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corn bean spinach mash
Good evening. It is a whole different year than it was when I started this blog, but it is still the same pandemic. Funny how that works!
Tonight’s recipe is corn bean and spinach mash, a recipe that is exactly what it sounds like. In fact it’s so simple that it barely even warrants writing up a recipe, but a cooking blog is not about the recipe, it’s about the journey.
Corn bean and spinach mash is a dish you make when you are wrung out yet determined. It is very easy, requiring almost no brain or body power to assemble, and yet at the same time it is also pretty healthy.
Usually you make it with potatoes but I don’t have potatoes, so I made it with brown rice. To make it with brown rice, put on the brown rice. Put it in a rice cooker if you’re lucky or on a stovetop if you’re not. To make it with potatoes, boil some water and cube some potatoes. Boil the potatoes until they are very soft. Think about the Irish potato famine while you wait. There was an Irish potato famine memorial right next to the office down in the financial district. It had its own wifi network. Probably still does. Now think about the current famine, here, in the contemporary United States, where hundreds of thousands of people are losing their homes and their livelihoods and their actual lives to this ongoing capitalist collapse every day. Wonder if anyone’s still going to the Irish potato famine memorial during the pandemic. Probably, if the wifi’s still working. Skip the potatoes to skip this step.
With the potatoes or not, add the beans (canned or dried) and the corn (frozen or canned) to the pan. (If you boiled the potatoes, please drain first. If you did not, put some oil in the pan. Maybe some chopped onions too. The original instructions don’t call for them but they really make things better.) The order doesn’t really matter, but I suggest beans first. (Well, onions first, obviously, then beans, corn or corn, beans.) Add seasonings of your choice—I put in garam masala, cayenne, chili and garlic powders.
Make sure your spinach is washed. Do you remember at the beginning of this pandemic how you were washing the hell out of everything? Now you’re still washing most things, kind of a lot (roommates never really get things clean), but the old levels were truly out of control. And to think that we were all afraid of touching our faces but we would bring them everywhere unmasked.
Before you add the spinach, slice up some tomato and otherwise prepare whatever else you might want with this. Spinach cooks really fast so once it’s in it’s pretty much done. You just want to wilt it.
I don’t have any process pictures because I did all this yesterday. Tonight I just microwaved it.
That white stuff on the right is yogurt. I know it’s really thick so it looks like sour cream but it is not sour cream I promise you. Sour cream is gross, in my opinion.
It’s too thick, honestly. I would have preferred a thinner yogurt. Also, this individual yogurt cup cost two individual dollars, which is not even that much for a decent individual yogurt cup around here.
I used to get this shit at work for free.
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the top 8 tracks on folklore from least to most embarrassing to enjoy
Hi I’m Anthony Fantano and welcome to the needle drop. I don’t know if he says that, because I don’t watch him—if I wanted to listen to a repulsive white man talk about music, I could just go on a date. (just kidding, covid!)
Forgoing any further introduction, here are the top eight tracks from Taylor Swift’s new album, low-caps “folklore,” ranked from least embarrassing to most embarrassing to enjoy, according to me. The whole album is 16 tracks long, but I’m only doing the most noteworthy half because 16 is too many. You’re welcome for that decision.
Methodology: To get on this list, songs had to be both embarrassing and enjoyable. There will be natural fluctuation between tracks, but as we go down the list, assume that the songs are getting increasingly better to listen to and worse to think about, like this:
The rankings:
8. cardigan
This is a song about feeling at times like an unloved trash bag, as we all do, and then being warmly reminded that you matter because you are in fact someone’s fallback. The hook goes:
and when i felt like i was an old cardigan under someone’s bed
you put me on and said i was your favorite.
Beyond reveling in this pathetic status, this song serves as an admission that the speaker a. uses the word “cardigan” and b. thinks of those bland, preppy sweaters as a comforting thing to wear. In a cooler universe, this song would be called “flannel.” It is just okay to listen to.
7. mad woman
This song has big Ophelia vibes, big Handmaid’s Tale vibes, big “daughter of the witches you couldn’t burn” vibes. One of the verses contains the line “and women like hunting witches too,” because, hey, woman-on-woman misogyny is bad, didn’t you know. Strong reminder that if being called crazy is the worst form of oppression you’ve experienced, you still have it pretty good. Sometimes sounds decent, sometimes too croony.
6. invisible string
This one uses a pretty lazy, commonplace device: She opens couplets within verses by just naming colors, and uses these to create a simple repetitive structure for introducing random, useless details:
green was the color of the grass where i used to read at centennial park
i used to think i would meet somebody there
teal was the color of your shirt when you were sixteen at the yogurt shop
you used to work at to make a little money
Sure this device is tired, but that’s only the surface of what’s embarrassing here. More embarrassing is the image I’ve conjured of a teal-shirted teenage boy smiling through his braces behind the toppings station at one of those blindingly lit American-kawaii froyo stores. I don’t know who needs to hear this but don’t fuck the froyo boy. Song is pretty catchy.
