Memes. I secretly love filling them out, but I'm too chicken to send them to other people because I'm afraid of annoying them. This one is "Five things you don't know about me", and I've been tagged by Cathy of Not Eating Out in New York. Since this is a website about food, I figure they should be food related for them to be of any interest to you. I'll change it to "Five food memories I haven't told you about yet."
1. September, 1996 -- I studied abroad in London my junior year in college. I dragged my crap for the year to the dorm, where a bunch of excitable freshers were moving in, escorted by their loving parents. I lugged my two suitcases up three flights by myself -- nobody offered to help. I was starving, so I went out to find some food, but it was a Sunday and the dorm was by Parliament, which meant there were very few places to get takeout. I found a sandwich shop. Mad cow scare was in the air, so I opted to go vegetarian and get a cheese sandwich. When I got back to my dorm room, I opened the wax paper package. I was appalled to discover that the two slices of white bread had been slathered with salted butter, a pale slice of white cheese glued between them. I ate my sad little sandwich sitting on the window sill, staring out into the gray, gray evening. It was a fitting start to a long and lonely year.
2. 1990ish -- My cousin Lynda was living with her then boyfriend Steve in an apartment in the Mission district in San Francisco. We decided to pick up dinner from the nearby Thai House. The chef knew my Pau's brother, who was an electrician for lots of Thai and Chinese eateries all over the Bay Area. My Pau went and asked the chef to make our meal Thai style. We got back to Lynda's apartment, opened the foam containers, and dug into one of the most miraculous Thai meals we'd ever had. There was something magical in that meal. We all remember it. I have vague memories of roasted chilies floating in a fiery tom yum goong, perfect sticky rice, bamboo skewers of charred satay. I don't know if it was because we were all super hungry, or because it was rare for the whole family to sit down for a meal together, but I've been to the Thai House several times since, and no meal from there has ever come close to being as delicious as the takeout we had that day.
3. February 4, 2007 -- My Mae stayed at Le Parker Meridian when she came to town for the Carnegie show. The next morning, we ate at Norma's, which is in the hotel. We waited for an hour for a table. The first glass of water the waiter poured for me had a short, coarse hair in it, presumably from a mustache. Brunch was utterly forgettable and stupid expensive, as it too often is. My Mae and I both got food poisoning that day.
4. June 1999 -- I had just moved to New York from California. I didn't know how to cook very many things, but I wanted to cook something I knew. I made a Mollie Katzen recipe for a curried yellow split pea soup, a great recipe which I'll have to try and recreate here sometime. It was a typical New York summer day in a typical sweltering New York apartment. I offered some soup to my friend/roommate Julie, who politely declined and said, "It's a little too hot for soup right now." It was a total light bulb moment for me. I had never considered food weather-conditional before.
5. 1987 -- One of my friends had a Welsh mother and a Chinese father. Since her mother had what I perceived to be an English accent, I thought she must have been advanced and sophisticated. During potluck days, my friend would bring in a dessert her mother made, which I thought was dreamily occidental. It was an English trifle, sort of -- slices of Sara Lee pound cake soaked with strawberry Jello, layered with Cool Whip and canned fruit cocktail and refrigerated. I should make it sometime to see if I'd like it now.
Buck stops here because I hate passing it, but if you feel inclined to fill it out yourself, consider yourself tagged.
Name: Sarah Lookofsky
Fancy Italian espresso machine
