I'll Be Missing You

Oftentimes, I’ll sit around and think, “I could really go for a nice soup today. Minestrone or maybe Gazpacho.”

Then I go into the kitchen and make cereal.

Cooking is such an otherworldly concept and every time I’ve tried flipping ingredients into art it’s been a miserable failure. Our kitchen is, you know, an apartment kitchen: small, cramped with shiny wedding presents. We have to stack our silverware on top of our electric stove. We have to line auxiliary glasses that won’t fit in cabinets next to the sink. Suffice it to say, not only is cooking unsuccessful, it quickly turns into a tense, tight mess of ingredients.

My parents make incredible salsa. My father has written me the recipe. My mother has stuffed a plastic bag full of the prepped ingredients, looked me in the eye, and said, “just dump this in the food processor you stupid piece of shit.” In Spanish.

Recently, I crushed a shot glass in the garbage disposal. By recently I mean several months ago. So in addition to the mess of produce piled up after each failed dish, I have to run everything down to the dumpster in real time. By dumpster I mean throw it out the window into the Earth.

The task at hand is towering. Part of the preconditions of our pact include severely cutting eating out expenses. Happy hours stay; mid-afternoon McDonald’s lunches go. Weeknight fine dining goes; weekend brunch and the occasional trip to Hyde Park Grill stays. Breakfast McMuffins go; the Saturday morning breakfast taco hangover recovery effort stays.

To kickoff this challenge in style, we toasted and pinky-swore over bar food at Texas Land and Cattle Wednesday night. Lotta chips, plastic, too-thick white queso; not as much red meat as would be ideal but we’re on a budget. We diagrammed, brainstormed, schemed, respectively ordered the house red and white wines.

Sirloin nachos, I’ll miss you most of all.