Not By Bread Alone

Having children sometimes makes you feel old. At other times, it makes time flies faster than you remembered. This afternoon my children had dental appointments. For some reason while we were waiting for hubby to come pick us up afterwards, the 14 year old had the following conversation with the 12 year old.

A: Stop sounding like a nerd!
B: I’m not a nerd! What’s a nerd?
A: A nerd is someone who sounds stupid.
Mom: No, a nerd is someone who is good at academic subjects but inept socially.
A: No mom that’s the OLD definition of nerd. A nerd is someone who says stupid things and is unpopular. A geek is someone who is good at math and stuff but may not be stupid and may not be unpopular.

Quick rewind to 1985, when I overheard exactly the same conversation on the bus to our high school cross-country team away meet. Kathy, who is a PhD pediatric psychologist these days was explaining these terms to Yunli, a high-flying investment manager in Shanghai today but was a quiet little wallflower who just came from China with her MIT grad student parents. Same conversation.

Yunli: What’s a nerd?
Kathy: A nerd is like a geek, but a little different. You know J (name withheld on purpose of course)? Well, he’s a geek.

J was the youngest student in Kathy’s calculus class and the perennial math competition champ for his grade. Kathy was a senior and J was a, um, sophomore. Today, of course, J is an anti-spam expert working for Microsoft.

With this old reel playing in my head, I suppressed my laughter and let the 14 year old and the 12 year old banter on. Something are so different when you are a parent; somethings never change.

Still trying to get back to a post a day, but hey a post a week is a start.

I had so much fun this weekend. Friday night was Moms Night Out with my older son’s school. The boy himself actually just left to go on a school trip to Prague. Lucky devil. Forty years after The Prague Spring (http://novaonline.nv.cc.va.us/eli/evans/his135/Events/Czech68.htm) my son, an American of Chinese and African American parenthood, is able to visit Prague freely with his friends from an American elementary school. How amazing is that? I hope he has a great time over the next few days.

Big back to mom’s adventures. So Friday night’s outing was at the fabulous Blue Water Grill Chicago (http://www.brguestrestaurants.com/restaurants/blue_water_grill_chicago/index.php). They have fabulous sushi, shrimp, oysters, clams. Nice, fresh, raw seafood. What a delight! It was also fun to talk to some of the other moms from this school, since I’m hardly on campus to drop off or pick up.

Saturday night was another adventure. Hubby and I decided to have a date night at a karaoke place. Chicagoans that want to try out a Japanese karaoke box where you can get a private room and sing your heart out all night long should check out Lincoln Karaoke in the Lincoln Square neighborhood in Chicago. It’s clean, the owner is very nice and friendly, and they have thousands of songs in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and or course, English. The food menu is kind of small and the food is pricey, but they have a good beer selection. Beside, we were there to SING. Hubby did mostly Japanime songs and I did Cantonese and Mandarin songs from the 1980’s, plus a few traditional folk songs too. Yes, he is much more current on pop Asian culture than I am. My pop Asian culture repertoire is unfortunately 25 years old.

Then Sunday night, we went to Friendship Restaurant (http://www.friendshiprestaurant.com/), another fun gathering with interesting people and good food to top off the fun weekend.

With all this excitement, I am inspired to plan another bunch of fun things to do for Mother’s Day weekend next week. It will probably involve some outdoor activities (if the weather cooperates) and great food. The Cantonese saying 民以食為天(1) describes it well. Eating always comes first for people, and good eating is defining the best.

(1) 民以食為天: Cantonese mun yi sik wai teen, Mandarin min yi shi wei tian; literally means “people consider eating to be the sky”

I thought I wrote a post on April 1, but I guess I didn’t. It was still sitting in Draft, getting stale. So I deleted that post, about hope for the future in Taiwan, and started this one. My dh bought me a beautiful new MacBook for my birthday in January, and I am slowly transitioning to it. I think I’ve finally gotten this equipment ready for some real use. Hopefully this new change will also pump up my anemic work life. The last post I made on this blog is from Nov 2006, when I started business school at night, and also when some of the craziness in my work life began. Now I am three classes away from graduation. Hopefully the work life is within six months from a turnaround as well. In the mean time, I will try to get back to my first loves–language, literature, history, music, and culture.  I’ve been waiting for the muse to return for a long, long time.  Perhaps I should start by writing first and then let the inspiration come later.

Dh moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress. It’s so much easier to use that it will be harder to come up with excuses not to post every day.

Today is our wedding anniversary and boy what an adventure the past 15 years have been. I still remember that day, snowing and windy, challenging for a wedding indeed. But we made it through that storm, and many other storms throughout the years. By the grace of God, there will be many more other challenges to come and to conquer.

