Fit for a King

A week that starts with doomed inadequate prep followed by a 13-hour day luckily improved.  I suppose the plus side of running out of food halfway through Thanksgiving is that we don’t have to secretly recycle leftovers for the next couple weeks.  Really, the only extra food I dealt with was delicious re-cooked rib eye—left in the oven so that nearly three inches of fat rendered into crisp cracklins (sort of a cousin to extra crispy thick bacon).  This got chopped up and put in quesadillas.  If we had the wherewithal, something quite fancy could have come of it, with fresh guacamole and such.

That was for taco Tuesday.  Today’s food adventure (charade?) was seitan à la king (a.k.a. Satan, King of the Underworld, Stew).  Not sure if the roots of this dish trace back to Louis XIV, Henry VIII, or that guy from “The King’s Speech” (all big wheat gluten fans).  Don’t we all deserve protein chunks coated in luxurious béchamel (canned powdered white sauce mix), with just-picked (frozen for several years) peas, pearl onions, and carrots, a bag’s worth (1 C. minced) of garlic (my creative flair), flavored with the finest parsley and paprika?  Fit for a king, served to the madding crowd at McMurdo.

I think we’ve gone through the five-week menu cycle three times now, which is not a ton of repetition, but I suppose enough time has passed that I’m beginning to yearn for novelties.  A tiny slackening of rope from the powers that be have made possible inventive daily “action” dishes, yielding some awesome results: tonkotsu somen noodles with chasu pork (like ramen), made-to-order French dip sandwiches, niko dango (Asian glazed meatballs), and pear + bleu cheese + caramelized onion crêpes.  These items are made in much smaller batches than the rest of our food, and usually have a bit more love put into them because they’re something we’re interested in.  We take some pans of wan, gray pork chops or a few cases of oozy nearly-lost pears and are genuinely excited about transforming them.  (I’m using “we” a bit vicariously here, but I did cook noodles and flatten out a crêpe…and eat lots of crêpes.)

These tiny victories help restore pride in what we do.  Sure, it’s essential that scientists and forklift operators eat (and lots of them happily get double cheese-burgers three times a week), but it’s nice to give them something they’ll really enjoy.  Word travels fast when there’s something good, and people come up with an eager expression, looking for a little bit of contentment and satisfaction.  Sharing that feeling about the same object or experience is basically what I think community is.

Here’s me and my favorite rock: