by Kate Christensen | Oct 9, 2012
This morning, just as I was waking up, I dreamed I was cooking a dish that was meant to be a compendium of intense flavors: extremely sour and salty dried Chinese plums, Coca-Cola syrup concentrate from a little keg I had to tap, tiny silver birthday-cake decoration balls, and thinly sliced jalapeno peppers. The resulting amalgamation, which I pictured myself stirring in a sort of vat with a big wooden paddle, was sweet, spicy, bitter, salty, and crunchy; in my dream, it was very beautiful, and I thought just before I woke up: I have to make this.
Of course I won’t make that. Can you even get those little silver balls anymore? I am sure you can, but I haven’t made or decorated a birthday cake in many years. My mother used to keep them in our cupboards when I was little, along with a bunch of other things I haven’t thought about in years. After I woke up from that dream, I lay in bed, thinking about all the stuff we always had around the house when I was growing up in Arizona in the 70s — stuff that I never buy, or think about, or eat anymore.
It wasn’t only kid food – there was a whole array of things that, when we ran out of them, we would put on the shopping list, which was a common contraption, a wood back with a round paper roll on a dowel, the paper threaded through a steel corrugated ripper-offer at the bottom. A pencil dangled on a string next to it. When it was dull, you sharpened it. Our lists were written in everyone’s handwriting, from my mother’s illegible flat-lined cursive to my baby sister’s big spidery letters. We were all zealous about it; it was fun to add items. When we embarked on a trip to the supermarket, the list, often nearly a foot long, came with us.
There were certain things that we had around the house all the time: cottage cheese, for one thing, and Karo corn syrup and Graham crackers. We always kept a set of food coloring squeeze bottles in different colors, soft fat plastic containers with colored hats; they looked like a row of little gnomes. We replaced as a matter of course powdered sugar, popcorn, frozen mixed vegetables, and canned creamed corn.
Then there were those wholesome staples our mother bought that we didn’t care about, boring things like whole wheat flour and yeast for making homemade bread, fresh vegetables, wheat germ and Cream of Wheat cereal, prunes and raisins, and peanut butter, which had to be crunchy in our house. On most nights, she gave us cut-up raw vegetables or frozen mixed vegetables to snack on while she made dinner, which was more often than not some sort of fish or chicken or meat, one or two cooked veggies, and a starch. Dessert was also generally fairly wholesome: fluffy tapioca, or Jello with canned fruit cocktail, or warm butterscotch pudding from a box, or vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s syrup poured from the little can we always kept in the fridge.
We yearned for the treats we only got once in a while: Vienna sausages in little cans with a pop-top lid, hot dogs and fish sticks and frozen chicken pot pies and TV dinners – when we were allowed to have them, we lingered over the freezer case, choosing carefully between Salisbury steak or fried chicken, dizzy with excitement. My little sisters loved Kraft mac and cheese; I was the only kid in the land who hated it, for reasons I have never understood. Once, we got to have Spam, fried in slabs, which we loved, but our mother thought it was disgusting and nixed the stuff forevermore. We never got pop, as we called it in Arizona, or sugar cereal, or chips of any kind, or processed sweets like Pop Tarts or Hostess anything, so these salty, fatty, special main courses were our indulgences.
Yesterday, we needed groceries; Brendan gallantly offered to go and get them. We hit on the menu for the next few nights, then I said, “And that usual other stuff we always get, and the stuff for Dingo’s stew,” to which Brendan replied, “Of course,” and off he went. He came home with two full bags and didn’t forget anything. We almost never make a list. We don’t need one: our shopping habits are so efficiently codified and our cupboards so ridiculously organized and pared-down, we always know what we need. Just like my mother’s kitchen in the 70s, we generally always buy the same things, but our staples seem lackluster compared to the glittering array of glamorous, thrilling stuff she stocked her pantry with – so lackluster I don’t even want to write them down for fear of falling asleep. (Here’s an example: gluten-free flax crackers. Canned kippers. Nettle tea. Goat cheese. Zzzzz.)
I’d rather think about baloney sandwiches on honey-wheatberry bread with thick globs of mayonnaise, with Campbell’s tomato soup, so salty I had to drink three glasses of milk with each bowl. And deviled ham… what the hell was deviled ham? Was it a ham paste you spread on bread? All I remember is that I loved it. I’m sure I would hate it now – along with all the other stuff I prized so dearly as a kid. It’s all too salty for me now, it all contains gluten, and it’s all probably disgusting. But in my memory, those foods remain just as delicious as they were back then.
