Thanks to Bink

During my sophomore year in college I usually carried a steno notebook around with me. This was surely because of the influence of the writing classes I was taking, in which we were encouraged over and over to "write what you know" and the nature of the acting training we were getting in the theater department. I wrote down random thoughts and my friends did too. Sometimes people would draw pictures in it (but not me, usually, as I was - and am - more comfortable with words).


Before the era of the coffeehouse, there was really only one place to go in Tacoma if you were under 21, and that was Denny's. My friends and I spent a lot of time there, sometimes with our books and notes, but usually eating fries and cake and drinking sodas and talking and teasing each other. In that period when I was bringing along my little notebook, Bink and I went up there one night. I was wearing a blue denim skirt with buttons up the front that I really liked, and somehow we wound up talking about it.

The Gift of a Day

A and S got married in the summer of 1995. They were going to have a small ceremony on a historic apple orchard run by A's employer, the Oregon Historical Society, and several of their friends, including Shobi-wan and I (who were no longer living together by then), helped with the food and other wedding details.


My wedding gift to them was to host the rehearsal dinner. A lot of the guests were coming from out of town, so I think there were 20 people invited to the dinner. My housemate and her dog were away for the summer, and in the meantime I was taking care (read: watering) the garden of peas and poppies, grass, and trees. The front yard would make a great party area.


I scheduled the day to almost the last minute, since it was going to be a very busy one. There was a staff meeting scheduled at my job at Coffee People. Staff meetings were scheduled before opening and after close, so I attended the AM staff meeting, which was at 5:30. While I would usually feel at least annoyed about having to be somewhere that early in the morning, it happened that being out and about at that time of day was going to give me a nice, long day to get everything done.


My plan was to go to the Canned Food Outlet after the staff meeting, which ended about 20 minutes before the canned food store opened. I sat at a table and drank an additional latte, thinking that this was going to be my last opportunity to sit and relax until late in the day. I hit the store and returned home by 730, turning on the sprinkler so the grass would be dry by the time of the party that afternoon. I washed dishes and cleaned the house, and then turned the sprinkler off and put it away.


I had already prepared Romanian Marinated Mushrooms from the Sundays At Moosewood cookbook, which was going to be both the vegetable and the dressing for a spinach salad. I made three lasagnes, one white and vegetarian, one vegetarian red, and one red with meat. The Florentine lasagne was from a recipe of Phil's mom's, who was moving toward a vegetarian diet, and the red ones were Jujubi's recipe doubled and split in half, with ground beef added to one of the halves.


It was only after I had made the third lasagne that I realized that I hadn't thought about baking them. I couldn't fit three lasagnes in the oven! And yet I didn't want to bake them in two batches, since it would take so long that the one baked first would be cold by the time the other two came out of the oven. This was a big hiccup in my otherwise perfectly-planned day. I barely knew my neighbors, but I was familiar with the little boy who lived next door, and his mother baked the white lasagne for me. She even brought it back to the house when it was done.

A, S, and Shobi-wan (who was the best woman) arrived about 90 minutes before the party was supposed to start. As soon as they arrived, I drove out to the airport to pick up my mom, as she was attending the wedding as well. Upon returning I took a quick shower and changed clothes, and while I set the banquet table Shobi-wan and the maid of honor laid out picnic blankets on the grass.


I had never hosted a dinner party by myself before, and that the timing worked out so perfectly, from the dried grass to the hot lasagne, made me particularly proud of myself.

The Ultimate Cookie

The summer before my senior year in high school, I worked at a cookie store on Haight Street that was in a former bank (and that is now a clothing store). This was in the '80s when Mrs. Field's were everywhere, the snack food of the times. It was late summer when I started, and I expected to have a pretty light senior year - not to mention that we got out of school around 2:30 anyway, and said so in the interview. I was hired despite the fact that the manager, as she told me, didn't usually hire teenagers because we were unreliable.


I worked a couple days a week as a baker in the back of the shop with two other people. The dough came in tubs and we scooped it out with ice cream dishers onto parchment-lined cookie sheets. After baking and cooling, we wrapped most of the cookies in paper and boxes to be delivered elsewhere. The back room was the "wholesale operation."


There was a "retail operation" in the front of the shop, and the cookies to be sold in-house were slightly larger than those packed for delivery. I worked behind the counter on Sunday evenings, playing the Dr. Demento Show on the radio and goofing around with my coworkers. There were two of them, both of whom I thought were at least ten years older than I (but I was only 16 that summer), and one was older than the other.


Hanging out with them was confusing. Sometimes it felt like they were both "kind of" flirting with me and that they were in competition for my attention. I wasn't used to this sort of attention being paid to me and I didn't really know what to think about it. I was flattered, but I wasn't attracted to either of them - and the fact that both of them were way off limits (since I was 16) did not make them more attractive either. It was exciting, though.


