Potluck in the Pre-Apocalypse

There was a potluck at the farm Friday in honorof a Spanish apprentice who is leaving next week. There were two long, white-clothed tables set out on a hill overlooking the lettuce beds and it was extremely dark, even through the light of the four tiki torches around the table. I thought it was a really classy setup. I made cornbread! And not just any cornbread. Here's the recipie:

Green Chile Cornbread!

1 box of Jiffy Corn Muffin mix
1 can of creamed corn
1 egg
1/3 cup milk
1 can green chiles
about five slices of cheddar cheese
1 packet of taco seasoning

Whisk the Jiffy, egg and milk in a bowl. Add creamed corn. Pour half the batter into a baking dish (I forgot to grease the dish, but that would be a good idea). Tear the cheese into little bits (shredded cheese would be easier, but all I had were slices) and layer on top. Add a layer of green chilies (you don't need to use the entire can. I used 2/3 of it.). Pour the rest of the batter into the dish. Sprinkle with taco seasoning (I used about 1/2 the packet.)

I wanted the spices to be mild, because I didn't want to take away very much from the base cornbread flavor. And alternately, if you just wanted to take all the ingredients and mix them homogeneously into the batter, it would probably be really great. But if I did it that way, I would still put the cheese on as a layer. Hey, I might try it that way next time.

This recipe was modified from a oneI found online that called for twice as many ingredients, but I stripped it down to save money. Plus this way it's vegetarian (no hamburger) and one of the girls here is a vegetarian. Oh, the original recipe suggested serving it with a dab of sour cream on top. Don't you think that'd be awesome?

The dish was cheap and really well received!

In other news, I read The Road this weekend. One of the other apprentices let me borrow it. It's about a man and his son who are just scraping by in a post-apocalyptic world. The two of them walk down a road with a shopping cart full of their stuff. Drearyness ensues. I think it's part of the reason I didn't sleep well last night. I liked it well enough, even though it's repetitive and the first 50 or so pages are tedious. And it's a grammatical headache and there are hardly any dialogue tags.

I'm going to get back to reading Walden today. I need some green to balance some of that corpsy, ashy black and white.

Eat well,

Jason

"I See You're Still Alive"

The homeless people in Kailua-Kona know me. Kailua is where I started when I came to Hawaii. It's bloated with tourists. I went back a few days ago to get my mail. A hirsute man walking down the sidewalk recognized me from the free-meals-and-services-for-homeless-people place and said, "I see you're still alive." I smiled and stuff. Then I went to the library and got some comic books.

A couple of weeks ago in Kailua, I made a homeless friend named Judy. She is an ex-hippie, ex-biker, ex-healthy person. I think she's in her late 50s. She introduced me to the aforementioned welfare place. The manager there told me that she's "one of the good ones." She lives with lots of cats in a really awesome nook in the woods behind a shopping plaza. The day I met her she had a relapse of some sort of illness after eating a mean burrito and went to vomit blood behind a dumpster. More than once. When I went back to Kailua, I asked a friend of hers how Judy was and she said that Judy'd been taken to the hospital. Still vomiting blood. Well, I hope you get well Judy. Maybe I'll be walking down the sidewalk in Kailua some day and I'll see you without expecting it. I'll smile and I'll say, "I see you're still alive." Good luck.

I'm gonna escort some kids up the hill and get some beer now.

Dog-Eared Belfry

I logged onto blogger today and realized that I have had a blog on blogger since May 2007. I completely forgot about it. It was called Dog-Eared Belfry. I like that name! Should I blog under that?

And that brings us to today.

Is this my third week in Hawaii? I'm not living on the streets anymore. I have lettuce to thank for that. And the goodwill of Ken and Barry at Kaola...ala...something Farms. Everything Hawaiian is hard to spell. My God!

It's a communal setting. I've wanted to live like that for a long time. I am hogging the communal computer. I need to go to bed.

There's a big ol' rat in the warehouse.

Love,

Jason