To celebrate, dh and I went to a Thai restaurant for lunch. Singha, http://singhachicago.com/, where I had a spicy but richly nuanced beef green curry and dh had a chicken pad thai. For dinner, we ordered from the neighborhood Japanese restaurant, Kikuya, http://kikuyaonline.com/. That was an hearty dinner with Ebi Tempura Mori, Tamago Sushi, California Rolls, Sashimi appetizer, Salmon Teriyaki, Chicken Teriyaki, and Niku Udon. Yes, it is expensive to feed six people in the household. Everyone had their favorites and enjoyed themselves. It’s great to have children who are adventurous too.

I heard some good news on Friday. So I decided to have a celebration dinner last night. It was a scrumptious meal:

Spiced Squash Soup
Lettuce Salad
Crab Cakes
Broiled Salmon with a medley of green, red, and orange peppers
Mint Chocolate Ice Cream (no I didn’t make this myself, but Edy’s is pretty good)

It’s fun to marry the hearty fall flavor of squash soup with seafood. I was originally going to bake pork chop but I think I ended up with a better combination. Here’s the recipe for the crab cakes, real simple, but yummy:

24 oz crab meat
2 tb mayonnaise
1/2 tsp each cayenne and salt
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 eggs
2/3 cups breadcrumbs

Mix crab meat, mayonnaise, cayenne, and salt. Add onions. Mix until well blended. Add the 2 eggs and breadcrumbs until the mixture just binds. Form into patties 1.5 inches in diameter. Don’t handle too much or mixture will become too dry and tough. Heat skillet over medium heat with a little bit of olive oil until just sizzling. Fry until golden brown on one side. Turn and fry until the other side is golden brown too.

Bon appetit!

My out-of-blog life has been kind of chaotic for the past two months, but here I am again.

Today I created a nice salad for lunch. We needed a quick and nutritious meal between eye appointments and fabric shopping. So I cut up some roast turkey breast to make a salad. Thinking that a turkey and lettuce salad seems bland, I added raisins for a nice punch of flavor. But the contrast of taste between turkey and raisin seems a little sharp, so as a binder of the two flavors, I added some cubes of fresh pear. No salad dressing needed. The salad is fine eaten by itself. Here is the recipe:

3 cups of lettuce leaves ( I used a combination of red and green leaf)
about 0.5 lb turkey, cubed( I used a roast turkey breast)
2 small pears, cubed
half a cup raisins

That’s it!

This weekend some of my husband’s relatives are in town for a family reuion. Although we had decided not to join the reunion activities, we did have a chance to get together with a handful of relatives yesterday afternoon. One of the many topics we covered was food. It was delightful hearing this group of older African American women recount memorable dishes by their mothers and aunts.

There was the story of how one woman who grew up in a rural Missippi town was happy that her older sister who had moved to town to work had come back one weekend. Their father had just bought some beef stew meat. The older sister woke up early in the morning and cooked the stew down, really down low, getting the meat all tender and flavorful. It was so good that the other sister still remembers the dish and the love the sister poured out on it more than six decades later.

There was another story about how one woman can bake anything. Moist cakes, crisp biscuits, and ooh she would make biscuits and then use the biscuits to make pie crust for the yummiest peach pie. Sounds great, especially if the peaches were picked from the backyard too.

The lady who hosted this gathering was of course herself a good cook. Even though she had just “gotten something together quickly”, the food she served at this gathering was again honest down home cooking with no cheating–baked sausage, jerk chicken, creamed corn, spaghetti salad with tomatoes and imitation crab meat. And she served her famous pound cake for dessert–buttery, moist, sweet but balanced with a slight lemon flavor. A little piece hits just the right spot after dinner.

It gets me to thinking that these Black grandmother on my husband’s side of the family are cut from the same piece of silk as the Chinese grandmothers on my side of the family. OK neither of my grandmothers were good cooks because of their particular circumstances. But my great-grandmother was a passionate cook just like these other ladies we talked about yesterday. She made the dessert soups ever–red bean soup, sweet potato soup, etc. She made them whenever she felt like it, whenever I felt bad, and just because.

After hearing about all these recipes that warms the stomach as well as the heart, I decided to make some county food myself. No, not African American county food the ladies were dwelling on yesterday, although I make some finger licking corn bread myself too. But I thought about the movie The Road Home (2001, starring Zhang Ziyi) in which the young girl kept making Green Onion Pancake to send to the school, hoping to get the young teacher’s attention. In the end, it did, and they were married for many, many years, running the little village school together.

So I made Green Onion Pancakes (it’s actually not a pancake but a savory flatbread). Here’s the very simple recipe:

2 cups flour
1 tsp sale
1 cup water

Mix together to form smooth dough. Knead on floured surface for a few minutes. Divide into 12 balls. Flatten each ball into a thin circle using a rolling pin. Heat over oil in skillet for 3-5 minutes each side. Serve warm. Goes very well with soy milk.

Feels good to close the loop on yesterday’s conversation with a good country biscuit from my own tradition.

Back to food, one of my favorite topics.