Now, my favorite indulgences seem to have become those things my mother didn’t let us have, like potato chips. Last night, because we’re grownups and we can have whatever we want, we made ourselves pre-dinner cocktails and tore open a bag of Vinegar and Salt Kettle chips, sitting at the kitchen counter on stools, shoving handfuls into our mouths, crunching away, washing them down with lovely booze.
1970s afterschool snack
Take a handful of Triscuits and put them on a plate. Cut part of a brick of Cracker Barrel cheddar into slices. Put them on the plate. Take the plate into your room and get into bed with a book and lie there till dinnertime, snacking and reading like a pasha amid his silken pillows. Replenish as needed when your mother isn’t looking.
by Kate Christensen | Oct 5, 2012
When one candidate seems not to want the Presidency and to be unwilling to pretend that he does, and the other wants it so badly, he’ll say anything to get it, it makes for a lopsided, terrible, weird debate. There was the weary, abstracted, exhausted incumbent at one podium, hunching and scribbling and grimacing. And then there was the eager-beaver challenger at his, hopped up as a frat boy trying to get into a girl’s pants, hiding the roofie in his pocket as a last resort.
“Of course I love you, baby,” he lied. “Of course I care about you as a person. Of course I’ll still respect you afterwards.”
“If you believe that,” said the incumbent, “then vote for this guy.”
“Vote for this guy” echoed a little too convincingly.
We had made a good debate supper, cheeseburgers and oven fries and a cucumber-tomato-arugula salad, in the spirit of trying to hold on to the last shreds of summer. We had about half a bottle of decent red wine open; we poured it and settled in to watch.
“Is Romney the only person in America who’s not bored right now?” I asked at one point.
By the time it was over, we’d worked our way through most of another bottle of wine. Our burgers seemed to have given us dyspepsia.
“Asher Platts for President!” said Brendan.
Asher Platts is a local Maine State Senate hopeful running on the Green Independent Party ticket. We see his homemade, punk-rock-looking signs all over town. One day, he came to our door. He’s very tall and skinny, and there’s something of the serious 19th century statesman about him, young and inexperienced though he is. I was sorry to tell him that we’re registered to vote in New Hampshire, so we couldn’t support him.
I slept badly that night and woke up yesterday morning feeling even more jaundiced as well as muzzy-headed from all the wine I’d had to drink to get through the debate. At the soup kitchen later on, my fellow volunteer, Teresa, and I agreed that “none of the above” seemed like the most viable choice.
“I didn’t watch, said Monica, the kitchen supervisor. “I cooked instead.”
We agreed that Monica had made the right decision.
Brendan and Dingo and I drove out to the farmhouse in New Hampshire yesterday afternoon to spend the weekend. When we got here, the green meadows were alight with dying, golden milkweed. The trees were ablaze in the drizzly fog; the mist hung over the woods, and the lake glinted slate-grey off through the trees. The world felt vivid, intimate, and fragile.
We wrote all afternoon. When my work was finished, I read about the Maine Tar Sands project: a 67-year-old pipeline now carries crude oil from tankers in Casco Bay in South Portland up through the pristine, lake-filled Maine and New Hampshire wilderness to Montreal. This seems bad enough, dangerous enough. But evidently there’s a terrible, potentially catastrophic plan afoot to reverse the direction of the flow and send hot, sandpaper-like Tar Sands oil from Montreal to Casco Bay across the White Mountains into Maine, directly crossing the water supply for most of the region’s people. This is scheduled to be determined in less than two years.
My jaundice shaded into despair. I thought of Monica, avoiding the debates, cooking instead. I rooted around in the cabinet above the counter and found most of a bag of Jacob’s Cattle beans and poured them into a colander, rinsed and picked through them, then put them in a big pot with a lot of water, brought them to a boil, and left them to sit overnight. Just that simple thing cheered me up: I was going to make Boston baked beans.
This morning, I rinsed the soaked beans well and covered them with fresh water and let them simmer for a couple of hours while I worked. We took our daily walk with Dingo to the end of the road and back, then Brendan went to town for salt pork and booze and a few other supplies. When he got back, I got to work.