When school started the guys started making plans to be my senior prom date. First one, then the other, both in full hearing of each other, would talk about going out to dinner, renting a limo, and all that prom stuff. Eventually they agreed they would both escort me to the prom, and that the African-American guy would wear a white tuxedo and the white guy would wear a black one. It was totally silly, and yet it was fun to imagine people's reactions to my a) showing up with two dates who b) no one knew.


I quit about a month into the fall semester. I had found myself in three AP classes, and wasn't really interested in working at the cookie store anymore. When I gave my notice, the manager said that she had never really expected anything else, and that she had been planning to fire me anyway. I never even went into that cookie store again after that.


I went to the prom with a friend who had graduated the year before. He wore a black tuxedo.

From A Meatloaf-Deprived Childhood

Mom didn't make meatloaf very often - thank goodness. I ate pretty much everything when I was a kid, and No did too. But the meatloaf was thick and tough and pretty boring, as far as flavor went, and even though I didn't like ketchup very much when I was a kid, I often poured a lot of the stuff on my slice. I realized later that Mom made meatloaf the way she made hamburgers, which would make sense: Mom makes the best hamburgers of anyone. But take an enormous burger and put it in a casserole dish, and allow it to bake in its own grease, and it's not a very good hamburger anymore.

I thought Mom made the worst meatloaf in the world until I had Denver D's mom's meatloaf. Phil and I were dropping Denver D off in Denver on our way to Colorado Springs, having driven from Tacoma. His folks had already eaten, but we were offered some leftovers to make the last 90 minutes of our two-day drive. Phil had had food poisoning the whole trip, so he got chicken broth, and Denver D and I got meatloaf.

His mom's meatloaf was like a piece of plywood in consistency and color. It was the kind of food that you have to drink some water after very bite to get it to slide down your throat. I remembered the ketchup trick from my childhood, and went to the fridge to get some. They had no ketchup! They did have some barbecue sauce, and I poured it all over my slice of meatloaf. I never remember the brand, but I always recognize the bottle in the grocery store, and am loyal to it because it made that meatloaf edible.

I did not eat anyone's meatloaf for years after that. When I was working at the Women's Daytime Drop-In Center in Berkeley, a place for homeless women with children to hang out during the day when the overnight shelters were closed, it happened that there were clients who were fantastic cooks. Each morning a few clients would volunteer to cook lunch for everyone, and I would hang out in the kitchen sometimes and watch. I told a couple of them that I came from a meatloaf-deprived background; while I knew from books that meatloaf could be good, my mom and my mother-out-law made terrible meatloaf and I hadn't had anyone who could teach me by positive example how to make it.

They laughed and bid me watch while they made a couple big meatloaves with ground beef, oatmeal, eggs, sauteed onions and peppers, grated cheese, ketchup, and seasonings. They formed the meat into loaves and placed them on cookie trays - not casseroles, much to my surprise: You cook bread in loaf pans, so I figured you had to cook meatloaf in loaf pans too. It was explained to me that this way the grease runs off and doesn't poach the meat, so you get a nice crust. At some point one of them pulled the trays out and, using a spoon, painted the loaves with ketchup.

Needless to say, this was the only meatloaf I had ever had that I liked. Eventually I got around to making my own, following their example exactly. I collected meatloaf recipes for awhile, but I've gotten enough practice that I make it different ways depending on what vegetables are in the fridge, if and how much cheese we have, and usually with ground turkey and pork sausage.

Vegetable Curry

I didn't learn how to cook until after I got out of college. I had few kitchen skills, and still don't know how to chop an onion properly. I remember consulting my Joy of Cooking to learn how long to boil an egg to hardness. Upon graduation, the things I could make were Blackbottom Cupcakes, Aunt Syl's Enchilada Sauce, poached eggs, and potato-and-cauliflower curry, also called aloo gobi.

I never look at it, but this is what it looks like:



I learned how to make aloo gobi from Jindi when I was in tenth or eleventh grade. My mother had asked Jindi to teach her how to make an Indian dish. Jindi is a vegetarian and this vegetable curry is a pretty simple dish. Mom had invited me and a friend to come to the cooking lesson also, and since we really liked Indian food we went along.


Truth be told, I don't remember too much about the lesson itself. I remember cutting up the onions and the potatoes, and that my mom and my friend would both ask "How much was that?" when Jindi would put the seasonings into the pot. Jindi said, "You don't have to write it down" when we asked for the recipe, and I didn't, for about five years. When I did write it down, it was really for other people, or in case I forgot how to make aloo gobi.


Because I never make it exactly the same way each time, any way I make it is fine. Jindi was right: Aloo gobi is home food. You don't have to write those recipes down.

Dining Not In Paradise

Years ago, Denver D and I were wandering around the U District in Seattle, killing time before meeting someone somewhere else. After wandering long enough, we decided to have dinner. Denver D lived in Seattle and when he pointed out two Vietnamese restaurants we chose the smaller one. They were only a couple of doors apart and he said he'd heard they were about the same in quality, though he'd only been in the larger one.