5. illicit affairs
Title says it all here: This song is about how thrilling and fun and ultimately horrible it is to be involved in a romantic situation you’re not supposed to be in, and how that forbidden sheen can get you totally enthralled with a crappy garbage man. Not a whole lot going on below the surface. This song is both very enjoyable and very embarrassing because it is very relatable.
4. seven
We are back to the aggressive levels of white woman previously seen in “mad woman,” only the case has gotten much more severe. Here’s this song’s final chorus:
Sweet tea in the summer
Cross my heart, won’t tell no other
And though I can't recall your face
I still got love for you
Pack your dolls and a sweater
We'll move to India forever
Passed down like folk songs
Our love lasts so long
Okay let’s just skate past the part where a presumed adult is telling a fellow adult (I sure hope!) to bring their dolls when they run away together. That in itself is too big a can of worms to crack open. What I want to talk about is the line “We’ll move to India forever,” which pretty obviously uses an Orientalist fantasy of India as some nebulous, ethereal image of the East. Real people don’t live there; it’s the exotic dreamland where sweet-tea drinking southern belles bring their adult toys when they elope. This song is very catchy.
3. betty
Let me start by saying that now that we’re in the top three, all of the remaining songs are vying for the #1 slot. I could very easily see this and the next as the Most Embarrassing to Enjoy. But “betty” is clocking in at number three today.
This is a song about a teenage romance gone bad, in which a speaker named James (who is “only seventeen, I don’t know anything”) has cheated on a girlfriend (Betty) and is now considering showing up at her party, begging for forgiveness, and hoping for a kiss in the garden. We get the backstory in the bridge:
I was walking home on broken cobblestones
Just thinking of you when she pulled up like
A figment of my worst intentions
She said "James, get in, let's drive"
Those days turned into nights
Slept next to her, but
I dreamt of you all summer long
First of all, “figment” of “intentions” is not really a phrase? But secondly, and more importantly: Excited bloggers all over the internet have posted a smattering of theories detailing why this song is Taylor Swift’s coded revelation that she actually maybe fucks girls, too, y’know, and hey, maybe the object of this song is the supermodel Karlie Kloss, whose middle name is Elizabeth. Apparently Taylor Swift is named after James Taylor, so she could be James, or at the very least James could be a woman. I’m going to allow for the possibility that the speaker “James” is a woman, because why not; it does not change the narrative. But said narrative doesn’t make sense: who is this woman pulling up next to James and picking them up on the cobblestone? Did James really spend all summer with her, and if so, why? James is only seventeen by the time they get back to ask Betty’s forgiveness, so like, where the hell are James’s parents? Do they not care that their child has gone off for the whole summer with a person I can only picture as a cheetah-print-and-goggles-wearing divorcee driving a convertible?
Furthermore, the Karlie Kloss/Taylor Swift fan theories are gross for the simple reason that these two tall skinny white women look pretty much exactly the same. What is it with the internet’s obsession with wanting practically identical people to hook up? There might be an incest thing going on there that you guys could stand to reflect on. And on the more cynical conspiracy-theorizing side, couldn’t this just be some convenient queerbaiting? Didn’t Taylor Swift get criticized for appropriating gay rhetoric and imagery for “You Need to Calm Down,” like, 20 minutes ago? If she were going to come out, wouldn’t it have been an ideal moment to do so when she was under fire for that? I’m not saying all celebrities are shallow opportunists, but, you know, maybe.
This song is infectious. You will need to lobotomize me to get it out of my head.
2. exile
I know I originally said this was gonna be number one but I lied. It is pretty rough, though. This track features Bon Iver, and it’s not the high-pitched sad boy of “Skinny Love” renown. This Bon Iver is deep-voiced and country, like Bon Iver playing Tim McGraw in an uncomfortable SNL parody. Also, the whole song is centered around the tired and overused metaphor that a person is a place, and the person the speaker is pining after is home, and the speaker is in exile because they can’t go home to the person they love. It’s a heartache-ballad, cry-sing in your car, absolute jam.
1. the last great american dynasty
I really tried not to let this be number one. I really didn’t want it to be, which is precisely why it is. This was the track that first alerted me to the entire album’s release, because Ed Markey supporters on Twitter seized on it and decided it was about the downfall of the Kennedy family. It is not. The opening verse goes:
Rebekah rode up on the afternoon train, it was sunny
Her saltbox house on the coast took her mind off St. Louis
Bill was the heir to the Standard Oil name and money
And the town said, "How did a middle-class divorcée do it?"