I drained the soaked beans over a bowl and reserved the liquid, then put the beans in a glass baking dish with one finely minced onion and half a pound of chopped salt pork. In a small pot, I put molasses, dry mustard, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, salt, pepper, and brown sugar and brought it to a boil with some of the cooking liquid. I poured it over the beans and covered the dish with aluminum foil and put it into a moderately hot oven and left it there.
After another hour and a half of work, I checked the beans, added more liquid, left the cover off and put them back into the oven. We made cocktails: a Dark and Stormy for Brendan, a “sippin’ tequila” for me: silver tequila on the rocks with half a squeezed lime.
Thanks to the tequila, I felt my spirits moving in a sideways direction: not lifting, but no longer stagnant; like a detour when you’re caught in traffic, you get to the same place faster, at least. I cut two small delicata squashes in halves, scooped out the innards, and put them on a cookie sheet. In each half, I put ground cinnamon, fresh sage sprigs, black pepper, and olive oil. I chopped half a red cabbage into ¾ inch thick rounds and splashed olive oil and black pepper on them and arranged them next to the squash and stuck them into the oven.
Soon, I’ll chop the beautiful, springy, extremely fresh jacinto kale into bite-sized pieces and put them onto another cookie sheet and roast them. Meanwhile, the baked beans smell amazing. Outside, the world is dying and heartbreakingly beautiful.
by Kate Christensen | Sep 26, 2012
In the course of my life, I’ve had my fair share of mental-health “vicissitudes,” let’s call them. I’ve never been medicated for any of them, although at one point a psychiatrist strongly urged me to go on lithium. At another point, my best friend and mother strongly suggested some sort of antidepressant. I fear brain meds with the superstitious abhorrence of a “primitive” who doesn’t want his photograph taken for fear of losing his soul.
So I’ve endured these various episodes without anything stronger than booze, food, and books to help me. That might be why I view all my memories through gels that are colored by whatever strange weather was going on in my brain at the time. Sometimes I cringe. Often I cringe. Bad weather influences behavior, especially when there are no meds to act as umbrella, sunscreen, hurricane shelter.
I was manic for the five years it took me to leave my marriage, recover from it, and fall in love again. Mania is a particularly fearsome system because it allows for all manner of outrageous excesses – of consumption, flamboyance, expression – while its high hard winds and blinding sun block rational conscience and regulatory thought.
For the five years before that, I was depressed. For a while, I couldn’t get out of bed or stop crying. I had what I now see was a bona fide breakdown for a number of months. Then I managed to pull myself together enough to go about my daily life again, but I was still not feeling well at all, inside. I remember being interviewed at the Brooklyn Public Library during this period by a local NPR radio host named Leonard Lopate. He teased me about how horrible all the characters in my latest novel were. This came at me like a knife in the chest; I had lost my sense of humor entirely by this point, many months into an unrelenting black fugue state. “I hate nice people,” I blurted, like a two-year-old. When he asked what I was working on now, I said, my voice trembling on the verge of tears, “I’m not writing anything. I can’t write.” He was flummoxed, understandably. This was not a therapy session, that he was aware of, anyway.
And of course there have been all those other mental storms, less extreme than mania or depression, but strong enough to bend my un-medicated, unmediated mind to their force fields – corrosive rage, demented passion, dizzying confusion, panic attacks, anxiety attacks, and so forth. Even simple unhappiness has been dangerous, when a swamp of resignation and malaise hindered an urgent need for action and change.
But the most precarious state of mind, in my experience, is always smug complacency, those times when I feel pretty okay about everything, in a warm-oatmeal, chamomile-tea, down-comforter, footie-pajama kind of way, as if I were sprawled on a billowing couch, looking out the window at life going by, almost drooling sometimes with a wholly illusory, borderline-infantile bonelessness.
Invariably, luckily, just as I’m settling in for a long winter’s nap, the gods splash a bucket of ice water over me and I jump up shrieking, dripping and shivering and properly awake again.
My relationship with food always changes radically right along with my mental state. When I’m manic or depressed, at those far extremes of internal human experience, I don’t eat much at all; I can’t. Food attenuates for me into a remote, untenable idea of something I used to love, and still love, in theory, but can no longer tolerate or understand. When I’m anxious or unhappy, I tend to eat whatever comes to hand, standing up, on the fly. In those extremely fleeting, rare states of calm, focused, centered, balanced serenity, I eat thoughtfully and without fanfare, like some species of Buddhist monk, for nourishment and social communion. This almost never happens.