The restaurant was really small, and it was not only hot but as muggy inside as it was outside. There were a few fans bolted to the ceiling, pointed at the tables, moving the air around your head but not providing any comfort in particular. We sat at a small table in back, under one of the fans. The table had salt, pepper, and a sticky bottle sriacha chile-garlic sauce sitting on it. We reviewed the menu and ordered.


Denver D had taught English in Taiwan for about a year after we got out of college. While waiting for our meal, he remarked that this restaurant convincingly recreated the experience of eating in Asia: a small, almost-clean setting, with tables close together and muggy air.


When the food came, the grilled whatever-it-was I had ordered (I no longer remember) had been garnished with a sprinkling of peanuts. I can't eat peanuts at all, not even a garnish, and when we finally got the waiter to come back, I explained that I couldn't eat this food with peanuts all over it because it would trigger my very bad allergy. He took the plate away and returned two minutes later - a surprisingly short time to prepare a whole new plate.


In the semi-darkness I looked closely at the plate and saw that there were still little pieces of peanut on the food. It was clear that the waiter had taken the plate back to the kitchen and shaken the peanuts off the food. I told Denver D that the waiter had not responded to the problem, and so we talked about what to do next.


That was resolved for us by Denver D noticing a baby cockroach on the table. He said that the cockroach made the recreation complete, only with smaller cockroaches. I pointed out that we were not eating dinner in Taiwan. We left.

Mom's Cooking

I had a mom who worked "outside the home" while I was growing up. She didn't have much choice, being a single parent, but she worked three days a week until I was ten or so and four days a week until I was in eighth grade, at which point she went full-time.


When we were younger, Jindi was at the house when we got home if Mom wasn't there, or the Stay At Home Dad (who was in junior high then) and Dimpi (his sister) took us on the bus back to their house. When I was in the Upper Form at CSH, I wore my house key on an orange yarn hair ribbon under my uniform, and ate graham crackers with milk while watching The Brady Bunch in the afternoon.


No and I always called Mom when we got home. Sometimes she asked us to put the potatoes in the little oven and turn it on, since they took so long to bake. Mom would come home and turn on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and put together the meat and vegetable parts of dinner. We had a lot of three-part dinners, often a potato (baked or boiled, or very occasionally frozen french fries), a piece of chicken or beef, and a vegetable. We often had broccoli, but in the spring had asparagus or artichokes. Mom would garnish our 60's modern plastic dinner plates with a piece of parsley, which we never had to eat (thank goodness, I don't like parsley to this day!). For dessert, which we ate at least half an hour later, we usually had fruit cocktail or ice cream.


Mom made one casserole, which she called Irish-Hungarian Goulash. From my friends who grew up in the Midwest, I understand versions of this are called Hot Dish, though one friend told me that if it doesn't include cream of mushroom soup it isn't Hot Dish. We hardly ever had this casserole, probably because Mom wasn't the make-on-Sunday type and she got home from work after 5pm. Of course, I love it, and consider it comfort food. Maybe you do too.

Mom's Irish-Hungarian Goulash

1 pound ground beef
1 onion, chopped up
1 can stewed tomatoes
oregano, basil, and salt
cooked elbow macaroni
grated cheese for the top

Brown beef with onion until cooked through. Add the can of stewed tomatoes and the herbs and stir. Combine in deep casserole pan with macaroni. Sprinkle cheese on top and bake at 350F until heated through. Serve with broccoli to happy children.


I am thinking about all this because recently I have been eating the way I ate when I was a kid. KT had a baby two weeks ago, and Mom and I have been spending a lot of time at my brother's house. Mom has been cooking for the new parents, and a lot of it is tried and true classics from back in the day. They're also relatively fast meals so Mom can hang out with the new parents and the grandchild. It's been fabulous.

Christmas In San Francisco

Today was Cookiethon! over at Park Place. This is a day in December on which HR and some others have a cookie-baking frenzy and bake a boatload of a bunch of different cookies.

I do not make cookies, but I have mad skillz when it comes to eating cookies. Hardly anything is too rich for me and the only thing that keeps me from eating butter and sugar on bread every day is being a grown-up. I had to leave the house for a little bit when the peanut butter cookies came out of the oven, only because the scent was so overpowering I couldn't breathe.


When I mentioned I had never heard the song "Christmas in San Francisco", Nutmeg and I went on an online search for it. We could only find the lyrics and Nutmeg said the song is so bad she couldn't sing it for me. Then she got the idea to ask KOIT, the local easy-listening radio station, and ask them to play it. KOIT is famous (or infamous) for playing Christmas music from sometime in November through Christmas. She wrote an email asking that they play this song for her friend who'd been raised in the city and had never heard it. Just as Zirpu and I were getting ready to leave, the song actually came on. In these multi-cultural times, I think it's okay to use a Yiddish word to describe a Christmas song, and that word is schmaltzy.


