2 posts tagged “food & wine”
This week has been hot. It's one of those jumps in temperature that happen every summer, when stepping outside hits you like a blast furnace (or as I called it in front of a bunch of HVAC folks, a "heat furnace" which is about the stupidest thing ever). The heat has a withering effect on you. If you're doing any lifting or walking, you're soaked and filthy in seconds, and generally miserable for the rest of the day, great rivers of sweat bloom in your armpits or drop from your forehead and somehow find their way into your mouth after a thorough tour of the inside of your nose. It is oppressive weather. It is Satan's weather.
But it does happen every summer. It is to be expected.
And I tend to get to this point in the summer and I want to throw in the towel. The sweat-stained, sand-encrusted, sad little towel. All my thoughts of "wait until summer, when we can finally have fun outside" have gone out the window. Or, in the window? Definitely through some kind of window of some sort.
What a waste. Summer is hot. It takes some getting used to, sure, but it's not a roadblock. It's not a mine shaft cave-in. It's tricky terrain. It's learning an alternate route. It's a taste that needs to be developed, like jalapenos or onions.
Or ras malai.
In celebration of Father's Day, (and let's be honest, because she found a recipe for it), Jenna made me a batch of ras malai, which is a homemade spongy cheese served in sweet milk, topped with pistachios. It was fantastic. Better than at the restaurant. And it's served chilled, so it's so refreshing on a hot day. We were both very excited about it. Aaron refused to touch it.
He might have been on board until he saw me shelling pistachios. The sight of that wrinkled green nut was enough to put him off ras malai and how.
Well, I reasoned, it's a dessert. And the kid eats a lot of sweets. No need to push another one on him. But at the same time, it's a new food. I know it can be tough for a four-year-old to take a chance on new foods. They've got so many taste buds at that age. They need to be meticulous, to treat each bud like a newly blooming flower, gentlly nourishing it with chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. And the occasional half chewed candy found in the dirt at the playground. And sometimes a key. Seriously, he says he swallowed a key. He won't eat a combination of dessert and cheese, the two best things ever and he's wolfing down a key?
I don't get it. But I figured if he's brave enough to eat keys, he should be brave enough to eat a new treat. We asked him, we told him he'd like it. We offered him to have just a tiny bite from our dish. And he blanched and turned his face away and informed us that ras malai, whatever else it may be, is also icky.
The bite on the spoon got smaller and smaller. "Just try it," we encouraged. "It's sweet, like cake."
And then he did. Truth be told, I was not expecting that. But he took the tiniest bite of ras malai, prepared to spit it right back onto the spoon, but he didn't. He liked it. He seemed as surprised as the rest of us. In fact, he asked for his own bowl. Just no pistachios.
Then yesterday, while he was at home with suspected pink eye (false alarm, and I can't figure out any way that could be related to swallowing a key), he tried a pistachio. After his success with the ras malai, it didn't take much convincing. I just told him it tasted like a moon nut, which is his phrase for cashew.
Once again, he loved it. He started shelling them himself, making a neat little pile of withered green nuts to pop into his mouth. I was excited for him.
And I've been thinking about it today, and I think it's pretty significant. You've got to trust someone an awful lot to take their word that something is going to taste good. And it's not like we've never steered him wrong before. He's spit out asparagus, sweet potatoes, even Super Nerds, which are my new favorite candy. But he was still willing to give these strange looking foods a shot, and all for the better. It turns out he liked them. Two new foods for us to put on the list of Things The Kid Likes To Eat.
As a parent, I think it's easy to get caught up in the Big Things. We've been talking up him writing the words "Stop" and "Go" all day. That's a big step for him. But just as important it's the little things. He takes the time to add two new foods to his repertoire. He learns to trust Mommy and Daddy's tastes one more time. He forges ahead in a situation that would be just as easy to back out of.
Which brings me back to the heat furnace. (Good grief.) Yes it's too hot today. But then, after that, it's too rainy. And then it's too buggy. And then it's too windy. And then it's too cold again, because summer is passed and we're all a little older. Might as well play outside. Take a chance that you'll find something you like out there despite the urge to spit the day back onto the plate. Maybe you'll get to add one more day to the list of Days the Grownup Really Likes.
And if today is not that day, so be it. Console yourself with some comfort food. Just don't eat a key.
Sometimes my family can get a little weird about food. Looking through our family photo albums, you may not see any pictures of the birthday boy or the bride and groom, but there will always be two or three nice shots of the cake. Six months later, I wouldn't be able to tell you if the event was a funeral or a bar mitzvah, but I will be able to tell you that there were these really tasty little rolls with pickles and cream cheese and slices of ham. So probably not a bar mitzvah.
Plus, I'm always calling my mom up to get old recipes. Recipes that are available on the Internet, but might have some slight variation from the exact recipe I had as a kid, even though I'll end up changing some huge fundamental part of the recipe anyway. For example, I will call to make sure that the chicken recipe I'm curious about uses 1/2 cup of flour instead of 1/3, and that the unspecified white wine was usually a chardonnay instead of a riesling, but then I'll substitute the chicken with Geno's pizza rolls. And throughout the meal, I'll babble on and on about what I need to change next time. "I'll get the low-sodium mushroom soup instead, and try to get frozen corn instead of canned, and maybe instead of these pizza rolls, I'll go with generic ones."
When we were dining out today, it did not seem out of the ordinary that my sister would make excuses to walk by one of the other diners and then to the front of Noodles and Company to figure out what he was eating. I mean, sure, we had already ordered our food, but genetically, my family is hardwired to get a little extra thrill in solving the mystery of what'd that guy get. Check to see how much he leaves behind. Is he eating his wife's food? Does he spill any? Does he seem to be uncomfortably gassy after the meal? These are all tidbits to file away for the next time we eat here.
When she was asked by the manager what she was doing, she had a story all ready. Always prepare for the possibility that someone might not like the game of dinner deduction, that's a lesson we all learned early. She told him that this was first time our families had eaten at a Noodles and Company and she wanted to see what was popular. It was mostly true, except for it being the first time we'd eaten there, and that the real reason she was walking by was to appease that incessant inner plea for food knowledge.
This struck a chord with the manager. He told us that whenever someone eats at Noodles and Company for the first time, he likes to bring out samples of some of their most popular meals. And so, about three minutes after our food arrived, the manager came out with three additional full sized meals for us to sample. At that point, four adults and two toddlers had nine meals. And then the manager came back with more.
It was quite an experience. No one else got four extra meals. Just us, at our own cozy table in the back. We felt like the cast of Mad Men, getting all kinds of special treatment from the noodle dudes. Of course, it did nothing to cure my sister or me of food-stalking, but it was pretty great.
So I just wanted to give a big recommendation to Noodles and Company, especially if you haven't eaten there before and you have no problems telling everyone who works there that you're a noodle virgin. Or if you get amnesia and you can't remember anything about Noodles and Company, you could probably tell them that and maybe you'll get some freebies for that, too.
After such great service, I'm certainly planning to go back. I won't tell them that I've never been there before, because that would be dishonest, and I'm pretty sure most Noodles and Company managers read my blog. But I definitely need to go back, because I totally forgot to take pictures of the food.
