Cooking with power tools: Green Curry

You've probably resigned yourself to the fact that as a single guy living alone, cooking doesn't make much sense. This isn't a gender thing so much as economics: unless you're working to pinch pennies and willing to eat the same thing four times a week, it costs as much or more to buy the ingredients to prepare a meal as it does to order out.

However, every once in a while you may get inspiration. Or you may have roommates, or company coming over. In this case, you will likely discover the Second Truth about single guys in the kitchen: you don't have - or maybe don't even recognize - most of the kitchen tools mentioned in recipes. Like a "cuisinart." When a recipe calls for that, you may try chopping everything with your dull knives, or fashion one of those mortal and pesters, but unless you have a barrel and a baseball bat, hand-mashing everything needed for a curry paste from scratch will take approximately 3.4 days.

This is where some guy genius comes in.

If you're a guy attempting to cook, you're probably one of those purist overachievers, so when a recipe gives you the option to "buy 20 rare ingredients and chop them all up, or just use store-bought curry paste," you're going to choose the former. It looks something like this:






So to properly cook a meal you must nourish yourself throughout. Therefore, don't forget:




Start chopping things and put them in bowls:




At this point, realize how long chopping things takes, especially things you've never seen before and that are strangely resistant to knives, like this:



Now that part in the recipe about "food processor" that you thought you were too hunter-gatherer for starts to make sense. So, next step in the recipe (modified for guys) is to go to the thrift store and find yourself something that looks like it might be called a food processor:



Being a guy, you will be very proud not only that you knew what to get, but that it's in good shape and that now you have one. Being a guy, however, you may have also forgotten something like the motor that such contraptions are supposed to connect to to make them spin.

Given that you started this entire process late on a Sunday afternoon, it is now quite late and your stomach expecting dinner sometime is getting quite hungry.



However, being a guy, you are not one to admit defeat. And you are definitely not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a new food processor, much less return to value village twice in the course of making one meal. These fresh ingredients are in mortal danger of wilting or spoiling if a solution is not found.

Some real guy genius is now called for.

Rinse and repeat. Voila.

Cook up your tofu (here's a real cooking tip: After draining and chopping the tofu, boil the pieces for 10 minutes, strain the water off, then toss them in sesame oil, soy sauce, and furikake (seaweed flakes). Broil in the oven until golden brown and turn once to get a second side golden. The tofu will be crispy on the outside but light and fluffy on the inside).

That's pretty much it. You'll be so exhausted and starved by the end, you'll forget to take a picture of the final product, but the real magic is on the record. Remember guys, there's very little done in the kitchen that can't be done just as well with something from your tool bag.

A 2am city

Lie down
In a bed of spearmint
Inhale
Memories of the best desserts
Drift
On the lake's wet kisses
Listen
To cool air whispering
Secrets to your feet

Solid ground only a thin black strip
Of bushy zipper
On uniform lake and sky
The cars in pairs unzipping
Where her daytime played too shy

A 2am city
Lets you breathe until sunrise
May kick you
But only in its sleep
Is content to let you dream

A city at 2am
Is a city I can live with.

Pregnant less travelled

What if she had gotten pregnant? -he wondered to himself. What if they hadn't immediately gone to the juice bar the following morning where she downed a 24 ounce pure kale extraction, followed by a trip to Planned Parenthood just to be safe, where she got the morning after pill and that was that. What if he hadn't noticed after 45 minutes of the most passionate lovemaking he still remembered to this day that somehow in the midst of it the condom had come off and lay deflated, on her belly rather than where he had put it? The sinking feeling of oh shit, there is a price to this, and this is it. 

There isn't meant to be this level of unadulterated pleasure in life. The place they went when they were together, at least it seemed to him, was downright otherworldly – the more time he spent with her, the more access she gave to him, the less he felt like venturing out of the apartment to do his job, to eat, to attend to anything that has to do with what life's really like. The place they went with their lovemaking was not of this world, but the world still had them, and it had extracted its payment.

What happened 15 years ago, there was nothing new in it. He'd gone over this territory so many times in his head, how the slap of consequence stood out as a starkly carved figurine against an otherwise misty landscape of what he thought might have been love. What struck him tonight had nothing to do with that history.  It was the few steps beyond, the road not taken, the divergent path existing possibly on the parallel plane of what might have been. He had never let himself go there before, never had to, yet -- What if she had gotten pregnant?

She wouldn't have kept the baby, he was fairly certain of that. She had her Ph.D and her trips to India and her ascent to figurehood on the world's stage squarely fixed ahead of her, and she wouldn't have given that up, not for him, not for any ethical dilemma. He wouldn't have had a baby to deal with, not with her. The anxiety he felt the morning after - as he dutifully accompanied her around the city, fumbling for a role he felt he ought to have been trained for, unsure whether he should be supportive or decisive or neutral, completely at a loss for any idea what empathy might look like in this case – all this anxiety was sufficiently tempered by the knowledge that he had chosen a woman who did not have that maternal trigger, or... at least would never admit if it were there. The anxiety were more like what he would feel if he were interviewing at a company that his dad owned: where the outcome was nearly assured, but it was still important to get the performance right so as to deliver the proper, favorable impression. The crippling effect of even this minor role was exactly why he was in no shape to take on a child.

No, the impact of the question of pregnancy was not one of having a baby. Pregnancy rather raised the unbearable fact of his responsibility, of a very real requirement on him to step up in personal matters, which he avoided frenetically at that age, and more strategically in his maturity.

But tonight, for some reason, that next thought-step clicked into place. He saw about himself what he hadn't been able to face a decade and a half ago.

If there was a baby on the way, his tactic would be definite, unquestioned, and pursued with a steely, cloaked resolve. In seeing the course he would have taken, his mother suddenly made sense to him for the first time in his life. The impetus just revealed in himself was the same program his mother had tyrannically pursued regarding his father during his boyhood. The plan with the child would be simple, swift, effective: make it hate her.

Make its mother evil. Tell the story from the beginning, before it could speak. Hang the injustice of the world around the neck of this woman he wanted to die with but who could never give him all he demanded. Be the better parent, the victim, the caring one – and never let up on the plotline that mother was the villain.

He didn't know why he would do this. He didn't know where it came from or what all he gained by it. He only knew, with a clarity like the glare that cuts a summer morning's haze, that he would've done this. He would have dug up and exploited all evidence, lured the child to his side, made it his ally, grateful and loyal and dependent on him, and turned it against its mother, for as long as they both shall live.

Just like that, he knew how his mother felt as he had gestated in her belly. Understood the look of being emotionally battered in photographs of his infant face. The tirades against males that made him hate both his gender and any woman who would not regard him. The estrangement from his Dad, a campaign carried on unceasingly, although he felt he had never quite looked at his father or the question of whether he wanted this. His own sexuality, understood by him only through the comments and gazes and dominance by his mother. In one unspeakable impulse, his life made sense.

The road less traveled was not a better one. He had dodged a bullet and spared the world one unnecessary violence. His gut had told him that he would terrorize a child, because as a child terrorism is what he had known.

He returned to his apartment, where he had no child, and he had no partner. And he sat.