Wednesday from trashy to healthy and back again.

Living with roommates puts an edge of uncertainty to stocking foodstuffs. My apartment operates under very lassez-faire rules in terms of what you can eat. Basically, if it's in the apartment, you can make use of it how you see fit. Before becoming roommates we were friends old and fast, so there's no bitterness over finishing a loaf of bread or snagging an ice cream sandwich. Occasionally, though, I find myself with ambitious culinary challenges when I forget to check if the gouda fell to a midnight snack attack or the left-over tuna casserole is not there to take to lunch tomorrow. It was in a convergence of these sorts of disappointments that "corn porklins" were born.

Without tortillas or bread in the house, I was forced to make some late-game compromises. I saw a box of Jiffy cornbread mix, thought of the taylor pork roll in the fridge and set about making some tricked out corn muffins. Pour the mix in a bowl, add an egg and 1/3 c. of...
Well, it should have been milk, but we were out of that too. I instead grabbed a carton of chicken stock out of the fridge, hoping it wouldn't be too savory for breakfast food. I also thought adding some mayonnaise to the mix might keep things moist and add a little more cohesion from the egg protein. I ladled out two big spoons of white goop into the mixing bowl before I realized I was shoveling out Miracle Whip, not mayonnaise. While most people's venn diagrams of the two don't leave a lot of room around the edges, they are drastically different in terms of food chemistry. At this point, though, there was nothing to do but plow forward; mix in the pork roll, add a chunk of Oaxacan cheese and throw them in the oven while I made myself decent for work.

about 20 minutes at 400F later, these crispy golden badboys popped out. All accidents asside, they came out beautifully. They taste like corn dogs made into muffins with a stringy mozarella bonus in the middle. Deferring to my girlfriend's greater aptitude at whimsical names of things, the "corn porklins" were born. If I ever start that white trash bakery, these will be a staple item.


Maybe it was just the name "corn porklins," but I felt inspired to do my colon some good over lunch. That inspired my run to the Whole Foods salad bar. It's a lot easier to stomach grazing for lunch if you can sneak two types each of tuna salad and curried chicken along the side. The tuna salad with apples and nuts mixed in was unexpectedly fantastic. My hopes for "Chuck's tuna salad" fell disappointingly short. Perhaps I should have known. The chicken korma was worlds better than the vindaloo, but this was perhaps because the thicker korma sauce stood up better on it's own without rice to deliver more of the sauce.
As for the actual salad bit, I mixed a little of every type of green they had, and then added carrots, cucumbers, red onions and a light sprinkling of blue chese crumbs before adding "Korean Kimchi" and "Real Blue Cheese" dressings. The combination conjured memories of hot wings and my favorite Korean BBQ joint in Osaka. Perhaps not the healthiest salad, but still a very good dose of roughage.

Eating any kind of actual dinner got delayed by the bounty provided by my office. This celebration was for the departing Dean Diller who was headed to be Dean of Cardozo Law School. You could tell he was dearly loved here from the fantastic spread I shall here describe via haiku


chicken satay sticks
coconut and sauce, nice touch
solid but still plain


who doesn't just love
shrimp cocktail and cocktail sauce
you cannot go wrong




salmon, cream cheese, toast
quality ingredients
topped witha pickle


nondescript quiche thing
I prefer not to wonder
what lies within you


prosciutto, melon
you guys are so good apart
please, keep it that way


red tomato dome
releases green seed goo drops
when bitten into


red onions, cheese, meat
I don't know the specifics
but devoured six

deserts, to have one
is to say yes to them all
or at least a few











So my actual dinner wasn't until much later, and exhausted from laughing lustily at Featherweight and a stellar performance by Crush at the Magnet last night, the girl friend and I opted for more comfort food to push back the impending dreary weather. So it was that I had to throw away a white Haines t-shirt after trying to stir oversized beefaroni the way Italian chefs toss a risotto. I caught all the beef and the roni, but a pretty significant splatter of sauce Pollock-ed my shirt and even got a splat on my brown dress pants. The pants are worth cleaning, but the shirt had already suffered an erruption of kombucha tea, and so I applied a liberal coup de grace of mustardy hand print for good measure before casting it in the trash.