The wedding was charming, if a little gauche
There's only so far new money goes
They picked out a home and called it "Holiday House"
This is very obviously about a real couple, Rebekah and William (Bill) Hale Harkness, who had a real mansion in Rhode Island that they called “Holiday House.” The Harkness name is on basically every building in Connecticut and a lot of the Northeast because Stephen Harkness, Bill Hale Harkness’s great uncle, was a founder of Standard Oil along with John D. Rockefeller. In 2013, Taylor Swift bought the property known as “Holiday House,” as she says in the song:
Fifty years is a long time
Holiday House sat quietly on that beach
Free of women with madness, their men and bad habits
And then it was bought by me
The cool, fun, left-ish internet reading of this song is that it’s a revolutionary tale about toppling class hierarchy—getting a hold of wealth and bringing the institution that created it to its knees by… “fill[ing] the pool with champagne”? How much would that amount of champagne even cost? This is not a song about revolution. Taylor Swift didn’t storm into the Standard Oil house and burn it down or take it over; she bought it. It is not a song about destabilizing the ruling class. It’s a song about joining it.
It absolutely fucking slaps, unfortunately.
#taylor swift#folklore#i am putting this in the tumblr tags in lowkey hopes that a rabid taylor swift fan will see and come after me#come on that would be funny
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Zucchini Lentil Spaghetti
Alright people, let’s keep this post short. Write directly into the text editor, which is uncharacteristic for you. Post without editing significantly. Deviate even further from the norm.
The dish we’re making today is a riff on this, which, when made correctly, is actually quite good. If you have the time, the ingredients, and the power of will, this makes a healthy, hearty, vegetarian spin on bolognese. Just double the lentils, carrots, and zucchini. Quadruple the garlic. Also cut out the sugar, because why would anyone want sugar in this shit. Otherwise, under normal circumstances, this is pretty good.
Under abnormal circumstances, like, for example, voluntary captivity in the grips of a global pandemic, you can make basically this but with jarred sauce instead of fresh tomatoes. Maybe you stopped buying fresh tomatoes—and also apples, berries, and any other fruits and vegetables that you might eat raw without removing the skin—because you are afraid they are all covered in the viral load of the novel coronavirus. If you can’t peel them or cook them, you have no way to confidently, definitively, remove those viral particles. So let’s assume you are working with zucchini, carrot, lentils, and the shriveled butts of two onions, one white and one red. Boil the lentils for a while and then sauté all that shit together with a few big cloves of garlic and some red pepper flakes.
The herb flecks pictured here are basil, thyme, and oregano. Were those in the recipe? I don’t know.
The recipe definitely calls for some red wine, so dump a splash of that in. I used my new favorite wine brand, which is my favorite due to a combination of the two most essential factors: its affordability (13 bucks a bottle for 13 percent alcohol) and its catchy name (O.C.D.). Unconvinced? Read the pitch in the top right.
Obviously you’re going to drink some of this wine while you’re cooking your shit, but you’re not going to drink a lot of it, because you are a small person with a smaller alcohol tolerance, if you are me. Also, things have been going pretty well for you lately. You have adjusted well to near-constant isolation: You’re reading a lot, drawing and painting and doing yoga and, even, sort of working out? There’s also a boy you like in a way you haven’t liked a boy in a long, long time, and he actually seems to like you back, in that same way. You take a degree of comfort in this and it’s actually freed up some of your creative mental space, so not only can you draw but you can actually kind of write, again, finally. You haven’t been able to do that for a while.
Of course there are still the modern stressors, like the fact that record numbers of your friends and peers and neighbors are now freshly unemployed; that people are dying en masse in hospitals and in makeshift tent hospitals and in their own homes, so many afraid to go to the doctor lest they be slapped with bills or arrested or deported. So many killed when they do go to the doctor because the United States does not actually have a public health system, and we would never have been equipped to handle this pandemic as long as private health insurance was allowed to go on existing for a profit. And it looks like we won’t be righting that wrong for a while, because we’re apparently going to reelect Donald Trump, and in the best-case-scenario we elect Joe Biden, who is a senile and cynical enabler of imperialist warmongers and racists; and then you think about Tara Reade, who says Biden stuck his fingers inside her when she worked for him, and you imagine what it would feel like if your rapist were in line to be the next President of the United States of America, and you hope your assumption is right, and he never will be, and you want to cry.
And you get back to the recipe.
Remember this shit? You used it last time you made pasta, and you haven’t touched it since. Detect the distinct, earthy scent of mold when you open the jar and fear the worst, but then find that the blue and white circle is only on the cap’s interior lining, not in the sauce itself. Flick it into the sink, rinse the lid with scalding water, and proceed. Choose mold over coronavirus.