All of my favorite Park Place people showed up, including Gaia and Byronium who had just arrived the night before from two weeks in India, and Pumpkin, whom, I believe, I conjured by wearing socks that don't match (as he often does). A couple of very young girls had a grand time decorating the spritz cookies (sugar cookies from the cookie press). Nutmeg insisted we watch Steven Colbert's Christmas Special and we listened to carols on the iPod/CD player. JR brought home a 7' tree on his bicycle. HR, Cutie G, Byronium and others made cookies. The rest of us ate them and drank coffee and eggnog. It was raining and cold (well, not New Hampshire cold) all day.


It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Thanksgiving Traditions

We don't have any. Other than a couple dozen, or more, people at my mom's house, and particular dishes, that is. A friend of the family's brought her yams with pecans and mandarin oranges for years, and the last two years she has brought them to the house and left for another Thanksgiving dinner. She even brings the yams in the same dish every year. Another friend, when she's not in LA with her daughter and he son-in-law's family, always brings Brussels sprouts in some form.


A volunteer at the food bank told me that in her family, everyone writes what they are thankful for on slips of paper which are then baked into crescent rolls. When the rolls come to the table, each person takes one and reads the slip, and then everyone guesses who wrote which one.


I really like this idea but I don't think I could institute it at Mom's. Our Thanksgivings now require two or three tables, and hardly anyone eats rolls. With three kinds of stuffing, we don't exactly need them.

A Late Post

Since I haven't been to bed yet, for me it's still Saturday and the 15th, though the clock indicates it is 12:40 am on Sunday the 16th. So a short post and I will write more thoughtfully tomorrow.


1. Four places that I go to over and over:

The food bank, the Hayward Public Library, Mom's, home


2. Four people that e-mail me regularly:

Shobi-wan, Mom, the Tea Lady, Zoyie


3. Four of my favorite places to eat:

Pakwan, Alice's (La Patisserie & Le Paradis in Hayward), Buon Apetito, Mom's


4. Four places that I would rather be now:

The Cabin (Rocky Mountains), Playa Fiesta (Puerto Vallarta), Lake Pinecrest, somewhere quiet


Four TV shows that I watch (but none regularly - I go in spates):

Battlestar Galactica (grrr!), Dinner Impossible, Chef Jeff Project (which ends this Sunday), The Daily Show

Something Not On Politics

I have come late to biscuits and gravy. This is mostly because I did not grow up in a biscuits kind of household, but I didn't grow up in a gravy kind of household either. I usually saw gravy at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I didn't know "sausage gravy" was something people still ate (though it had many appearances in the books I read).


Shobi-wan is probably one of a rare breed, the native Wyoming vegetarian (she told me that for the first ten years after she stopped eating meat, her relatives would always offer her chicken instead). While we were living together, Gardenburger opened up in southeast Portland and Morningstar Farms products became available at the grocery store. You know the saying, "My girlfriend/boyfriend is a vegetarian, so I am too."


Shobi-wan introduced me to biscuits and gravy with vegetarian sausage-tasting patties and homemade biscuits. However, recently Zirpu and I were at Costco and he enthusiastically purchased three boxes of Morningstar "sausage" patties and I was reminded of those biscuits and gravy Shobi-wan used to make.


I asked her and her response, had it been verbal rather than by email, probably would have been accompanied by a not-very-but-slightly exasperated sigh. She said any white gravy will work. I didn't know what white gravy was, but checked out my trusty Joy of Cooking, to me the place I go to learn/review American basics. I can make an Indian feast but I've had to look up how long to roast pork, make any kind of gravy, and how to part out a chicken.


Fortunately we have a jar of bacon grease in the fridge so I used 1:1 bacon grease and flour, plus a little extra flour (either it wasn't ever going to thicken or I lost patience), and a cup of milk. The veggie sausages got heated in the microwave and broken up, and I served it over canned biscuits. I think there's a part of me that believes you either have to be in the South, from the South, or grown up rural - that part of America that is "real"** - to make good biscuits.


I like these better than the B&G I've been getting at our breakfast place. The gravy was thinner and less greasy so I didn't feel like I'd eaten a jar of paste after. And almost vegetarian!



** Oops. Sorry. Well, not really.

Our House Is A Very, Very Fine House

The parenting blog on sfgate.com has a feature titled "Off Topic Tuesday," which allows the bloggers and commenters to talk about non-parenting topics. I think this is mostly because Peter Hartlaub, the lead blogger, likes to talk about growing up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. I can get behind that. Like him, I also grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. In fact I mostly read the blog because of "Top of the Hill, Daly City!" and the old Nut Tree.


This past Tuesday the discussion was "The Best Place You've Ever Lived." I noticed that the definition of the "the best place" had a lot to do with how close the house/apartment was or is to whatever the resident thought were good things to be near - the beach or ocean, restaurants, schools, etc. I was thinking about this, and the place I've lived the closest to all those kinds of things was the house in which I grew up: My elementary and high schools were within walking distance, as were the Junior Museum; the California Academy of Science; the Japanese Tea Garden; UCSF with its community pool and fun summer classes like Circus Skills; the Children's Playground, the Panhandle, and not too far from Sharon Meadow, Marx Meadow, and Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park; Rocky Road Mountain; and Haight Street with its roller skate rental shops and cafes (this last when I was in junior and high school, as I wasn't allowed on Haight until I was a teenager). We spent a lot of time at Baker Beach and at the Exploratorium. The corner grocery allowed us kids to sign for candy on our parents' accounts.


