When I was living in Venezuela, I spent a lot of time with my extended family. Especially my grandmother, the exciting, loving “Bita.” One night, while I was in the car with Bita and some other relatives, I made some comment, the content of which I forget, but which I prefaced with the descriptor “in my youth…”.

The entire car erupted in laughter. My godmother managed to ask — in between gasping for breaths — just how old I thought I was. I told them I realized I was in the company of people decades older than me, but that it wasn’t as if I had just graduated high school and college the day before. I was 24 at the time.

Now I’m 25 (26 creeping closer), even further removed from the days of “my youth,” if you’ll humor me, and I like to reflect on some of those days, especially the most positive of them. Many of those positive days coincided with shows put on at my old house/venue, “The Abdab.”

The music we heard there was great. But like so many things human, it was the community that gathered around the place that made it so memorable. Every few weeks or so, for 2 years, my roommates and I had the pleasure of hosting bands from around the world and the locals who embraced and supported their art.

One of the people who influenced us to share our basement with the community was PJ Bond. We enjoyed his stories of amazing house shows he had been to and thrown, and as stories usually go, they portrayed the New Brunswick scene the way we wanted to see it: idealistic, beautiful, fun.

We especially latched onto the idea that food is a great way to get people in a good mood. Pot-luck style, that was the way to go. Who doesn’t smile when they arrive at a show and find out there’s free food there? My mouth waters at the thought of it.

So when we had our first show, we thought real hard about what to make. The easy way out was the universal punk pasta. Put tons of pasta in a bowl, heat up a ton of tomato sauce in another bowl, and if you’re feeling saucy, put out some shredded parm. Can’t really go wrong (except that the pasta dries out if you don’t keep it covered, which is a problem with punks coming in and out of your dining room / mess hall).

Someone smart made a good call though. We had recently experimented with some recipes pulled from roommate Zach’s amazing vegetarian cookbook Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. The cookbook is from some vegetarian restaurant out in the midwest I think (look it up kids). And almost all the recipes were way bigger and more intricate than a few curious-but-not-so-serious college sophomores to cook very often.

One of those recipes became the basis of what would become known as Abdab Chili. I’m not going to rip the recipe from the cookbook — I don’t have the book, and the recipe, like all good recipes, has evolved from its prototype into the monster it is today.

The Abdab Chili monster became a staple at our shows. A huge vat of it with bowls of shredded cheese, sour cream, and sometimes some chopped sweet onions could invariably be found on our dining room table while music blared below. Punks would fill styrofoam bowls of it, ask us if those meat-looking things were meat or veggie-protein-crumbles (they were always the latter, or sometimes our home-seared tofu crumbles) and then criticize our use of non-environmentally-friendly bowls. It was tons of fun. If I made my home-fried tortilla chips and put them out there, people would dip straight into the vat of chili for a nice corn-fueled scoop of deliciousness, wiping the dripping tomato sauce off of their smile with their bare arms.

I can’t share Abdab Chili on the internet, because I haven’t yet started a company that sells digital food sent and assembled via 3-D printers that are fed edible ingredients and use meat lasers to cut… so the best I can do is share a recipe. When you cook it (preferably with a partner to talk to and a beverage in hand), do it with the best, most idealistic intentions. Share it, make a mess, and clean up later. Celebrate.

There used to be potatoes in it, and the ratios are probably all wrong, but here goes:

Abdab Chili

Ingredients

1. 4 medium-size cans of Diced Tomato
2. 2 tiny cans of Tomato Paste (thickener; use more or less as desired)
3. 1 huge onion (or 2 medium, who cares? add more for more yum)
4. Two-tree garlic cloves. Again, your choice how many.
5. 2 squash/zucchini (your choice. not butternut, unless you want to try it out! I’m talking about yellow/green guys)
6. 2 normal bell-size peppers, whatever kind you want. Remember, spicy peppers will make your chili spicier
7. 2 packs of ground TVP (I have used this smartground stuff to great effect, but this is up to you! use whatever “meat” you want)
8. A bunch (like, 3tbsp?) of ground coriander
9. A bunch (like, 2tbsp?) of ground cumin
10. One more bunch (like, 3tbsp?) of chili powder
11. Salt to taste, my friend. I use n number of pinches

Directions (Abdab-style)

