jalapeno
I never thought I’d consider getting a haircut an oddly intimate experience. Intimacy is reserved for people you’ve dated, family members, a handful of good friends. Probably a doctor or two. Maybe, the woman who gives you bikini waxes. But never hair stylists. Or so I thought.
I successfully made it through 5 years of living in New York without a mouse problem. Sure, there were the pantry moths and that teeny-tiny roach infestation in my building and a rogue “what the FUCK IS THAT” every once in a while, but as far as I knew, I had gone through my life here without a single Mickey or Minnie in sight.
Until last week.
As I sit at my desk on this blustery afternoon, my mind naturally turns to what I'm going to eat for dinner. Do I want to spend a couple hours at the grocery store, stirring and measuring and roasting after a long day?
Fuck no. I want a bowl the size of my head filled with guacamole. With some crunchy things to dip thrown in for balance. A reasonable request, I would say.
During my senior year of college, I noticed that I was peeing all of the time. Like, all of the time - upwards of 20 times a day. I couldn't sleep through the night without getting up to pee, and having to go up and down a lofted bed made it a whole ordeal. I drink a lot of water so I thought that was why, but something seemed amiss. I went to the doctor to get a check-up for my summer job and mentioned my issue. He sent me to a urologist, who sent me to get an ultrasound. It came back abnormal, so off to outpatient surgery I went.
To make a very long story short, it turned out there were cysts in my bladder. And they weren't even paying rent to live in there! The doctors had never seen anything like it before, which made me very special, but also made me very scared. When I woke up from the anesthesia I was crying because of how freaked out I was. I couldn't really see, so I can't picture this part very well, but one of the nurses gave me a bag of cheez-its to eat post-surgery, either because I asked for them or she intuited it because nurses are SAINTS, but then I started crying more because my mouth was so dry that I couldn't eat the cheez-its. It was a rough day.
Here at Gateau | Gato, we love nachos. LOVE them. When we're together, if we aren't cooking, photographing, writing or editing, there's a pretty good chance we're drinking beer and wine, respectively, eating nachos and talking about the scorched dessert that is the New York dating scene. What is it about nachos that makes them such happy food? How did we get so lucky, to have this amazing dish on offer at most bars with a happy hour? Do they come from the heavens with the angels and scary babies and whatnot?
Not exactly, but their history is still pretty cool!
The year before I moved to Tel Aviv, I spent a summer volunteering as a first-responder with Magen David Adom, the Israeli ambulance service. You might envision me delivering babies and reattaching limbs, but legally first-responders were allowed to take blood pressure and pulse and that's about. I did get to check the blood sugar of a man who had taken 8 Valium, though. My ambulance driver was pretty rebellious.
There is a magical place in Michigan called Traverse City, and it's kind of like the Emerald City of Oz, only instead of everything being green, everything is cherry. There's a huge cherry festival during the summer, when the trees are blooming and the weather isn't truly heinous. Cherries are in everything, and that isn't an exaggeration. With the cherry boom, cherries work their way into anything remotely edible. This is proof that God/Gods/higher powers/divine felines exist, and that they are good.
I can’t tell you how much I love Mexican food.
It combines all of my favorite things – cheese, spice, corn and avocados and can be eaten with your hands. It's my go-to drunk/pre-drunk/drinking/non-drinking-but-just-hangry food (just ask any of my kickball teammates). If I could eat bottomless nachos and never feel sick, I would sign my soul away to the cheese-covered devil.
Ah, 2019. Hello there! You snuck up on us rather quickly. We had plans! We had goals! We had holiday-themed posts! And all of that got lost in the end-of-year, pre-holiday chaos.
But yet, here you are. So, we will try to make a comeback. For our own sanities. Because we’ve missed you so much.
I’m not really one for “new year” hype. Too much pressure, too much buzz, too many people at the gym. There is one thing, however, that I’m super excited about. It’s a book.