As I write all this down, I realize how lucky I was to live in such a place. I haven't lived in a place so close to everything as I did then. While I was thinking about the post on the other blog, though, I was thinking about my favorite place I'd lived as being the house I shared with Jujubi, Phil, and 17 other people across the three years I was a sophomore, junior, and senior in college. One block from campus, it was university owned, and had one bedroom for a triple, one for a single, and one double. There was a fireplace, a kitchen with yellow tile counters and a breakfast nook, one and a half bathrooms (including a tub), a livingroom with a plate glass window, a separet dining room, a huge basement, a backyard. On clear days we had a view of Mount Rainier from the window on the stairs. This house was known as Our House, after the song, and the Dance In The Living Room House, or DILR House. More formally (well, hardly "formally"), it was called Eleven Twenty Three, after the address.


The university thought it was a six-person house. Most of the time, only five of us were officially living there: soph year, Jujubi, Phil, Mrs. P (before she was Mrs. P), Bink, and I lived there. Junior year, Mrs. P and Bink had moved out and a friend moved in, along with two freshmen, one of whom left college after a couple weeks and the other of whom moved into a dorm at the semester break. Senior year Jujubi, Phil, and I were joined by two others of our friends. In the meantime, though, we had one friend or another sleeping on the couch for a semester or boyfriends sharing sleeping space. Since all the keys had "Do Not Duplicate" printed on them we left the door unlocked.


At that time, Tacoma wasn't much of a place to hang out in. The only place to hang out close to the university was a bar, so if you were under 21, which I was most of my college days, and you wanted to go out you went to Denny's or Dunkin' Donuts on 6th Avenue or up to Seattle to the Last Exit. There was a grocery store and a 7-11 within walking distance, and a public library and park a long walk away. Bus service was marginal so without a car it was hard to go to the mall, a movie, or Point Defiance Park.


But I didn't want to go those places most of the time. I was really happy to be at home. Because we were on the main approach to the campus, everyone came to the house all the time. On snow days, I would get up in the morning to one or several friends drinking coffee on the couch - people whose classes started earlier than mine and learned classes had been cancelled once they got to campus. When we had cast parties, from down the street you could hear people singing with Steve Miller, "I've been to Phoenix, Arizona, all the way to TACOMA!" If it was a warm fall or spring day, Phil would grill chicken or hamburgers, sometimes on the front lawn, and people would stop by on their way home. On the colder evenings, they would come by for some of Jujubi's great bean soup and beer bread.


At the time I credited Jujubi with the power of making that house feel like home. Maybe it was because she had such a nurturing vibe and I felt like a kid most of the time (I was, but I didn't think so then). She and Phil were the love in that house, and I just kept the door open. Our friends brought in a lot of love of their own, and that's what made our house so very, very fine.

Ten Kitchen Essentials

The San Francisco Chronicle's Food Section has a story this week titled Ten Kitchen Essentials. This list "goes beyond [the] basics like kosher salt and panko breadcrumbs" listed here and includes the following:

Mirin (Japanese rice wine);
Dark chocolate (at least 62% cocoa);
Fish sauce (the Southeast Asian clear sauce);
Quinoa;
Salted capers;
Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce;
Garbanzo beans (I prefer to call them chickpeas);
High quality honey;
Whole grain mustard;
Fancy tuna in olive oil


It happens that quinoa and chickpeas are a standard item in my pantry, piled on shelves in the garage, as well. I personally prefer rice to quinoa, but Zirpu likes quinoa's higher protein and lower glycemic index better, so we have both. It's also important to be able to whip up a batch of hummus anytime, and I have been known to use them as part of a whole non-chickpea-focused recipe as well. We like mustards here, and the kinds of mustards we buy - garlic mustard, jalapeno mustard, Jim Beam mustard - tend to be made with whole grain mustard. But we also keep the usual yellow on hand. I use fish sauce so slowly that it becomes part of the pantry after I buy a bottle for the few tablespoons I need for a Chinese recipe from my wok book.


The rest of this intrigues me. These are pantry items? I think of pantry items as the things you could make a meal of, not with. It strikes me that perhaps this list was mistitled as "essentials' and should have been called something like "Ten Versatile Pantry Items" and even then not including cream of mushroom soup is pretty questionable). Kitchen Essentials in my kitchen, in no particular order:

Olive oil
Quinoa
Mustard of some type
Chickpeas
Onions
Garlic
Tuna (not packed in oil)
Pasta (low carb, soy or whole wheat)
Barbecue sauce (because I have several slow cookers)
Flour

The top ten things we pack the boxes with at the food bank are:
Canned fruit;
Canned vegetables;
Canned corn;
Canned soup;
Canned tomatoes;
Canned chili, stew, or ravioli;
Tuna;
Pasta;
Rice;
Cereal


These are what I consider the "essential" essentials, the best guess for feeding folks from nonperishable goods for the best price (several commenters in the original article mentioned the cost of the Chron's list).


