Ξ May 19th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Food |
Last night, I used a pair of tongs to snag some olives. Mark chided me for contaminating the olives with chicken (cooked). “Yeah, thanks a lot, dude. Why don’t you use your fingers instead?” So I did.
For lunch today, I was in the kitchen, fiddling with some pasta. I was just smooshing the feta cheese with my thumb (freshly washed) to crumble it. I’ve always liked to get kinda personal with my work.
So my mother comes down just as the smooshing action commences, and I’m caught with cheese all over. She scolds me the same way she has for 28 years. “Why are you touching that with your hand?! Use a fork!” The hand is clean, the unused cheese is unsullied, but those sights are unseen and of no consequence, alas.
So this harrowing juxtaposition of culinary gaffs made me wonder why I did what I did. Far as I can guess, my mother’s harridan ways have taught me to use serving utensils when in front of other people — except that certain other people prefer that I use my hands (or get a clean utensil, but that would have been oh so trying last night! [pbbt!]). As an ongoing form of rebellion, I like to use my hands (washed) when I’m alone — and then I get caught b/c I’m in my mother’s kitchen instead of being in someone else’s (finger-friendly) kitchen.
Frankly, I find it amusing whereas a dog — Kibo, for instance — would be greatly confused by these conflicting signals. So I shall gleefully continue to use utensils and my hands in other inappropriate ways.
For cooking, you perverts.
Ξ July 24th, 2003 | → Comments Off | ∇ Food |
O what evil doth lurk in the kitchens of Men!
My mother prepared something called a “salt-baked chicken” today. It didn’t sound particularly promising, especially since the name was not Vietnamese. It’s not because I don’t like non-Vietnamese food — au contraire. Rather, I trust my mother to make non-VN food about as much as she trusts me to make VN food.
Witness my 25-year exile from our household kitchen, for purposes of food prep. Eat, yes. Wash dishes, yes. Screw around with ice under the faucet tap, well, OK (I was in 5th grade and bored).
One wing and thigh into my meal, I can endure no more of the agony masquerading as roast fowl. It’s a first for cooking at our house — I can’t finish dinner, and asking for seconds is right out.
While I wash the dishes, I conduct an impromptu inquiry. As the facts fall out, it seems that the dish came from a cookbook.
“Well,” says I, “There’s the problem: American cookbooks are never any good.”
Volunteered information reveals that the cookbook actually covers Asian cooking.
“That’s a poser, and no mistake,” I splutter. “Then it’s the miserable foreign devil editor’s fault for misreading the original Chinese ideograms. We’ll have to throw the chicken out.”
My mother is offended — we never throw food out. Ever. Unless it’s seafood, in which case it’s thrown out at room temperature.
“All right, all right,” I assure her in a conciliatory fashion, “We’ll rinse the chicken instead. Maybe that’ll flush out some of the salt.”
As our evening’s interrogation continues, it is revealed that my little sister found the recipe some time back, and has been begging my mother to try it out for the past two weeks. So it’s not really my mother’s fault. And I can’t blame my little sister.
So I content myself with chastising my sister for poor taste, and plead with her to find a better dish for tomorrow. Preferably a low-sodium recipe.
A note to the casual reader: Do not try this approach to culinary criticism, unless you have a solid history of reassuring your mother that her cooking is quite good on many prior occasions. Even then, make sure that you leaven the evening’s negative tone with further protestations of your mother’s normally exquisite cooking. And blame the dish, not the mother.
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