Fat Girl Gone Thin

I rarely find it as a harbinger of good things when I begin a story by saying, my fridge smells like a small furry creature curled up in the corner and died.

But this is only about half right. The dead things in my fridge are not, nor were they ever fuzzy, small yes, but not fuzzy. And they didn’t crawl into my fridge on their own accord. No, in fact, they arrived from the local asian grocery in a gallon-sized bag. Dried shrimp. Thousands and thousands of baby dried shrimp.

Happy Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the Tiger and I’ve decided to mark the occasion by blockading my fridge as a bio-hazard smell zone until I have time to cook something both fabulously Chinese and New Yearsy.

Until then, I am haunted by the millions of tiny beady eyes starring out at me, trapped behind a curtain of Ziploc plastic. This is why Americans don’t eat things with the heads still attached. We don’t want our food staring at us. Especially as we stick a fork full of it into our mouths. I just want to say “sorry” every time I open the door and there they all are… Watching me.

Also, the peanut butter I put on my toast this morning didn’t have the lid on tight and now tastes like a nutty ceviche. Which is never a good way to start the day. So, long story short, it’s time to use up my fishy little friends and welcome in the Tiger.

In addition to the dead baby fish in my fridge, I decided I should try my hand at making egg rolls. This is a food that can be found on the menu at not only Panda Express but also Jack In The Box, so I assume this will not frighten my culturally repressed friends. It is also a dish that is actually very easy to make but seems to inspire awe in the eyes of the average dinner guest.

A few greasy egg rolls, some shrimp artfully disguised amid some Chinese sausage and shiitake mushrooms. LOTS of rice, and it was a meal.

I had great plans of making turnip cakes as well, but if I had read the recipe all the way through, I would have realized that you need more than the two hours I had allotted my self to make up a batch of those. Something about grating, straining, seaming, simmering, and marinating… no, two hours was definitely not enough time to make those.

Back to egg rolls. I am saddened to say that I posses only a small hand grater that was acquired at a dollar store during college. Why I have not remedied this situation yet is beyond me. It seems weird to buy a new one when this one still works, and I have a Cuisinart for when I need to get down and dirty, so alas, the sad little grater remains in my collection.

Three carrots and half a cabbage of grating later, my arm was tired but my dried mushrooms were done soaking. Time to cook up some ground pork and get this party started. It’s important to remember here that when preparing exotic food stuffs for friends you must use extravagant hand motions and employ flipping action whenever possible, especially when using a wok. Also, I suggest using many more spatulas then necessary as well as many, many little bowl full of different ingredients – like on the Food Network. This ads to the Merlin like mysticism of the meal as a whole.

When the pork and veggie filling is all sauteed together, drop a spoonful in the corner of those store-made egg roll skins, fold it like an envelope and roll. Literally, it is that easy.

For the final touch, I added some fumi furikake to the rice. This essentially is Japanese for rice seasoning and is little more than sesame seeds and dried seaweed, but you will want to use the fancy name to further entice your friends. Also, use lots of the little bowls here too… for the various rice toppings. This will also make it look like you tried harder than you actually did.

For dessert, I wanted something Valentine’s Day-ish, so I went the red/purple forbidden rice route, cooked it in some coconut milk for added flavor, mixed in some stevia and cooled it in the fridge. Dropped in a shiny martini glass with a splash of cream, it was the perfect combination of creamy sweetness, if I do say so myself.

And this, my friends, is how you make a fancy-shmancy dinner in under two hours. Rachel 30-minute Ray would be proud.

I think one of the things that draws so many people to food – to good food – is how many facets of our life that is touches.

Meals are a sensory parade. Taste, smell, appearance. Few things engage us on as many levels as what we so haphazardly stuff in our mouths three times a day.

In truth, food is the stuff of legends. It has been the cause of wars, of love, of death … It has shaped history in innumerable ways. Think of the lasting cultural changes left in the ruin of the Potato Famine or the way Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, led to the transformation of working conditions for American immigrants. Food is such a part of our lives that we rarely step back long enough to recognize the ways in which it has transformed the world around us.

Yesterday at the grocery store I stumbled on an interesting package of rice. Forbidden Rice. A great marketing tool to be sure, but this package had more to it than shiny lettering  and glossy images. What caught me was the description.

 ”Legend tells us that this ancient grain was once eaten exclusively by the Emperors.” In fact, it is rumored that this black grain (actually dark purple) was so highly prized that for hundreds of years it was only grown on palace grounds and fed to the emperor and his concubines as an aphrodisiac.