Now, please excuse me while I make biscuits out of flour and bacon grease to go with the slow-cooked ribs with barbecue sauce.

We have pets!

350 of them.

Their sheer numbers should tell you what they are,
but if not, here's a hint:











Alameda County runs a program called Stop Waste, to encourage residential and commercial trash customers (that is, all of us) to reduce and recycle. We got a letter asking us to consider buying a yard composter or a Wriggly Wranch, or ideally, both. I read it and gave it to Zirpu, remarking that the county is greatly subsidizing the price of these items. I didn't expect him to do anything with the brochure but recycle it, but Zirpu got online and ordered the set. The day after Zirpu's birthday, two big boxes arrived via UPS. I stuck a leftover gift ribbon on one of them and when he came in I said, "I got your birthday present!"


Yesterday Zirpu and I went to the liquor store/bait shop down the road. As we walked in we passed under a stuffed deer's head that seemed to define "moth eaten" and by the kind of freezer that usually holds ice cream sandwiches filled with sardines in bags with "for bait ONLY" printed on them. Zirpu marched up to the counter and tried to determine whether jumbo or regular sized worms would be better for the worm bin. The instructions that came with the bin said to add about a pound of worms, but the lady was only selling them by number. In the end, he selected 50 jumbos and 300 regular size (which are much smaller than the jumbos, actually). The instructions that came with the worm bin say that if you feed them and keep them healthy, eventually the bin should be able to support 1500 worms.


I am not sure what we will do with the compost and castings the worms produce. Perhaps Zirpu's garden experiment will expand, though most of our backyard is covered by the deck.

Birthday Weekend

A success! I had a great time this past weekend, but I was wrong about having a birthday party every month helping me relate to being 40: I'm used to saying I'm 40, but I'm not used to the idea yet... Just celebrating the thirteenth anniversary of my 27th birthday...


I'm still much younger than most of the people I work with, and I doubt there are many 40 year olds who can say that. Go food bank volunteers!


The birthday party was big fun! I managed, somehow, to invite just enough people from all the circles of my life for everyone to see someone they knew. The chatter was loud! The food was good - if I say so myself, since I made most of it and Shobi-wan made the rest.







We had yummy beverages made from Stirrings brand martini and margarita mixes (with which I wound up due to circumstances beyond my control). I told everyone that since the mixers don't include high fructose corn syrup, and lemons and limes are high in Vit C, the drinks were healthy!

Plus, Rouzi has agreed to be my personal bartender. Every forty-year old should have one.










As requested, my friends also brought 107 pounds of canned goods and a generous cash donation to the party for the food bank, which rocked. I got the idea from a young Alamedan who did it for her birthday party two months ago.



The next afternoon Shobi-wan and I went kayaking at Half Moon Bay. I had never been before and just as I was thinking, "Hm, kayaks!" Shobi-wan asked, "Wanna go kayaking?" We got outfitted and paddled around the outer walls of the harbor, looking at pelicans, jellies, and sea stars.


Monday Mom, Shobi-wan, and I went to a preview of the new California Academy of Sciences, which was amazing. I am really excited to go there when the whole place is open. There were a few familar things: the pendulum, which a docent told us hadn't originally been planned as an exhibit in the new building, but the docents petitioned and persuaded the curators to add it back in; the T. Rex skeleton; the original Hall of Man with dioramas of African animals (which now includes an African penguin tank, and had a human in it playing with the birds); and the original seahorse railing around the alligator swamp.


In the evening we met Zirpu, KT, and No at Destino for dinner and alfajores for dessert. A great birthday weekend!


The best thing for me - and excuse me if you think I'm getting soft in my old age; I've always been sappy - is that I got to spend it with people I like who like me.


Now, what to do for my October Unbirthday...? I'm celebrating the whole year, you know!

An American Hundred

Checking out some of the responses to the Very Good Taste posts on the Omnivore's Hundred, this New York guy has put together an American version (VGT is written by a couple of Brits). Ha ha, I think, more fun!

He says:

OK, here's my Americanized take on Andrew at Very Good Taste's Omnivore's Hundred. What makes this an Americanized take? Well, I'm an American and I can step out my door right now and buy most of these things.

I'm afraid that mine isn't as exotic as Andrew's, but I'm surprised by how many of what I consider everyday foods, aren't. Not to say I eat these foods all the time, but each has crossed my table. I'm also not listing foods that are only available in one location, with the exception of Brooklyn pizza.

