Fool's paradise

[muckefuck]

Leaving the Container Store today, I remarked to the Old Man that we'd ended up observing MLK Day by going someplace with the fewest Black people we could find. I was painfully aware of the irony when we planned the trip, only I didn't see an alternative. If he'd been feeling better then, we could've completed it last weekend and I was too sick of all the Christmas shit littering the den to put off buying sturdy plastic boxes for it yet another week. It doesn't all fit in the ones we've acquired, but most of it does and we can manage with the odds and ends.

The lunch place, Kingsbury Street Café, felt like Trixie ground zero. (My long hair is trendy again, but I'd have to wear it down and artfully radiating even at the cost of rendering a fur-lined hood purely decorative in -27°C windchill.) I was genuinely shocked when monshu made the decision to eat there even after being told of a twenty-minute wait. My "salmon hash" was flavourful and generous with the salmon, even if I didn't care for the trendy substitution of tater tots for actually potatoes, but he's being super cautious and only had plain pancakes. We hardly need to come to North & Clybourn for that.

Sunday was a day of pure hibernation. We'd spent Saturday running around so we had plenty of heat-and-eat treats from Middle Eastern (the chive-feta spread is a keeper). I ended up having to hike all the way to Whole-mart for the "vegetable crumbles" for the meatless shepherd's pie, only to find that pea protein is a key ingredient, so they might not actually be lower in purine than real meat after all. Same for the fake chicken strips I transformed into a kind of gyro with the help of fresh tzatziki and a little romaine.

But I had to do something to make up for my splurge on speck at Spacca Napoli on Saturday with tyrannio and innerdoggie. To be honest, it felt distinctly odd eating at a straight-up Italian place with them, but they vetoed the Mexican place I wanted and I nixed the inconveniently-located Turkish café with its paradoxically meat-heavy menu. Hours later, as I was coming back home on the Broadway bus, I learned that someone had been shot dead at a McDonald's only a mile due east right about the time our pies arrived. But that's the privilege that comes with living on the "right" side of a divided city.

Comments

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

The Turkish place seemed to have more vegetarian food than the Mexican place to me, actually. If I'd realized you were OK avoiding meat entirely I might have suggested Urban Vegan - other downsides are that it's cramped and that they have brown rice only. (My mother's comment after eating there was that it was nice to have kosher versions of all the stuff they used to eat when we lived there before they became more observant, but "In Bangkok they feed this kind of rice to dogs".)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Similarly, I knew someone from North Carolina who called yellow corn "pig food". (She came from white corn country.)