Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Lost Car Salad

The town was eager to keep it's quaint village appeal. Armed with affluence they fought off the fast food chains for well into the 1990's. The only exception was one lone, Dunkin Donuts. The white border of the Whitney shop where one could purchase expensive china, extended across the top of the donut shop window masking it with discretion. The orange and pink Dunkin Donuts logo was kept simple, each individual little letter neatly pasted against a white wooden banner. Truckers and travellers parked in diagonal rows along the sidewalk out front, the cluster in front of the store was a constant, even while the rest of the town adhered to socially constructed quiet hours. The Dunkin Donuts was a house of mysteries, where strangers came and went, apparently ignorant of the spell of scrutiny imprisoning the rest of us. The only way to break the spell was to completely shatter it into thousands of pieces, which is exactly what Joey did.
"Has anyone seen my car?" A voice carried from down the street. It was Joey, he was looking at me as he spoke.
"your...keys?" I asked, thinking he had misspoken.
"No. My CAR". His eyes squinted from the harshness of a morning sun after a night of drinking. He wore a sleeveless tank top and a bandanna on his head, which had been his uniform since the early playground days and only now was he beginning to embody it. During the week the men of the town wore black suits and carried briefcases and were sent off on the train together. At night the women would park at the train station and wait at the door of their station wagons, the kids tightly strapped into the back with eyes unfocused and talking slowly with mouths moving absent mindedly.
On Sundays the men wore sweaters, and pushed the baby strollers as their wives walked tethered to their sides. Joey staggered, weaving through the sweater clad families, along the sidewalk, "Have you seen my car, No? ahhF*$#!" He had a thick Brooklyn accent, which he also wore daily.
I arrived at college with a need to define myself, I wanted flashy labels like punk rocker, activist, or vegan. No longer housed by the structures lined with hometown judgement, I sought new cages imagining them to be without boundaries. The flashy labels I donned were knock-offs. I spoke definitively of things I knew little about. One night, after defending my new found veganism over massive quantities of beer in a freshman dorm room, I left to go home to bed and decided to stop in a phone booth on my way to order some chicken wings. When the door of the phone booth swung open and I was found huddled over a menu with a guilty look on my face, whispering into the phone, caught failing to uphold my own standards.

Joey, here is your blue cheese and bacon salad. It pairs nicely with self discovery and searching until we all find what we are looking for.

The dressing:
In a blender, mix:
1 clove garlic
4 oz blue cheese
3 tsp white wine vinegar
3/4 cup sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbsp salt free seasoning (or parsley, or spices that you like)

Mix 1/2 head chopped romaine lettuce with 6 stalks diced celery, and 2 sliced tomatoes. Add 1/2 head cauliflower (crumbled) and some blue cheese (crumbled) and 6 strips cooked, chopped bacon.

Christina's vote: "Real bacon over a delicious salad, this is living!"

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