Life as Experiment

I've been living in a very rural community for two years and I'm considering relocating to the city. People think I am insane. When I first moved up here, people thought the same thing. I had absolutely no experience with livestock, farming, or anything country besides my background in archaeological field work. Oh, and I owned an ironic pair of cowboy boots. It was, however, an irresistible challenge, a new experiment.

Sometimes, I get these great bees in the bonnet and simply MUST try out some new experimental thing. Recently, it's been bok choy. How do you even cook bok choy besides your standard Asian saute/stir-fry type of dish? I made a delicious soup with it the other day, with a very light broth and lots of other yummy veggies. The bok choy was added late in the cooking so it wouldn't turn into bok mush. It was ok but not particularly stand out. Last night I became obsessed with the thought of finely minced vegetables. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do with these veggies but it was guaranteed to be pretty in the making. There is just something deeply satisfying to me about mincing things into teeny tiny cubes and putting them into nice piles. Taste was completely secondary to the almost tangible mental sensation that was forming in my mind. I could feel the knife chop-chopping away in my imagination and I could almost see the little stacks of cubes. Maybe one of those Legos I am always stepping on traveled through my skin, floated into my blood stream, and became lodged in my brain. This, of course, would make one think in terms of the intense tactile satisfaction of breaking bigger things into tiny cubes, making nifty piles, and then rearranging them into something else. You tracking?

Once I started chopping, it occurred to me that I am blogging these days and blogs normally have lovely photographs of people's painstaking efforts to make and do beautiful things. So I tried, honestly, to photo-document my progress. Here's the rub: I get so deep into a project that I often can't stop for little details like taking pictures, following directions, eating, or drinking. Ha, that shit's for plebes. I'm a patrician of the maker's process. I can't be bothered with details. So I took some sort of random, poorly lit pictures of piles of onions, fish fillets floating on top of sauce, and a rather horrible final shot of a bed of rice with toxic-looking yellow goo covered in julienned bok choy leaves. My final dish turned out to be fish curry with caramelized bok choy stems, sweet potatoes, and mirepoix dressed with raw bok choy and celery leaves. It was all very schmancy sounding but it looked like a confused street taco threw itself up on my plate. I didn't mind, it tasted bomb and the six year old loved it. In fact, he requested it for lunch. Granted, today he will be the only kid with sweet potato/bok choy fish curry at his rural kindergarten. Good thing he's not afraid to wear a different hat.