some more food surveys

I am not entirely sure why I love doing these so much. In any case, here is a desperate attempt to add some content to this poor abandoned blog.

Favorite food to crunch: Kimchi and Korean cucumbers. Barring that, dried seaweed, papadum, or any kind of fresh, fresh fruit. And of course fresh summer grapes.

Favorite comfort food: Singapore chili crabs, grilled lamb, bulgogi, papaya salad, and the occasional bout of Peking duck. Well, that's what I crave when I feel the world is kicking me around anyway.

Favorite picnic lunch: Krystal burgers with extra mustard. The omni-present cold fried chicken. Cheese with black truffles and cheap butter crackers. I actually don't like picnics much. They usually involve wasps and things being squashed that should not be squashed.

Favorite food scene in movie: I honestly can't think of any. I certainly get drooly when watching Iron Chef and the more salubrious moments on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations.

Favorite food lyrics: Lots of chocolates for me to eat, someone there to rub my feet...oh, wouldn't it be loverly....

Best food smell memory: The smell of my grandfather's grilled salmon coming off the grill when I was very small - served with buttered rice, big yellow pats. Fried grouper, lifted out of my father's dinky little white portable frier, crumbly and with a stark white interior. And of course gumbo that has been sitting and spice-infusing quietly away all afternoon. We're not much for baking, in these parts.

Favorite summer snack: Big, juicy tomato slices with goat cheese and lots of salt and pepper. Heirloom tomato soup, served cold. Fresh briny oysters. Late summer grapes in a million different varieties and flavors, served up like bountiful jewels from wooden crates (I love my California farmers markets.) And of course popsicles: in Red, Orange, Purple, or Green flavors.

Food that reminds me of the ocean: Grouper for my earliest memories, clam chowder for my cliched ones, and delicious dry-chili crabs for Hong Kong and Lamma Island, where they fish them out of a tank and kill them gently all for you, set under flickering little white lightbulbs, asses in plastic chairs.

Favorite winter snack: Root vegetables, caramelized in the oven. Fresh, hot masala chai. Little snappy gingerbread wafers. Cranberries in any variety. Big joints of beef, cooked and falling apart. (Maybe not a snack, but....) And of course pomegranates, give me all the pomegranates you have and will ever have.

Most likely to eat for lunch: Salads composed of anything fresh and left over in the fridge. Rice noodle soups with plenty of vegetables. Idiot-proof stir fries. Edible frozen entrees. In India: tandoori gobi and chicken tikka, just because.

Least likely to eat for lunch: Anything greasy or fast-foodesque. I do not profess to be a saint but I like my food fresh and recognizable as food. I do not like walking around with a recumbent grease slick in my insides.

Makes me gag: Squashy and un-fresh things. To be honest, not much makes me gag anymore. I'm even coming around to bananas and I used to leave the room in protest when people ate bananas.

Food tradition I love: Getting whatever the hell I want for my birthday. My dad's usual summer kick-off BBQ with lots of pork ribs. Standing rib roast with greens and Yorkshire pudding on Christmas, and of course thanksgiving - the turkey is swell but I'm in this for the oyster dressing and cranberry sauce. Super Bowl parties: I always eat until I get sick. And then I eat some more.

Food tradition I loathe: Any gungy canned gloppy American standby. Just because your family enjoys tapioca and jello molds and casseroles that taste of glue does not mean I will. It may be your Aunt Mildred's recipe, but your Aunt Mildred may have shot her taste-buds with nicotine long ago and does not need to inflict her evil on a latter generation.

Favorite wild foods: Wild blackberries, stolen from someone else's bush. (This adds allure and danger.) Tiny, crisp wild strawberries. Freshly caught fish. Grapes from the arbor or growing by the fence. For comedy value: live black ants, which I swear on my life taste like lemon sourballs.

Favorite medicinal food: Jello is medicine in my family but I believe this is voodoo. And I do not like it. I enjoy drinking various elixir-ish teas. And ginger ale cures all ills. And ice cream.

Food that reflects my heritage: Gumbo, pork ribs, okra, cornbread, molasses, peanuts, etouffe, bourbon, hummingbird cake, pepper sauce, crawdads, pulled pork, fried catfish, spicy chili, moon pies, cheerwine, collards collards collards.