Boil spaghetti while you cook the vegetables, but consider eating just lentils and zucchini and carrots with sauce in the process. Think about how you pretty much never eat pasta, but you had mac-n-cheese recently, and you’ve seen people tweeting jokes about the “quarantine fifteen.” Liken it to the freshman fifteen, which you feared but never gained, and think about how all you’ve done in your adult life is lose weight, and that’s probably not ideal. If you do become stricken with Covid-19, you will need the calories. Make the pasta. Stir it in.
As you eat, receive a text from your mother, an update on the status at your grandmother’s nursing home. When your parents first contemplated removing her from the place, where she was restricted to her singular room, you were hesitant. Your mom has a zealous tendency to take matters into her own hands, for better or for worse, and you were unsure of whether bringing your grandma home would hurt or help. But you understand how this sickness tears through nursing homes, and your grandmother will soon turn ninety-six, so she is unlikely to survive the virus if she does get sick. Your mother, of course, is almost sixty, and asthmatic, and drinks too much, and people in her family die early. She’s also a biologist, and she has to know at this point that the incubation period for the virus is fourteen days at least, because you’ve told her, repeatedly. But her text is rubbing it in. It says I was right, even though there’s no indication that she, and her mother-in-law, and your father, and your sibling—all living together—are in the clear.
Do not respond. Get another glass of wine and write another blog post instead.
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Spaghetti Squash
The restaurants in New York City are shut down and people are posting their cooking triumphs. I am seeing split pea soup on Slack. I am seeing chicken karaage on Twitter. I am seeing nothing on Instagram because I do not go there.
As neither a particularly good cook nor a fan of food writing, I am joining the food posters. Tonight I cooked spaghetti squash. This is not the novelty gourd that when baked becomes fibrous and golden, sort of resembling spaghetti in shape and appearance but not at all in taste or texture. This is spaghetti plus squash, a meal that requires only a few more ingredients than the two in the title. The other essentials are olive oil, garlic, and tomato sauce.
The first step to making spaghetti squash is to almost not do it. My strategy involved plummeting into a deep tunnel of anxiety after fact-checking an essay about the latest coronavirus. If you do this, you will learn that one of the early symptoms of the virus is a loss of appetite. This symptom also frequently occurs in people with anxiety, and if you are me you are definitely one of those people. But regardless of the cause, it takes a minute to get hungry for spaghetti squash. Lie in your bed, take a shower, clean your room up a little bit. Then proceed to step two.
Step two: get some squash. Don’t do this today. Do it five days ago. That way if you get stuck on step one, you can think about how that squash is still in your fridge, and you should use it while it’s still good, especially since you know you could have your access to produce restricted. Don’t take a picture of the squash before you cook it. Just drag the package out of your soapy sink later. Take a picture of the package.
Cut the squash into little circles, or cut it however you want. Wash the cutting board before you do this even though it’s already technically “clean.” Also wash the “clean” pans, knives, spatulas, and other utensils you might need.
Put the oil in the freshly-washed pan and heat it up. Cut the garlic into little slices, or mince it, or squish it through a garlic press as long as you wash the garlic press first. Drop the garlic in the oil. Burn it a little because the oil is too hot. Add the squash circles before the garlic burns too much without them.
I forgot to tell you to boil the water. You should probably already be doing that. Throw some salt in there to make it go faster if you’re behind schedule. Put whatever spaghetti you want in the pot. I used this one even though the Trader Joe’s ethnicized name varieties make me uncomfortable.
While the spaghetti and the squash are cooking, make yourself a sad little salad. Use some store-bought mix of greens that have already been “washed 3x!” Wash them again. Remember when people were worried about romaine lettuce?
Also wash and use one scallion and some bottled balsamic vinaigrette. Don’t wash the dressing, but maybe wipe down the bottle. Or do whatever you want. I like this one, but you really may want to make a better salad.
When the pasta is almost done boiling, dump some pre-made tomato sauce out of a jar and into the squash pan. Cook the squash in the sauce for a minute while you drain the pasta. I used this sauce. The label tells a lie. It is not spicy.
Dump the drained pasta into the squash and sauce pan. Realize you completely abandoned step numbering. Pour more sauce on top and mix well.
Dump some of this stuff on the portion you’re about to eat. Tell yourself it’s actually nutritional even though you know that’s kind of a stretch.
Here is your sad meal.
Receive news notifications while you eat and contemplate how even after we lose thousands of people to a public health crisis as visible as this one, we probably still won’t establish a medical infrastructure that people can access and afford. Consider how many more people probably got sick today casting their votes to ensure that they don’t get universal health care.
Look at your basil plant. Your parents are fucking botanists and look what you’ve done to your fucking basil plant. Worry that your parents are going to die. Worry that a lot of people’s parents, and grandparents, and friends, and children, are going to die.
Think about sprinkling some of the basil on your spaghetti, before the basil dies. You’d have to wash it. Don’t even do it. Go back to your sad pasta.
Wash a “clean” storage container and put the leftovers away. At least you won’t have to cook tomorrow!
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