The Method

The recipe-posting hiatus has gone on long enough.  Tonight's dish celebrates my most reliable comfort, my most beloved enemies and my troubled hypocrisy.

Methods
1.  Nuke sweet potato
2.  Whilst nuking, dice a yellow onion and get sizzling in a tiny amount of olive oil
     a.  "tiny" means a quarter teaspoon, mixed with chicken broth if you need to dissipate your saute
          medium in a big pan
     b.  because there must always be a "b" for every "a"
3.  Wash and dice creminis and kale
     a.  oyster mushrooms are also great in this one
     b.  remove kale shreds from main stem
4.  Toss creminis into pan with half-carmelized onions
     a.  open and rinse a can of navy or black beans
     b.  pour glass of Johan Vin Gris 2007 (yes, a good Pinot from this year is hard to come by);
          water, if you are a less masochistic Crohnie
5.  Add turmeric, coriander and pepper to the onions and toss
6.  Dice softened nuked sweet potato and add to pan with kale and a can of navy or black beans
7.  Pile onto whatever aid you need to get it to your mouth

I've been atrociously weak this year.  Atrociously.  There has been no fight in me.  I blame it on H.K. for giving me something to persistently lean on.  Despite an outwardly aggressive and invincible daytime manner, I come home at night and crumble into depression.  About what, you ask?  About my unreasonably perfect life, and how maladroit I am trying to keep up with it.  H.K. combats my crumbling with reason.  And yet, he always wins; my fears are consistently proven obdurately nonsensical (read: in fact, I am responsible for some of the awesomeness in my life). 

He reminds me of how difficult it is to judge oneself objectively, and urges me to trust his assertions as the objective party to my madness.  Suffice to say, his assertions are that I am doing just fine, and have a bad habit of defending everyone else's set-backs but my own.

And he is right.  I have this self-deprecation complex which, before H.K., I was always told was very unattractive.  For whatever reason, it hasn't driven him away (yet).  In the end, though, it inevitably seems to come out that I have spent the evening being upset about something simply because I had found time to relax (read: veg in front of a movie), and felt outrageously guilty about it. 

This happens because the Compulsion has projects it wants to do (read: Raganovel 20XX remains twenty pages of research and three pages of verse).  I think the problem there is that I'm too oriented about the goal, and not so much about the Method.  The Method, however, is what I live for in every other arena.  Particularly when Crohn's is feeling neglected does my pace retard and the Method become more important to appreciate.  And so I cook.