EPT
After that I'll talk about the writing of my favorite author.![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VoB8R.jpg)
Right. Walk into one of those fancy kitchen stores and they'll give you all sorts of ways to drop $100 or more to fill up your cabinets. This guy cost me somewhere around $20 and sits on the stove all day because he's just that useful. I got the 2" deep, 10 1/4" diameter one. You can snag one at most camping supply places too, possibly for less. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, skillet is my go-to piece of cookware.
Scrambled eggs: ezpz. Heat the skillet, get a decent amount of butter in there and grease the pan to make cleanup easy. Eggs, maybe a touch of milk, salt, pepper, stir it all up and then turn the heat down a bit before the butter starts smoking, then throw it all in the pan. Once one layer of the egg has cooked a bit, scramble it up again to cook the rest. Slide them out (there won't be bits stuck to the pan if you've greased it properly and avoided burning things) and enjoy warm.
Grilled sandwich: bistro food at home! I love cooking up big cuts of pork (in a separate cast iron pot with a lid, maybe future blog material there) so there's often some pulled pork or braised pork belly sitting in a tupperware in the fridge. This is ideal, but if all you have are cold cuts in the fridge, or prefer vegetarian options like mushrooms or peppers, go ahead and cook them up instead. Similar process to breakfast, heat up the pan and get some fat in there. Then the meat goes in and starts to crisp up in the pan. Throw in some onions and peppers if that sounds good, maybe 1/4" slices. Now, take some good bread, and throw it in too! Grilled bread is so good. All you need is that skillet, a little fat in there or on the bread, and medium heat for a couple minutes. Might take a little practice but you want to flip it just before it burns. A touch of black is good, full on burnt crust = start over. To finish, I pull out the bread first, and then usually either go for mustard and cheese, or cilantro jalapeno carrot slaw and a litte siracha.
Pork chops: Get the pan really really hot, throw some salt in there. Pat your chops dry and put them on the skillet. After 2 minutes, flip 'em. They should be nice and brown. Turn the heat off and cover the pan. My skillet doesn't have a lid so I just use one from another pan. You let the residual heat in the skillet and the meat do the rest of the cooking. After ~10 minutes you're ready to eat.
The skillet is one thing I don't mind washing. With good seasoning, you can basically run some water in there, swipe it clean with a sponge and some bubbles and put it back on the stove. It's one of those things that improves with good use: if you keep feeding your skillet bacon, it'll grow up to be a shiny healthy miracle worker =D Once in a while, after a particularly thorough cleaning, like if my girlfriend managed to burn something in the skillet, I'll give it a once over with a paper towel with a little cooking oil to get the shine back.
Fed and happy, we move on to reading material. Far and away my favorite author is Catherynne Valente. She's gifted, prolific and has a good sense of humor. Her writing gets inside my head and turns on the imagination like whoa. Fantasy/poetry/myth/fairytales/scifi? all sort of apply to one degree or another, depending on what you're reading. The first book I picked up was The Orphan's Tales. That one now sits on the shelf (signed!) with 8 other volumes. I've re-read nearly all of them and 3-read (it's a word, I promise) both volumes of The Orphan's Tales and Yume No Hon. Her serious blog and gif-tastic chronicle of her struggle against entropy and depression are both worth perusing.
Her writing often employs meta-storytelling. Characters become storytellers about other characters who tell their own stories in The Orphan's Tales. Eventually you'll have storylines that cross in unexpected ways, or presumably fictional characters that materialize into the world as actual beings. The style can confuse, and probably turns some people off of her writing, but I enjoy it.
I can't really do her writing justice by writing about it myself so let's just read a bit
Here are some of the opening lines from The Habitation of the Blessed - A Dirge for Prester John Vol. 1. THE CONFESSIONS OF HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699
I am a very bad historian. But I am a very good miserable old man. I sit at the end of the world, close enough to see my shriveled old legs hang over the bony ridge of it. I came so far for gold and light and a story the size of the sky. But I have managed to gather for myself only a basket of ash and a kind of empty sorrow, that the world is not how I wished it to be. The death of faith is tasteless, like dust. Such dust I have unearthed by Your direction, Lord, such emerald dust and ruby sand that I fear one day I shall wake and my vision will be clouded in green and scarlet, and I shall never more see the world but through that veil of jewels. I say I have unearthed this tale--I mean I have taken it from the earth; I have made it no longer of the earth. I have made the tale an indentured slave, prostrate beneath air and rain and heaven, and tasked it to burrow under the great mountains and back to the table at which I supped as a boy, to sit instead among barrels of beer and wheels of cheese, and stare at the monks who raised me with such eyes as have pierced me these many weeks. They sent me here, which is to say You sent me here, my God, and I do not yet have it in me to forgive either of you.
I am a very bad historian. But I am a very good miserable old man. I sit at the end of the world, close enough to see my shriveled old legs hang over the bony ridge of it. I came so far for gold and light and a story the size of the sky. But I have managed to gather for myself only a basket of ash and a kind of empty sorrow, that the world is not how I wished it to be. The death of faith is tasteless, like dust. Such dust I have unearthed by Your direction, Lord, such emerald dust and ruby sand that I fear one day I shall wake and my vision will be clouded in green and scarlet, and I shall never more see the world but through that veil of jewels. I say I have unearthed this tale--I mean I have taken it from the earth; I have made it no longer of the earth. I have made the tale an indentured slave, prostrate beneath air and rain and heaven, and tasked it to burrow under the great mountains and back to the table at which I supped as a boy, to sit instead among barrels of beer and wheels of cheese, and stare at the monks who raised me with such eyes as have pierced me these many weeks. They sent me here, which is to say You sent me here, my God, and I do not yet have it in me to forgive either of you.
Great stuff!
Thanks to TL for being awesome, my skillet for being awesome, and CMV for being awesome as well. Maybe someone else will like my favorites, or share some of their own here
