That thing with the alfredo pasta craving, I wasn't kidding. So last night I skipped the gym and made the damned sauce from scratch. I've been trying to buy and cook only organic pastured dairy, and I still haven't found an organic cheese/cream sauce I like.

It was really very good pasta. I added a tuna steak and itty bitty baby spring squashes to it after realizing that buying fish on Tuesday night that you don't mean to eat till Thursday is probably a dumb idea. Where I won, though, was this sauce:
One small container of creme fraiche (which gave it a nice nutty tang)
Half of a cup of hemp milk
One small container of grated parmesan
Healthy doses of paprika, salt, pepper & basil
Bits of Spanish goat cheese not yet finished from last week's groceries

Mix. Simmer till all melted. Done.

I had a little for breakfast when I couldn't talk myself into my normal vegan breakfast, and the sauce had basically hardened into a brick of parmesan - a characteristic it shares with my favorite pasta sauce from Chianti (that mom & pop place in Gayton Crossing).

I just made the second best pancit I've eaten in my life. And I grew up on Norfolk naval base, so I have eaten a lot of pancit. The best pancit evah? Made by a place in the food court at Waterside. No, really.

Anyhow. Pancit always makes me think about this. About half of my friends until they booted me out of public school in 3rd grade were half-Asian. Half-Filipino, half-Korean, half-Samoan, half-pretty-much-anywhere-there-was-a-US-naval-presence. It wasn't until like college that I realized that was one seriously complicated racial situation, naval housing. Military housing is where the blue-collar folk live. All these boys who join the Navy in their teens, travel around the world, meet exoticised Asian women, bring them home and have cutting-edge (given that you couldn't take a non-white warbride home until the sixties or seventies or something) multi-racial families while retaining pretty conservative working class views on the world.

The military is interesting like that. I wonder how much of my own perspective is colored by growing up with normal being... you know, that.

Of course, at the time, I was FIVE. So what I knew was that all my friends' moms, unlike mine, could cook. They made pancit and lumpia for kids' school things - white people dig pancit. Even my non-cooking midwestern mom picked up a few Filipino recipes.

( recipe for second best pancit, in case you're interested )

Beer? Is actually quite tasty.

It turns out that all these years while people were trying to give me beers that were nasty, there were in fact a perfectly decent set of beers off somewhere else. Who knew?

I just thought you might want to know. I'm currently enjoying a tiny bit of Chimay and feeling very monkish in my quiet house with my chalicey beer glass. It's all complicated, like a good chocolate or coffee. Yum.

This is intriguing: [don't read if lists of people's food are painful reading for you] incendiaryfood. I'm torn. The idea is that one logs one's food for a handful of days. Particularly if one is fat. Without changing habits or anything, just reporting.

I have this salmon w[W?]ellington at home that I bought on impulse at the Crap Ukrops that turns out to have an Awesome Seafood Counter Guy (and argggghh, lobsters). And I'd like to write about that, or about the fabulous Greek yogurt, croissant and cherries [in winter!] I had at breakfast. Then I'd also have to report my new thing as of today, where I bring really really good quality junk food (you know, organic chocolate, dried cow that was treated nicely before someone offed it, smooshed fruit) to the office so that I can still eat constantly in an office filled with sugar but not eat crap that makes me feel blechky and uncooperative later.

It's pretty easy to grasp a theme there, the massive class privilege of everything I eat. Even the meatball sub I had at lunch was at the posh Arby's behind Wilderness Office Park. The classism of my food is nothing new, though. Nor is it something I fail to remember on a daily basis; I know I eat privilege. I keep hot women around to make fun of my pink lady apples for just that purpose.

I like the this is what I eat. so? aspect of food logging for no diagnostic or dietary change purpose. If nothing else, just experiencing it exposes you to all the self-flagellation that's right on the tip of practically anyone's tongue when food comes up.

But. Isn't that like my food privilege? Or my weird thing with potatoes? I mean, don't we already know that? I think I'm trying to put it in a context of radical activism, and while there's some of that, it's probably more about analysis and introspection.

Still, I present the project for your reflection. Does it make you think?

I made The World's Greatest Soup last night. It wasn't at all what it was supposed to be (it was supposed to taste North African, for instance, and it was more of a South Asian/European fusion), but it was still excellent.

( Not exactly peanut soup )