Blank Canvas

Maybe it was a lot to ask of a Triscuit. Maybe Tamalehawk should have been content to relent to the cracker's meager reason; eat it plain and refrain from the strain of glopping a topping on its cratered plane. But this wasn't just an idle snack. This was lunch.

Piled with peanut butter, celery, raisins and sunflower seeds, the cracker became a vast valley of promise and potential. Salty, sweet, crunchy and consumed in one bite, Tamalehawk wracked his brain for further modifications. Chili sauce? Pineapple? He vowed to visit the Triscuit lunch again. Also: Ten minutes into Top Chef and he is already enraged with that colossal douchebag Mike. Someone please suvee his face off.

If It Bleeds

Tamalehawk accidentally presents Part 1 of the Use Your Arugula series, wherein he scrambles to save the tiny leaves from a grievous descent into the garbage by tossing them on top, tucking them in, or burying them beneath any other food item being consumed. As the sad yellow tinge starts to hamper their hue, he'll resort to just eating them despondently straight from the container.

Here, Tamalehawk tried in vain to painstakingly recreate the cover of Bon Appétit, and immediately butterflied the chicken upside down, misplacing the spine and exposing a cage of craggy rib bones. Thankfully arugula obfuscates his mistakes like Dutch hiding from the Predator. Get to the chopper!

Rediscovery

Tamalehawk has long subscribed to the adage "Can in the pantry, app in your cap." It's a little esoteric, sure, popular in a bygone era when people served appetizers in the family cap and you were just thankful that you had a family cap to eat out of. These days, the percipient pith persists: If you have something edible in your pantry, there's a decent chance you can fry and eat it.

These little canned artichokes sat like silent sentinels, waiting and wading in pervading marinade until called into action as an emergency appetizer for guests. Drain, dry, dredge in some seasoned flour, and dutifully dunk into a bubbling bath of oil, salt and serve, and in mere moments you've shambled from shame to salvation. Also works with chickpeas to make adorable crunchy pellets that you'll eventually just eat with a spoon. Lemon squeeze on either is both mandatory and optional.

Dark Matter

Some thief crept into Tamalehawk's dreams and with precarious precision pulled forth the most ambrosial frozen opus in recent memory. The Hawk household had to freeze federal funding for fear of spraining some kind of critical gland.

The Mission to Marzipan may be mottled with manifold mysteries, but from takeoff to landing it delivers, especially when your spoon uncovers a crater of velvety almond ore. It's enough to make you smash the dash of your spacecraft and let the signal from headquarters echo out endlessly, or at least travel to two different 7-11's in search of it. Which happened.

The Pangs

Daily has Tamalehawk chastened himself for the fact that the tractate lay slacked and half-redacted. Meals long inspected, digested, and reflected, eaten one-handed standing, forever braising in the maze of his brain.

A prisoner to his hunger, Tamalehawk does manage to carve out a few stolen moments for minor innovations, such as this is amaretto cookie cut and slathered with Nutella and apricot-orange preserves. The result is a kind of miniature dessert sloppy joe, a tiny delight the likes of which was way worth it despite elaborate schematics and tenuous structural integrity.

Emergence

Tamalehawk isn't going to perch here and pretend he has an excuse for the stunning stretch of saturnine silence he has foisted upon his flock of fellow food followers. He's been soaring sullen and lateral over a littoral landscape feeding formidably, his journey charted solely in the folds of his curved bird mind.

He alights again on the brittle and neglected tractate with a tomatillo in repose, itself exposed with husk flaps akimbo. Having shucked and rinsed the intriguing veg, Tamalehawk roasted a host of tomatillos in the oven and, together with jalapeño and cilantro, made a salsa verde that might get elected for local salsa office. The main attraction: a frenzied foray into the realm of carnitas - pork shoulder marinated in a sauce including but not limited to three kinds of citrus, achiote paste, cilantro, garlic, and extra etcetera, and which completely ruined his leg feathers in a sudden spray from the blender - slow roasted, shredded, and bedded into heated tortillas. He couldn't help but top them with homemade pickled red onion, radishes, queso fresco, and más cilantro for a taco that would probably push any other taco down on the street without remorse.

The Swoop

June came and went, quietly sliding by with only two paltry posts to its name. Tamalehawk sounds a mournful squawk for the lack of traction on his beloved tractate. Raising a baby hawk has been a full-time job, often pushing experimentation to the back burner, where it simmers unceremoniously until Tamalehawk gets a free wing to stir, panic, adjust, and rejoice.

That's not to imply that he hasn't maintained a steady trickle of triumphs. This curried lamb burger with grilled zucchini and chili-yogurt sauce would certainly spur a sheep to nod approvingly. Tamalehawk is typically particular about his lamb manifestations, preferring chops to sinewy shanks, but the subtle, uniform taste and texture of ground lamb was designed for the burger format. The toasted whole wheat English muffin made a perfect carrying case, creating a durable lining for runaway flavor.