Brrr.

Fatigued.
I'm tired.

So, a lot of people on the vegan blogsphere are making posts about their 'go to' foods, or their comfort foods. I thought i'd go ahead and share mine with you all, since i've been eating it rather often of late.

Now, let me preface this by stating that I am an 80 year old woman, and you cannot judge little old ladies on the things they eat. Not many of you know it, but deep down inside i'm that little old lady who cringes at roller coasters and microwaves, the one who rinses out ziplock bags to use again. I'm rather proud of this, and I think it's rather sexy (just cause theres snow on the roof doesn't mean theres no fire in the oven, eh? eh?).In this same vein, my Oma (another small, old lady) has two sets of things she cooks- one set for other people, and one set for her. She constantly claims that the things she likes to eat no one else likes- they represent the strange and unmarketable culinary misfits that she deems good enough for her but not good enough for anyone else. I can sympathize with her, because i feel this way about a number of the foods i like to eat. This is why i do not offer them to people. I, like my Oma, know that i can cook 'better', but 'better' is not necessarily what i prefer. Case in point, my comfort food.

Boiled Sweet Potatoe.

Unseasoned, rather mushy, still in tuber form, boiled sweet potatoe.
Lately the one's i buy from market fit perfectly, cut in half, in the rice cooker pot i throw on the table top burner in the kitchen. I boil these suckers, shucking peanuts while watching the pot in my below the knee cashmere coat (the kitchen is inhumane amounts of cold), and then retire to my room with two plain halves of a boiled sweet potatoe in a bowl.
It's sweet potatoe heaven.

Then i take out my dentures for the night and crawl into bed.
But seriously, what can match the pure unadulterated delight that is warm, mushy, boiled sweet potatoe? Skin all soft though still adding that toothsome edge to counteract the soft and yielding sunset hued flesh? Okay, maybe i do enjoy them too much. Fuck it.

What else has been up lately? More job searching, bearing little though some fruit for my labors. The roomies and i have hauled a concrete block onto the rooftop patio above my room for a makeshift fireplace. We fill it with logs and huddle around it under the darkening, pollution tinged winter sky. We roast things in it. We are hunting for a cast iron so we can make baked goods. We shall be triumphant beijing gods of winter.

On a side note, while i wait for scottie to boil us some tea, i'll tell you what happened between the last paragraph and this line.

Scottie came home, hollered ahoy across the courtyard and shambled off to his room. Shrugging on my coat I went after and stole some of his ever so potent (it's got the taste and consistency of congealed jager) chinese herbal throat medicine stuff. Then we shambled over to the kitchen and did what two sick room mates suffering the Beijinger pre-winter weather do: downed raw cloves of garlic. Ohad, le Israeli roomie, insists this will make us better. I took mine, like a little 80 year old lady, unadulterated and pure. Scottie had to do his in glasses of water. Pansy.
Now what we refer to as "the garlic shivers" are descending, so i'm going to go to sleep. For those of you who have never munched your way through a handful of raw garlic cloves, the stuff makes you feel really, really weird.
l
ove&luz

jess