The Riot Grrrl’s Guide to Kale (an excerpt)
I.
Sometimes I worry that I’m the Japanese racing bike of twee. I go from zero to ridiculous in 2.35 seconds. One minute I’ll be having a serious conversation about serious things – the national deficit, where to stay in Budapest, baseball – and the next I’ll be giggling and twirling my ponytail and squealing at a puppy. I have early-1960s-Peggy-Olsen hair. My glasses are large and navy blue. I teach Latin. One of my first grown-up-apartment purchases was polka-dot dresser knobs at Anthropologie. I collect vintage prints. I dream of owning an old Leica. I painted my kitchen table and chairs resolutely yellow. My best friend and I are working on a travel book in the style of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels. I clap and jump up and down and go, “Yayayayay!” when I get excited. I wear pleats. I wear random t-shirts. I wear cardigans. So many cardigans. Basically what I’m saying is that I am completely absurd, and I know it. No wonder no one takes me seriously. You might as well just call me Suzuki.
II.
My first grocery-shopping trip in D.C. was to the overly-optimistic YES! Organic Market. (I have since reasoned that the glaring affirmative is defiant: YES! You ARE paying twice as much for that as you would at Whole Foods! YES! Our stores ARE impossible to navigate! YES! You WILL be coming back because you’re too snobby for the Giant!) Scanning my leafy greens, the nose-pierced, dreadlocked cashier stopped.
“Whoops, shit,” she muttered. “That’s RED chard, not rainbow … havta fix that.”
“I suppose you don’t wanna make the system mad, yeah,” I reasoned, assuming that every store in the universe Walmart-tracks everything nowadays.
“Yeah, I’d hate for you to get home and look at your receipt – ‘That dumb bitch! She scanned the wrong chard!’ – that’d be horrible,” she chuckled.
I leaned in conspiratorially. “I suppose this is totally against The Movement, but chard is chard is chard in my book.”
“Heh, yeah. Pretty much.”
The conspiracy created, she took her chance: “Don’t tell anyone in The Movement,” she stage-whispered, “but I hate kale. Hate it. I think it tastes like dirt.”
“Really?! Man, I love kale. I actually longed for it when I was living abroad,” I enthused. “Aside from the bangs and the glasses, that’s probably the most annoying whitegirl hipster thing about me: my deep and unerring love for kale.”
III.
Kale Pasta
Feeling: “I just need to feed us, okay?”
Serves: Ehhhhhh … 1-4?
from 'Eat All the Feelings!'
- Kale (1 large or 2 small bunches), washed, stemmed, and medium-roughly chopped
what kind of kale? I don’t care! It’s your day!
- Garlic (4-6 cloves), smashed and chopped
how many vampires/mosquitoes/ex-boyfriends do you need to ward off?
- Crushed Red Chili Flakes (1 tsp. - 1 tbsp.)
spicinesss is the real spice of life
- 1 lemon, zested and juiced
- Olive oil (as much as it takes to cover the bottom of your skillet)
- 1 tbsp.-ish butter, if you feel like it
- Salt & pepper (to taste)
- 1 box linguine
or whatever pasta you like
- Parmesan / pecorino Romano / nutritional yeast / whatever you put on noodles
Bring a big pot of pasta water to a boil. While it’s coming up to said boil, heat a healthy amount of olive oil in a skillet over medium-low-ish heat. Add the butter if you’re using it. Once the oil is sort of shimmery, add the garlic and sauté until lightly golden brown. Then add the chili flakes and the lemon zest, and stir it around. Once it’s lovely and fragrant — and before any of the aromatics have burnt! — chuck the kale in and stir/toss it around to coat it with the oil and mix it with the good-smelling stuff. Sauté the heck out of that kale, until it’s lovely and wilted. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Whenever the water is boiling, salt the daylights out of it. Someone in Italy once told me that pasta water should be as salty as the Mediterranean Sea, so throw a good handful of it in there. Boil the pasta until al dente, and then drain.
Dump the drained pasta back into the pot you cooked it in, and then throw the kale in on top of it. Add the lemon juice. If it still seems a bit dry, you can add more olive oil and/or butter, as you see fit.
Serve with as much cheese as you want.
IV.
Anna’s asking me something. She’s also bouncing, so I’d better get energetic.
“Eh?” People don’t realize that I go everywhere with noise-cancelling headphones and loud music nowadays. It distracts the hamster.
“The new episodes?! Have you seen them?!?”
Ah, okay. 'Doctor Who.'
“Um, no. Just that first one … ‘The Bells of St. John,’ I guess. I saw that one.”
“Did you like it?!” I love that she’s interested in what I think, that we’ve got this thing that we share. I really do. But today I just want to be alone with the hamster. We’ve got some serious spinning to do.
“Eh, it was okay. I wasn’t wild about it. I was pretty into Matt Smith’s bowtie, though.”