1. This is chili, so chop the veggies to whatever size you like to bite into. Everything will shrink a little and get soft, so, you know, something to think about.
2. Sauté onions and garlic in oil. I’m an oil lover, so I basically deep fry them. I do this in the same vat that I’ll be cooking the chili in. IMPORTANT: do not burn garlic. I suggest waiting a few minutes before adding it in.
3. Once onions are golden-brown and your kitchen starts getting compliments on how it smells so good, add a little more oil (if you feel like it) and then throw in the peppers.
4. Let the peppers soften and maybe even char a little (a few minutes) before adding the chopped squash.
5. Once you start getting scared that everything’s starting to burn (5 minutes perhaps?), add in those spices! STIR! YUM! Ok, so it’s starting to smell a little more serious, and less onion-aromatic.
6. Throw that “meat” in there. If you are using real ground meat, I hope you already cooked it in a separate pan. We’re just warming it up here, before…
7. Tossing in ALL the tomato cans. Remember, remove the actual metal cans from the chili before serving. Suggestion: open cans, pour contents into chili, then recycle the cans.
8. Cook on low-medium for about forever (at least until that huge vat starts bubbling mildly), then reduce to low/simmer and let it reduce a tiny bit. Start serving it whenever you feel like it. It’s going to look watery when it’s super-hot on the stove, so don’t be afraid to serve it, it’ll congeal or something once it cools down, and it’ll look more like “chili” then.

The past two evenings have been spent with new friends and my best friend Mrs. Pint-o-ale, and much of the discussions I’ve had revolved around reading. What we like to read, when we read, on what media we find ourselves reading the most. My answer to the first question was something along the lines of “fiction, historical accounts, Edward Tufte”.

Which brings me to my point. I’m not really enjoying reading historical accounts these days. I know I crave the information, and I find military history fascinating in general. I had more than enough credits to minor (and nearly enough to major) in history in college, only I skipped the intro courses so I couldn’t count those credits towards some more words on my degree. I watched the History Channel almost exclusively through high school and college.

And I enjoy reading. I don’t tear through books like some people, but about 95% of my subway riding is conducted with my nose up to paper pages.

Back to my original train of thought: Why can’t I get through more than a few pages of John Keegan’s incredible one-volume account of The First World War before wanting to stick my earbuds in and listen to a podcast or music? This never happens when I’m reading fiction (not even while reading the incredibly dense fourth section of 2666 which chronicles, one by one, hundreds of gruesome killings of women in Mexico, shit).

The closest I can come to diagnosing this bizarre aversion to reading history is that I don’t get “sucked in.” When I read Bolaño or Fitzgerald, I find certain passages pulling me deep into the story. I even think about reading when I’m not reading. That’s a pretty good barometer of a good book, I think! But it’s not happening with history books the way I want it to.

Oh, and I had to put Infinite Jest down a few pages into the ebonics-written chapter. Lost my patience. I’m told it gets better.

Frequent visitors to this site (or my portfolio) may have noticed a new button in the menu — “sunflowers”. Go ahead and click it if you like. It will take you to a short explanation of my book (not yet published) and a listing of the blog posts I wrote about it. I might write some more, but the short story is that I was writing a ton in late 2008, early 2009 (both on the book and on the blog about the book), but petered out in the summer of 2009 as school was heating up and life had more structure than it had the previous year.

I kept in touch with my friends who were characters in my book, sending them my chapter drafts, soliciting feedback, and just generally trying to keep the flow of inspiration on full for as long as possible.

It didn’t last.

Turns out inspiration is fickle, even when you’re writing about arguably the most exciting experience of your life, as I was (and still am, ostensibly). So here I am, wondering where I’m going to get it next.

My girlfriend faces these issues daily, in the writing phase of her PhD. We seem to be in a weird cycle where when she is inspired, I am in the doldrums, and when I’m on a roll programming and creating, she is down in the dumps about her work. Lots of problems, but it’s clear that our discussions about the creative process aren’t exactly cures for our inspirational woes.

Here’s the funny part. This whole post is an attempt at finding inspiration to keep writing my book. It’s my first blog post about the book since April 2009, and I’ve written probably about 60 moleskine pages since that time, so we’ll just have to wait and see if any kind of burst of productivity results from this meta-writing.

To end with a question, what do you do about this crap? Other than reading 43folders, of course.