Feed on POSTS
Did ya’ll know that I tweet? [Clarification: tweet, not tweak, I am not a meth head!] It’s like the instant-messenger of blogdom for our generation of instant webification and the desire for everyone known human to know what we are doing and thinking during every known moment.
I update sporadically, mostly as an outlet for petty venting. Dee said she lol’d at this recent update:
“Miss, how do you eat supper?” Loda was curious about how we fed ourselves since moving out of the school building, and its dining hall, months ago. “Do you take food from the dining hall to your home? Do they cook for you there?”
“No, Loda, we cook for ourselves.”
“Miss!” Her eyes widened in shock.
“What? You don’t think we can cook?!”
“No, miss. We know the teachers can do many things. But you are too busy, no? You have no time.”
This was true, months ago, when I barely had time to schedule in bathroom breaks. But as we progress and gain a better handle on our work and quasi-personal lives here, we’ve found time to keep ourselves nourished, if only somewhat haphazardly.
“Cooking is such a waste of time, miss,” Loda continued.
“It’s not that bad.”
“No, miss. It’s a waste of time to cook here. It is different in America because you can just go and buy some vegetables in a bag and open the bag and you can eat it like that. Here you have to wash the vegetables, examine it to make sure there are no insects in there, clean it some more. You have to do that for all the vegetables. It’s a waste of time.”
Most families in Bangladesh, beginning in the lower middle-class bracket, have servants and housekeepers who perform all daily house chores, which includes cooking. While Bangladeshis (women, mostly) do cook, their servants do the prep work, the tedious washing of veggies and such. Loda, who knows we don’t have a servant in our homes, was appalled that I’d waste time with menial tasks when there were larger responsibilities looming in front of me, you know, like educating her. The way she sees it, since I come from a place where clean, ready-to-eat vegetables flow freely from bags on produce shelves, its difficult for her to imagine that I could handle the inconvenience of veggie washing.
I had to inform her that yes, while we do have an abundance of fresh pre-washed veggies, American do still actually wash food too. I mean, only when we can find a free moment in between all that casual sex we engage in.
Speaking with her got me to thinking of all the awesome foodstuff that I’ll be devouring when I get home, the least of which is about every item imaginable that is stocked at Trader Joe’s, the one man in my life who has never disappointed me.
Upon my homecoming, I shall tear through a bags of organic baby spinach and gulp down gallons of soy milk! I’m gonna make mountains of salads, topped with baked beans and soy meats! I’ll lay down two slices of nutritious multi-grain bread and stuff it full of tofurky, mustard and veggies until its too thick for me to hold with merely two hands! I’m gonna inhale the aroma of homemade veggie noodle soup, filled to the brim with organic cherry tomatoes and chunks of veggie meatballs!
I’m gonna bake up a storm, the oven will never not smell like something sweet is emitting from within its amber chambers. The first thing I want to try to make are peanut butter and jelly cookies! Yes! PB&J cookies!
Do you hear me, universe?! Sure, you’ve beaten me down, banished me to a country where there is an absence of drink and salads. But I shall rise! I will rise high and mighty, like a phoenix smothered in rice and daal. I will shake the oil-saturated curried cauliflower off my wings and I will dance in the aisles of grocery stores lined with shelves and shelves stacked with breakfast cereals!
Oh, glory, glory, hallelujah!
Daniel, my fake Chinese husband, sent me a link to an awesome video uncovering the mysteries of (American) Chinese food:
Jennifer 8. Lee: Who was General Tso?
Reporter Jennifer 8. Lee talks about her hunt for the origins of familiar Chinese-American dishes — exploring the hidden spots where these two cultures have (so tastily) combined to form a new cuisine.
Dear almighty, what I wouldn’t do for a steamy never-ending bowl of perfectly seasoned pho right about now. I crave a lot of things, some edible – some not, and pho is at the top of that list. According to Dr. Me, a good bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup can end malaise, overall feelings of anxiety and it’s a mean cure for a hangover (not that I am ever afflicted with hangovers in Bangladesh).
I love pho so much that I cut a stencil of it when I was home (gold sprayed onto black fabric):
From the Chittagong Club, one of the few places in this city that serves alcohol.
Sometimes Engrish is more accurate than English.
There are three goals on my short list of things to do in America before living abroad again. They are, in order of most importance: get laid, earn some money and enter a competitive eating contest. Two out of three ain't bad. (I'm still unemployed.)
Portland's very own vegan grocery store Food Fight! was holding an anniversary event to celebrate it's fourth year. I read that there were a few eating contests and called the store and was told that they were already filled up with competitors, but decided to go and try and sign up anyway. Lo and behold, there was a single spot left for the sticky buns eating contest.
Before that faithful Sunday, I was very unfamiliar with the sticky bun pastry and learned that it is much like a cinnamon roll minus the white frosting and spice. I'm easily excitable and my heart raced as I anticipated stuffing my face.
There were six of us, seated before plates of seemingly benign plates of pastries. It was a race to see who could inhale three sticky buns the quickest.