I'm going to steal some text from Very Good Taste right now. Why not? I stole his idea.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here or at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The WhiteTrash BBQ Omnivore's Hundred:

1. Tomato Soup Cake (Bink and I made a Coca-Cola cake once)
   
2. Turducken
3. Chicken Feet (a friend of mine put them in the soup she made to go with her matzoballs)
   
4. Sauerbraten
5. Limburger Cheese
   
6. Asian Pears (when I had a crush on Bink, I introduced her to these)
7. Ham Hocks (with greens)
   
8. Ghee (as an ingredient)
   
9. Corn Bread (my favorite recipe for this is one I got from a textbook when I worked at a culinary college)
   
10. Buffalo Mozzarella
11. Florida Stone Crabs
    
12. Som Tum
13. Oxtails
14. Sundried Tomatoes
    
15. Beef Jerkey (also salmon jerky)
    
16. Tongue (in tacos)
    
17. Calves' Liver
    
18. Shoofly pie
19. Pulled Pork
20. Sour Cream Chocolate Frosting
21. Bison
    
22. Persimmons
23. Monk Fish
    
24. Hoja Santa Cheese
    
25. Whoopee pie
26. Peking Duck
27. Sopa de Ajo - Castilian Garlic Soup
28. Pistolettes
29. Naan
30. Country Ham
31. Jambalaya
32. Anchovies
    
33. Black and White Cookies
34. Chives
    
35. Potato Pancakes (latkes!)
    
36. Boudain
37. Macoun Apples
    
38. Brooklyn Pizza
39. Star Fruit
    
40. Dosa
    
41. Lutefisk
    
42. Rhubarb (with strawberries, in pie)
    
43. Scrapple
    
44. Cuitlacoche
45. Cherry Pierogi
    
46. Kumquats
47. Ambrosia Salad
    
48. Taylor Ham
    
49. Sardines
50. Capers
51. Dungeness Crabs
52. Grape Leaves (wrapped around both kinds of dolmathes)
    
53. Pepper Jelly
    
54. Hanger Steak
    
55. A just picked vine ripened Tomato still hot from the sun
56. Stuffed Quahogs
57. Smoked Eggs
58. Chicken Kiev
    
59. Bigos
60. Andouille
61. Shropshire Blue Cheese
    
62. Real Moonshine
63. Yuca
64. Chicken Katsu
    
65. Clams on the half shell
    
66. Scallion Pancakes
67. Tamales
    
68. Maine Lobster
69. Picadillo
    
70. Romesco Sauce
71. Sour Cherries
    
72. Paella
    
73. Gulf Shrimp
74. Empanada
    
75. Fluff (straight, and on ice cream - not with peanut butter, obviously)
    
76. Ostrich
    
77. Wild Blueberries
78. Skate
    
79. Black-eyed Peas (when Zirpu's sister and her husband got married, on a New Year's Day, we all ate this for luck)
    
80. Hatch Chile Peppers
81. Morels
    
82. Water Chestnuts
    
83. Massaman Curry
    
84. Goose
    
85. Jamon Serrano
86. Knish
87. Quail Eggs (raw, on sushi)
    
88. Gyoza
    
89. Conch
    
90. Rutabaga (with strawberries, in pie)
    
91. Turtle
92. Salsify
93. Hummus
    
94. Seviche
    
95. Barbecue Baby Back Ribs
96. Parmigiano-Reggiano
97. Pine Nuts
98. Basmati Rice (this has a lower glycemic index than other white rice, so until I can bring myself to eat brown rice again, we eat this at home)
    
99. Pickled Herring
100. Kohlrabi (we get these at the food bank, and almost no one knows what they are).
     

I have eaten 53 of these items. How can it be that I've completed more of the British list than the American list? This list includes seven items I won't eat - I tried liver, recently even, and didn't like it. It was pretty discouraging when I started looking at the list and hadn't eaten the first five things. But then I'd eaten numbers six through ten and hit my groove.


I find it interesting that this "American 100" includes so many foods that came into the country with immigrants, but that will lead to a discussion of what are purely American foods, like turkey with cranberries or "hot dish," and how one defines American cuisine (in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, it's pretty clear that the dishes we call Chinese in the US did not originate in China).

Another 100 Meme

Stumbling around on the 'net, I found this fellow's list of The Omnivore's Hundred. Apparently it has, like all memes (what makes a meme a meme, that is), sped around the food blog world with all kinds of people responding and commenting. Actually I recommend reading his follow-up posts as well, especially why he selected the things he selected.

These lists are also fun because they are brainless posting subjects. "What, you wish to interview me? Sure!"

