Author: jalohing

This was meant to be a consolation meal. Back when I thought I’d miss a big party with D where the invite said the dinner menu would include shrimp and grits, I was feeling pretty mopey. It’s one thing to be 3,000 miles from your honey, and another to be 3,000 miles from your honey AND the most perfect food combination that humans ever invented.

Grits are one of my favorite mushy carbs, and mushy carbs happen to be my favorite category of food. Rice, porridge, oats, polenta, risotto, I love the cozy embrace of all of them. A spoonful of hot cheesy grits is like taking off your bra and putting on your fluffiest pair of sweats after a long day, or if it’s an East Coast summer where you are right now, like taking off your bra and firing up the ac after a long day. And is there anything better than the sweet crunch of a first bite into a big prawn? No, is the answer to that! Shrimp made well is both crispy on that first bite and then juicy and tender on every subsequent one. The combination of those two contrasting ingredients together is an actual love story.

But as much as I love shrimp and grits, I actually try to avoid it. I’ve been trying to return shrimp to its status as a special occasion food, and discourage myself from thinking of it as the everyday item it’s seemed to become in food media over the years. Having a tiny understanding of the environmental impact of overfishing influenced my feelings, as did this vital AP investigation on the actual slave labor which powered, and very likely still props up, the industry. So I try (and regularly fail, let’s be clear) to avoid shrimp. I usually do okay, or whatever, just fine enough not to hide under my bed all day though what kind of metric is that? But then again, I’m still eating plenty of meat, buying bagged snacks, using single use plastic for produce at the grocery store, and generally clogging up the oceans with the detritus of my convenience-focused life. Sometimes I’ll see people going nuts on gourmet sushi dinners and I’ll think fuck, if THEY can happily gorge on the last of the planet’s edible seafood, why can’t I? And it’s usually only after 10 minutes of that kind of stewing that I check myself and realize I need to log off. 

I’m pretty sure this environmental guilt and gourmet food jealousy and my uneven attempts at seafood asceticism have only ratcheted up the mystical allure of shrimp and grits in my food imagination. The thing is saddling oneself with personal environmental guilt feels like both a scam–what we need are huge structural changes from corporations and governments–and also, truly overdue. What if we DID unite to turn away from single use plastic? From our cars? From keeping the office thermostat at 65F? From eating so much goddamn delicious shrimp? It’s not everything, certainly, but it’d be something. 

So what’d I do a few weeks ago? I slowly went about acquiring the necessary ingredients for this dish. The grits were already in my cupboard, the shrimp and the bacon weren’t. Bacon! I haven’t even gotten to bacon guilt. And then I made this dish. And you know what the funny thing is? D ended up changing my ticket so I could stay and I made it to the party after all. I had my shrimp and grits twice, and you know what? Both versions were just okay. (I overcooked my shrimp! They were as chewy as chicken hearts!!) The brisket they served at the party was even better. And I felt so much sorrow for our planet with every single bite I took.

A few weeks ago D and I were still blissed out after coming back from the dreamiest stay with my aunties (Aunties, I still owe you a thank you card!!). In my wonderful aunties’ Sonoma County oasis we got to visit chickens and pluck freshly laid eggs out of their beds, pick borage and nasturtium flowers for our dinner salads, sit around blind taste-testing wines (main takeaway: my palette is awful) and talk about our experiences of queerness across the generations. There were blackberries picked off the vine, there was barefoot star-gazing, there was showering outside in the morning shade with the scent of plums underfoot. When I say dreamy, I mean dreamy. 

At their table, D and I, the youngsters of the weekend, threw around the label “queer” casually. It’s an easy term for us to use, reclaimed as it’s been by our generation of activists and public figures. But, D and I noticed later, that my aunties refrained from using the word. “Queer,” D and I understood, is not the same word to all people in the LGBT universe. My aunties told us stories of living through the Briggs Amendment era–of colleagues walking in their local pride march but with paper bags over their heads, a mind-reeling image to me. And we also got to laugh about our species’ enduring love of lesbian typology. 

