a chilly winter's night. But it often morphs into an animal that refuses to be housebroken or tamed; I can't get it to behave any differently than what comes naturally.

Some memories appear again and again. In one, I'm sitting on the kitchen island in the house in Maryland, ripping a slice of cheap white bread into chunks, rolling them into balls before shoving them in my mouth. No guilt for throwing crusts away, nor for lazing around doing nothing.

In one of her poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay writes, "I am tired, so tired / of passing pleasant places!" I don't think I've come across a sentence that's quite so true to adult existence. So this is the great epiphany (cue quarterlife crisis)—that as adults, we spend so much time doing what we think we should do, and very little time doing what we actually want. That said, I'm going to go read a book now. Goodnight—or, as my dad wrote in an email last night, "Have a sweet dream!" (Note that it's not sweet dreams, plural. I like the idea that one sweet dream is all you need...don't you?)