Smug complacency makes me wallow in food, obsess about it, become a glutton, a gourmande. Food nestles at the center of my nice safe life, forms the heart of my warm, fuzzy day. I find myself participating fully in the current national collective obsession with food choices as a way of pretending we have any control over anything at all. Organic, gluten-free, local, wild-caught – these decisions begin to feel political and meaningful, crucial and important. Some evangelical, proscriptive, black-and-white way of thinking, engendered by reports of food-industry horrors, causes me to scan labels, davening with nitpicky ferocity, to interrogate meat-counter guys and eschew all canned food, even organic enoki beans.
Eventually, the gods throw a pie in my face. A pie made with processed, bleached white flour, lard from pigs raised on antibiotics and offal cooped up in tiny, shit-filled pens, artificial chemical flavorings whose cancer-causing properties are indisputable, and genetically modified high-fructose corn syrup.
And there I am, back in what I think of as my “real life,” the one in which there are no down comforters, the one in which I don’t tend to drool, the one in which I’m as crabby, uncomfortable, and aware of my own absurdity as the next guy.
Harissa Haddock
The other night, I coated a few fillets of haddock in a harissa rub, a lovely amalgam of various spices that comes in small plastic tubs from Whole Foods. I broiled them and served them over coconut jasmine rice with steamed red chard alongside.
“This is Harissa Haddock, BBC News,” I said in a fake British accent as I pulled the fish out of the broiler.
I instantly had to email my friend Rosie about this. “Harissa haddock,” I wrote to her. “Dish? Or BBC News announcer?”
“Wait,” she shot back, “I thought she was the tragic, much preyed-upon, oft-violated young heroine of an extremely long 18th century novel.”
“Moll Flounders,” said Brendan.
And then we ate.
by Kate Christensen | Sep 18, 2012
Brendan is out of town tonight. We’re almost never apart, and we prefer it that way, to put it mildly. But whenever one of us goes off without the other, I feel a resurgence of some old part of myself, my lifelong pleasure in being alone.
We tend to go off for three nights at a time. My experience of being the one who stays home follows the same trajectory every time Brendan leaves. The first night, I’m blue and a little agitated, as if I’m going through withdrawal. The second night, I’ve slipped back into an old, much-loved skin, the quietude of my own mind without the presence of anyone else but the dog, and I revel and wallow in it. But by the third night, I’m agitated and restless again. By the time Brendan gets home, I’m more than ready to resume our life in tandem.
When I was married and living in Brooklyn, my husband generally worked late at his studio. On most nights, we ate together when he got home, at 9 or 10 or sometimes even 11. But once in a while, I called to tell him not to hurry home. He never complained: this meant he could stay as late as he wanted.
I was happy, too, because I preferred to eat earlier, and I loved going out by myself to restaurants. On those nights, I headed out early, at 7 or so, my favorite dinnertime. I had plenty of places to choose from. We lived in Williamsburg, before it was ruined and overpopulated and overdeveloped. Back in the mid-90s, new restaurants were opening here and there, but the old tried-and-true ones still thrived, hadn’t been driven out yet by exploding rents.
My favorite place to go for “bachelorette nights,” as I called them, was a place called the L Café, on Bedford just off N. 7th, near the L stop, owned and run by a woman my husband had gone to Bennington with; it was definitely “new Williamsburg,” and it was funky and quietly glamorous, but it wasn’t achingly hip – that was a few years away, the relentless self-consciousness that infected the neighborhood.
The L was in a narrow, long storefront, the general size and shape of the inside of a trailer. There was a sweet, lavish garden out back with wrought-iron tables and wooden booths. The interior had the dark wood wainscoting, tin ceilings, and linoleum floors of classic North Brooklyn décor.
I walked in and was instantly enveloped in moody indie music and a warm breeze of good smells from the kitchen. Strings of tiny white lights twinkled behind the bar. I always sat at a small table in the back and ordered a plateful of something homey like yellow rice and red beans and roast chicken, or lamb stew with chickpeas and root vegetables. While I ate and drank wine, literally wriggling my toes with the deep happiness of autonomous solitude, I would write, by hand – I can hardly remember how anymore, but in those days, I kept a journal I wrote in almost daily, like finger exercises for a musician. And I annotated the printouts of my current novel-in-progress with a pen.
