This recipe might be kind of complex so bear with me for a moment.

I’m standing in the door to my kitchen wearing a t-shirt and staring at the rain. One of our more aggressive ladies in this little village of ours is a strict nature practitioner. She fasts and she eats from her garden extensively. Not completely. She has a thing for her store-bought bread which brings mice which interest her cats which cause her dogs to bark and her life not to be boring from too much silence.

She gave me medical advice one time. At the moment, it was for my leg but now it’s for All of Me. She told me to just leave it out in nature. Nature has a way of healing. Maybe this explains why I’m only wearing a t-shirt. Maybe I don’t need the T-shirt.

If this doesn’t sound like a recipe to you, I’m just trying to give you the situation so you understand my thinking. It’s raining. It’s gray and raining and we’re just not quite ready to harvest and there’s just nothing to do. I mean, there is always the writing but I’m already way ahead. If I keep doing that, I won’t have any work when I need it.

Immediately and without any type of question whatsoever, there is almost no one who lives in this village who would even be thinking like me. Without the slightest attention to the weather, they would have woken up with coffee and cigarettes if they smoked. If they drink, they would take a shot or two if they had a bottle and if they didn’t, they would seriously be thinking hard about where to get their next 10 rubles to get one. Life just pops here in the morning.

And here’s me, vegan Jesus, just letting the rain drops dance on my belly and pecker and completely understanding that I have nothing particularly to do and no particular desire to make a project for myself. I mean, let’s just call this The perfect Storm. What I want, is some comfort.

Now listen to me when I talk to you because I don’t want to say this twice. When you are down in the dumps, as Paul Stanley used to say, there’s only one thing that’s going to do it for you. That’s right. Pasta.

It is time to carbo load. It is time to put the Rock at the bottom of the well. It’s time to tell all non-essential systems to calm down because digestion is being called into play at such an extent that the lights begin to dim or even go out.

Okay, I’m pompous. And I never get to the recipe. That’s me, by the way. Now, I don’t look for recipes on the internet anymore. I did when I was in Google cooking school. I went there for free and I got a good overview of the basics. I had access to a supermarket and I figured out a few things.

I just don’t do it anymore because I don’t need it and I don’t want the noise. You see, I’m a gardener who also lets his unused land, his natural areas, remain natural. And as gratitude for not butchering every living thing just for the aesthetic beauty of watching a human being use a gasoline powered instrument, I’ve been eating food from my garden since before we even planted our garden. Greens? I have so many greens I don’t know what to do with them. I feel like heading over to the church and getting them to agree to a community kitchen project where everybody contributes to cook or eat and nobody needs any money unless they want to work to help out with the logistics. I bet you we could make a business that would be quite sustainable and even appreciated by those of us who live alone and don’t want to cook. That’s not me but that is the guy across the street and there are quite a few people like him who might like a home cooked meal at least once a day.

But after all is said and done, my decision for the day was to walk outside in the rain in my t-shirt and gather up enough greens to seriously do the job. Now, this is nothing special to this world class kitchen. Natural greens have been covered since I’ve been here. But, what made today’s linguine and greens vegan special, it was the first tomato.

That’s right sugar bear, the first green tomato that stood out and said they were the best. And here I am in the market for comfort food, I’ve already got the linguine out, tell me there isn’t the place for a little fried green tomato.

Mirepoix? No. But I did pull up a red onion and use most of the bulb along with the spices and a bit of nasty hot pepper just because I love it so much. Chop those horseradish leaves fine and toss everything in on top of your oil of choice. Douse with water, bring it to a boil, slide that linguine into that boiling hot pot of luscious fertility food and let It go. When the water is gone, the party’s over and what you’re listening to right now is me waxing poetic over a job well done.

Why did I start writing about it? Because my neighbor pulled out of his driveway, backed in front of my house leaving a cloud of acrid auto emissions that came right into my kitchen just as I was getting ready to eat my meal. My habit these days is to try and do something beautiful in gratitude for people who probably should not be in this country anymore. Truthfully, the scandal I heard is that they are fugitives. That pesky Russian has been undercover for a while and him and his uzbeki accomplice have done something nefarious or have been doing nefarious things all along. It seems Belarus will invite any scum. Even me, right?