This isn’t the kind of thing you find on the back of the Mac n’ Cheese box.

Back at home I scoured through the fridge in search of something to pair with purple rice and faced with the choice of a jar of green olives, some hummus or half a cabbage – the cabbage won out. A cut of wild Alaskan salmon from the freezer and the meal seemed complete.

Grabbing spices from the cabinet in preparation for some braised cabbage, I lamented the fact that I had run out of the beautiful red garlic from this summer’s farmers market. Instead I was left with the common-place silver variety that adorns the isles of every produce section from here to China. Why? Because it lasts the longest. Perhaps one of the most middle-of-the-road choices one can make when it comes to this world-renown food and yet it is the only one that millions of people have ever eaten.

But like my rice, there is more to the silver garlic story than it’s non-descript packaging reveals. When you love food and you love to try new things, it’s easy to wage war against the ordinary – but there is a reason that a nothing becomes everyone’s something. In the case of the silver garlic, for thousands of years this has been the variety chosen by mothers and grandmothers for inclusion in the family dinner.

Silver garlic was so esteemed for it’s longevity that ancient Egyptians placed bulbs of it in the tomb of  Tutankhamen so that the pharaoh would continue to have sustenance throughout his afterlife. When archaeologists found the cloves during excavation, it was still easy to distinguish the item – some 3,000 years later. This is the same food that Egyptian slaves were fed while they built the pyramids. Each time we cook with an ingredient like this we are unwittingly becoming a part of the past.

And that brings me to soy sauce. Such a demure little liquid and only a tablespoon in this dish, yet the essence of this and thousands of other dishes have been the point of argument between chefs, philosophers and even physicists for more than 2,500 years.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first asked - what are flavors? It was also Democritus that decided that sweet, sour, salty and bitter were the only options out there. He believed that taste was based on the shape of the food molecule. Salty foods, when chewed, broke down into tiny isosceles triangles. Sweet foods became large and rounds atoms. Aristotle and even Plato agreed with Democritus and so for thousands of years, it was common knowledge that there were four, and only four, flavors.

In the early 1800s, a French chef (it’s always the French isn’t it?), Auguste Escoffier, the lead chef at the Paris Ritz, developed a veal demi-glaze that he said emboddied a taste all it’s own – not salty, sweet, sour or bitter. It was a fifth flavor. At the same time, a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, proclaimed that the tongue had receptors for another flavor – one that was umami, or “deliciousness.” The taste of dashi, a seaweed based soup, was deep and rich and could not be described by any of the other four flavors. Ikeda was mocked for his findings and his ideas were never accepted by mainstream chemistry.

Fast forward to the 1990s when researchers discover that the human tongue does in fact have five distinctly different flavor receptors – the fifith being a flavor reaction to the presence of glutamate, a substance that is present in almost all living things but which is transformed as it begins to die and the molecules begin to fall apart … think here of grilled meat or aging parmesian.

The fifth flavor has since been officially recognized and named umami (sometimes “savory” in the U.S.) in honor of Ikeda. One food that displays one of the strongest umami characteristics? You guessed it, soy sauce.

It was a simple Monday night dinner. No muss, no fuss. Salmon, rice and vegetables – but altogether amazing when you consider how it landed in one place, at one time, on the plate of a girl in a small town on the west coast of America.

I don’t do frustration well. Whenever I encounter something  that I can’t figure out, that I can’t get my head around, I become so inexplicably frustrated – in a manner of minutes – that I can usually be found sobbing, somewhere in a dark corner or nestled in between the freezer door eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream.

Not really. But you get the idea.

So try to imagine the scene in my kitchen the first time I tried to make curry. If you have ever tried to make this dish at restaurant-standard quality, you know what I mean.

It was the summer of my senior year of college. I had spent a delightful afternoon walking to the grocery store and spice market, collecting all the necessary ingredients to produce my very own home-brewed Indian meal. Some $20 later, I was in my kitchen toasting fresh cumin in a pan, drinking a glass of wine and rather enjoying the idea of impressing my friends with a delicious dinner.

Two hours later, I was dumping $20 worth of disgusting slop into the trash with one hand and calling for take-out Chinese with the other. This, I discovered, is why chefs tell you to taste your dish as you go. This is why you don’t just serve your crazy concoction up with a side of rice and watch while your friends start to look back and forth at eachother.

Recipes be damned! Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it’s worth a peanut butter-frosted donkey.

