Asian Dining Rules

My friend, Steven Shaw, Beard Award winner and co-founder of the eGullet Society, has a new book in print: Asian Dining Rules: Essential Strategies for Eating Out at Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Korean and Indian Restaurants.  This book serves as a primer for folks who might be mystified by Asian restaurants and is filled with useful information and personal stories.  Once such story includes a mention of yours truly, in a discussion about boiled peanuts.  Yes, boiled peanuts are not a delicacy limited to the American South, as they’re pretty popular in Vietnamese cuisine.  I happened to introduce Steven and his wife to boiled peanuts, purchased from a roadside stand next to a Piggly Wiggly in eastern North Carolina.

The book is a fun read and should be viewed as that, rather than a comprehensive guide to each region’s cuisine.  I particularly found the Indian food section to be helpful, as that remains the cuisine most difficult for me to understand.  And seeing it’s only 10 bucks from Amazon, it’s a bargain definitely worth purchasing.

Food Tricks and Lies

[Although I often think that my kids are far too picky eaters, my wife reminds me that they’re really not that bad.  And when I really ponder the situation, I realize that she is right (what else is new?).  None of my kids loves everything, but for the most part (one of my daughters being the exception), they do well.

That made me think of something I wrote nearly 5 years ago, when my oldest child was 9 and my youngest was 2.  I thought I’d revive this piece, which was originally published on the website for the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters on September 24, 2003.]

“C’MON, TRY the beets. They’re really as sweet as candy! Even better, they, make your pee turn red!” Yeah, those are the words I used not too long ago to get our kids to eat beets. For some reason, the L’il Varmints had a slight problem with putting beets in their mouths. First of all, they saw this veggie get pulled from the dirt at a nearby organic farm. These were nasty, icky, muddy things with hair at the bottom. Second, beets are red, seriously red, with just enough purple to make them unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. Finally, one of the adults at the table already professed that she hated beets. (Why the hell do people do that, right when we’re trying to convince the children how great they are?)

This is not a column about beets or other food that people “don’t get.” This is a tale of what we parents do to get their kids to try new food, to just give it a chance. A story of “try it, you’ll like it.” Most of us parents with normal kids encounter this situation — I’m not talking about children who ate sushi at the age of 4 or truly enjoyed sauteed mushrooms on their very rare prime rib (seasoned with fleur de sel, of course). I’m talking about the Froot Loops and PB&J eating type. The ones who seek out macaroni and cheese, preferably Kraft. Children who expect — no, demand — the blue colored ketchup with their Tater Tots. These are the children I know, my L’il Varmints, God love them. They’re also the children found in most typical households, from Milwaukee to Schenectady to Placerville — and all places in between.

Bunions, Onions and the PedEgg

Leave it to the smart folks at the eGullet Society to come up with a food-related use for a foot care product. The PedEgg is designed to remove dead skin and callouses from the bottom of feet. Using the same type of surgical blade operation as a Microplane, one eG member has decided that this will be her “go-to” gadget for grating lemon zest. It’s self contained, so all the grated up bits are stored within the “egg.” And right now, they’re buy one, get one free. Of course, just make sure you keep the one used for the kitchen separate from the foot care product, or we’ll have an altogether new meaning of the term, “toe cheese.” Ick.

This Little Piggie Went to Market . . .

As I was driving my 13-year old son to his soccer game in Charlotte yesterday, we passed a truck filled with hogs. My boy examined the truck, looked at me, and said, “Mmmm, pork.” I then began to tell him where those pigs were headed, and more significantly, where they likely came from. I explained to him that the pigs led a life in which they didn’t run around, were confined to a 6 square foot space of concrete floor, where the pigs’ feces are pumped to huge lagoons, fouling the air for miles around. I told him that this process makes the pork that he eats reasonably affordable, but at the expense of any semblance of humane treatment. I thought that he needed to know these things. He didn’t really respond, but he gazed at me with a perplexed look, and then said, “That’s not right.”

I am a hypocrite. I don’t really want to know first-hand how bad our food-animals have it. I don’t need to see the stockyards where cattle are raised, the hog farms where thousands of pigs are cramped together, how female chickens are pumped with antibiotics and raised in one-third of the time they used to take to get to market-size. If I saw those things, I might stop eating the wondrous flesh these animals provide.