Delicious salad dressing, unsettling prices at the supermarket
Last night Dibs and I prepared a delicious meal at home. We have been actively trying to eat at home more in the last few weeks. I didn’t get a second job so I could spend it all in restaurants, after all. Turns out I will be spending it all on increasingly expensive groceries, at least until we start getting our bi-weekly Hearty Roots Farm produce pickups and I leave for the summer at Hawthorne Valley Biodynamic farm, school and summer camp to work as a cook. Here’s to permaculture and living close to the food supply!
In preparation for eating dinner at home I paid a (guilty) visit to the Bowery Whole Foods, which is the most convenient grocery store to my workplace and subway line. Unfortunately, Whole Foods is, and always has been, goddamn expensive. Now that retailers have an excuse to bump up food prices, Whole Foods and everyone else did not delay in raising their prices on everything. So instead of the $20 I intended to spend to supplement this week’s rations, it was more like $35. I actually asked the clerk to remove a few items because I couldn’t justify spending the amount they asked ($1.43 for one small green apple, for example. Yes I know they are out of season. I am ashamed enough to have been shopping there in the first place.)
But anyhow, the prices have all gone up over there, and in addition there are an alarming number of visible security or “loss prevention” personnel all around the store, guarding the entranceways and stationed randomly throughout. (Probably where the cameras have the most trouble reaching.) This leads me to believe that Whole Foods has experienced, or expects to experience, an upswing in theft due to the upswing in food and gas prices, and a general state of despair over the economy. Very smart, those executives. I guess they didn’t get rich letting people eat for free. I was certainly tempted to cram several items down my pants, particularly a wedge of delicious aged gouda, a pricey tube of my favorite lavender-scented aluminum-free deodorant, and some vitamins which I didn’t end up buying. Alas, I was wearing a form-fitting ensemble with no pockets, which would bulge with my dinner soon enough.
We prepared a delicious summery salad, with mixed greens, orange bell pepper, carrot, tomato, mixed garden sprouts, and the aged gouda cheese. I mixed up a little salad dressing which was REALLY good and Dibs said was the gingeriest dressing he’d ever had outside of Dojo. It goes something like this:
juice of two lemons
2 tsp grated ginger, juice and all
2 tbsp soy sauce, tamari or Bragg’s
2 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp olive or canola oil
a few dashes of rice vinegar
3 tsp turbinado sugar, dissolved in a bit of hot water
mix it all together and shake it up real good in a jar. I thought of adding sesame seeds too but thought too late. I think orange juice would also work very well.
We also ate roasted red bliss potatoes with dill, garlic, rosemary and olive oil, some sauteed Brussels sprouts in butter (mmmmmm) and some baked barbecue tempeh with scallions. We both ate heartily and have two containers of leftovers now.
Over dinner we discussed a lot of heavy topics, such as science, religion, graduate school, hypocrisy, staying inspired to change things for the better and amend exploitative habits and ways despite inevitable complicity in “the system,”Hakim Bey a.k.a. Peter Lamborn Wilson, and the kitty cat Roze’s behavior.
Meanwhile, all over the world, food riots are breaking out, children starve in countries where the food they produce is too expensive to buy, a volcano forces Chilean peasants to evacuate their homes, monsoons destroy Myanmar, war rages on in the Middle East, prisoners resume being executed by the United States of Amerikkka, and a generalized international mayhem and apocalypse seems to be clearly upon us. 2012 needs to goddang happen already so we can get on with things.
But never fear, I will continue to provide my readership with salad dressing recipes until in the not too distant future I can’t afford to use salad dressing, or a computer, anymore.