That was four years ago. So I have no way to explain why, with absolutely no prompting, I decided to try my hand at making curry again this week. Wandering down the so-called “exotic food” isle at the grocery store, searching for dinner-time inspiration, I found myself staring face-to-face with a small jar that simply read, ” curry.” Not red curry, green curry, Indian curry, Japanese curry – just curry. And just like that I felt the stirrings of a challenge.

I think what I find most frustrating about this dish is not that I have fallen flat on my face while attempting to make it before. I think it has more to do with the fact that my former roommate could make curry like a Tibetan master … This from a man who’s dinner often consisted of Campbell’s condensed chicken soup – eaten directly from the can. And chili. From a can … Even he would admit on occasion that it closely resembled dog food. And yet, with little effort he would arrive at the perfect pot of Padang curry.

Some things are just so unfair.

Back at home with my jar of curry, I pulled out my pots and pans and began my journey. Nearby, I kept my emergency fall back – a can of spaghetti sauce and a bag of noodles.

The origin of curry is a curious thing. Some scholars believe it was devised in India, while others believe it was an invention of the English. The debate centers mostly around the fact that an English cookbook from around the time of Richard II included a recipe for the spicy dish. Though cuneiform text with references to ”a spicy dish with meat that bread is dunked in” was discovered on clay tablets dating back to 1700 B.C.

It seems it’s usually these time-honored dishes, the ones that have been around so long that no one even remembers where they came from, that throw me off the most. That throw most people off. It’s like pho. Have you ever met anyone that can make a great homemade pho? No. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And for me, my cookie is all crumbled up inside my curry.

A half-hour of onion chopping and sauteing later, the house smelled great – which is always the first step to success. Next was the chicken. I dropped in a few tablespoons of my industrial curry mix along with just a pinch of fresh garlic and ginger, a can of crushed tomatoes and coconut milk, cauliflower and mixed the whole shebang together. Then I turned the stove to low, hit the Pilates mat, and waited with baited breath for 45 minutes as my sauce bubbled away.

All in all, I must admit it didn’t turn out that bad and it was definately edible. (I think the jr of pre-mixed curry spices lent a hand) Then again, it wasn’t nearly as good my neighborhood Indian restaurant. But they’ve got a secret ingredient I can’t buy at the store - grandma. Grandma who’s been making this stuff day after day for 80 years. And given that this was only my second try, I was content with the results. Content enough to eat it again for dinner the next night.

By 5 a.m. I already smelled like a wet dog. And the thing is, my alarm doesn’t even go off till 6:00.

I think it was somewhere around 3:30 when I woke to the sound of a pounding hammer, or a slamming door. I had already gone to bed late, took an hour to fall asleep  – so when this sound, or whatever it was, woke me from my deep drooling slumber in the wee hours of the morning it took more than a moment or two to figure out what exactly was going on.

It’s one of those things where the sound is reminicent of something you know, but not exactly like it.

Like I said, it sounded like a slamming door, but came fast like a hammer driving a nail.

Regardless, 20 minutes later I found myself in my front yard, in my pajamas and some flip-flops holding an umbrella staring at the tree by my bedroom window. And to be fair, I did stand at the front door, like a normal person would, for several minutes trying to desipher the sound. But when I couldn’t figure it out and it was too loud to fall back asleep, I trotted out to the front yard.

And of course it was raining. Pouring really. And there was a woodpecker, busy at work up in my tree. So I’m thinking to myself, are woodpeckers nocturnal? And if it’s 3 in the morning, does that count as nighttime or is this guy just an early riser?

So I went back inside, and by this time even my cat was doing the ears-pointed-back, “Your annoying me” face… though she was dry and still curled up on the bed, so it seemed to me she still had a good deal going for her. Sometimes playing grown-up homeowner isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Rain rain, go away all afternoon. It poured in buckets to the point of street flooding by the afternoon. By the time I got home from work, all I wanted was something simple and filling for dinner. Fresh, clean flavors. Something warm.

I had no desire to treck to the store, so I tried to pull together something from the fridge. The bag of snow peas was getting old so it seemed as good a time as any to put them to work. Same with the broccoli. I felt an Asian dinner theme building in my mind. Soba noodles, check. Tofu, check. And some miso to pull the whole thing together.

Ok – in all honesty, the miso paste is close to three months old, but let’s be honest here folks – a bag of miso is pretty much just a giant flavored salt lick, so I’m pretty sure the life expectancy on it is somewhere in the neighborhood of a can of SPAM. I figured it was safe to use.

A bit of chopping, boiling, a swish, swish in the wok and tada! It’s dinner.

Sometimes at the end of a crazy day, a big hot bowl of noodle goodness is just what the doctor ordered. Now it’s time for a nap.