There’s so much we owe our elders, so much that they lived through that I can barely even fathom, and also, a lot that’s still the same. We may use different labels for our identities, but my aunties generously told us about how they too, even now, continue to grapple with how they understand themselves. Their openness was a real gift.

We left for San Francisco with a care package full of frittata and coffee cake, shiny wisteria seeds that our aunties said burst like rockets out of their pods, yellow plums that dropped down on us while D and I sat in their hot tub. On the drive back to the city and all full up on love I felt a stirring resolve to be good to my community the way my aunties were to me and D. 

It’s something I thought about for the rest of the weekend. Somewhere along the way we’d also squeezed in a trip to Berkeley Bowl, and so had plenty of veg and the best of stone fruit season stashed in D’s fridge. I nearly cried tears over the beauty of black velvet apricots. What sexy fruit. 

How will I be good to family, community, young people who are coming up now? 

Back in the city that Sunday morning D and I woke up a few minutes before the Women’s World Cup final and turned it on from bed. We squinted at it on D’s phone, not bothering to move to a larger screen. I, having just come upon my new favorite hobby, gushed about Megan Rapinoe, while D got up to fix some coffee, and a while later we finally sat down to breakfast. We watched the last of the game with the frittata from my aunties on the table in front of us, and I couldn’t help smiling at the scene: two queer people making out over leftovers from our lesbian aunties with the Women’s World Cup on in the background. 

What is it that inspires you to get off your ass and try an ambitious dish? For me, an incorrigibly lazy cook, it takes something close to a cosmic alignment of proper planets, already stocked pantry items, outdoor humidity, and ideal hair greasiness levels to get me to try something big.

The stars shifted ever so slightly when Narinda came to town a few weeks ago, and this was the result. From Bon Appetit’s cover to my kitchen, with Narinda’s confidence pushing me past the stuff that would easily scare me off. (Mainly: taking a chance on a big hulking piece of meat.) 

And guess what, the dish turned out not to be nearly as ambitious as it seemed. There was so very little to it. And I loved that Sohui Kim packed SO much flavor into a dish using East Asian kitchen basics. What a little ginger (key), red wine (pungent), sugar (sweetening), and hours on the stove (crucial) can do for a dish! It’d been a while since I’d taken a bite of braised meat so tender and so laced through with fat that the whole bite melted in my mouth. 

Alas, as is our custom, we ended up not eating until close to midnight. Was still worth it, I think. Thank you, Sohui Kim.

May I introduce you to a snack innovation developed from within the depths of my herniated disc pain a few months back? Take a sleeve of extremely, almost unbearably healthy unsalted rice crackers, add a swipe of butter plus a dash of table salt.

I SWEAR it tastes just like popcorn. Especially delicious when you won’t spring for the yummy bagged stuff or the microwaved stuff and when your stovetop popcorn comes out denser than if you’d just eaten the dry kernels straight.

Welcome to the sweetest view in my apartment. I pounced on this tub of Maltesers at Costco over the holidays, and bulldozed through them in a matter of weeks. I did share a bunch with B’s Scottish boyfriend. But more or less, finishing this tub was entirely my own achievement.

Do you know about Maltesers? They’re the British (and superior) version of the comparatively chalky Whopper candy. My sister introduced them to me years ago when she was living in Hong Kong. Let’s hear it for colonialism! The chocolate on Maltesers is milkier and smoother than Whopper candies. The malted crunch center is less sweet and, just as important, often much fresher. Of course I’ve had plenty of stale Maltesers in my life but when you get a good batch, oh it’s very, very good. 

There was no way I was going to let go of the tub after it satisfied its first use. Initially it became an adorable item of decor. Then I used it as a chocolate-scented collection bowl when I had a fundraiser-party at my apartment a few months back (the backlog of blog posts is LONG) and then it returned to the top of a book shelf for a few more months, being its bright, cute self. 

