It’s a little odd to think about pizza as being a uniting element in a relationship. Me and my boyfriend Evan aren’t exactly the kind of couple you’d see in the movies. We don’t exchange flowers and chocolates, or take walks along a quiet, mesonoxian beach. Instead, among other things, we eat pizza.
Pizza has always been one of my favorite foods. When I was growing up, though, it was in somewhat short supply. My penny-pinching parents would often scoff at my requests to order pizza for dinner. The few times when they consented to my wishes, the pizza was a wonderful treat. I supplemented my pizza cravings with alternatives as often as I could. I loaded my mom’s shopping cart with pizza bagels and pizza pockets from Meijer’s freezer aisle. I tried my best to buy lunch when my school cafeteria had pizza on its menu. I just couldn’t get enough of the stuff. I never got tired of how the gooey cheese, sweet tomato sauce, and zesty pepperoni flirted in my mouth with every bite.
When I first met Evan the summer before my freshman year of college, I didn’t know that he shared my passion for pizza. We met at a bonfire at my friend Brian’s house, and the only food we shared that night were hot dogs and s’mores.
The first time Evan and I hung out together, though, our first quasi-date, we made a pizza together. He had prepared the dough and sauce ahead of time, and when I got to his house he plopped a hunk of moist, white goop on the countertop in front of me and told me to knead it. I’d never kneaded dough before, and my hands were clumsy as I pushed tentative indents in the dough with my fingertips. He shook his head and showed me the correct technique, using the heels of his palms to achieve a more even shape. We switched off a couple times until the dough was sufficiently flattened, and then piled on the sauce, cheese, and pepperoni.
The pizza was hardly circular, and my inexperienced kneading led to an inconsistent thickness in the crust. Still, when we put it in the oven, my mouth was already beginning to water. The pizza’s aroma filled the house a few short minutes into cooking, and it was damn near torture to endure the waiting. My stomach growled loudly, voicing its impatience.
When the pizza was finally ready to eat, I eagerly grabbed a plate and cut myself a large slice. Evan, on the other hand, hung back. Wasn’t he going to have any? I asked him. He just shook his head and said he wasn’t hungry. Then why on Earth did we make pizza if he wasn’t planning on eating it? I asked. He smiled and gave a small shrug.
“I like watching people eat,” he’d told me. When I asked him why, he shrugged again and said, “Food makes people happy. I like seeing that.” I smiled and took a bite of pizza, looking down slightly to hide my blush. Evan only ate a small piece of the pizza, but he said he enjoyed it even more because of that.
This was the first of many pizzas that Evan and I have shared. A few weeks later, he explained to me his family tradition of “Pizza Day.” It was a simple enough concept; every Friday night, his family would order pizza for dinner. They never had the same pizza twice; every week it was different toppings, different crusts, different restaurants. To me, this sounded magical.
And so, pizza became a link between us, a shared love which served as a foundation for our budding relationship. Every once in a while, I’d come over to his house on a Friday night and he’d give me a piece of cold pizza from the nearly-empty box that sat out on the counter. We’d listen to “Pizza Day” by the Aquabats as we ate the pizza together. I’d joke that they wrote the song just for him. Other times, we’d split the cost of a Hot N’ Ready from Little Caesars and eat it together, no matter what day of the week it was.
During Christmas break of my sophomore year, Evan and I made another pizza. This time, he let me do all of the fun parts. I helped him make the dough from scratch, and got to watch it rise before my eyes in the saran-wrap-covered tupperware that we placed it in at the back of his counter.
The tomato sauce was my favorite thing to make. Evan had bought a large can of Hunt’s skinned, whole tomatoes and dumped them all into a bowl. It was my job to do the preliminary processing; I got to crush them into a pulp with my bare hands. Each tomato burst with a satisfying squishing sound as I squeezed them between my fingers. Pulp, juice, and seeds squirted out of each little ball, as if their insides were eager to become sauce. Evan laughed at me for finding such glee in this simple task, but I didn’t care. It was one of the most enjoyable cooking experiences I’ve ever had.
Standing in Evan’s kitchen and watching him knead pizza dough once again, I found myself becoming lost in memories. I thought back to the last time we’d made pizza together, more than a year previously. The difference in mood between the two experiences was striking. So much had changed in the time between, and yet somehow so much was the same, as well.
We were no longer the giggly 17 year olds we were when we met. We had more than a year of long-distance relationship experience under our belts, and a sense of closeness and familiarity which seemed almost as palpable as the dough. We were seasoned now, spiced with basil and oregano like the tomato sauce that was simmering on the stove, and more solidly grounded in our relationship. Evan’s three cats were still weaving their way through our legs as we cooked, but I looked at them now as old friends, practically my own pets. His parents and brothers, too, were no longer strangers to me.
It’s hard not to be mindful of changes as I look back on our relationship, but I know that some things will always be constant. The toppings, crusts, and seasonings of our relationship may change, but, like Pizza Day, we’ll always have a strong foundation to fall back on.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
The Myth of the Perfect Meal
Because this is my only reading response about Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour, I feel compelled to first address the obvious things about this read, some of which we covered in class on Tuesday. His writing is wonderfully smooth and engaging, and the book flew by as I was reading it. It was easy to get caught up in his descriptions and stories, and my curiosity of what he could possibly be doing next kept be reading. His tone and wit only added to the pleasant experience; I wanted him to tell me his stories.
