What ever happened to Edna?
+Blackstone Fried Rice, Crunchy Cabbage Salad, and Pineapple Coconut Cake
Welcome to Let’s Get Lost! I’m Rebecca, a recipe developer, food photographer, passionate people watcher, and chaser of new experiences. You might know me from my recipe websites, Of Batter and Dough and A Little and A Lot.
My husband and I are nomads without a home base but with many modes of transportation, namely an RV, a motorcycle, and a sailboat. I write recipes and stories for curious people who believe experiences are more important than things and who want more adventure.
I wrote my first People Watching story when we were here in in San Diego last year. A few spaces down from us was a woman who fascinated me. I never met her. She was only visible out my kitchen window, and as I chopped and sautéed, I named her Edna and gave her a history and a story. Then I put it on paper and gave it to an artist and asked if she would use her sketch pad to bring Edna to life.
And suddenly, there she was.
Even though the story I wrote was entirely fictitious, the spark came from a real person and since our arrival in San Diego last week, I’ve found myself wondering what happened to her. I suppose I’m wondering about both the real woman and the one born from my imagination. Is she still traveling around in her dilapidated RV? If I drove through the RV park where we were last year, would I find her there again? Did she ever finish painting her front door?
It’s been a year since I’ve shared the story of Edna, and many of you are new to this newsletter since then, so I’m republishing it in this issue along with a menu that I imagine Edna might have made for herself. She would serve it, of course, on mismatched plates and eat it outside, by herself, with thrift store flatware, next to a campfire. Since Edna uses her broken oven to store her clothes, the meal would be cooked outside.
And I can’t imagine Edna using a recipe. There’s a service here in SoCal that delivers boxes of “ugly produce and rescued food” and I imagine that’s exactly how Edna might prefer to do her grocery shopping, combining the ingredients in interesting ways to create meals as mismatched as the rest of her belongings.
So this week’s menu includes Blackstone Fried Rice, which can be made with leftovers or raw ingredients and pretty much anything in your refrigerator. And Crispy Cabbage Salad which can be prepared with any kind of veggies you like and is a great way to use up leftover bread.
Blackstone Fried Rice
Fried rice is exactly the kind of thing a Blackstone griddle was made for. You can, of course, make fried rice in a skillet or wok on the stovetop but it’s important to maintain a high temperature throughout the cooking process.
There are 2 important things to keep in mind when making fried rice:
Medium grain rice works best (my favorite is Jasmine rice). Rinse it well before cooking to wash away excess starch and spread it out on a baking sheet to dry before frying.
Cook everything for fried rice at very high heat.
If you’re cooking fried rice in a skillet or wok, it’s important to fry the rice in batches, adding no more than about a cup of rice to the skillet at a time to prevent the rice from getting all clumpy.
On a Blackstone you can cook the rice all at once. Not only is the cooking surface larger on a Blackstone griddle, the cast iron surface heats evenly and holds the heat much better than most skillets.
Crunchy Cabbage Salad with Toasted Bread Crumbs and Parmesan
The concept for this salad is so simple and adaptable to any kind of veggies you like, with or without the cabbage. And, it’s an excellent way to use up leftover bread. Here’s what we’ve got going on here:
Cabbage and veggies cooked at very high heat until charred (you could also do this on a Blackstone griddle or a grill).
Drizzle the veggies with a basic vinaigrette.
Top with crispy garlic bread crumbs and some parmesan cheese.
The result is a very satisfying salad with so much flavor and a plenty of crunch. It’s delicious served with almost anything but is also hearty enough to serve all on its own. How much you make is up to you, but be sure to make enough bread crumbs to include a generous proportion of crispy crumbs to veggies.
For dessert: Pineapple Coconut Cake with Toasted Coconut Frosting
This is NOT a cake that Edna would make. But it is a cake that many of you will be interested in and it’s a brand new recipe, so I’m sharing it anyway.
Let’s just set the scene for this decadent tropical pineapple coconut cake, shall we? Here’s what we’ve got going on here...
Take two layers of juicy pineapple cake with real fruit in the batter that are drenched in crushed pineapple syrup.
Spread a very generous layer of rich toasted coconut pastry cream in between the layers of cake.
Then cover the whole thing with toasted coconut frosting.
This cake is a rich and creamy tropical dream on a plate. And just like its coconut cream cake cousin, don’t even try to be dainty with the serving sizes. Moderation can wait. This is the kind of cake best served in thick, messy slices and eaten with abandon.
Edna
Illustrations by Sarah Pilley
What you would never know about Edna just by looking at her is that she has quite a lot of money. Less than some of course, but much more than most.