This past week Narinda was in town and I pointed her toward a rapidly wilting basil plant on my window sill. “Looks like it wants to be repotted,” Narinda said. But what kind of planter would do? Enter the cheeriest tub ever. A little of Narinda’s confident plant wisdom and a lot of my squealing later, this happened. Look at this little guy! I want to hug it. 

On a related note: I’ve started passing on some snacks that have lots of extraneous plastic and individual pouches. It’s hard to justify the extra packaging, even when it’s crazy adorable or extends the freshness of a snack. I buy a lot of bulk snack mix from my local produce market, and reuse the same plastic produce bag over and over when I refill it. Definitely not the cutest. But my environmental conscience is the tiniest bit clearer.

Hello from the thin edge between unconsciousness and delirium. My days are ruled by staving off my two afflictions of sleep deprivation and chronic, sometimes excruciating, pain. “The combination of those two,” Nayana reminded me, “is the recipe for torture.”

For the first month or so it was doable. I had a big trip to look forward to, to get strong enough for. But back in NYC now, something’s shifted. The monotony of the pain, the worsening of my sleep, is wearing me down.

A few days ago I realized that the best thing about Nortryptaline, a nighttime nerve pain medication I’d been faithfully taking for almost two months, was that it knocked me out for about 4 hours. On the medication, I’d fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and then get woken up by my pain a few hours later. But when I stopped taking the Nortryptaline five days ago (I should confess, without consulting my pain specialist), nothing really changed. Off the medication, I still am woken up by pain so bad I cannot reach my way back toward sleep. I still had, have, no choice but to stagger to my feet in the dark, and begin the one thing that brings me relief: moving around on my feet for at least an hour, often two, until I can go back to sleep before being awoken again in another 90 minutes to do the same all over again.

While still on the Nortryptaline I’d been throwing everything at my pain to try to get that second round of sleep in. I tried 600 mg of ibuprofen one night, 1000 mg of Tylenol another, then a tablet of Meloxicam the next. None worked. For a few nights I also took Vicodin. But as soon as I realized that every subsequent tablet of hydrocodone was giving me fewer and fewer hours of relief I stopped it. Pain is bad, but dependence and tolerance scares me more. So now I’m off all painkillers.

I stopped because I lost my confidence in the ability of painkillers to ease the kind of chronic pain I’ve been dealing with in recent weeks. It felt like my pain, ever present but thankfully no longer crippling, has become impervious to medication. I could ask for something stronger, I could lay on more and more of the Vicodin. But none of this is a fix. Crucially, I am lucky enough to be able to be delirious in the daytime right now, and to be unable to reach meaningful restfulness at night. But without sleep my body is deteriorating. I am foggy, heavy limbed, and so, so, so tired.

It feels like I am the parent of a colicky infant, being summoned repeatedly round the clock to tend to a needy baby. Except my herniated discs do not smile back at me, do not nuzzle back, do not provide the rush of hormones I need to sustain such self-sacrifice over and over. 

One night last week, groggy and up again to begin my nighttime pacing, I turned to D and whispered: it feels like I’ll never get better. (The self-pitying is worst at about 4:37am.) D had been happily snoring away till then, but awoken by the rush of cold air I let in by rustling the covers, they reached over and began sleepily massaging my busted butt. It was comfort, it was sweetness, but something about their serenity and the futility of their offering wounded instead of soothed me, and jealous of their unconsciousness, I left the room to shiver in D’s studio while I walked off my pain. 

To spend all day craving sleep and all evening dreading being supine, because it means handing my body over to Pain, is acquainting me with a new kind of powerlessness. It is a slow-motion unraveling. I don’t like it.

