Crazy Chemist Goes Cooking 1: Artemisia Calamari

I came up with this today. Haven't tried it yet due to lack of absinthe or comparable. I was basically violating pretty much every law of "standard" Italian cooking and doing things to tomato sauce that would make my Nonna cringe (or beat me with a wooden spoon), such as adding Cajun spices, ground cloves, Allspice, and on my mom's prompting (by prompting I mean promptly telling me not to), Worcester and Soy sauces. The result was almost too sweet, and so I decided to add some bitter. Absinthe, probably one of the most bitter substances on the planet, immediately came to mind; we don't have absinthe in my parent's disgrace of a liquor cabinet, so in consolation I added some Martini & Rossi. I cooked some elbows with ridges, and heated some leftover fried calamari in the toaster, poured the sauce on the pasta. It was CRAZY tasty. I thought the sweet of the cloves and Worcester would be disgusting, but the hots and hint of M&R balanced it out. When the buttery fried calamari hit my taste buds along side it, it was, as I often describe because I'm a perv, a culinary orgasm in my mouth. So with a little modification I came up with this:

Artemisia Calamari
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, once around the pan in a slow stream
1 tablespoon butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 shallots, minced
1/4 cup* Absinthe or comparable artemisia extract blend
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 can crushed tomatoes
Coarse salt and pepper
Ground cloves
Worcester sauce
Ground hot pepper
16 ounces pasta, such as gemelli, or penne rigate
Fried calamari

*Nota bene: I have never worked with the stuff, so I don't know how bitter it would get, and still need to tinker with the proportions with pretty much all of this. The idea is to balance out the sweetness and increase complexity, not wash out any other flavors (this is true of cooking in general).

Absinthe contains thujone, and a high alcohol content. However, in the proportions used, both are negligible. Thujone content in absinthe is already highly regulated (generally 10mg/L), and its toxicity in small amounts is debatable (in my opinion laughable, LD50 in mice is 45mg/kg ), nonetheless the absinthe should most likely be avoided if one is pregnant, planning to become pregnant, has a sensitivity, or other shit. Ask your doctor before being a total dumbass; use common sense and you'll be fine.

Place a large skillet over moderate heat. Add oil, butter, garlic, and shallots. Saute for 3 to 5 minutes until slightly golden. Add absinthe and reduce to about 2/3 original volume. Add chicken stock, tomatoes, Worcester sauce, salt, pepper, cloves, and hot pepper. Bring sauce to a bubble and reduce heat to simmer.

While sauce simmers, prepare the pasta and calamari. Cook pasta to al dente, drain (DO NOT RINSE UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH!!!1 I really fucking hate people who rinse perfectly good pasta. Liz did this once. I should have broken up with her at that very moment) and return to the pot. Add a few generous ladelfuls of sauce to the pasta and mix around a bit. Serve with fried calamari, feel free to mix it up if desired, I like keeping the calamari somewhat on the side and then mixing in-oris.

Now if you were completely bat-shit insane, you could substitute/supplement the absinthe with an extract of your.... erm... preferred native/ritual psychoactive. From what I've heard, the majority of those are also quite bitter, and could do the trick.

I have control.

I lost my glasses on the ski slope at West mountain today, and it set in motion the cascade of negativity that is just like every other time.

But something was different about this one. And in hindsight, I'd felt it several other times in recent history before.

It felt almost as if I was TRYING to flip out, like I was deliberately choosing to get angrier and angrier. And when I actually stopped and thought about it, it all dissipated very rapidly. But this level of calm, given the circumstances, felt totally alien to me, so strange that I had to pursue destructive and self-destructive behavior in order to "make things right."

I've seen enough into abusive relationship behavior to understand immediately why I would deliberately choose to be negative: it's all a matter of comfort, familiarity, and routine. But beyond that, I have control, control far more natural, and far more of it, than I ever did on any brain medication, any therapy, anything else.

I still feel the black clouds of self-doubt clinging to me as I struggle to brush them out of my way to clarity, but there can be no doubt about it.

Something has clicked in my brain.

I think the very something I've been waiting for.

I had to do a mental doubletake just then to make sure I wasn't on any medications, because it feels so strange to feel this well, given the circumstances.

And pretty much most of my negativity for the majority of this week has been because I've chosen to continue the negative loop, because I felt it was the right thing.

Obviously, it isn't the right thing. But 'twas logical.

I realized there was this disparity in a convorsation with my mom tonight. She asked me if her worries about me were rational. I told her that all worries are irrational. What she meant by, and I knew it, was that did my actions warrant her having fears. Were her fears justified. Well-founded.

From a logical point of view, yes, all fears are logically well-founded at some level. Everything in life is potentially bad, therefore, fear itself is logical. But not rational.

Logial, but irrational: Arachnophobia - spiders could potentially have a poisonous bite. However, the odds of running into one of those spiders in your house, in the Northeast, is very low.

Some fears are logical and rational: Jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

Some are utterly illogical and irrational: Stepping on cracks in the sidewalk could induce deadly earthquakes. But even then there is some semblance of logic; there is a direct, albeit weak, connection between sidewalk structural integrity and plate tectonics. An utterly illogical fear would be...hmmm I'm hard-pressed to think of one...Because a truly illogical fear would be a fear of something completely impossible. Anything is possible with one's own mind, and since fears deal moreso with preventing the anxious state of mind, rather than the stimulus directly, any thinkable fear is a logical fear.

To sum up the 4th possible case, it's pretty much impossible to have an illogical, yet rational fear (if its rational, it poses some real threat, therefore a logical reason to fear it).


So on that note, back to fear itself. Most fears are really not fears of something bad happening, but the fear of being in the state of fear. And that is why FDR's quote is repeated nearly ad-nauseum. Because it's so freaking true. (Magistra Sugarman's quote "ab ovum usque ad malum," is equally as true, in context, but nonetheless nauseating.)

So...what makes this period of time different...
Well, there is the utterly irremovable variable, which is time, and the dynamic nature of life.
But I have ingested a good deal of mugwort and wormwood. This actually strengthens the case for trying mushrooms, if only once. Other than that, maybe it is just the fact that I've had temper tantrums run the exact same course 999 times, and it took the 1000th one for something to click. I'm not a slow learner, just a really thorough one!! >.<