She lives in a dilapidated Fleetwood camper, circa 1987, with a half painted door and some ratty bed sheets, one white and one brown, and another that maybe used to be either white or brown, that she likes to tie from the camper to whatever trees or bushes are nearby to create a sort of enclosed front yard.
The other thing you’d never know about Edna is that she’s only 37. Built the same year as her camper and less dilapidated than she appears.
She likes to wear shorts over her pants and threadbare aprons over thrift store floral house dresses and is always bundled up even when it’s warm.
She shuffles around in her thick soled, orthopedic tennis shoes and moves with the kind of hunch that you typically only see in people who are much older than 37.
If you found yourself in San Diego camped next to Edna, you would not suspect any of these things about her and you could count yourself in the majority because no one knows her. Not really.
She’s the kind of person that many people know of, but don’t actually know.
The truth is that most people steer clear of Edna because she frightens them. It’s not that they feel physically threatened by her. She does not seem like an ax murderer and no one worries that she’ll steal their things or kidnap their children.
Rather, they feel frightened in that way that makes them cross to the other side of the street rather than risk getting caught up in a conversation that might be difficult to escape.
Or, frightened in the way that people are when confronted by someone whom they perceive to have a lot of overwhelming problems. The fact that the problems may not be real, that they were invented and then assigned to Edna, does not make it better. It usually makes it worse. Problems that exist inside the mind are usually much worse.
Edna does not see any of this as a problem.
Edna does not see much of anything as a problem.
Her half painted door, one side white and the other side school bus yellow, is the consequence of having gotten halfway through the project and realizing she didn’t want to continue.
Edna rarely does anything she doesn’t want to do and on the rare occasion when she discovers that she doesn’t want to do something that she’s already doing, she stops doing it.
She doesn’t particularly like school bus yellow anyway. She knows that now.
If you were to tell Edna that she should finish painting her door, she might look at you as if she doesn’t speak your language. Edna doesn’t believe in the tyranny of should and should not.
Maybe it’s her mother’s fault for not being diligent about imprinting all the unspoken rules and allowing her to pick out her own outfits no matter how outlandish or inappropriate.
Or maybe Edna wouldn’t have heard the rules no matter what.
Edna loves old, broken things. When she spends too much time around shiny new things in shiny new places, she starts to feel peaky. Like that achy, ominous feeling in your spine right before you come down with the flu.
Her treasures spill out of her camper, piling up on the picnic table, in the back seat of her faded red hatchback, and in neat little stacks around the fire pit. She keeps things where she likes with no interest in the fact that most people keep their waffle irons in the kitchen and their underwear in the bedroom.
What’s it to her where you keep your waffle iron or your underwear? The oven hasn’t worked in years and her limited wardrobe fits inside it almost perfectly.
The bed sheet walls she hangs outside to enclose her space are more for the containment of her things than for privacy.
She has no use for privacy because she has no use for the opinions of other people. It’s more than that…
She has no use for other people. They are, mostly, superfluous.
Even though she could go anywhere, she rarely leaves San Diego. She likes the weather and the beaches (who doesn’t?) and also, two of the fancy RV resorts don’t have the restrictions of other resorts.
Most RV “resorts” (sometimes the name doesn’t match the experience) don’t allow campers from 1987 and absolutely will not allow you to hang bed sheets in your space.
Their uniformed staff point to the piles of stuff on the picnic table and then to rule #487 that says, clearly, “clean up your trash.”
The piles are not trash. But there’s no point in trying to explain.
She is aware that there are places, like the beach, where people expect her to be and therefore pay her little attention. And other places where people don’t expect her to be and therefore watch her very closely. Like the gift shops at Hotel de Coronado, where they’ll let her stay if she buys something and doesn’t linger too long.
She likes the floor of the hotel with all the old photographs and the gift shop filled with new things that look old. She always buys something then drops it off, unopened, at the local goodwill on her way home or hands it to one of the homeless people on Park Blvd.
Or Liberty Public Market where the vendors eye her nervously as she wanders through the colorful stalls filled with handbags, and jewelry, and candles. She could buy anything she wants.
But she doesn’t want.
Instead, she goes back to her camper and washes the bird shit from the collection of old water bottles on her picnic table and lights a campfire where she animatedly tells herself stories and laughs at her own jokes.
What you would never know about Edna just by looking at her is that she enjoys her own company most of all.
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I like Edna. I think I'd risk it, show up with a cold 6-pack, and sidle up to hear what I can only imagine would be several lifetimes worth of amazing stories. Thanks for the (re-)introduction.