Let me tell you the scariest episode from the last few months. This is the story which, just seven days past, feels imprinted in my mind as That Sunday. This is the story I probably will think of first when people ask me how bad it really got. (Do you hear the hubris here, my use of the past tense? My assuming it won’t ever be as bad again? My confidence that it can’t get worse?) 

One week ago I sat down on my couch with a book, thinking I’d get through a few pages before finding something else to do with my quiet Sunday. But lately my couch and really, all chairs, have not agreed with me. Still, I curled my legs under me, I leaned to the right, I swung my legs left, I attempted to find a better spot. Then something happened. What exactly, I don’t know. I wish the moment had registered with a pop or a crack like other injuries. The herniated discs I’d been nursing for months did something, and I knew I was in trouble. 

I shuffled to the kitchen, where I keep the stable of meds I’ve acquired, and managed to make it to the sink and back to the kitchen counter with a glass of water before I got stuck. My nerves were screaming out and the muscles in my leg seized. The pain would surely subside, I wagered. I tried to shuffle, even to pivot, but everything made me wail. I waited, attempting every few minutes to maneuver myself away from the counter I was by now clutching, but nothing worked.

The thing you learn when you begin to see lots of doctors for unrelenting pain is on their intake forms they’ll have a list of adjectives they ask you to check off to describe your pain. Stabbing? Searing? Cold? Throbbing? Shooting? Sharp? Apparently these different words can indicate different conditions to doctors. But even with so many colorful options, pain is very difficult to describe. 

No one would ask me to chart my pain on a scale from 1 to 10 if it were attached to an apparent wound, like my intestines falling out of my stomach, or my arm jutting out of its shoulder socket. But this injury is invisible, and to explain it I can only use numbers, proxies, metaphors: it feels like my ankle is being sent through a garbage compactor, or, it feels like someone with steel hands is twisting my pelvis off my hips. It feels like I’ve had a three-month-long cramp in my right butt. (Okay, that one’s rather direct.)

That day it felt like someone set off a grenade inside my leg. I felt myself nauseous with the overwhelming electricity of the pain, and alone in my apartment, panic began to overtake me like hives climbing up my body. I started hyperventilating. My phone was back by the couch.

Even after I decided what I’d have to do it took me a while to commit to it: I forced myself to fall to the floor, a million fireworks popping inside my body the whole way down, and once there I used my arms to drag my body across the floor to the couch. 

And here is where I got luckier than any human can hope to be. I made one call and on the second ring, Mariah picked up. She is a friend, who also happens to be the person I’d trust most in a crisis, and who happens to live a few blocks from me, and who happens to have a set of keys to my place so she could let herself in, and who happened to be nearby, and happened to be able to come to me. When I say lucky, I really mean it. 

And Mariah came, and with so much calmness let me choke out a few sobs, then brought me more meds, and soothed me with the kind of distracting small talk that I think probably helps people in shock keep from dissolving. And then she lifted me and more or less carried my body to bed. Mariah put meds and water next to me and offered to leave some food on my nightstand, and I foolishly turned her down. When I woke a few hours later, still in pain but at least in bed, I was clutching my phone.

But as evening turned to night, and long after I’d drained my glass, I knew I’d have to make a move. And so, clenching my teeth, I rolled off my bed and crawled to the toilet. And then I army crawled back to the kitchen, dragging my right leg, which was somehow both simultaneously dead weight and aflame. I’d taken so many painkillers I knew I needed food to pad my stomach, but I could not stand upright. From the floor I reached for utensils, I pulled open the fridge, grabbing cold leftovers and yogurt, and I ate on the kitchen floor, on my hands and knees, with a potholder beneath my knees. I was not alone–D kept me company over FaceTime–but that night, hovering over my food, shoveling bites into my mouth with a shaky hand, I indulged in so much self-pity. And then, like a true millennial, after wiping up my tears I took a photo of my picnic. 

The next morning I asked my doctor for the Vicodin I’d repeatedly turned down (which Kate, blessedly, picked up for me while also choosing a walking cane for me) and got the spinal injection he’d warned would only buy me time, at best, while I prepare for a longer-term solution. 

