Last night, despondent about our seemingly limited choices for property ownership, we pulled up the Craigslist site for Maine and started looking for Maine farms and Portland houses for sale. We spent maybe an hour clicking on anything that looked good and learned a lot. A good rule of thumb: if the realty company has the word “moose” in its name, the house you’re looking at is too far away. It was a good hour of escapist thinking; we traded in the trash on the sidewalk for empty two car garages and laughed a lot about how all our stuff would look great in “that corner” of a 2000 sq. ft. farmhouse. It was therapeutic on some level.
I was back at work this morning and put on my headphones to listen to the new Avett Brothers album. I’d heard it a couple of times in the office and liked what I had heard but I hadn’t been listening closely. The very first song began:
Load the car and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north.
One foot in and one foot back
But it don’t pay to live like that
So I cut the ties and I jumped the track
For never to return.
Headed north! It don’t pay to live like [this]! With visions of 50 acre farmhouses and easy access to lobster fresh in my head from last night, I concluded immediately that this was a sign! I stopped and listened closely, eager to make even the most tenuous connections between the song’s lyrics and our thoughts of setting up residence in Maine. The music swelled at the chorus:
There’s a tomato blight occurring throughout the northeast which has made a noticeable dent in the variety and abundance of tomatoes available at the farmers’ market and in our CSA share. In spite of the blight, there are still a lot of tomatoes to be had, what with it being hard to keep a good tomato down in late August. So we picked up a bunch of your garden variety red tomatoes (plus some fancy heirlooms too good for salsa) at the market on Saturday and made Mattbot’s Famous Salsa, a tried and true recipe that involves Googling “best salsa recipe” for 15 minutes before arbitrarily picking one.
This particular recipe employed Burger King’s patented flame broiling method. I stuck all the veggies above plus a jalepeno and anaheim pepper, plus two huge cloves of garlic—under the broiler for about 10 minutes. When they had cooled a bit, I squeezed some of the water from the tomatoes and tossed all of the roasted veggies into the food processor with a big handful of chopped cilantro and a 3:1 ratio of cumin to salt (to taste, natch). I hit pulse a few times and… picante! I paired the chips and salsa with a Lagunitas IPA, which lately has been my go-to beer.
THIS is currently outside of our apartment, making one helluva racket. I don’t think I’ve actually seen or heard the word “cesspool” in serious context since David Macaulay’s Castle.
Lately (and for reasons I can’t quite explain) I’ve been drawn to books with supremely inane titles. Good to Great. Getting it Done. Making Things Happen. I stood in line at the Brooklyn Public Library yesterday with a few of these books and you better believe it was a reality check.
There are more uplifting and exciting posts coming soon, I promise… I was just tired of looking at that chicken salad and thought I should post something.
Recommended: Pat Metheny’s One Quiet Night on a Sunday evening. Especially if one loud week awaits.
This sandwich puts extra chicken to work for you. The English muffin succeeds where more notable breads fail. A sourdough places too much of a masticatory burden on the eater, ejecting chicken salad out the back of the sandwich. A toasted English muffin offers a perfect combination of sandwich structure and ease of chewing.
For the Chicken Salad
1 roasted chicken. I highly recommend Alice Waters’s method, described in The Art of Simple Food. And don’t skimp on the chicken, get one of those pampered free range birds that only urban liberal elites eat, it’s worth it. Some mayonnaise A mustard you like Any combination of: diced apples, diced pears, chopped celery, olives, diced pickles, chopped banana peppers, chopped walnuts — really, whatever you like in your chicken salad. I went with celery and apples; in the future I’ll substitute something saltier for apples, as the finished product was a tad too close to Waldorf salad for my taste. Salt and pepper to taste
Chicken Salad Preparation
Roast the chicken and eat it for dinner. Don’t worry, there will be plenty left over. Pick off any remaining chicken from the carcass and tear into bite-size chunks (this is easy, but somewhat messy). Add mayo, mustard, and any additional ingredients you’d like in your chicken salad. Exact measurements aren’t really necessary—just add ingredients until it looks and tastes right to you.
For the Slider
1 English muffin, toasted Mustard to taste
Slider Preparation
Toast the English muffin. Pile the chicken salad high atop the sturdier half of the muffin, add mustard to the other half. Combine and serve for $4 each at the letterpress-studio-slash-brewpub you plan to open “in your 30s.”
. And don’t skimp on the chicken, get one of those pampered free range birds that only urban liberal elites eat, it’s worth it.