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Brief miracles By L.E. Leone› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com CHEAP EATS You will wonder, if you ever see a certain silent film called Back to God's Country, made in 1919, how I managed to get my name in the credits. You will perhaps think, that must be some other Dani Leone. Being thanked, and for what? ... 90 years later! Oh, not for nothing, and it is me, me me, the chicken farmer. I just got time-machined back from Idaho, where I assisted my friends in the recording of a new score for an old Nell Shipman movie. I washed all the dishes and provided philosophical support. This is true. While I was gone, Crawdad de la Cooter rat-sat my shack for me. Instead of eating all the food I had piled up for her, like turkey legs and white bread, she raided my book shelves and stole many of my books, on grounds (flimsy, if you ask me) that they were hers. No prob, Craw. Books are like water to the chicken farmer right now. You take some away, and more flows in. Most recently I drank up Tortilla Flat, by Steinbeck. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola, and then Tortilla Flat again, still by Steinbeck. Crawdad being Jewish, I'm not sure how to interpret her remarkably Christian miracle of having collected more eggs while she was here than it was possible for my chickens to lay. Or maybe I should attribute the miracle to the chickens, because, while they are Jewish too, technically, they are also adamant surrealists. Whereas Crawdad is a licensed therapist. I'm not sure if I ever announced that yet. So if you need help with your head, or want to borrow any of my books, give the crustacean a call. Or if you need (for some reason) more eggs in four days than five chickens can lay ... For the handing-off of the keys to the kingdom, we met in the Tenderloin at Lahore Karahi, that Pakistani-Indian place I mentioned a couple months ago in connection with a dish called Butter Chicken, the very mention of the name of which requires me to step away from the keyboard for a minute and dance like old Uncle Lugnut when the ballgame fell into the bathtub with him. I'm back. Afraid of what I might do if I ate a dish called Butter Chicken, in public (I've eaten it takeout style, and it's pretty good), we ordered other things instead. Chicken vindaloo ($6.50); mili juli sabzi, which is a bunch of mixed-up vegetables ($4.00); salad, which is iceberg lettuce and beans and peppers ($2.50); and a couple pieces of naan ($1.00). Now, of all the wide world's many different takes on bread, naan, the clay oven baked leavened lalala, is my runaway favorite, without doubt, whenever I happen to be eating it. Dunked into the creamy curry-y vindaloo sauce, or scooping up cauliflower, for example, out of the mili juli sabzi, it just tastes so ... I don't know, fried, almost. It makes me happy. Lahore Karahi is my new favorite Pakistani/Indian restaurant. Of course, Indian food in general drives Crawdad crazy, as has been well-documented in this column through the years. But now that we're not together anymore, we don't have to worry about that — which is just one of the many reasons why I highly recommend divorce, as a matter of course, for all married people. If not now, later. We didn't have to go home together, see? I could go to Idaho, to do the dishes, and she could come up here to my shack to be crazy and perform miracles. Which is how it happened, exactly. And between meals, up there, I managed to snack down on and even retain a little bit of the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. The conclusion to which, being slightly more vital to the sum of human knowledge than anything else I might add about Lahore Karahi, I will try to restate here, in closing, to the best of my chicken farmerly understanding: OK, listen, time is relative, the universe is not infinite, is expanding, and will most likely contract, about a gazillion years from now, until which time (relative), one of three or four things of which we can be certain is called entropy, the thermodynamic principle by which things overall, well, fall apart rather than coming together. So ... Eat up! * LAHORE KARAHI Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–11 p.m. 612 O'Farrell, SF (415) 567-8603 Takeout available No alcohol MasterCard, Visa. Quiet Wheelchair accessible
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