Category: Holidays

Sink o’ de mayo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Take that, A.I.

Yesterday being Cinco de Mayo I made the usual magic in the kitchen — guacamole and Lazy Gringo Posole.

This is not exactly a forced march through The New York Times Cooking section. You th’ow the ingredients for the first into a bowl and mash ’em up, and you th’ow the ingredients for the second into a pot and simmer ’em up.

One more day on the counter and this avocado would’ve been a goner.

Shit, a Republican could do it, if someone kept an eye on him to make sure he didn’t stick his dingus into the grub or try to bomb it onto the table. You know how those guys cook.

Soups and stews were among the first dishes I learned how to cook, and when the sloth has got me with a downhill pull I will fall back on them at the drop of a chef’s toque and drop the fucker myself.

The posole takes two hours to cook and about no time at all to prep. I toss three cloves of garlic into a small food processor for a quick, coarse chop. Next I add four or five dried red chile pods, seeded, and a large yellow onion, chopped into chunks the processor can swallow. Zoom, another round of push-button chopping. Toss the results into a 6-quart pot.

Drain and rinse a 25-ounce can of white hominy and add that to the pot. You can do the whole dried-hominy thing if you like, but I told you I was lazy. Add a pound and a half of pork or boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch bits, two teaspoons of Mexican oregano and one of ground cumin, salt to taste, and 6-7 cups of water. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and go watch the hummingbirds for a couple of hours, returning to the pot now and then to give ’er a stir.

Caution: Posole in progress.

The guac’ is even easier. To a bowl add one large avocado, a light drizzle of fresh lime juice, a couple-three teaspoons of finely chopped tomato (optional), a smidge of minced white onion if you like it (Herself does not), and salt to taste. Mash with fork, leaving it a little chunky just ’cause. Serve with corn chips.

You want some nice warm flour tortillas for the posole, along with some class of crunchy garnishes — minced jalapeños, chopped radishes, green onions — and a scattering of cilantro. Watch the BBC’s “Lord of the Flies” on Netflix as you dine and be glad you’re not a castaway kid trying to get that pig in the pot you don’t have.

Lights out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
My impression of what an MRI of Pestilence Piggy’s noggin might reveal.

We pulled the plug(s) on the 2025-26 holiday season after breakfast this morning.

Herself boxed up all the small stuff — Bicycling Santa, Fat Cowboy Santa, Cat Santa, etc. — and then we disassembled and bagged the fake Christmas tree before dragging the unwieldy sonofabitch out to its corner of the garage, where the bicycles jeer at it.

“Ha ha, ha haaah, ha, you only get out once a year!”

Then I set about pulling down all the lights out front. I got a little carried away this year, adding a strand here and a strand there, until PNM sent us a thank-you card for using more power than the Coronado Center.

As a consequence, dismantling my creation took longer than I had expected, and by the time I started dragging all the bits and pieces back into the house the clouds were right behind me and splish, splash, my bike ride got rained out.

And yes, those are skulls you see in the pile there. Leftovers from Halloween that I decided to leave up for a while.

Far as I’m concerned, it’s still Halloween. It ain’t over until the last ghoul’s been staked and baked. And the White House is still possessed by devils.

Great minds

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
The luck of the (southern) Irish.

Rooting around the Innertubes for some New Year’s recipes I was congratulating myself on picking a couple of winners, both from The New York Times Cooking section, which by itself is worth the price of a subscription.

One was a simple Hoppin’ John recipe from Bill Neal of Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C., as adapted by Craig Claiborne in 1985. The other was a jalapeño cheddar cornbread from Melissa Clark, the franchise player on my pro cooking squad.

But when I crowed about this to Herself I found she’d beaten me to the punch. She’d already found her own recipe and acquired the ingredients for it, too.

Good thing I shot off my big bazoo before heading for the grocery. We’d have been eating Hoppin’ John and cornbread from New Year’s right through St. Patrick’s Day.

Meanwhile, I had to quickly re-establish my primacy as tenzo of this zendo. Facing an economy of scarcity — a lack of fresh red grapes, which I dice up for the morning oatmeal — I displayed my resourcefulness in the kitchen, or “skillful means,” as defined by the late poet-gourmand and Zen student Jim Harrison, by locating a wrinkled honeycrisp apple in the crisper and chopping that up instead. In your face! as the sage Dogen has taught us.

Jimbo hated oatmeal. But he’s dead and didn’t have to eat any of it.

From soup to nuts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Our Chinese pistache is not quite in “Last Leaf” mode, but it’s getting there.

I fight off the snow
I fight off the hail
Nothing makes me go
I’m like some vestigial tail
I’ll be here through eternity
If you want to know how long
If they cut down this tree
I’ll show up in a song

Not a lot of snow or hail to fight off in these parts lately.

Christmas brought a record high temperature — 65°, eclipsing the old mark set in 1955(!) — and it wasn’t even The Duck! City’s first record high this month.

Herself and I went out for a little pre-feast hike in the Sandia foothills with a couple hundred of our closest friends, their extended families, and their dogs. Only saw two cyclists in just under five miles, and their rigs didn’t look new to me, so, maybe not a festive holiday season for the local IBDs.

The good news is, we’re delivering the teachings of Jeebus to the Nigerians in the usual explosive fashion. So, at least the Military-Industrial Complex is ticking along nicely, if only in terms of supplying shiny objects to the news media, since it’s a little late to carpet-bomb the Epstein files.

The bad news is … well, not all that bad. I couldn’t locate any crosscut beef shanks for my beef vegetable soup, so I had to call an audible and run with another recipe that proved to be not quite as good as our favorite, which is from a “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook with a 1981 copyright. After a week’s worth of chile-infused dishes I was striving for mild, and overachieved for a change.

However, Herself’s cornbread was superb, as was her salad, and thanks to exchanges with neighbors and colleagues we had an extensive menu of possibilities for dessert.

With the second season of “Fallout” finally available, we’d thought to revisit season one, since we’d forgotten what all the fuss was about. Alas, our Amazon Subprime Video membership is not ad-free, and the viewing experience was peppered at random with multiple sales pitches for depression meds, Range Rovers, and other shit that we don’t want, don’t need, and/or can’t afford, some of them running more than two minutes at a stretch.

Which was really a stretch. So this morning we decided to bring capitalism to its knees by signing up for the ad-free tier, then binge-watching both seasons before finally canceling the service entirely.

¡Venceremos! You’re welcome, comrades. Just crawl out through the fallout, baby.