Reggae Kale Burrito Sunday with the Girls

One of my favorite teenage memories was of being at my friend Beth’s house on Sunday mornings. Beth lived in the sometimes-bastardized town of Desert Hot Springs where I grew up in latchkey oblivion from age six to twelve. After I left I thought I would never go back but ended up loving the time I could spend at her house in high school. She lived next to Cabot’s Indian Pueblo museum, which at the time was not regulated as it is today. Outside of her bedroom window was a huge Indian totem head that I would imagine protected me while I slept. Her house and the museum were on a stranded plot of sandy sprawl and wild land ridden with tumbleweed, creosote, sage bush and sand. On Saturday nights we would dress up and stay up late in the desert doing avant-garde photo shoots on the skeletons of abandoned couches and washing machine drums. We would wake up on Sunday mornings, the pillows flaked up with the night before’s geisha white pancake makeup, to the smell of her herbologist mother making fresh poppy seed muffins in the kitchen. Her mother’s boyfriend then, who slept in his van and was a breatharian, would come in lured by the smell and we would crank up the KCRW reggae marathon for the morning. With the French doors thrown open we would eat and sing along with the tunes of a mellow mood and the whistling desert wind breathing through the rooms and hallways. The sound of low-key reggae was forever memorialized in my mind as the soundtrack to good food filled Sunday mornings.

Last weekend for my birthday, seven girls who form the core of my friendship soul swarmed into my beachside home for the weekend. I treated them to a special kale burrito scramble on Sunday morning to show them the gratitude I feel that they are all in my life; these women who know me better than anyone and who love me unconditionally. One of them switched on her IPod while I cooked and the sounds of Bob Marley swooned through my home as I was reminded of Beth’s house and the love that is shared unconditionally between real girl friends.

A simple pan of garlic sautéed provided a beautiful bath for the chopped up tomato and kale. Once simmered down, the whipped up eggs and Parisian spices were tossed in to scramble along with the juicy vegetables. Served buffet style along with “Natty Dread” and the pounding Venice Beach rain, we ate the lovely mixture atop Ezekiel wheat sprout tortillas with black beans and cheddar cheese. In our world, it was a version of a cleansing Sunday sermon morn.