Cherchez la Polenta

I’ve written plenty about Cashland, but so far there’s been nothing from No Cashland. Until now, that is. Hello! Welcome to my shiny home office; take off your tie or kick off your pumps (or both, perhaps), won’t you? No business clothes here. And yes, these are pajamas I’m wearing. I know, the comfiness is almost unbearable.*   (Oh, but…**)

There’s a lot to say about the absurdity of No Cashland, about the mountains of paperwork that has to be filled out when you’re laid off, or the number of FedExes I got from BigAnonymous in the first two weeks (especially FedExes of documents in which one sentence was updated - if they’d sent just those pages via regular mail and then sent me the cash they saved I could have eaten off the difference for a month). And there are the times, once or twice a day even, when the panic beast rears up its head and starts feeding on my brain, sucking out all the reason and replacing it with the kind of lurking hysteria that triggers a crying jag when I run out of shampoo. (Yep, shampoo. I told you it was hysteria.)

But I have also seen things that I didn’t see before. Before you go all, “Here comes the speech about how blind I was until something got taken away from me, and now I’m just grateful for what I have,” – which is true, by the way, and no less potent for being so (not to mention an indicator of how lucky I am that my crying jags are about shampoo rather than say, having to find space in a shelter, a fact of which I am acutely aware) – you should know I mean this literally. The first week I was laid off I would look through the kitchen cabinets and think, “I have nothing to eat.” And then I would actually pick up food – box of polenta, bag of rice, can of tomato paste – and move it aside, all the while thinking, “How can I have nothing to eat? My, I wish there was something to eat in this cabinet. Here, let me move this random thing that seems to be labeled with a picture of corn/tomatoes/rice on it, not that I can imagine what that is, and perhaps behind one of these things I will find something to eat, like a tuna melt.”

But I managed to come to my senses each day and cook, and as I used up my cabinet food supply I had to use my imagination more and more to figure out what to make. It’s one thing to throw some pasta in a pot, but it’s another, if your cooking muscle has atrophied like many New Yorkers, to look at a box of polenta and a half tub of cream cheese, and maybe a scallion and a dash of cayenne pepper and think, “Dinner!” (Mess around with those ingredients, by the way; that one was a win.) Each meal becomes a kind of puzzle to solve, either by looking through cookbooks and riffing on what’s there or just by trying things out—literally, following your nose. You exercise your brain and your senses, and at the end you get a delicious (probably) meal. Remember when I said earlier that Cashland has a knack for making people dumber? Turns out one of the best-kept secrets of No Cashland is that cooking is more than just tasty and economical; it actually makes you smarter.  Cherchez la polenta, and pass the wine.

###

*I was wearing pajamas when I started this entry this morning, but I was interrupted by the discovery that a van leaves from my corner every other Monday to go the 125th Street Fairway. Free ride! 10% discount on your grocery bill! I am bold in some ways, but I am not bold enough to go to the Fairway in my pajamas.

**… I am in jeans and a tank top. Don’t bother suiting back up on my account.