Asian fast food

Pre-Elliot, I would try a million different recipes.  I would tear them out of magazines, borrow them from  websites and hound BigD for directions of how to make whatever it was that I remembered from the dinner table when I was eight.

These days, while I will try new things occasionally, I have gotten into a bit of a rut. Along with a few surprises every now and again, our staples are Husband's favorite tacos, the BigD classic*, Jenny's wok recipe and crispy chicken wraps.  Most of these are not created from scratch.**

But even as my head is still clouded with Elliot-things: like getting to know each other and helping him learn important skills, I am slowly trying to get back to cooking meals that are a little more fun than what can be found on the packet aisle at the grocery store.

Last week, we ate lunch with a friend from Singapore.  She served us soup that was so good and so pretty that I asked for the recipe.  She said that it was "just Asian fast food."  That it was nothing special and that in Asia you could buy it on the street for just a few dollars, but it was special and a few nights later, I made it for Husband.

And it was good...

Here's what you need...adjust the amount of each ingredient for the amount of soup you'd like to make.  Keep reading...I think it will make sense...***

And, depending on your level of skill and time, you can create every single bit from scratch or cheat a bit and get it from cans and jars.****

Pork filet

Cha sui marinade, which is kind of like Asian BBQ sauce, sweet and a little tangy

Kernels of corn

Chopped green onions

Cooked udon Noodles

Medium boiled egg sliced in half

Miso soup

Marinate a pork fillet in Cha Sui sauce for a few hours.

Bake it in the oven at about 250 degrees C until it's done (flipping and spooning the sauce over it about every ten minutes or so).  Make sure it's still a little bit rare in the middle...the timing depends on the size of the piece of meat.

In the meantime chop the vegetables or pour them out of a can.

Boil an egg to medium (about 8 minutes)

When the meat is cooked, set it out and when it is slightly cooled, slice in disks.

Cook the miso soup to boiling.

Put noodles in bowl about 1/2 way, then pour boiling soup over top.

Add in slice of egg, disks of pork, onions and corn.

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*Awesome pasta with zucchini and squash. If you've ever eaten dinner at my house, you probably have had it.  It's one of my absolute favorites and no one cooks it better than the BigD herself.  But I try.

**I didn't know that "from scratch" was a good thing until I was about 25.  My elfin grandmother, who was not an elf, but was about the same size as an elf, was a fantastic cook (Her fried chicken is unparalleled to this day).  But she was sadly lacking in baking skills---with the exception of pound cake and chocolate cake...those were TASTY.  She was not aware of this and often would proudly present her brownies, proclaiming that they were "from scratch." We would take a bite, praying not to chip a tooth. For years afterward, I was certain "from scratch" was polite code for "tasted horrible" and would avoid it at all costs.


***There is a talent to writing recipes. I am pretty sure I don't have it, but hopefully you'll understand it anyway.

****Guess what I did?  And really, it's Asian fast food.  Also, I'm not in the business of judging.

May the Force be with You

Every single morning, at least for the last month or so, I wake up at about 5:30am when Elliot does. I feed him, put him back down and then go downstairs to make sure that he has enough milk to mix with his cereal and various food stuffs for the day.

This may sound super early and it is, but it's not so bad.

Not when you consider that he's been in bed since 7:30 or 8pm the night before.

Also when you consider it's a tiny bit of complete quiet time, all by myself, while I take care of the business at hand.

So of course, I do not spend it improving my mind reading classic novels or even watching CNN. I browse my favorite websites* for editor-selected chunks of goodness.

And this morning, I saw a quote on Jezebel.com about what Carrie Fisher had to say about what she writes.**

I love Carrie Fisher. I think she is funny and smart and honest and doesn't have any phobias about embarrassment, either. ***

When I was little, we lived in Southwest Georgia on a farm**** about 20 miles outside of an 800-person town (Or thereabouts...). And every summer, BigD would drive us to North Georgia (where I grew up the rest of the time) to Nana and Papa's where we would stay for a good chunk of the summer.

We would spend the days swimming at the local pool with our cousins and eating the very best fresh sliced tomato and Durkee's sandwiches, ever.