That was one week ago, and already so much more pain has flowed through me since then that it feels like another lifetime. 

I will admit that I have never thought of myself as a particularly courageous or hardy person, and that part of what makes me want to write this here and share it is that I’m a little taken aback, and maybe even impressed, that last Sunday, when it seemed my pain might swallow me whole, I did not back down. I have inside me a will to live, it turns out, and I will try not to forget it. 

I already lived a small, quiet existence: meandering through the aisles of supermarkets and libraries, long-distance bestie text chats, noodles dates, Netflix, FaceTime calls with my beloved nieces, the older one already tiring of compulsory social niceties, needing to be nudged to acknowledge me over the phone, the younger one still learning how to focus her eyes on the faces in front of her. 

But in the last few months my life has narrowed even more. My days are consumed entirely by the management of pain. I live by the schedule of whatever medications I’m on as my doctors juggle back and forth about how best to treat my condition. I have three of them tending to my current problems–enough attention to be flattering if my issues weren’t so serious, or so expensive. I count down the hours until I can take my next pill, which may or may not provide me some relief. My meals are timed to best pad my stomach lining so the powerful painkillers don’t burn a hole through it. The pain, and then the drugs, determine when or whether I will sleep. I never was a big drinker, but now I had better not have even a drop of alcohol. The same, oddly, goes for grapefruit. I don’t walk much, definitely don’t run anywhere. Some days I can barely shuffle.

These are very, very quiet days. Days so quiet that as I was waiting for the kettle to boil this morning I attempted to mimic an Instagram treat. My wallet (and limited mobility) won’t allow me to make it to Davelle anytime soon, but there’s always jam and cream cheese and bread around. 

And funny attempts at tiling them up on a piece of toast. This was, to be clear, more amusing than delicious. But that’s what I’ve got room for these days. A little silliness before I swallowed a very bitter, potent pill.

Can a blog wither from neglect, die, and return from death? If so, is it then reborn a new blog? Or is it un-dead, a zombie blog? Limbs askew, irises washed away from its eyes, mouth dripping the blood of other once healthy blogs? (I recently watched Train to Busan, maybe it shows?) These are minor thoughts I’m considering since having to tussle with my domain host after letting my renewal for this here blog lapse a few months ago. 2018 was a rough year for me. 

But the blog is back. It and I both are decidedly more alive in 2019. 

I saw this snack during a hazy scroll through Instagram last year. The dish was served at a diner somewhere in Hong Kong or Taiwan. As soon as my eyes floated across the image it made total sense to me. I wish I’d held onto a link to it to give it proper credit now. Google has since told me there are infinite variations on this dish! 

I’ve made it for myself, and I’ve made it for others. And I recently learned it makes a terrific party appetizer for a crowd. The best part is you can make it the day before and keep it in the fridge. It’s delicious when it’s chilled. Obviously you’ve gotta already love a little slime, and if so, it’s supremely satisfying to take a bite of the fresh okra and let the juicy, slick seeds pop between your teeth.

So here’s what you’ll do the next time you want a classy and healthy snack. It’s so simple, I spent more time rooting around for the cutest appropriate plates in my cupboard than I did actually making this. You’ll need just three ingredients: okra, soy sauce, and wasabi. 

1) Bring a pot of salted water to boil.

2) Throw in rinsed okra, and cook for just a few minutes. I’d say give it a minute past the point when the color in the okra brightens to a grassy green. Ideally the okra is tender but retains a gentle crunch.

3) Remove okra from the pot and send it straight into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking.

4) Find your cutest plate, throw okra into it. Then locate a coordinating small dish, into which you’ll pour a bit of soy sauce and squeeze out a little wasabi turd.

5) Et voila. Use a spear of okra to mix the wasabi and soy sauce together, then keep dipping one into the other, and eat!!