The Omnivore’s Hundred

Here’s a chance for a little interactivity for all the bloggers out there. Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers. Here’s what I want you to do:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. [I will be coloring these in green as I don't know how to cross words out]
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The Very Good Taste Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison (sausage in spaghetti sauce)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare (but I've had tuna tartare)
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp (can you say gefilte fish?!)
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich (allergic to the ole goober pea, I am)
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (had to look this one up - yet another stinky French cheese)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (plum wine; also slivoviz, a lethal plum vodka-like beverage)
19. Steamed pork buns (I've been craving these for days)
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras (as a Californian, should I even consider eating this?)
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (if undercooked counts - ouch!)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I've had cognac, and I've had Swisher Sweets cigars, but not together)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O (in black cherry, red cherry, lime, and strawberry, all with vodka, and orange with Malibu rum. In 2002 I made gin and tonic Jell-O shots from a recipe my mom gave me out of the New York Times).
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (I'm pretty sure this isn't what he means, but I did eat an earwig about ten years ago. Thinking about it gives me the heebie-jeebies).
43. Phaal (why eat something too hot to taste?)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more (save it for those who would appreciate it)
46. Fugu (I run the risk of death with peanuts - that's enough for me)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel (I love unagi!)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (too sweet for me)
50. Sea urchin (by accident - yay sushi boats!)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer (easy to make, too)
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (I don't think I've ever eaten a Big Mac - it's always been Quarter-Pounders for me)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips (hello, I grew up in the '70's)
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (this is mud. Maybe a special mud, but unless someone providing me medical attention insists, I'll pass)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian (A friend told me that the taste is not worth the smell)
66. Frogs’ legs (Did you see The Muppet Movie? 'Nuff said)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (there's a Hungarian version of funnel cake heaped with sour cream and garlic which is even better than the sweet version. Plus, it keeps the vampires away for hours)
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost (I've had a cheese that sounds like the way this one is described, but I don't know if this is what it was)
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu (turns out it's a kind of rice wine - I've had rice wine, but not this)
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (ate an apple one many mornings during break in ninth grade)
78. Snail (I'm sure if I just concentrate on the butter and garlic, it'll be tasty. But will knowing what it is, and the texture, totally turn me away from the plate?)
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (in both chocolate and strawberry)
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash (I've had what my mom called goulash, an American dish of beef, onions, tomatoes, and noodles, with as many variations as there are moms... I think in the Midwest it's known as "hot dish" and includes cream of mushroom soup. But real goulash? Not yet, it's on my list)
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano (usually includes peanuts)
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta (which I mischievously like to call Italian cornmeal mush in Phil's memory)
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake (I think so but I can't quite remember - I know we had Rocky Mountain Oysters at that restaurant, but also a lot of booze)

I've eaten 54 items on this list, with four maybes, and nine I will never eat (though two of these are things to which I'm allergic). I'm willing to try things, usually, at least once, and often again after a few years to see if I've changed my mind.

Eggplant Dolphin

This eggplant came from the farmers' market. I was immediately reminded of the Play With Your Food books, only it didn't need any alteration to look just like what it looks like.

You say it's your birthday? It's my birthday too, yeah!

Bink, Jujubi, and I are planning a joint birthday party for ourselves in August. Their birthdays are the same week as mine, and as we spent our 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st birthdays together, it seemed appropriate to me that we spend our 40th birthdays together as well. We've been talking about this since April, and have finally sent out the invitation this week. It is beyond peculiar to me that I'm about to be 40, as I have felt 27 for years - thirteen! - now. At least I have a couple of friends who are doing it too.


When we were in college, Phil's birthday was also in that week. He was a year older, but his birthday was the day before mine. Only about a week ago it occurred to me that Phil would be 41 this year, and I realized that I've always thought of him as being 24, as if he were still around he wouldn't have been aging right along with us. And of course he still is 24, because that's how old he was when my most recent interactions with him happened.


Last night The Killer Lady and I met at a taqueria for dinner. For the ten years we've both lived in the Bay Area, we've always had dinner together on July 14 in Phil's memory, and it's become traditional for us to go out for Mexican food. There were several places to choose from, but we chose La Calaca Loca, because the name "The Crazy Skeleton" is a name that Phil would have liked. It's odd how you still know those things about someone years after they've passed out of your life. Plus, the Day of the Dead decorative theme seemed especially right.

Memoir

I'm reading this memoir right now that so far sounds pretty bitter to me. I wonder if the author meant it to come across that way. The memoirist came to the US when she was about two years old from Vietnam, having fled with her family in April of 1975. Like other memoirs written by immigrants that I've read, there is a lot of discussion of the food the neighbors or schoolmates ate in comparison to the food the writer ate at home with her family: Baloney on white bread instead of falafel in her lunch; banana bread and milk after school instead of sliced steak and pho.

There are, of course, descriptions of the neighbors and the friends in and out of the writer's community. Most of the memoirs I've read are by women who talk about envying their schoolmates' perfect, (usually) blond hair and nice clothes. Often these girls are mentioned by a changed name, sometimes by first name only, and sometimes are composites of people the writers knew in elementary school.

Reading this memoir in particular made me wonder if people recognize themselves in someone else's memoir as the girl next door or the boy who picked on the author every day in third grade. Especially for the neighborhood kids, because everyone who's in a neighborhood for a long time knows where that is. I try to imagine reading along in a book and thinking, "Hey, that sounds like me" if I were to run across a description that sounded like me in elementary or high school. If I had appeared in this book, I would have been the girl with a long brown braid and ham and mayonnaise on white bread in her Holly Hobbie lunch box.


But would I have recognized myself as someone to be envied? Not after starting fourth grade, but how we see ourselves is often so different from how others see us. . .