Pork chops with plums, two ways
The kids had two days off school for Rosh Hashanah. Monday I dropped Raffi off at “break camp” and then took Ilya home and napped during his nap instead of working. It was super relaxing and restorative sleep because I expected to be woken up at any moment. I didn’t open my computer all day except to allow Raffi to watch like three straight hours of kid trash on Netflix after I picked him up. Meanwhile I hung out with his brother and cooked a dinner that was frankly terrible, almost inedible?
I often console myself about un-productive workdays by cooking a nice meal at the end of them, a trait I gave Friendship’s Amy, who once bought expensive pine nuts to make homemade pesto after a long day at her useless blog job. Having kids has really taken the fun out of doing this, though — I can’t take my time when cooking and the results are often critiqued in detail by Raffi, who never sugarcoats his opinion. He will call a dish “discusting” or just stand up and spit his partially chewed mouthful into the garbage. I don’t take the culinary opinion of someone who considers gum to be the ideal food super seriously, but not having a receptive or discerning audience for my work (Keith and the baby will eat anything literally anything except olives) does put a damper on my enthusiasm. I know this is the stage when a lot of people give up and just make box mac and cheese and chicken nuggets and hot dogs all the time, and I do that too, but I don’t want to eat those things (except box mac and cheese, but I see that as an appetizer and would like another full meal afterwards) and I don’t have the energy to make/clean up after two separate meals, even if one of them is just boiling water or defrosting nuggets. So I have continued to make dinner, and I have continued to complain about it. I have complained about it here and if memory serves I even have an essay complaining about it in Charlotte Druckman’s forthcoming Women in Food anthology! Loving and hating home cooking, insisting on doing all of it despite often hating it, etc.
The bad meal was not the recipe’s fault. I had made it before and it had convinced me, again, that Alison Roman is not even close to overhyped; it’s quick, simple, greater than the sum of its parts, and uses a technique you wouldn’t have thought of on your own (quickly marinating the plums and onion in lime juice and fish sauce before adding them, together, to the meat juice and quickly softening them without creating a jammy mush - I wouldn’t have thought of that, at least). The first time I made it I served it with coconut rice, which made total sense with the flavors.
This time, though, my bad vibes leaked into the dish. I overcooked the plum-onion sauce and it was too acidic and too sweet, pink mushy grossness that the meat would have been better off without. I ate my portion joylessly and went to bed with Raffi after reading him his new favorite book, which is one of Dav Pilkey’s lesser works — it took him a while to land on Dog Man after Captain Underpants, and in the meantime we were graced with Diaper Baby and Ook and Gluk, the mildly problematic “kung-fu cavemen.” Real Pilkey-heads know what I’m talking about. It occurs to me that I could write a full review of this book, because it’s certainly the only novel I’ve read multiple times in recent memory. If you’re interested in hearing my detailed thoughts on the entire Pilkey oeuvre, drop me a line!
The next day, I dropped Raffi off at his friends’ house to be, as he calls it, “babysitted,” and actually managed to open my laptop during Ilya’s nap. I received a heartening email from an editor for whom I’d filed something two weeks earlier and had not yet heard back from. Rereading what I’d written cheered me up, not that it was so brilliant but it was recognizably me doing my best to think something through. It made me feel like myself.
For Rosh Hashanah’s last hurrah I made “the Doree chicken,” in the Instant pot with boneless thighs. It came out totally fine, definitely just okay, but I was back in the saddle, at least.