Yesterday I made pasta with bay scallops (the tiny kind, 60-80 count), brocolli, and a yummy pesto I made on Sunday with parsley and basil. I like making pesto with a 50-50 mix of parsley and basil because the parsley stays green with refrigeration whereas the basil turns black after a while. It doesn’t affect the taste, just the asethetics, but I must remember to balance all three senses–color, fragrance, and taste–in my cooking so as not to offend my Chinese ancestors. Anyway, the pesto was great with the pasta. I still have a jar enough for at least 2 more similar sized meals, or maybe one good dinner with friends. Guess I should pull up that address list on my Yahoo mail before the summer is over.

Tonight’s dinner was broiled chicken breast with a balsamic glaze. OK, I confess, the glaze was from a bottle, and a free sample from Peapod no less, but it was good stuff. Talking about friends, the last time I used it was almost a whole year ago when an old friend visited from LA with her fiance. She’s a teacher and he’s an artist. We had great fun and got several very creative original prints a few months later as thank you gifts.

After dinner, I played the piano for a while. Yes, after one’s filled with good food, one needs food for the soul as well. I picked up this volume of 68 piano classics from Borders the other day for under $8. It contains a wide range of pieces from Bach to Shostakovitch. But unlike the other 3 or 4 compilations I own, I haven’t played at least half of these songs before. It promises to be a fun summer of piano adventures.

Here’s what I played tonight: Beethoven’s Ecossaises (sounds vaguely Asian, very delightful tune); Beethoven’s Minuet in G (heard this before, didn’t know it was Beethoven); the intro and Var. 1 of Beethoven’s Six Variations from the opera La Molinara (never played this before, will try the other variations later in the week); Brahms’ Hungarian Dance (a bit heavy fingered, hey I was sight-reading after all); Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28. No. 7 (a short three liner); Caesar Franck’s The Doll’s Complaint (or Le Plaintes d’une Poupee); and finally Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Song Op. 19. No. 6 (which I practiced for months years and years ago for music festival competition). It felt good to pour my feelings on the keyboard for a while at the end of a work day.

I’m participating in a language research project by U Penn, http://mixer.ldc.upen.edu. Basically folks are recruited to call into the line and have a 10 minute conversation with another caller in theri native language. Usually you just dial in and see who is around who may speak your language. If not, you continue the conversation in English. Earlier today (I know it’s past midnight, but I haven’t gone to bed for the night yet…) I talked to two different Cantonese-speaking women. Very fun. And of course I fell asleep with the full intention of dialing back in at 9 pm EST for another round of conversations. The purpose of the research is to gather a large speech corpora recorded over the phone to help telephone sound technology deliver high quality speech sounds for a large number of languages. Hey only an ex-linguist would understand the significance. My conversation partners this afternoon were totally in the dark with respect to why anyone would want to record Cantonese phone conversation.

I decided to retitle this blog to “Not By Bread Alone”. This is a reference to Matthew 4:4, where Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”. I thought, how appropriate to frame my interests in exactly these two categories–food and words. Food of course refers not only to food that we eat, but also food for thought (i.e. ideas, learning) and food for the soul (i.e. music, art, etc). And word of course is expression of thought (again not just in written and oral expression, but also as expressed in culture, in emotions, and in spirituality.) In other words, food can also sometimes be word and vice versa.

But now onto some real words about some real food…

Here’s the list of entrees I made last week: Broiled Salmon with Lemon and Soy; Lemon-Oregano Chicken (a fantastic organic chicken from Peapod, with fresh lemon and fresh oregano from my Angelic Organics boxes); Beef Stir-Fry with Broccoli and Cauliflower (the garlic tops from my Angelic Organics box give a mild and fresh garlic flavor) ; and Portabello and Tomato Pasta (at which my husband gently suggested, “This would taste good with Italian sausage in it”) Humph, carnivores!

Unfortunately because I had to work late on Friday, hubby ordered Edwardo’s. Good hearty all-meat pizza for the rest of the family and a wimpy chicken caesar salad for mommy. Saturday again was another order out day, because I came home after a long day of shopping with my oldest daughter. Knowing that I wanted more flavor for dinner, I ordered from Noodles, etc (www. noodlesetc.com), a very cute, woman-owned Pan-Asian noodle shop in the neighborhood. I think everyone else enjoyed their selections, but I especially enjoyed the Pancit, a nice mild blend of flavors very reminiscent of the luscious terrain of the Phillipines.

After having to taste other people’s cooking two nights in a row, tonight I made a pork tenderloin with Charlie Trotter’s Thai BBQ sauce. The guy may be a primadona, but he sure makes good food. The pork was accompanied by roasted yellow squash, very tender and yummy. I also roasted some beets too, but haven’t yet figured out what to do with the roast beets. They’ll probably make an appearance in a salad within the next couple of days. Right now, bread is being baked in the bread maker for the kids to make sandwiches to take to day camp tomorrow. Hey my mother never did this for me.

That’s enough talk about food (even bread). Tomorrow I shall turn to other kinds of things that feed my soul.