Every now and again, Nana would hand each one of us a sandwich baggie filled with multicolored popcorn, a few of the small individual Hershey's chocolate bars and a can of Coke. Then she would load all of the cousins into her giant yellow Cadillac and take us to a matinee.

Sometimes it would be Pippi Longstocking or maybe The Apple Dumpling Gang, but one summer it was Star Wars. Like the vast majority of theatergoers that summer, we LOVED it. We begged and begged to go again and again.

And that summer, we must have seen it about three times.*****

When we got back to school that fall, playing Star Wars was all the rage. The Middle County Elementary School had a playground with some swings and a concrete area for Four Square and lots of room to run, but occasionally we'd have recess or PE across the street on the baseball field. They'd just let us loose.

As you may guess, I was not one of the ultra-popular kids. I was usually hanging out with one of my best friends or maybe over in the corner, reading a book. But this fall, every now and again, BigD would roll my hair up into those giant buns and when we all played outside at recess, I would get to be Princess Leia.******

And really, who wouldn't want to be? She was a awesome princess. Yeah, she needed a little assistance rescuing herself, but she shot a gun and smack-talked and figured out how to send R2D2 and C3Po out for help.

Cut to almost three decades later:

I'm back in Atlanta, at the Georgia Aquarium and I'm on assignment. Jane Fonda is being roasted for her charity, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. And the room is full of the celebrity types, all looking swanky.

Early in the evening, before I started to work, I found a place and perched at the top of the staircase, surveying the crowd of pretty people. After a few minutes, the crowd shifted, and I felt a touch on my shoulder and a woman said "Excuse me."

I turned around to face Carrie Fisher.*******

I had collided with the ex-Princess Leia, and now, even cooler, a hilarious writer.

We both offered apologies and then chit-chatted for a moment about the night.

After a moment, she stared at me up and down and said, "You look great, but I think you need one thing."

Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a little spray bottle, said, "May I?"

She reached into my hair, poofed it out just a bit and sprayed.

"It's glitter spray," she said and tilted her head down. "See, I'm wearing it, too. And, really, everything is better with a little bit of glitter."

THE END

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*Most of them are in the lists to the right. Good stuff, really.

**Scroll down to the bottom of the list for the quote and if you want to read the full Vanity Fair piece, click here.

***I am well aware I am no Carrie Fisher, for a variety of reasons. But if you count the good ones, she's a pretty good, even great example to have.

****Not a "momma go outside and pick up the eggs from the chickenhouse farm." It was/is a commercial farm where, back then, my dad grew peanuts and soybeans and corn. There was even some livestock in the back corner of the main field. (The livestock was really a bunch of pigs, but doesn't livestock sound less muddy?)

*****This was a VERY big deal. No joke. My grandparents grew up without much money and did not believe in wasting anything, not Christmas wrapping, not the crusts from the sandwich bread and certainly not money to see a movie more than once. But this summer, we did.

******They would also play Dallas. I wasn't allowed to watch soap operas, plus we couldn't get all channels on the tv at the farm because Big D thought satellite dishes were tacky.

*******No joke...she's not that tall. Neither am I.

Read This

One of my favorite sites is Jezebel, which for anyone that pays attention to the sideline list will not find as a surprise.

It's the sister site to Gawker, which I rely on to keep me slightly informed about the media gossip in New York.

And I pay attention to Gawker mainly so I don't feel completely uncool and out of the loop, though I suspect I am becoming more and more uncool and out of the loop, which is becoming more and more okay with me.

Life changes, and quickly, but that is another post, for another time.

My point today is Jezebel has a feature in which they review books.

The books they choose are not books on any best seller list, at least not the best seller lists of today.

Jezebel reviews books that mattered when their readers were growing up: The Witch of Blackbird Pond or The Island of the Blue Dolphins...

And today it was From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

I learned to read at an oddly young age, an age which I will not share here because it's obnoxious to mention in conversation, but it was pretty lucky in any sense.

Lucky because Big D (who for those unfamiliar with this blog is my mother, so named because she is not. She is D for DaAnne, but small...) likes to have projects.

Also because from about age 3 until age 12, we lived on a farm in deep south Georgia in a town called Colquitt (not the county, but the town, for those geographically inclined.)

