Day 11: Valena does Vegan or, insight into my, dare I say it, rather Succulent first voluntarily induced vegan feast (part b.)

valena's down home homemade spaghetti squash lasagna...ie, voluptuous vegan

 

It was sometime after Thanksgiving but before (say) winter solstice that I decided to resuscitate Succulent Sobriety. I was drinking every day. I balanced my 15 beer-a-day quota through slamming pot after pot of (beloved) java while chain smoking like a motherfucker. I was sleeping four hours a night. Every time I went into one of West Peoria’s fine watering holes I would blow through 100 dollars in a blink, and it’s pretty bad when you waltz into Mike’s Tap and go through 100 bucks in a blink since Mike’s Tap is intrinsically the size of an ice fishing shed.

More so, my waistline was turning into a sausage patty. I began to straggle into my favorite pair of jeans. If yer a perennially young and impecunious writer the holidays can sometimes be financially trying because birth of Christ usually entails birth of bankruptcy. I found myself unable to perform menial activities (ie showering, masturbation, reading the New York Times, optically doling through BrainPickings every day and just drooling at the vat of hip erudition for hours on end) without the clutched aegis of an adult beverage.  I was back in the habit of trudging across snow banks to-and-from Walgreens on Western every morning with a 12 pack of PBR that would be nominally reduced to crunched aluminum shingles by 10 am, when Western Liquors open, trudging across snow banks again in Iditarod-eskimo fashion lugging a 12 pack of Sam Adams seasonal, each case usually split with my roommate, finding myself wildly pecking at the lunar sheet of the page  passing out around five pm, somehow, via more caffeine, hoisting my intellectual mettle out of the pre-holiday gutter and into professional work mode, arriving at work at 11pm, shoveling anything I could foist  into my lips for replenishment before finding myself lulled by the incessant purr and tinkling drip of the coffee pot galvanizing my senses for the next eight hours when I would tramp to Walgreens and press the repeat button on the  recursive chronicle of a self-imprisoned life.

I realized that I needed a change and the only way I can make changes is by hardcore writing about wanting to make changes, employing cemented alphabetical emblems woven together in such an approach as to fledge tightly wrought sentences that somehow become an emotional crutch, a psychological pillar, an encouraging mast keeping my physiology afloat as I sail into uncharted seas of the next 40 days substance free.

I also realized that I was going to have to give up my dear friend Valena’s cooking.

As I said before and as the bulging circumference of my waistline will attest, nobody cooks like my friend Valena. I simply can’t say no to her cooking. I have no remorse over this or how (due to my unalloyed inhibition to act like a drooling glutton every time I open her fridge) I seem to have no logical voluntary control harnessing the anatomical mechanics of my motor skills whenever the scent of her cooking is wafting in invisible olfactory-orgasmic baubles above my head.  Very simply put: I want publishers’ in New York to react the same way to my novels and poems the same way I react to her cooking: They not only want it they somehow need it 24-7 and they need to come back to it for seconds and thirds and fourths and that they will pay any amount of US currency just to take scoop a heaping narrative into their salivating lips once again.

 

 

 

I was originally set to commence my sojourn on Jan 6^th, that way it would end on Valentine’s day. Due to frigid climate and wind chills caroling drifts of fifty below it was pushed back a week (it will end the 21^st instead of Valentine’s day). The last week I overdid it on drinking and feasting. There was always beer burrowed like frozen moles in the arctic snow on the lip of my back porch. My roommate was kinda going through a (truculent/pugilistic barroom-clamoring) month of just plain hedonistic post holiday drinking punctuated with a harrowing stint in the ER the eve SS II convened. Knowing that we would also sacrifice the lactose brick substance known as cheese, Valena made (simply kickass) beer-cheese soup which we indulged by the fireplace.  We ordered whole pizza’s from Casey’s and gorged (yes, gorged) at 5 guys burgers.   The last official meal she created was a simply luscious Cheeseburger soup. Add  excessive chunks of Habanero cheese and healthy squirts of Sriracha hot chili sauce and even the most obese flabby-chinned Chinese buffet-consuming glutton would have a  willing incentive to fast for 40 days as well.

 

The first week of SS2 I did nothing but juice. Valena stopped by my apartment Monday night. I was asleep and went to work later that night but when I arrived home the next day here is what I found awaiting my consumption on the shelves of my fridge:


The first item looked like an orphan bassinet or, more aptly, like a un-disemboweled Russian Matryoshka doll  stationed sideways and severed in half. On closer scrutiny it was a squash known in the vegan vernacular as “spaghetti squash,” which is cutting a squash in half and baking it and then scooping out the interior and stringing apart like spaghetti (it strings out like spaghetti automatically). Valena then added a spate of her signatures don’t-fuck-with-me I’m Queen chef spices which, after initial indulgence you just can’t help beckoning for more. After a week of juicing my ass off my jaw bones swelled because I wasn’t used to chewing. Splurge a lil’ hot sauce on the entrée (I am male, watch me spurt) and damn do you have a meal.

The next meal generously delivered from the holistic food magi was a translucent zip-locked bag that, upon first perusal, looked kind of liked a clogged aortic sac of gravy but was really Valena’s homemade concoction, a vegan take on lentil soup flooded with mashed potatoes and carrots and vegetable broth. This was Valena’s own personal favorite and I must confess, I wouldn’t have known it was vegan and purportedly good for you had she not informed me.  It was  a velvety, creamy pottage that applauded the taste buds in an aromatic symphony of flavor.I mixed it with a crunch of tortilla chips and then threw in some whole wheat crackers. What was beautiful about this simple offering was how filling it was. It was the perfect complement on a winter morning. The perfect bowl of soup hand crafted by a beautiful friend.

 

The final bag found in my fridge looked like leftover salsa from my coworker’s annual superbowl party. It turned out it was variation of Valena’s specialty only it was lovingly extracted to fit  Vegan regime. Vegan Taco soup. In her culinary ingenuity Valena had concocted her world famous Taco Soup without the taco meat or cheese, making it a vegan exclamatory. Valena didn’t like the Vegan taco soup, but again, I couldn’t get enough of it. It doused my lips with a zangy aftertaste and made me, again, drool for more.

The next day I went over to her place and she made Tofu stir-fry. I have a hardcore aversion to Tofu, reviling aquatic clod of dun-colored soy bean curd. About a decade ago my ex-girlfriend gave me thirty boxes and they sat, unopened, in my cupboard for over a year before jettisoning them unopened.

I really don’t dig Tofu.

It looks like a liver-deficient fecal sample.

That said her Tofu stir-fry served as the coronation of her cooking. Packed with snow peas, pepper, peanuts rice—I enjoyed the fried Tofu which looked like an elephant ear when fried and tasted oh-so delectable indeed.  

That's a pithy synopsis of my first official Vegan dinner. Thanx Valena for cooking the most gland-salivating meals I know and (yes) its so nice to have a companion who is voluntarily willing to go trek through this road of self-discovery and spiritual discernment with you.

I am a very blessed writer indeed.