Is that a bowl of onion?
No. But almost.
This dish is another product of my misunderstanding of carbs. Because when I think low carb, what I’m actually thinking is low grain. So I’m eating lower carb because I’m eating chicken and salsa un-atop the bed of rice I’d otherwise lay it upon, but onions are pure carbs, so I’m certainly eating carbs. And tomorrow I’ll probably have pasta, so what am I really doing?
Let’s go back to that irresponsible recipe classification, though. Do adjacent chunks of onion and tomato constitute a salsa? Or are the few sprigs of cilantro you’d need to make pico de gallo the minimum required to earn that label? I don’t know. And the answer doesn’t change the end result, which is onion. Another shopper was lingering over the reds, so I settled for a white and thank god I did because this amount of red onion would’ve damaged me. I only ever saute or stir fry white onions and now I remember why. Raw white onion is almost nothing. It’s Red Onion LaCroix. A complementary meh that should’ve allowed the unseasoning of the chicken to shine, which it did not, and the underripe juicelessness of the tomato to pop, which it did not. The tomato was bone dry, with a consistency more like chicken than the actual chicken (cooked until the insides pulled apart like string cheese) and completely flavorless. Three underperformances by the only three ingredients. I can’t even be mad because 1) I did it to myself and 2) properly cooked chicken with fresh tomato and red onion is still nothing food.
But okay, we need to talk about the glove. A solitary gardening glove? DNA I would understand. I mean, not actually understand, but I can grasp the concept. Kind of. Not really, I guess – like, it’s a mug shot of your cells? But at least I know the police use DNA to solve crimes. What I didn’t know is that they also use Amazon.com purchase history, which certainly seems illegal, or at least ineffective. Of the million people living in and around Denver, few enough of them ordered Gardening glove BLACK (2gloves) listed by seller Manygloves! that it was reasonable for the investigation to send a cop to every Ship-To house in the city and ask whoever answered the door what they were doing on a random Thursday two months ago and, oh, did it involve casual homicide?? What sort of online shopper is settling for the Amazon Basics Gardening Gloves (Black) for $9.99 when Gardening glove BLACK (2gloves) exists on page two for only $5.99 and why is it apparently ALL of them?? I’ve never been great with probabilities, but no part of this adds up.
Neighbor Steve wasn’t much help, either. I spent the whole day in my head, mapping out the case with all the pieces I had, struggling to connect them in a way that led the cops from a two-month old headline to a five-day interrogation with the apparently unflappable Neighbor Steve, and after robotically downing the above bowl of sadness, I grabbed my bottle of auxiliary wine and knocked on Neighbor Steve’s door, making sure my knuckles didn’t convey any of the confusion or annoyance pumping through the rest of me. The wine was a nice 2019 cabernet sauvignon, full body with hints of a white $12.99 sticker beneath the orange $9.98 sticker. Had I bought it before? Impossible to say. My wine buying process starts with me picking a variety based on nothing and ends with me grabbing whichever bottle was initially the most expensive but has since been discounted below ten dollars. It is then consumed and forgotten and the process begins anew.
Turns out Neighbor Steve wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but I poured him a glass anyway and he went through the motions out of solidarity. Still too normal. He even looked better today, the bags under his eyes noticeably lighter. His boss had given him the rest of the week off to “make sure his head was right, no rush” and Neighbor Steve joked that it was his first vacation in half a year, maybe he’d try being falsely accused more often. Maybe arson next time. We quickly went through the bottle and the wine loosened his tongue and the half answers from yesterday took on a more definite shape. It hadn’t been a battering ram and smoke grenade SWAT team extraction, the police simply knocked on his door and took him back to the station for questioning. It never got too aggressive, like they knew they were reaching. He said he’d never ordered gardening gloves and that he didn’t even have a garden, and they asked if he’d ever seen anyone poking around his porch, or if the neighborhood had any history of package theft, and they asked how much he knew about the case and if there was any reason – work schedule, porch visibility, general lack of awareness – why someone would choose his house to order homicide-grade gloves to, and, no, they didn’t seem to get much of anything from his answers, and, no, they didn’t mention any other suspects.
And it was there Neighbor Steve flickered. Or something. The briefest tensing of his shoulders, an involuntary wrinkling of his forehead. A twitch, a tic, a spasm. A shade pulled across his eyes. Then he was back with a shake of his head, saying how I should’ve brought over a second bottle. He seemed more anxious, as if reliving everything had allowed the gravity of what he’d been through to finally set in?
Or – not. And, unfortunately, I thought not. His eyes were still focused on me, not at the door or the ground or off in the distance like I’d seen before. He was a little shorter and a little bigger than me, and the secondhand recliner he was sitting in was doing its best to swallow him up.
I picked up the empty wine bottle. It’d been too long since Neighbor Steve had spoken, but I said that I thought one was plenty.
And that was that.
Burned and Bland 