Victory, from the jaws of defeat.

Last night I (Brooke) was nearly defeated. Guam had me down: it is filthy here, and hot, and I can't keep up with the dishes that want to be washed; and things are so expensive; and the bathtub is covered with dead ants (where do they come from!?); and I have less than six weeks to learn everything on the bar exam.  

I went to the grocery store looking for something, anything to make for supper - at least some greens to make a salad! - but the choices were either too expensive; too wilted or spoiled; or both. I was getting incredibly discouraged. I found a single head of iceberg lettuce that was in OK shape, and there were a couple of bags of yellow potatoes - it was hard to see through the printed plastic bag, but I tried to get one without flies crawling around inside - and some bagged carrots that didn't look too slimy. So I bought these things, not because they looked good or sounded tasty, but because there wasn't anything else to buy. 

Then I went home, washed dishes, washed dishes, washed dishes until the dish rack couldn't hold any more. At that point it was time to start on dinner but I still had no ideas; just a few sad potatoes and carrots. I didn't even have a vegetable brush! 

I did, however, have a small rough plastic scrub brush I'd bought at the hardware store to clean the crusty stuff off the bathroom fixtures - but I hadn't actually used it yet, so I enlisted it for vegetable duty. The potatoes, it turned out, didn't have any flies - but they were completely subpar. I am convinced that producers send their worst products to Guam - since we don't have any choice here - these potatoes had a lot of green on them, and they were all marred by those deep gashes that look like surface cuts but turn out to be brown fungus spreading deep inside the potato. Just icky. 

So I hacked at them with a little knife, wondering what the price per pound would turn out to have been once all the un-useable parts were removed; eventually I had a nice pile of potatoes and scrubbed, cut carrots. Without really thinking about it, I tossed them with some olive oil and butter, Italian spices (because they smelled homelike and comforting, like crispy autumn nights when you come in from the cold and mom has made a big pot of spaghetti); some salt and a little brown sugar. That's it; once they were roasting at 350-ish (the oven is not precise), I was feeling a little better - we may not have anything for supper but carrots and potatoes; but at least we'll have carrots and potatoes and I think they'll probably taste OK. 

Does anything go with carrots and potatoes? I remembered some Italian sausage buried in the freezer - Italian sausage is a kind of fail-safe, must-have for me: you can grill it, or cook it in a pan, eat it on a bun with peppers and onions, or turn it into pasta sauce, or slice it and cook it and stab it with fancy toothpicks if you're feeling silly; you can keep it in the freezer, cut it up frozen, and start cooking without waiting for it to thaw. I stock up when I see it on sale and save it for days like yesterday. 

Ah, but then - as you know if you visited this blog last week - I remembered (how could I forget) the leftover ham! And in a good old rustic kind of way, ham makes sense with carrots and potatotes. Plus it was already cooked - it just needed to be fried up in a pan. Fried ham with seasoned roasted potatoes and carrots: put them together on a plate and suddenly you have an honest, home-cooked meal. I was NOT going to be defeated so easily! 

Thus, I discovered a supper where no supper existed before, and conquered one more day of living on Guam.