Mixed Grill

This little blog will probably remain by the wayside until we move house again, which might be sooner rather than later. It will be within Pittsburgh and probably within a year or so. Everything here is dandy (I’ve even come to appreciate the lack of closets for forcing me to organize things instead of piling them up behind closed doors), but we never planned to rent this particular domicile indefinitely. I’ll get into that some other time, maybe.

Anyway, while I am between moves, I might spend some time reminiscing about how I arrived at and departed the various apartments I’ve inhabited, and maybe sprinkle in some stories about helping other people move. It could get way too personal though, so I make no promises.

Believe or not, that is not what inspired me to post today. I was taking another crack at getting the bobbin-casing components of my sewing machine to play nice together. I wanted badly to call my competent-seamstress BFF over to help, but Philly is a little far for that. I considered how I might befriend some one locally for the purpose, how I would be happy to compensate with beer or a home-cooked meal. Imagine the Craigslist posting. If I thought it was actually broken, I would seek out a professional, but I’m pretty sure this is something that could be handily corrected by anyone who has used a sewing machine more than three or four times.

So I turned my attention to another “hobby” in the hopes of feeling like less of a nincompoop. I was editing some relatively recent photos (i.e., clicking the auto-adjust-exposure button) and remembered that in my last post I had expressed a desire to grill. Without further ado…

That, dear reader (hi sis!), is skewered fennel and bacon-wrapped tofu, along with the more usual suspects, sausage and corn on the cob. I should probably hide this entry from anyone to whom I might offer a home-cooked meal as compensation for anything, but allow me to explain. The bacon-wrapped tofu was a sort of joke that KC took seriously. Well, it started out serious because I’d read that tofu has a tendency to stick to the grill, and we happened to have some bacon leftover from an unusually indulgent breakfast, so I thought, why not? I’m a big fan of veggie-burgers with cheese and bacon because the ground beef is not my favorite part, and bacon-wrapped tofu seemed conceptually similar. I quickly talked myself out of it because as much as I love tofu, it just isn’t quite tasty enough to include in a non-veg dish. A non-veg meal being shared with vegetarians? Of course. But swaddled in meat? Meh. But it turned out that KC had been looking forward to it.

This is something one forgets about when accustomed to grilling vegetables. Holy flaming animal fat!

But it turned out okay. A little charred, but edible.

Apparently I was more excited about the fennel and the corn. The texture of tofu with the strong, smoky, salty, meaty flavor of bacon was totally weird, but we did scarf it down right quick. I guess that’s the thing with bacon. Even with it’s not that good, it’s still pretty good.