Weekend Update, June 1, 2014

“If you ever find yourself in a jam, just take a moment to sit and think; calculate things, look at every angle, 

and then wonder where all that jam came from.”

Melanie Kay Taylor 

There was food aplenty this week, and not just the kind that comes home in a shopping bag. There was tenderloin for the carnivores, grilled salad for the herbivores, and for the logovores- wait. You've not heard of logovores? Easy. Logovores, aka verbavores, are those of us who are happy to eat almost anything

but are happiest when chewing on words.

Last week, a happy string of coincidences led to a meeting with Tim Halls, the inventive chef behind the creation of this stuff:

And that led to a conversation during which a few exciting suggestions crawled out of a bottle of barbecue sauce and evolved into an entire week's menu plan. Which led in turn to a week of pondering the capricious nature of circumstance, and the links that connect coincidence and consequence; the split seconds and single steps that are the difference between

delight,

and debacle.

 No debacles on the dinner plates this week, thanks to Tim and his great ideas. The trains of thought kept speeding along throughout the week too, dinner and thoughts alike leaving the station with a grilled pork tenderloin on Wednesday night. The tenderloin was coated in the rub and refrigerated overnight, cooked in the oven at 350 until it reached a temperature of about 120F then finished off on the grill until it had reached an internal temp of 140F. There were a few zucchini and some asparagus in the fridge, so Tim's assurance that a good dry rub was good on more than meat was put to the test:

here they are shaken up with olive oil and
dry rub. I nearly dirtied up an 
entire bowl, before I realized that
they would fit in a bag.

And here they are on a plate:

For a meal that felt like it took a total of 45 minutes, this was awesome. And grilled salad!!! Amazing! And chimichurri sauce? Chimichurri sauce has joined the ranks of amazing, all purpose, great on everything, have it in your fridge and you'll never go hungry sauces. Think pesto, but with cilantro and parsley and lemon. Tim was right. Find a good dry rub blend, and you can use it on anything. Cheap frozen tilapia even got a sprinkling of it on Friday, and turned out great.

Wednesday's tenderloin was the only intensive cooking session of the week- the next night, leftover tenderloin went for a spin in the food processor and joined some leftover black beans to become pork and beans-

NO!!!!
Holy ads-gone-bad, Batman!
That is the second creepiest kid on the internet!
Not THAT kind of pork and beans...

This kind of pork and beans.
And rice with chimichurri sauce stirred in too.

Those of you who love the cilantro spiked rice at Chipotle, stirring a spoonful of chimichurri into a bowl of cooked rice will fix you up fast and cheap. Then, as the leftover train picked up steam, the train of thought raced toward a derailing. And it was all because of this:

That's the last of the leftover pork in a Vietnamese Pork Sandwich

I would type its actual name, except you'd be able to tell from

the way I'd type it that I can't pronounce it.

See those crisp-tender slices of carrot and radish? The night before they piled on to these flavor explosion sandwiches, they were soaked in a mixture of salt, sugar and vinegar. That is,

they were pickled. Yes, really!

Which sort of blew my mind. I realized that as a child of America, I think of pickles only as cucumbers pickled veggies, pickling as a way of preserving, pictures of dill pickles, pickled just means preserved in brine or vinegar. Which explains why we call someone who's working on preserving their liver in a liquid substance pickled. 
But it does not explain why we use the phrase "in a pickle" to mean anything other than, well,

wearing a pickle.

But NO! In a pickle means the same thing as being in a fix. Which is really silly in itself, isn't it, because if you're in a fix, it's because 

something needs fixing.

And the vocabu-pickle only got picklier when I realized that being in a pickle is the same thing as being in a jam! 

Right down to the crazies that they cause!
This crazy-for-jam girl
 is my nominee for Creepiest Kid on the internet.
( and I have been waiting for years to use this picture.)

In a fix! In a pickle! In a jam! I really was 

in quite a stew!

Then the internet revealed that by an epic coincidence, I had stumbled upon the truth of what makes a pickle a pickle in the last few days of National pickle week.

I am not making this up.

This fact  calmed the terminology tempest down, as stews often do simmer down when the end is in sight. Because I realized that fix, pickle, jam or stew, even an unpleasant chain of coincidences will often end with something worth knowing and something good to eat.

And that's sort of what I hope for you this week.

I hope that circumstances this week

lead you from one happy meeting

and one happy meal to another.

I hope the week's coincidences 

Are of only happy consequence. 

But just in case.

Just in case you find yourself in a fix,

souring into a pickle puss,

simmering in a stew,

or stuck in a jam,

I hope you know

that there really are people who love you

and you don't have to clean up the mess alone.