“Aaaaaah,” she sighs. We have already established that Matt Smith is adorable (even if he doesn’t have Tennant’s hair, which we both fantasize about running our fingers through) and that man + bowtie = sex god. I should not have conversations like this with my students. I should also not swear around them or smoke cigarettes with them. But this is Anna, and with Anna it’s different.
“Anyway,” she doggedly continues, not picking up on the fallacy of my excitement, “I have not been impressed. I think Matt’s a great actor, and a good Doctor…but I’m worried about Jenna. I mean, she’s pretty and all…but I wish she’d just die for real. This ‘companion dying all the time’ bit of Moffattiness is just too Moffatty. And the episodes are boring! I actually skipped through most of ‘[Insert episode title here; I wasn’t listening, but rather bemusedly reflecting on the fact that she’s using the word I made up for her].’ It was awful! I’m so disappointed. Anyway, watch them – I really want to know what you think!” And then she bounded away, leaving me to call the elevator back and head upstairs, late for class, hamster gnawing at the corners of its cage, mad from neglect.
Anna is fully capable, now, of carrying on a conversation by herself. I don’t know if she picked up this little habit from me, or if she just watches too much teevee. Or maybe it’s just a habit of only children from fucked-up families. Spending a year helping her work on her senior thesis has certainly improved her English, this much is true. In addition to sounding less Czech, she speaks much faster now, and I’m pretty sure that’s my motor-mouthed fault. She’s going to have trouble in university next year, I think: she’s going to speak circles around her classmates and, undoubtedly, her professors. Hopefully she’ll have time to take English courses in with all that biochemistry or whatever it is she wants to do.
I never, ever thought that I’d teach high school English. Even less that I’d enjoy it so much. My father always told me that teaching English was a sign that you’d failed in life. (He used to do it; my mother still does.) No, I do not love all of my students equally; they’re not all Anna. Some of them have been studying English for eight, ten years and cannot put together a simple sentence. Speaking with them is about as pleasant as a trip to the dentist’s. But there are a few who make it worth it, make it fun, make it the reason I get up in the morning (because spending time with my husband is not the reason anymore).
Walking down the hallway to my office, the hamster starts running on his wheel again. “What am I doing?” I think. “Maybe this is just something else that I hate for a while. I hated my job for a few weeks this winter; maybe hating my marriage is just another fleeting emotion. But I hated my job for a few weeks, and I’ve been miserable with this relationship’s life for a few months now, and not for the first time…it’s been years… ” And he’s off. He’ll keep spinning like this until the bell rings, and then, irritated, I’ll yell at my students for not turning in their abstracts and start threatening them with Fs.
I know I don’t have a huge amount of “authority,” as the Czechs say, with some of my classes. I’m no good at being stern and serious all the time. I giggle too much and am too blonde. Some students simply will not respect this. And the ways to get these Czech kids to respect you are so odious: oral pop quizzes, yelling, failing kids, a general air of disdain. My colleagues mostly make it clear that our students are not people: they are air-wasting lumps of unformed clay glopped into seats. They need the serious molding that only the memorizing of exhaustive lists of names and dates can provide. Their ideas and opinions are irrelevant:
“What do you think of this book, Honza?”
“I think it’s great. I think it’s about the triumph of the human spirit against soul-crushing totalitarianism.”
“No, that’s wrong. F.”
I can’t do that. A student asked me a week ago if I really cared what they thought about things. When I said that I did, I had a classroom of blank stares. Jaws dropped, I shit you not. Kids at my school learn a lot of math. Math is the answer! Euclid be praised! They do not, however, learn to think. They are the least imaginative teenagers I’ve ever seen. They groan whenever I make them do something creative. Except the few, and I’m on those kids like white on rice. I smother them with encouragement. I give them periodic un-asked-for life advice. I probably drive them crazy sometimes, but teachers drove me crazy sometimes; it’s the circle of life.
On the other hand, I suppose not caring is a lot easier, and eats up less of your free time. On the other other hand, though, my free time is pretty messed up right now, so I’m glad for the distraction.
As predicted, my students did not finish their abstracts. Also as predicted, I said I was going to starting giving F’s. Some of them looked actually hurt. Good. Maybe they’ll stop being so disappointing.
The dog and pony show about food takes up an amusing hour. We talk about how the Czechs don’t eat fruit; they drink it. They laugh at my joke about confusing the words for “trout” (pstruh) and “ostrich” (pštros) for as long as I did. They marvel at the fact that I know the words for “beetroot” (řepa) and “radish” (ředkev), and that I can almost pronounce them correctly. I don’t mind them knowing that I speak food in Czech; I would hate for them to know that I understand the shitty comments they make sotto voce. Except for that girl who called me “ty píčo” four years ago. Nobody’s done that in my presence again; I can be sufficiently scary – full of “authority” – when I have to be.
The bell rings and I go back to my office. Please, just let there be some distraction; let the hamster stay asleep. No dice. And the next class is so boring and bad at English that he won’t stop running, because I don’t need to think to deal with those kids. In fact, it’s better if I don’t. I’ll just get pissed off.