my apologies

The reason there have been very few recipes lately on this supposedly food-related bl*g is because I have not been cooking, with the exception of setting afire the occasional piece of toast. For example, tonight at dinnertime I was in the car, driving two hours south to visit someone I love in rehab. However, before I left I bought a gruel-on-separate-plates-is-tapas dinner from City Market, which I almost crashed the car photographing.


At rehab I sat through an incoherent two-hour lecture on codependence by a counselor who halfway through her speech pulled up her sleeve and revealed a hideous bug bite, the kind that I'm pretty sure warrants a visit to the hospital. "I was bit by a spider," she muttered. "Everything seems slow to me. Does everything seem slow to you? I took two Benadryl. Am I talking slow?"

She went on to tell us that addiction is the elephant in the room for most families. "It stinks!" she yelled. "Have you ever had an elephant in your house?" She looked belligerently around the room. Unsure of whether she was talking about a literal or metaphorical elephant, no one answered, but she continued, not talking slowly at all: "You can tiptoe around it, but the elephant will take a big crap in your formal dining room! They're hairy and they smell!" She laughed meanly. "You can't ignore the elephant when it takes a dump in your parlor, can you? What are you going to do when the elephant gets drunk and won't come to the picnic?" The elephant/picnic attendance tirade went on for a full five minutes, during which time I waited for either the spider venom or the antihistamines to finally take her, but no such luck.

And then I drove home.