Happy
Mid Autumn festival. I should have
gone out to soak up the full moon last night.
We had nothing to harvest except bushels' worth of metaphors. We had
family over last night and boa-ed jiaozi like
any good family from Shandong should do.
We were hosting so we were
able to serve sour grape juice, rather than sorghum liquor. We called on the phone out to Shandong
where the rest of the family was meeting and I could almost smell the baijiu through the phone. Perhaps it was bidirectional. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival
My contribution was from earlier in the day was a bowl of
guacamole. Steeped in Chinese
tradition, clearly. I had picked
up some avocados for my salad at the market. I picked up a bunch of other things I wanted and then
figured I ought to buy snacks for the kids, like chips. My younger one does not like to eat
avocados but who loves to cook and has recently made guacamole with her mom lit my thoughts to check if they had any sour cream, an item more rare than avocados in China, but there it was next to the yoghurt.
At home I exposed my daughters to the mystery
ingredient. “No thanks.” “Trust me on this one. If you stick your pinky in once, you’ll
want more. It’s not sweet. But you’ll love it.” The little one only graced the surface
and licked. She couldn’t have
gotten much of a taste of anything with that. The older one went for it got a
pinky full and confirmed that it was awesome. No more publicity was needed before the younger one followed
suit. “It’s awesome.” “Told ya.”
My wife said “oh I’ll make the guacamole” but I insisted "You
can do everything else" but let me do this one with the younger one. With very little ground to stand on
defending the dish as an ancient and integral part of the Mid Autumn festival, I secured the requisite approvals and set out with my daughter to chop and mush. The end result was on the creamy side, so we added a
bit more of this and a bit more of that, though we’d already used all four of the avocados. “It’s awesome” suggested
my co-chef. My wife came by and
tried and said, “Oh. I see.
Definitely needs something.” Pausing,
I considered whether or not she was right. She never uses sour cream. Looking with the little one on her laptop she found some recipe
somewhere on line that said you used tomatoes. “You see. You need
tomatoes. That’s the
problem.” “You don’t ‘need’
anything. There is no "problem"” “It says so in the
recipe.” “Whose recipe? It’s not an official preparation
mandate.”
Debriefing (only so successfully) afterward, my gal made the
point that we really should teach the young one how to follow things like
recipes. “Yes, and this is
certainly valuable, however I was specifically teaching the complementary art
of improvisation, love. I made it
to-taste. Chefs do that
sometimes.” “Chef. Chef’s 如法炮制[1].” My
older one called out from the kitchen.
“This is awesome.” Holding
back a smirk I went to go consider and encourage this praise. “Save some for
the guests.” Neither of my kids
have ever eaten a bit of avocado, willingly, in their lives. Half the four- avocado bowl had been
decimated. “Save some for the
guests, though they’ll never eat any.
All the Chinese relatives will react the way mom did, trust me. That thick, creamy taste is a turn-off
for the Chinese palate. We can
kill it later when we serve it tonight.”
My ears are off in Brazil again today. I have a memory of riding around on
busses through the green Colombian hills around Medellin in 1991. The bus, back to the city stopped every
so often and the kid would yell, “Medi, Medellin!” That’s what comes to my eyes when I hear cheerful, upbeat
samba. It doesn’t make any sense,
I know. Brazil, which I’ve never
been to, won’t look like that and the music I’d have heard on that bus was most
assuredly salsa, but there you go.
I have found my way to Paulinho da Viola’s album “Paulinho da Viola 1971.” Billed as one of the most elegant of
all samba masters, it is lovely, though I confess it is sometimes hard,
listening to a song like "Reclamacao", which is on now, to understand
differentiation within the tradition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulinho_da_Viola
And while my ears are pulled to South America, the residue
of my consciousness is off in Eastern Europe, for that is where the sturdy,
young Patrick Leigh Fermor has, at the beginning of the second book tracing his
walk from Holland to Istanbul in 1934, “Between the Woods and the Water’
finally traced the Danube into: Hungary.
Read it. Please. That’s all I can say. He writes so beautifully. I try to write about what I see every
day and I marvel on every page at how he renders what he recalls fifty-two years after his
trek. Here is a passage I read to my older daughter, and later my
wife and now to you:
Holy Saturday had filled half the
vast cathedral and I could pick out many of the figures who had been on display
by the river: the burghers in their best clothes, the booted and black-clad
peasants, the intricately-coifed girls in their coloured skirts, and their
white pleated sleeves paneled with embroidery, the same ones who had been
hastening over the bridge with nosegays of lilies and narcissi and
kingcups. There were black and
white Dominicans, several nuns and a sprinkling of uniforms, and near the great
doors a flock of Gypsies in clashing hues leaned whispering and akimbo. It would scarcely have been a surprise
to see one of their bears amble in and dip its paw in a baroque holy-water
stoup shaped like a giant murex and genuflect.
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