I always had a second glass of wine but never a third. I stayed there at that table for two or even three hours in a self-contained bubble of words and food and wine. People came and went and talked at the tables all around me; I didn’t look at anyone. I eavesdropped a little, but only in a desultory because-it-was-there sort of way, without any real purpose. If someone I knew came in and greeted me, I said hello back with the borderline-rude brusqueness of a night watchman, guarding the factory. The whole point of these nights out was to be alone in public with a plate of food and some wine and my writing.
These nights afforded me immense happiness, more, I think, than any dinner party or one-on-one dinner with my husband or a friend, in those days. I’ve always felt loneliest in the presence of other people – people I can’t connect with, people I feel unseen by, people who make me feel insincere or uncomfortable. For me, loneliness comes from a sense of missing something. I don’t miss anything when I’m alone.
The L is closed now, like many of my old favorite places, not that it matters, since I don’t live anywhere near Brooklyn these days. Tonight, Brendan’s second night in L.A., I fed and walked Dingo and headed for the fridge to unearth the pot of chicken vegetable soup I made yesterday, which is very good and wholesome and filling and all, but which I had for dinner last night as well as lunch today.
I stood there for a minute while Dingo eyed the cut-up apple on the board on the counter. Because he’s trained me well, I tossed a few pieces at his head, and he caught them as expertly as a frog catching flies.
There was no wine in the house. That settled it.
“Guard the house,” I told him, collecting my laptop and phone – the contemporary equivalents of a journal and printout of a work in progress. “I’ll be back.”
Outside, a warm, strong, rainy wind blew. I walked along two blocks of uneven brick sidewalks to Bonobo, the hipstery local pizza place. There were strings of tiny Christmas lights strung along the tin ceiling and moody electronic music playing. I sat at a table in the back by myself and ordered the house salad and wine and a gluten-free arugula pizza. The waitress had a pierced nose and a tattoo and could have worked at the L Café in 1997. I ate and drank and wrote and ordered a second glass of wine, but not a third.
Bachelorette Soup
In a big soup pot, put all the vegetables and herbs in the house, chopped small: in this case, the rest of the cauliflower, 4 ribs celery, 2 onions, ½ sweet potato, 1 ½ heads worth of crushed cloves of garlic, a handful of basil, 5 tomatoes, and a red pepper, plus the chicken bones from the leftover roast chicken, the rest of the chicken broth in the box, 2 bay leaves, salt and pepper, some cumin and herbes de Provence and cayenne, and a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce. Cover with water plus an inch. Bring to a boil, uncovered, then turn down to a simmer.
After half an hour or so, when everything is soft, add the leftover coconut-saffron jasmine rice (or some other starch) and the chopped leftover chicken meat, optional. Bring to a soft boil again, turn down, and simmer for 10 minutes. Taste the broth; adjust seasonings. Serve with fresh lemon juice and Sriracha.
by Kate Christensen | Sep 14, 2012
On our way here from Portland yesterday for the weekend, we stopped at the Earle Family Farm on the main road just before the turnoff. We bought a pound or two each of their just-picked late-summer tomatoes and squashes and cucumbers and peppers, plus eggs from their chickens and sweet, rich mutton sausages made from their ewes.
It’s a 130-acre biodynamic farm. Their hand-built greenhouse is filled with flowers and herbs. Next to it is a garden; another, larger one is in the field just above, and their sheep are pastured higher still on the slope of Dundee. The little store in the barn has a cash box stuffed with change, and it runs on the honor system. Prices are on a chalkboard next to an old hanging scale. Packaged meat and eggs and perishable produce are kept in two old fridges and a freezer. There’s an enormous basket of yarn for sale, too, hand-dyed hand-spun skeins from their sheep.
We waved to Tom Earle, driving by on his tractor, as we walked back to say hello to Danny, the new ram. He was markedly obese, and his balls must have weighed twenty pounds, collectively. They hung between his hind legs like giant soft durian-sized bobbles, swaying and undulating and almost touching the ground.
“Damn, that boy is hung,” said Brendan.
I laughed.
The fat, fluffy ewe in the barn with him looked exhausted. Ruth, Tom’s wife, told us that she’d had to separate them with chicken wire.