Let me preface the following with saying that I was grossly ill-prepared. I didn't know that sticky buns were such a bitch.
Each bun was bigger than my first and was a knot of dense dough smothered in sugary syrup. Imagine making out with the Pillsbury doughboy, but he was a terrible kisser and kept trying to ram his doughy tongue down your throat and his saliva was made of maple syrup. That's how awesome this was.
In the end, I only managed to stuff down one and a half of those horrifically sticky buns. I accomplished my goal of being an eating competition participant, but failed at the eating part. Perhaps, I just don't embody enough of the American spirit to be able to handle cramming all those sugary-slimy rolls down my face. I pushed away my plate and just shook my head.
A really skinny dude was the runner up and the woman who won was a pro. She was strategic and watered down her massive sticky bun and just shoved the mooshy gooeyness into her face. Then she slurped down all sticky bun water and even licked the plate. Just looking at this picture kinda makes me wanna gag.
A girl knows a girl has problems.
For example, I'm a rage-aholic, unable to survive without hulking out on some rage-a-hol every now and again. I'm also addicted to thrift stores that sell by the pound, buying tons of other people's junk. And now I must confess that I am also a victim of yet another compulsion: snacking.
If there's a veggie fruit platter at a party, I'm hovering by it. While cooking, sometimes I get full from chomping on ingredients before the meal is prepared. My fingers have grown calluses from popping open peanut shells and sunflower seeds. I eat raisins with chopsticks when I'm using my beloved ZieZie because I don't wanna get the keyboard all sticky.
A girl loves her munchies.
For the most part, this has been a private issue as I am still a functioning member of society even with my snacking dependency. I haven't had to eBay off my Mr. T Experience 7″ collection or hawk my yellow booty to pay for my habit.
But I may have severely pissed off my dealers, the only two supermarkets in town, with my addiction.
A Better Life (Bu Bu Gao) and Heart to Heart (Xin Nian Xin) both have open-air bulk bins. It used to gross me out, large wooden troffs of dried fruits, nuts and grains sitting idly as passing customers coughed and sneezed around them without covering their faces and then occasionally dipping their unclean hands into the mounds of food. But the I began to acclimate, my standards of sanitation dwindled and I joined in on picking through handfuls of green raisins, unphased by the fact that dozens of folks have sifted through the same pile of shrivelly grapes. I crossed a new threshold- eating unwashed food. And I survived.
I grew more confident in my digestive abilities and began to freely pick through their bins- even the expensive stuff like almonds and walnuts were fair game. And I kept at it. And they noticed.
The clerks at both stores shoot daggers at me now and hover around as I pick raisins. I get the feeling that I was caught on security cameras and there's a loop of me munching on their products that's being shown in their break rooms. It's not paranoia either, because I know the snarky Hunan sneer when I see it- and I'm in the crosshair.
I've got to lay low and I've hit a new low by alienating my supermarkets. Of all the things tumbling around my brain, this is the one concern that I can't stop dwelling on. It's more than just finding a new place to buy groceries while I fade from their collective memories and surveillance tapes. This is the end to part of my social life.
I use the term social loosely, as it isn't really a social activity, but going to the market is one of the few things that get me out of the house. Without a gang of ne'er do well friends to hang out with, I've turned to spending my free time in well-stocked aisles.
This is akin to being caught yanking the tap, refilling your pint glass and getting banned from your neighborhood bar. That's how devastating this feels.
For shame.
What's more sad? My self-imposed exile from A Better Life and Heart to Heart? Or that I compared a grocery store to a bar?
On a whim, I bought a small package of Chinese Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed those little suckers. It dawned on me that it's been months since I've had an Americany cookie with chocochips in em! Superyumtastic!
On Thanksgiving, I treated myself to Chinker Oreo cookies, but it didn't hit the spot like tiny drops of chocolate chips melting on my tongue. And besides, I didn't have any proper milk for Oreo dunkage.
But all these snackies are special treats that I don't tend to indulge in because it's mostly full of hydrogenated oils and preservatives that I didn't even eat in the States, but can be comforting at times. What I'm really into lately are Chinese roasted chestnuts, street-vendor corn-on-the-cob and these:
Unfortunately, I have no idea what they actually are. The raisins are pretty obvious, but it occurred to me that I had never seen green raisins before in the States and haven't really seen green grapes in China. They taste like raisins, look like raisins, but China has a way of deceiving me and they could be chunks of sweetened bird turds. Here's the label from my bag of raisins for any of you that might know some Chineseys, what's it say?
And then there are the huang dou, which literally translated means yellow beans. Initially, I thought they were regular ol' roasted soy beans, but then I Googled images of soy beans and they are more oblong in shape. So, what the heck kinda beans are these suckers?!
Both of these snacks usually stocked in my cupboard, and even though they seem pretty obvious- I'd like to know exactly what they are because my moms made me all paranoid about the stuff I'm eating here. They seem so harmless, but I'd hate to be eating radioactive nut pellets and sugary-shrunken snake heads without knowing.