Food most like me: Chili crabs: messy, overt, in your face, little gain for the effort!

Favorite raw food smell: I love to stick my head in fresh ozone-filled vegetable gardens and just inhale. I do love the smell of raw corn.

Why I Like Asian Food

For some reason, I'm trapped in an Asian culinary aesthetic and I can do jack shit about it. It embarrasses me because I'm all too aware of the trendy kids who, obeying the Hive Mind, have convinced themselves that their skinny, withered bodies are only capable of metabolizing 200 dollar slices of sashimi and not much else. This of course is bullshit, further evident when you watch them attempt to use chopsticks. But I digress.

Now, I am lily white. You could probably see my whiteness from space. I've never even been to Asia. But my family on my mother's side has lived in, worked in, and generally tooled around Asia rather a lot and some of it has rubbed off on me, some perverse notion of how much much more interesting things are Over There. Last time I was at my grandparents house, my grandfather joined me in sneering at Italian food, about how there wasn't enough there there. "I like spicy," he said, and then we went out for lamb vindaloo and wounded ourselves, self flagellation being another aspect of the dominant culinary aesthetic in my family. I suppose we enjoy gasping for air and getting chili peppers in our eyes because we are just that hardcore.

I realized I'd reset myself to a distressing degree when I found myself vaguely turned off by macaroni and cheese. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with macaroni and cheese, other then the occasional tendency celebrity chefs have these days to put lobster, truffles, and whatever other overpriced ingredients they can find in their cuboards in it. But yet I wasn't interested, I didn't find the taste worth the calories or worth my time. I found myself thinking, "This is okay, but it could really use some fish sauce." Which would of course be an abomination before God and possibly get me zapped by a lightening bolt, because it wouldn't even taste good. And yet.

One is often asked what their desert island cuisine would be, at least among the yuppified foodie circles I find myself in. There's a certain ingenuity in answering "pizza," as if that were a cuisine, mainly because you can put whatever the hell you want on it without violating the rules. (Thus the California Pizza Kitchen trying to convince us a tostada on a pizza covered in barbecue sauce and gypsy tears is delicious and worth money.) But I would answer, eyes glazing over in a red bean paste induced haze, that it's either Vietnamese or Korean for me. I cannot decide. I have eaten them both in short succession this week and they were both so damn good that it would feel like a horrible affront to pick either. Nuoc cham or spicy tofu seafood soup? But they're both equivalent to crack! Profoundly, deeply, antisocial crack if you intend on breathing on anyone afterwards.

I suppose my mania for Asian food has only increased since I have lived in a rural and extremely twee Massachusetts town, where seasoning is generally considered with distinct suspicion and the Mexican place in town puts cheddar cheese on everything and charges 8 bucks for a deeply unpleasant burrito. Needless to say good Asian food is hard to find. My friends all swear by a truly woeful Chinese takeout joint that has the art of gloppy neon-orange sauces down to a sophisticated science. General Tso's Chicken generally has one redeeming feature for me - the damn broccoli - and they even managed to louse that up by giving you two florets and extra MSG infused fried chicken parts. I believe there is not a single vegetable based dish on the menu, which is made all the more infuriating by the fact I walked in once and saw the family that runs the place chowing down on steamed lemon grass fish, Chinese greens, and some delicate looking dumplings, all nowhere in sight of their actual menu, of course. Dammit. Yes, there's an okay Thai place in town whose owners I have befriended. They can even whip up a rendition of papaya salad that sort of tastes like the real thing if I squint, although it's woefully under seasoned. They know me now and I've convinced them to actually spice my food, so they can throw a seafood stir fry at me that has that good smoky chili pepper taste that the Sodexo run college dining hall is mandated not to dispense. Still, I pay 12 bucks for the privilege at lunch and 20 at dinner, and it makes me miss California all the more, land of the 5.00 Vietnamese lunch that is at the same time smack yo' mama good.

So that's why I intend to return to California: better food, less stinging ice pellets in winter, fewer New York scene kids with attitude problems. I feel comfortable in a state with a big Asian influence on its culture, feel at home and pleased when I'm elbowing with elderly Asian ladies for the last fish part on offer at the Vietnamese grocery store. I like to live in a place where a weekend shopping excursion can involve curry braised chicken necks and durian. Life is more pungent here but it tastes a hell of a lot better too.