The Earles have no frozen lamb this year; last spring, Ruth told us, many of their lambs died of something mysterious, a wasting disease. This year, all the sheep are obese, also mysteriously, something to do with the rain and grass and temperature, Ruth guessed, but she didn’t know for sure.
“So no lamb, not now,” she said. “We’re butchering chickens in mid-November, though. You want stewing chickens? Yeah, they said they’d do the older hens when they do the turkeys. Nice that it’s at the same time. I could do it myself, I know how to do the whole thing start to finish, but it’s better to have someone else do it if you’re the only one who can. You eat organ meat?”
“Sure, we do,” I said; I’d happily eat anything from their farm at all.
“Well, I’ll keep that in mind when we butcher the pigs. Oh, and I’m running a pickling workshop tonight. I think I’ll see what happens if I throw some lemon cucumbers in my pickling mix. Have you ever had one? Here, taste, just brush off those prickly things. Want to come to the workshop?”
I did, in fact, want very much to go, but I had a lot of work to do and wanted to get to it. I asked if I could come another time.
Ruth and Tom Earle seem to know how to do everything, in the 19th century style of farming. They are always working, all day, somewhere on their farm. When I was young, in high school and in the years following, I attended and then worked at four different Waldorf schools in various anthroposophical communities, so-called because they were formed around the teachings of the early 20th century Austrian mystic and clairvoyant, Rudolf Steiner. He gave his overarching philosophy the rather ambitious name of “anthroposophy,” which means “the knowledge of the nature of man.” His theories gave rise, in a practical sense, to revolutionary new forms of education, farming, and medicine.
There were biodynamic farms attached to the communities where I lived — in Spring Valley, New York, and then Chateau de La Mhotte in the Allier district of France, and finally Harlemville, in upstate New York — so I couldn’t help overhearing a thing or two about its basic concepts, along with discussions of the etheric and astral bodies, Ahriman and Lucifer, Findhorn, and homeopathic medicine. But all I know, really, about biodynamic farming is that things are done organically, according to the phases of the moon, and it’s deeply spiritual, arcane even — not the first adjectives I would use to describe the Earles.
Tom is slight, lanky, handsome in a rawboned way, taciturn, sweet-natured, and warmly practical. Ruth is talkative, energetic, bright eyed, small and round and strong, with long grey hair and a soft, round face. They look, in fact, like a quintessential 19th century New England farming couple. They do not exude one whiff of mysticism, but evidently intricate beliefs and practices are at least partially the reasons for the abundant, beautiful produce they grow in fields of granite-strewn, thin soil, the unbelievably delicious meats and chickens and eggs from the animals they raise and pasture.
We drove away from the farm discussing that mutton sausage, how good it was, last time we’d got some. In the house, we unloaded the bags of food and put things away. We drank tequila on ice with limes while I made a quick semi-succotash of the Earles’ patty pan squash and green-and-orange, knobby, lumpy, richly ripe heirloom tomatoes, chopped and sautéed in olive oil with smoked paprika, Worcestershire sauce, and the tiny bit of old dried thyme left in the glass jar. While it bubbled, I fried four of the eggs we’d just got. They were so fresh, their yolks were orangey-gold and their whites puffed up a little in the hot oil. I slid them on top of the vegetable stew, two per plate, and we tucked in. The still-runny egg yolks melded into the savory gravy, the whites were crisply browned, and the whole thing was delicious.
Awesome Lamb Burgers
Because the Earles have none this year, we recently bought some ground lamb at Whole Foods, flown all the way from New Zealand. We also bought Canyon Bakehouse gluten-free hamburger buns, the best I’ve ever found.
Brendan picked a handful of mint from right outside the door; that, at least, was local.
To 1 lb ground lamb add:
1/2 large onion, minced
8 garlic cloves, minced
a small handful each of minced fresh mint and cilantro
1 T harissa spice mix
1 tsp. each of salt and black pepper
1 T olive oil,
and a dash of Worcestershire sauce.
Form 4 patties. Fry in oil over medium heat, about 7 minutes a side. Serve on toasted buns with a sauce made of the following ingredients, mixed well:
2 T mayo
4 T ketchup
a dollop each of apple cider vinegar and Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp harissa spice mix
a small handful of minced cilantro
Eat with oven-roasted red potato wedges and a French lentil salad with grated carrots on a bed of red-leaf lettuce.
