The Great College Alma mater Football Bet (Silverton Style)
February 3, 2012
Word Count: 795
Chinese Home-Cooking
Anyone who is familiar with me knows that I love to experiment with eating different types of international food. There are few things in life I love more than going out to eat and trying all these wonderfully different exotic cuisines. Like a strung out drug addict who likes to travel the world experimenting with various mind-altering concoctions, I love all sorts of diverse meals.
This fascination with different types of nutritional sustenance stems from my childhood and the incredible Chinese dinners that my mom used to make for the family. Credit for these amazing Far Eastern food fests should be given where it’s due, to an aunt out in California.
Before my mother’s marriage, she really didn’t know anything about cooking. Her family lived in privilege while she was growing up in Shanghai. My father laughs whenever he recalls their first night at home and the fact that she overcooked the roast to a crispy blackness.
My aunt’s family came from Hong Kong, so she taught mom to cook Szechuan Chinese dishes. She also sent us care-packages throughout the year to celebrate special occasions. Within these treasure boxes were many of the ingredients needed to prepare the meals, and this is where our Sunday night Chinese food extravaganzas originated.
These meals always occurred on a Sunday night since it took my mom at least two days to prepare the food, and she didn’t like to cook on Friday nights. Her son inherited this propensity for not wanting to prepare food on Friday. Only in his case it’s pretty much every night of the week.
Chopping vegetables and mixing ingredients was an elaborate ritual taken on by my sisters and mother. Thankfully, the males of my family were not charged with this arduous task. My sisters turned into master chefs as a result of this practice with spices, sauce mixing, and adding ingredients. Is this coincidence? Maybe, maybe not since my stepmother and her daughters seem to have some pretty advanced culinary skills as well. Quite possibly through some sort of bizarre osmosis?
Inviting everyone in the family and arranging the seating became a complex ritual in and of itself too. One uncle was quite the American food traditionalist when it came to sitting down to eat. The follow-up to that being my mom always positioned a plate of Wonder bread next to his place at the table.
Another uncle was quite fastidious about what he ate, and many was the time mom would chastise he and my grandmother for picking out vegetables so carefully prepared six hours previously. She also lambasted them for putting too much Soy Sauce on their food, but this has more to do with my father’s family heritage, and another uncle who used to enhance the taste of his coffee by placing an entire cube of butter in his cup.
These meals were truly a gastronomic delight because of all this skilled preparation. Just walking into the kitchen became an exercise in olfactory overload of the sweetest sort. Why couldn’t every meal be like this one? Then again from time to time I assisted in the cleanup, so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have meals like this too often?
The end result has as you may have surmised been my developing a taste for food from all over the world. Not everything though. Some of the dishes that guy from ”Exotic Foods” on the “Travel Channel” consumes look downright disgusting. Bill Gates couldn’t give me enough money to eat a steaming bowl of Menuedo. Finally, the only thing that tastes worse than drinking a cup of hot “Yake Butter Tea” is gagging on a mug of cold “Yake Butter Tea.”
The ubiquity of international restaurants here in the four-corners has changed everything. One of the things I loved about living in Telluride is their tremendous number of quality ethnic restaurants for such a small town. There are more Mexican restaurants in Durango than you can shake a stick at. The Thai joints in Ridgway and Ouray are amazing, and my favorite Nepali eatery happens to be in Montrose.
So what can we conclude from these beautiful childhood memories of mine? Quite convincingly that I love to eat, and the quality and variety of said sustenance is very diverse. Admittedly I’m not much when it comes to preparing the actual food. This habit will probably never change.
Ironically, I really enjoy watching cooking shows on TV. The one thought that continually passes through my mind while observing them? “Gosh, that looks good, wish someone would prepare it for me so I can taste test the result.” The mystery remains, how come I don’t have the initiative to learn from any of this?
