Find out what a 'chaffle' is in this week's GrubStreetDiet from comedian jacquelinenovak
Novak, with her Quest chips and Rao’s “dip.” Illustration: Eliana Rodgers The comedian and author Jacqueline Novak doesn’t know exactly how many times she’s performed her show Get on Your Knees since its debut in 2019. “It might be 300 … or 500?” she guesses. “I don’t really feel the performances adding up in that way. It’s more like there’s the one show, and every time I perform it, I’m just inside the one show.
Brussels sprouts. The last several years, the Brooklynian pride that people take in enjoying them like they’ve always felt they were delicious? Like they never once blinked at the stench? Something is amiss. I resent the fried Brussels sprout appetizer but I continue to order it with friends. It’s tough having no full meals in the fridge. Just raw, constructional elements from the perimeter of the supermarket, as the experts encourage. It’s like an alphabet in there. I have the letters, I even have a few words — semi-prepared items like roasted turkey or packaged smoked salmon — but now it falls to me to build these sentences, the meals.
I suggest, tonight, when the food arrives, that we don’t even have to eat the shrimp, you know, if we get too full. “We could save that for tomorrow’s lunch,” I say, like some douchebag. Referencing tomorrow’s lunch feels like a costume I’m wearing for you readers. We always eat the shrimp. “Tomorrow” never holds meaning for me with food. I am hungry today. Improbably, this time we don’t eat it. I’m actually worried that not eating the shrimp will misrepresent who I am to readers.
They are sugary, and by comparison, the traditional margarita that I then order for my real drink feels like a salad, a noble, elegant choice. Alcohol is not my drug; I don’t notice its absence. It is food around which meaning constellates, but if I’m getting a very sweet drink, I feel like I need to get something more out of it. A Frappuccino better be caffeinated, a frozen drink better be boozed.
I can already imagine the readers out there thinking, Just get the enchiladas. Please, please, I know. I am Mrs. Get the Enchiladas. I am a pig whose only pleasure is food. Spiritually, I would never be someone who is “off grain,” but times are desperate. I have to consider the consequences on my energy.
Chris and I later get our hair cut together at Goo Salon on Fairfax, and I pose, Is today the day we try Jon & Vinny’s? It’s the first restaurant anyone ever mentioned to me when I moved to L.A., and I still haven’t been. I see there is a wait, only a single couple standing outside, but that won’t do.
I have, at most, a foot or two of counter space and it is occupied by an AquaTru water filter, so I prepare everything in the manner of a juggler, objects balancing on each other. I dump in an ingredient while the fridge door is still open, and put it back before it’s closed. I know Chris has already been starving for an hour, so I make a decision to prepare him a salad with the shrimp, although all kitchen surface is currently in use. I can do it. My abilities are hindered only by having tried a xylitol-sweetened drink promising mood benefits and it immediately expands in my stomach, painfully.
I microwave the shrimp, throw it on top of the salad, and deliver it to Chris. He hadn’t been promised the tenders so there was no disappointment. And I know they’re coming his way later anyway. From the ribs up, there’s no xylitol pain, and ribs-up is where the tender will most be enjoyed, mouth and the top of the stomach. Might as well have some pleasure in the mouth. I am not someone who finds stomach pain to be an appetite suppressant. Physical pain and food pleasure are two radio channels I can listen to simultaneously. The food might even drown out the pain.Turkey, cheese, and mustard “rolls,” cold, in front of the open fridge.
The pleasure of Quest chips in Rao’s is that what I taste when I’m eating it is something that isn’t present. I taste what it is striving for but cannot be. I am thus tasting faith itself. When I’m feeling more dignified, I heat up the marinara sauce, thus giving Rao’s one of its expected attributes: warmth. On the second helping, I usually just go cold. It is precisely this devolving from dignity to less, that progression, that gives the seconds their meaning. A third iteration, an encore, would be to glug-glug straight from the jar.
Any way that I may have denied myself during the day, emotionally, in interactions, I feel like I reconcile when I eat like this. I am describing a process a therapist might try to heal me from. And yet, I’m not sure I want that. This all goes back to the source bag, the Tostitos bag of my youth, humongous, the size of my torso. Anything less than a torso-size bag seems unlikely to fill my torso. And I always think of my stomach as being my whole torso.
I’m trying to budget more, but dinner has to come last on the cuts list. The moment I worry I’ll go hungry from budgeting, I panic. I click over to my credit card portal and start looking for other things I can cut out, like automatic subscription re-ups I forgot to get out of in time.I go to a small café near my place and decide to achieve the $6 credit-card minimum via food instead of additional espresso. I choose a tuna sandwich without the bread.
I sheepishly ask if avocado can be added … and red onion? I wave my credit card — I’ll pay extra of course!The place serves breakfast burritos, but what I do not see is an egg plate on the menu, nor a place to cook them. After all my deranged salad-and-sandwich demands, I cannot now start inquiring about how I can get the breakfast burrito without the tortilla.
I notice a man eating eggs — on a plate! — with avocado. I don’t stare, but I note the eggs seem to have been prepared in something square, a thin puffy mattress of an egg. I’m imagining a silicone egg-cooking microwave insert. Still, I could make this work. I fantasize about modifications I would make to the kitchen, maybe donate one of those Instagram plug-in stoves, since the café’s so close by.
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