Kelly Lagor's Lagoraphobia

I’ve been cooking more lately.

It’s funny that now that I have enough money to buy groceries regularly, I eat out a lot less than when I had no money for groceries. Plunking down $50 a week seemed more painful than spending $5-10/meal each day and just making do with frozen stuff in between.

As such, I have a lot more things lying around my apartment that lend themselves to serious cooking than just pasta with frozen veggies. So I cook more. And every time I get a little better at it.

Tonight I made the BEST quinoa I’ve ever made and I wanted to share. It’s completely vegan (if that matters to you) and takes about 20 minutes.

I had some shallots lying around leftover from the AMAZING butternut coconut rice I made the other week (from the OUTSTANDING vegan cookbook Appetite for Reduction) so I took half of one of those and sliced it. I fried that up in a tablespoon of olive oil until they were brown, then added three large cloves of diced garlic. I let those cook for a bit, then dump in a cup of quinoa and let that toast with the garlic and the shallots and the oil until I’ve almost convinced myself they’ve changed a different color. Then I add two cups of vegetable broth, bring the whole thing back to a boil, cover it and turn it down to simmer for 15 minutes while I make whatever else I’m having with it. Sometimes I’ll sprinkle some salt over it to season it, but honestly I don’t think it really needs it.

(Mostly the whatever else has been a few Morningstar buffalo wings because GAT DAMN cooking things in a gas over makes everything more delicious, and some frozen broccoli that I cooked, drained, then sauteed in butter and toasted garlic until everything else was ready)

I love this shit. I could eat POUNDS of it. It reheats fantastically and it’s a little bit crispy from the toasting and so very, very garlic-y and wonderful.

I have been a vegetarian for going on nine years and I’m only just starting to make vegetarian and vegan dishes that push all of my salt/garlic/savory buttons. Don’t ask me if I miss meat because honestly I’ve never been able to stand it. Some kids go to college and gain fifteen pounds their freshman year because they’re free to eat all of the candy and burgers and pizza that their meal points and stomach capacity would allow. I went to college and lost weight because I didn’t have to force myself to eat stuff I didn’t like anymore.

So what about you? Do you have any awesome recipes to share?

(Not actual size)

Growing up, Easter was all about the scavenger hunts. We would wake up early and pace around our baskets wrapped in festive cellophane, trying to figure out what all was in there, buried beneath the candy. As soon as our parents were up, my brother and I would tear into the baskets, taking inventory of our bounties and searching for that egg-shaped piece of paper with a clue printed very carefully in my mom’s neat handwriting.

We would then scour the apartment looking for the next clue. Even though our apartment was small, and our bedroom wasn’t included (highlighted in blue), the hunt seemed to make the place stretch out as miles of nooks and crannies and crevices where the clue could be. I even remember one year, I had to look up a movie the clue referred to (out of the thousands that lined the east wall of the living room), get the number from the index – the clue was slipped between the tape and the case.

At the end of these hunts, I would find a stuffed bunny (I still remember Butterscotch, which was one of the softest things I’d ever felt up to that point). Those bunnies live in my mom’s storage locker.

It’s easter today and I’m alone in my apartment, drinking cold black coffee and trying to drown out the noise of the party in the courtyard in my complex with morose music as I stare at my stack of DVDs along the south wall of my apartment, knowing there’s no slip of paper hiding between the plastic disc and the plastic case.

But that’s nostalgia for you – it allows you to completely block out the fact that you’re an adult with the warm wonder from childhood. It lets you make excuses as to why every second of your adult life isn’t awesome. And really, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.

Listen to Randall Monroe - he is a wise man

Take a minute to remember all of those minutes you spent between the powerful fits of child-like wonder and contentment waiting until you were grown up so you could finally do what you want.

So let me ask you this: what are you waiting for?

If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some words that need to be strung together.

Somewhere, the day has slipped away from me. And not slipped in the traditional time sense, but in that I thought I had it pinned down, but it was torn off sometime between lunch and now.

That buzz I’d been riding on the news that my undergraduate honors research thesis is finally being published might have had time to mingle with the contents of a conversation I had last night, or that quiet walk home after my bedtime. They annihilated one another in a perfect combination of phase and anti-phase and I’m left with the steady hum of the air conditioning, which is on too high. And the Lucky Charm marshmallow smell of my lip gloss does nothing to make my chapped lips feel better – it just makes the flap of dead skin on my lower lip stick better over the spots I’ve been worrying bloody this afternoon.

That second one has nothing to do with sound. But the aching from my lip is feeding into the aching in the back of my head.

I’m struggling with the restraint I’ve been trying to show this past year.  There are things I want to ramble on about so I can extract them from my own software cycles, but I’m not letting myself. I feel like something’s building. I feel like it’s going to explode.

Hopefully in the form of a piece of art. After all, that’s been the point of the restraint – to keep from skimming everything away from my subconscious, to let things roil a bit. I’ve been trying to examine the effect of this exercise – to see if the act of keeping things to myself can change how I make art or the art I do make.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post. It’s finally that time –

Time for the first challenge.

I am going to take the next 30 days to make something from this place – my meditation on the importance of secrets.

If you’d like, you can do the same. It can be anything to do with the theme – it can be any type of art. At the end of the 30 days(May 12th) if you have something you want to share, send me a link and I’ll link to it from here, or even post it if you don’t have a forum of your own.

Just remember – it doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be.

Now I’m going to go try and chase down the rest of this day. I think there are eddies in the ventilation system current somewhere in the vicinity of the vending machines.

I’m posting this from bed via the wordpress iPhone app so we’ll see how that goes when I come back to read this in the morning.

It’s raining. I love the rain. It’s for all the usual reasons – the constant gentle tap on the glass that makes you grateful to be warm and indoors, the silence that holds itself around each drop, the forgiveness you can allow yourself for all of the things left undone.

But there’s more than that. In a place like San Diego, the rain is a rare thing. So when I lay in bed, listening, it’s a more active kind. I almost want to hear every drop so that it’ll be held in my memory on the sunny days, the foggy mornings, the mild, dry nights.

You see, the rain was a more constant thing growing up. To the point that it became framed in such a way as to be a nuisance. But as the desert sucked away that pretense, so too did it take with it that feeling of home. You might be able to guess what’s been on my mind lately.

I spent the day in the desert. I’m spending my night in the rain.

I’ll write about the trip to the desert sometime soon. In the meantime, I hope you can find your home either in the patter of the drops or that silence between.