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Kitchen Hack: Garlic Salt

Posted on by Julie Pearson

If you’re like me, you often look around two weeks after a grocery trip and see that you still have weird odds and ends left in the fridge. None of them are appetizing, but they do exist. I found myself in that situation tonight, and let me fill you in on a little secret. I want to stress that no company is paying me to tell you this. The secret is:

Throw everything in a skillet and douse it in garlic salt.

Easy, right? Beyond the existential hurdle of making it into the kitchen in the first place, despite knowing that no matter how much you eat, you’ll soon be hungry again…YES! It’s so easy. Tonight I used chopped onions, the tail end of a bag of spinach, and leftover quinoa. I threw them in a skillet, and doused it in garlic salt.

Was it good? No. Did it have flavor? Yes, a few of them in fact. Was it dinner? Technically, yes. I’m still hungry, but aren’t we all kind of hungry, really?IMG_0940

Jackfruit is Crazy

Posted on by Julie Pearson

One of my prime lifestyle ambitions at the moment is my quest to find the perfect sandwich in LA, and become spiritually whole in the process. I’m talking very specifically about a reliable go-to sandwich that costs less than $7 (okay, less than $10) and makes me better understand the meaning of life.. I’ve gotten a series of recommendations from friends (and Yelp), and created a sandwich spreadsheet to guide my journey.

SandwichQuest: Part One was a trip to Organix deli and fancy-hippie grocery store in Eagle Rock. I walked there with my friend Jen, who read an article about it and was interested in their fancy vegan wares (neither of us are vegan). Organix does not have a public bathroom! I had to pee pretty badly and was really assuming they’d have one. It factored into my experience a little, so just pretend you have to pee while you read this.

We both ordered the puerco, which is a jackfruit BBQ sandwich. Jackfruit is a fruit (you can guess this; you’re not stupid) but if someone told me I was eating pulled pork, I would have believed them. I don’t eat a lot of pork, so I’m not the foremost authority on this subject. Either way, the fruitmeat was good, the bread was good, and there was some cabbage on top with a purplish sauce situation that I found very enjoyable. While this won’t be a go-to sandwich (Eagle Rock is too far away, and this sandwich contained neither turkey nor avocado), I do highly recommend it.

Grade: A

Spiritual Wholeness Quotient: On par with staring at a waterfall as it thaws after winter. (I had to pee.)

Recipe: Mediterranean-ish Wrap

Posted on by Julie Pearson

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Last night, I wanted to eat something. I wanted to cook, but I didn’t have the energy to cook. Here’s a perfectly functional recipe for something in the vaguely Mediterranean family kind of.
You’ll need:
1 tortilla
some hummus
an amount of onion
brown rice/quinoa blend
mozzarella cheese?
spinach
3 or 4 grape tomatoes
To make this totally acceptable wrap, you’ll want to start by warming the tortilla- I used a regular tortilla even though I meant to get the extra soft ones because they’re spongey and they make me feel safe. This recipe works best if you forget you put the tortilla in the toaster oven, so it comes out far too hot and then brittles itself into a crunchy crisp.
Next, slather hummus onto the tortilla. Any amount will do. Slice an arbitrary amount of onions (best if it’s enough to overpower the whole dish), taking extra care to forego a cutting board and slice your thumb with a serrated knife in the process.
Pause to rinse the blood off yourself and the onion.
Then, add 1/4 cup (maybe? that sounds like a nice measurement?) of instant quinoa/brown rice blend. Throw on some mozzarella cheese because hey, it was in the fridge. Top it off with some fresh spinach. And don’t forget, grape tomatoes are another thing you can slice without a cutting board. So why not nick your thumb just one more time for good measure?
Verdict: This was okay. It tasted a little weird, and that was probably the mozzarella. But if I ordered it at a restaurant, I wouldn’t send it back. I also wouldn’t go back to that restaurant.

Welcome!

Posted on by Julie Pearson

Isn’t it crazy how there are six-point-something billion people on this planet and we’re all trying to pretend that we’re functioning humans? Sometimes it boggles my mind when I step back and think about it. There’s no way that everybody can possibly be thriving, and we’re not. Isn’t it crazy how many of us are not being our best selves?

But I believe we can all be our kind-of-okay selves. And I’m here to show you how! And probably to show me how. I don’t know, we’ll figure it out as we go. Right, friends?