Trash living

As I was walking around in a post-exam haze a few nights ago, sipping on a can of walking beer,¹ I stumbled upon a house in the richer half of the neighborhood where a bunch of stuff was piled outside in the driveway. There was also a "skip", what I would call a dumpster in my trash dialect, but a skip is shaped like a sandcrawler from that one Star Wars movie. (Star Wars? You're familiar? The movie Star Wars? It's got a big pointy pyramid tank in the desert full of tiny dudes² in robes? It's like that except we're in England in a rich neighborhood.

Piled to the side of the skip was a radiator, a rusty bike frame, car parts, and about a hundred pots and pans. Jackpot.

I am a trash aficionado. It became a habit back when I lived in Turkey. Residents simply put stuff they don't want anymore out on the street, and then it would get absorbed into the texture of the city in minutes, perhaps seconds. There was a whole secondary economy of trash pickers and rag sellers and peddlers, called eskici, "old stuff guy". These old guys would push wooden hand carts down the narrow streets, buying and selling, calling out their titles to attract customers in a mournful and bizarre ululation, "old stuff guy, old stuff guy" almost like a Pokemon. They even had a union. I'm just an amateur.

The pile of pots and pans were mostly cheap aluminum, but underneath the rubble, I saw a glimmer of color, and my heart leapt. I went to pick through the pile of forgotten kitchenware and found every millenial's dream: a pile of abandoned Le Creuset. In good condition. I mean, obviously someone had just died, and whoever was stripping the house either didn't know or didn't care what they'd dug up. I'm happy to take the win. I emptied my walking beer and stacked up the cast iron in an unweildy tower, and, taking multiple breaks, trudged home. I set the spoils out on the table and took the photo you see above.

I then visited the local grocery store – it recently opened, it has excellent produce and loads of fancy products – and one of the owner's henchmen and I are on good terms. He saves me all the almost-expired products that the fancier residents of the neighborhood decline to purchase, and gives them to me. Today, it was bacon: two packets of artisianal cured pork one day away from expiry. Can I put away two packets of bacon in a day? You bet I can.

Coming home from the grocery, I saw my downstairs neighbor, and we chatted for awhile. I offered one of the Creuset grill pans, as I had a copy – in exchange, she gave me a box of cat food her mother mistakenly ordered to her address.

So there I was, my trash bacon and trash pans, with trash cat food for my trash prince Levi. I made Amatriciana.

I will summarize the instructions briefly: saute onion on med low until transluscent and gold, add pancetta and cook for another minute, add tomato and chili and let cook down until think, about half an hour. Add pasta and a giant handful of grated cheese. Perfect brainless food.

Exams are finished and law school is now concluded. I have some time and space to do other things again. Although this is not the end of my legal education, the academic portion has concluded, and I have the summer off. Expect more posts from Ernie's Kitchen in the weeks to come. This is just a quick post to reannounce my foray into blogging.

I will have to write another post entirely about those exams, but to give you a flavor, the difficulty of six consecutive eight-hour exams is less the physical stamina component and more the psychological endurance – exam period took place over the last three weeks, and I was a nervous wreck by the end of it. It was two exams per week. Which was good because I had the chance to study for the coming week in the off time, but bad because of the sense of overwhelming anxiety and dread. We had six weeks after lectures had finished to gather and hold the entirety of the course in our heads, and then brain dump 4,500 words about three chosen questions for each subject in one frenetic scribble. I am exhausted. But very relieved it's over. Grades are out in a month. Grades here are very fake – in descending order you can get a 1st, a 2:1, a 2:2, or a 3rd (a bare pass). A fail is below 45%, and a distinction is above 70%. But whatever. That's a problem for another time.

1. Do you really need further explanation?
2. They're called Jawas. Of course I know what they're called. I know this because Jari and I collected Star Wars cards from Bosco's on Spenard and never once learned how to play.³ Jari won the lottery drew Yoda as a rare pull from a booster pack and I always expected that I'd get Darth Vader because, well, it wouldn't be fair otherwise, and of course I never did. But I did get a lot of Jawas.
3. Never learned how to correctly play Warhammer either, but it did involve spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on tiny figurines, glueing our fingers together, painting them obsessively, and then rolling ten million dice. Warhammer was a fixture of our childhoods. It is also the only thing keeping the British economy afloat, alongside the indie video gaming industry. The only time we ever tried to actually play, we went to Bosco's on a Saturday and spent a few hours around extremely bad-smelling teenagers taking ages to push little regiments of warriors around a big table. It was beyond boring. I much preferred the painting and reading about the lore. But I did like rolling ten million tiny dice over and over again.