About 800 people lived there in the mid-80s. My family and I lived about 20 miles outside of the city proper on a dirt road off the Bainbridge Highway.

(If you are ever driving on that road towards Bainbridge, look to your right. You'll see a two story brick house in the middle of ring of pine trees surrounded on three sides by fields. That is the house. My dad built it for my mom in an attempt to make her happy so she would stay. It didn't work.)

At any given time, we could only get about three channels on the television and never at the same time. Some of our neighbors put up satellite dishes, but Big D thought they were tacky.

So on the hot hot summer days, and pretty much every other day, we read.

(There are huge chunks of pop culture I have only read about, never actually experienced, but again...another post, another time...)

I read constantly. I read the encyclopedia from A to Z one summer and "grown-up" books when I was done with the encyclopedia and my own stack from the library.

Now, I read magazines and books and the internet. And I ingest and store the information, but for some reason it's likely that I will stare at you blankly when you ask what I've been reading. I have a weird inability to just reel off a list of what has passed in front of my eyes, at least I can't do it on command.

I can, in fact, tell you about the books I read as a child.

The librarian at the Colquitt Library was the nicest woman in the world.

Her name was Miss Vera.

I don't know her last name, because as in the Southern way of nomenclature, we called everyone by their first name prefeced by a Miss or a Mister, no matter that she wore a wedding ring and I thought she was the second oldest person I had ever seen.

(The first was a great great aunt who lived in an old falling down house. And when she died, her children found thousands and thousands of dollars stuffed into the mattress and underneath the floor boards and in drawers. No kidding. She didn't trust banks and she was so wrinkled that she looked like a dried piece of fruit. I mean this kindly. She was also a nice lady who made quilts. But that was the oldest person I had ever seen when I was that young.)

Miss Vera, who was probably in her 60s, must have had scoliosis because she was hunched over almost double, which made her just about the height of me.

I'm not tall now, so I was even less so when I was not-quite-double-digits.

Big D would take me the library at least once a week and I would peruse the stacks. And no matter what I chose, Miss Vera would have put aside a book or two for me as well.

I read The Great Gilly Hopkins about a tough girl who was tough because she needed to be to survive.

I read The Cricket of Times Square about a little guy who was a little bit lost.

I read Bridge to Terabithia about best friends and imaginary worlds.

I read A Taste of Blackberries about loss.

And I read From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler about a girl who didn't want to be ordinary and ran away with her brother to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

About eight years ago, I was walking on the Upper West Side with a friend of mine.

It was a sunny Saturday. We had just had brunch and were wandering around a bit.

He was going to meet a friend to watch a hockey game and I had to go to work.

We passed by what would have been called a yard sale if it we were in the suburbs. But, because we were in New York City, it was a stoop sale being run by a teenager with slightly smeary eyes, as if she couldn't get off all of her makeup from the night before.

I have a certain need to support kids in their business ventures. I stop and buy over-priced, poorly sugared lemonade and I always purchase things I do not need at any sort of money raising venture run by an industrious kid.

So we paused while I flipped through the book section.

And there it was, a copy of "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler."

I was torn.

Should I tell this too-cool-for-school Manhattan teen that she was making a big mistake?

Should I tell her "Trust me. Do not sell this book."

And further, "If you are going to sell this book, do not sell it to me for just one dollar. I promise you, I will pay more. I will be happy to fund at least one over-priced drink...one that you should not be able to buy at a place you are not old enough to pass through the doors of at your young age."

And more than that, "This book matters. One day when you are possibly not living in Manhattan, you will see it and it will remind you that Claudia Kincaid longed for, and intended to have, a life not ordinary."

I did none of that. I bought the book. And raved about it for blocks until my friend and I parted ways.

That book is somewhere here.

When we were figuring out what had to go into storage back in the States and what would come with us to Norway, I had to cull through my piles of books.

And "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" made the cut.

So somewhere in the piles of books I have not sorted through, but intend to, so we can finally have a party, is my copy I bought from some unsuspecting teen on the Upper West Side of New York City.

I'm going to find it soon.

Then I will reread it and maybe even write a thank you note to E.L. Konigsburg. I will thank her for telling me early on that it's okay to aspire to to a life that is just a little bit different.

And also, for giving me the idea that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a fine place to run away to.