Late Summer Mishity-Mash Eat Some Yeah

The "Late Summer Mishity-Mash Eat Some Yeah" is the name of the pictured dish, and oh yeah, one wants to eat some. It's just so good, I can't believe I'm here in this place, at this time. This food turns me into Carl Sagan, all thinking about my place in the universe, observing the miracle of nature, and then eating most of it. But oh! That's totally okay, because the food becomes a part of me, and I am a part of it, I am food cooking itself, the iron in my blood was formed in the heart of a red giant star, and the ancient Hindus knew exactly how old the universe was, and that Greek guy, Eratosthenes, who figured out how big the Earth is by hiring a guy to walk to Syene because what else did he have to do back then. You've seen Cosmos, you know what I mean.

Eating this food, you might emerge somewhere else in space, somewhen else in time. I started with the last of the latest batch of butter. It is homemade, but I used a mixer because if we're going to live in an industrial model, we might as well have some practical benefits. The cream is from a very nice lady who is the best at dairy. Bring your dairy game. But be careful. Josie might embarrass you. This cream is nuts, I have to chisel it out of the jar and I get like half cup of buttermilk from 2 quarts of cream. It is outrageously thick and I won't do grocery store butter again if I can help it. I chopped up some garlic into the butter, so when it melts in the fry pan, bam, you've got garlic. Thanks, Last Month Me for chopping all that garlic, back then. All the doing of garlic is done, and it doesn't even matter anymore.

Then! I add olive oil, because mixing butter and olive oil is the way to go, and I owe the idea to Nina Planck in "Real Food." I owe my life to Nina Planck. Without her, I would've died of an overdose years ago. Just kidding, I don't know Nina Planck, and I'm not interesting enough to have a heroin addiction.

So at this point I made the one move on this dish that I wish I could take back. I added the hot pepper (cherry bomb) in with the potatoes (yukon gold). I feel that I lost both the heat and the flavor of the c-bomb to a too-long cooking time. No use crying over spilled raw, unpasteurized milk bought in an environment that feels like a drug deal.

I covered and simmered while I chopped up stew meat into something resembling a fajita cut. Maybe someone can tell me why that's crazy. I'm sure someone can. But I can't find hanger or skirt steaks here off grassfed cattle here in Lincoln, Nebraska of all places. I suppose what I should do is buy a deep freeze and a steer, but my last job I made $2.50, which might be illegal...in EUROPE, but not in these United States. Digression!

So I chopped that stew meat up finely, oh yes, oh so finely until it was kind of like those thin strips of meat you see in fajitas. These meats are then placed on top of the tater and pepper mixture. And now I'm getting HUNGRY, but there's nothing I can do, and I'm past eating off the week and a half old fast food pizza in the fridge, because I'm a grownup.

At this point, I chop up a yellow onion, an orange sweet pepper, and a tomato (Jubilee). My friend who gave me the tomato to try works at the Old Cheney Farmer's Market booth for an amazing organization here in Lincoln called Community CROPS. They're good people doing really good work. They take low-income, beginning, and immigrant farmers and work with them on land and education, where these fine farmers go on to grow things that aren't silage corn and soybeans. Everyone wins.

So the meat is browned, the taters are crispy, and the hot peppers are black. I make a space in the center of the pan, where, using Science, I calculate the hottest place will be. Here I crack three eggs. I cover. I wait for the yoke to get covered with that translucent film. I flip. Flip. Now I add the onion, sweet pepper, and I make a little space for the skin of the tomatoes to come in contact with the pan, so they'll get that roasty blackened skin. Yes. Yes!

So I cover this briefly. In the past I have cooked onions and sweet peppers too long, just like I just did with the hot pepper. Those days are over! I steam them this time until they're just a little cooked, you know? The onions still have a little sulfur in the final product, and the peppers are still a little sweet, like the God of Philip K. Dick intended, before blasting you in the forehead with a pink light of flavor called the Late Summer Mishity-Mash Eat Some Yeah:

Not pictured are the Jubilees, a very tasty, low acid tomato. Also, a secret nuclear weapon of a sourdough buttermilk pancake called a No-Coast Westie Cake. I heated a cold one up on the skillet between the first and second serving. Maybe its creator, my friend and partner and all-around dynamite dame will come around later and tell you all about it. Pictured, but not credited is some cilantro grown by another CROPS friend. Don't ask me how he's growing cilantro in this heat. Maybe he bought them at Hy-Vee? No way, that dude quit banking to grow food. He believes.

Everything is local except for the olive oil. Here's to hoping global warming turns Nebraska into USDA Zone 11, and we can do it Alice Waters-style here on the prairie.