Foreign Things
A young father tells me that his 7-year-old daughter is a very picky eater. And there is evidence. He offers her several possible choices on New Year’s Eve, including macaroni salad, and she hollers a resounding no! to all of them from her bedroom. Tugboat, our cat, is a picky eater too. It can be the exact flavor from the same company, but he won’t eat it if it’s in paté form, the prince wants it as shreds.
I’ve seen parents needing to trim away the outer edges of bread slices. (When I make a sandwich for this kid, he gets to remove the crusts himself.) They can’t pour spaghetti sauce over the pasta. Hide pulverized broccoli and peas inside meatballs.
It’s still a foreign thing when I hear parents asking their kids what they want to eat. My mother never asked us, nor did I to my three kids prior to preparing their meals. I don’t recall getting explicit instruction on family dinner decorum, but I knew not to ask my mother for a second bowl of rice if we had guests over for dinner. I knew not to take the last piece of food because I believed it belonged to my mother who would decide using her chopsticks to place it into one of our bowls. A luxe treat was getting to toss my rice into the frying pan to soak up the pan juices from a small steak that she had cooked solely for her husband. The bits of fried garlic in the steak drippings coated the white rice and made it taste like heaven — sufficient proof that I could tell my friends the next day that I indeed had steak for dinner.
Another foreign thing is a potluck. People really just bring over a dish to share. Essentially I’m invited to a meal where the probability is high that no two foods complement each other. Beef chili and tuna casserole — with watermelon salad. My goodness, where did you find watermelon in late December? I walk along the table half trying to be polite and half trying to decipher this mess of a smorgasbord. Ah yes, of course, deviled eggs. It’s not just the food not getting along and that most of them are not at the temperature they need to be, it’s the fact that I have to work before going to a party. Why would you invite people to a celebratory occasion and make them suffer at the same time?
Even when it’s a themed potluck and I have to examine the taco bar sign-up sheet posted in the teachers’ lounge, the whole thing is inefficient and wasteful. Potentially we’re asking 40 different staff members to get into their car, drive to the store, find a parking space, search the isles for the item that they’d signed for. Soft corn or flour? Hard shells? Ooh, I haven’t seen these shells that stand up! Then do mental math to know how much to buy, get in line to pay, drive home but leave the stuff in the car or else they’ll forget all about it. Finally, we all witness what happens after the gathering — there are leftovers. A lot of food leftovers that people had touched, poked, held up to the light. Did you want to take these cool stand-up shells home? I’m thinking what the fuck for, so I replied, “Yes, of course. Thank you.”
Happy New Year, everyone.
I made the most cumbersome thing to date, bánh bèo. (I’d have to drive over a hundred miles one-way to order these at a restaurant in Santa Ana.) They are steamed rice cakes topped with pulverized dried shrimp, mung bean, and scallion oil. It really was delicious, one of my favorite Vietnamese appetizers.