The thing about the second half of the book that really got me thinking, though, was towards the beginning, when Bourdain was in Tokyo. The main premise of this book, of course, is to search for the “perfect meal.” It wasn’t until I reached the chapter on Tokyo that I realized I had been expecting him to find it. As I read through the first half of the book, I kept making mental notes of each place he visited and each meal he tasted, filing them away as if I would have to later judge and evaluate them for perfection. Reading the Tokyo chapter completely discredited this mindset, a mindset which I hadn’t even been fully aware of.
What was it about the Tokyo chapter that made me come to the conclusion that the perfect meal is truly a myth, unattainable and impossible to pinpoint no mater what anyone else says? Simple. I despise seafood.
My whole life, people have urged me to try seafood, to just eat a little bit, but I just can’t stomach it. I’m not sure what it is about fish and seafood that is so repulsing to me, but something about it makes me want to be sick. I hate fish, I hate shrimp. I hate oysters. I hate clams, I hate mussels. All of it, absolutely all of it, disgusts me. I was more disgusted by the description of the cutting up of the 400-pound tuna fish than anything he said about the pig being gutted. Because, to me, pigs are supposed to be eaten. Fish aren’t. This isn’t a blind hate, either-- I’ve tried just enough seafood dishes to come to my conclusion that it’s just not for me, thank you very much.
So, knowing my abhorrence for seafood, you can probably imagine what it was like to read “Tokyo Redux.” While seafood had been featured in plenty of other dishes throughout the book, the overabundance of catfish and clams in this chapter was too much for me to handle. I was absolutely incapable of comprehending how anything that features seafood to this extent could ever be dubbed “the perfect meal.”
Yet as I was reading this section, I was also struck by how, had the ingredients been anything else, the meal would have seemed wonderful. It was fresh, artfully prepared, and made from the highest quality ingredients available. It should have sounded good! Bourdain said that it was not only the best sushi and seafood he had ever eaten, but also one of the best meals he had ever eaten, period. This left me with mixed feelings; it was something I could understand on the one hand, and something I simply could not comprehend on the other.
So I came to the conclusion that no matter what anyone else has to say about the matter, “the perfect meal” is a myth. Food and taste are much too subjective to try to make a science out of it. There is no one answer to the question of what the perfect meal is. Because, if it came down to the choice between Bourdain’s gourmet sushi meal and a burger or two at the 24-hour diner near my house, I would undoubtedly pick the burgers.
The thing about the second half of the book that really got me thinking, though, was towards the beginning, when Bourdain was in Tokyo. The main premise of this book, of course, is to search for the “perfect meal.” It wasn’t until I reached the chapter on Tokyo that I realized I had been expecting him to find it. As I read through the first half of the book, I kept making mental notes of each place he visited and each meal he tasted, filing them away as if I would have to later judge and evaluate them for perfection. Reading the Tokyo chapter completely discredited this mindset, a mindset which I hadn’t even been fully aware of.
What was it about the Tokyo chapter that made me come to the conclusion that the perfect meal is truly a myth, unattainable and impossible to pinpoint no mater what anyone else says? Simple. I despise seafood.
My whole life, people have urged me to try seafood, to just eat a little bit, but I just can’t stomach it. I’m not sure what it is about fish and seafood that is so repulsing to me, but something about it makes me want to be sick. I hate fish, I hate shrimp. I hate oysters. I hate clams, I hate mussels. All of it, absolutely all of it, disgusts me. I was more disgusted by the description of the cutting up of the 400-pound tuna fish than anything he said about the pig being gutted. Because, to me, pigs are supposed to be eaten. Fish aren’t. This isn’t a blind hate, either-- I’ve tried just enough seafood dishes to come to my conclusion that it’s just not for me, thank you very much.
So, knowing my abhorrence for seafood, you can probably imagine what it was like to read “Tokyo Redux.” While seafood had been featured in plenty of other dishes throughout the book, the overabundance of catfish and clams in this chapter was too much for me to handle. I was absolutely incapable of comprehending how anything that features seafood to this extent could ever be dubbed “the perfect meal.”
Yet as I was reading this section, I was also struck by how, had the ingredients been anything else, the meal would have seemed wonderful. It was fresh, artfully prepared, and made from the highest quality ingredients available. It should have sounded good! Bourdain said that it was not only the best sushi and seafood he had ever eaten, but also one of the best meals he had ever eaten, period. This left me with mixed feelings; it was something I could understand on the one hand, and something I simply could not comprehend on the other.
So I came to the conclusion that no matter what anyone else has to say about the matter, “the perfect meal” is a myth. Food and taste are much too subjective to try to make a science out of it. There is no one answer to the question of what the perfect meal is. Because, if it came down to the choice between Bourdain’s gourmet sushi meal and a burger or two at the 24-hour diner near my house, I would undoubtedly pick the burgers.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Stealing Ronald McDonald's Dinner
Before I start critiquing the first 9 chapters of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, I want to be sure that I make the point of how much I enjoyed them. Bich Minh Nguyen is a wonderful writer, and her memoir has been pleasant and enjoyable to read. The story is relatable, detailed, and personable, and it is partially because of these traits that reading it almost made me disgusted and somewhat depressed.
As I read stories about Nguyen’s early childhood, I was struck by how much she equated fitting in in the United States with eating the “right kinds” of food. She talked many times about her obsession with such “American delicacies” as Hamburger Helper, Toll House cookies, and Wonderbread. Reading such an intense and detailed narrative about a young immigrant’s obsession with finding her American identity through unhealthy, processed foods only affirmed my pre-existing opinions about America’s poor reputation.
Reading Nguyen’s memoir felt backwards to me. I was shocked when the Vietnamese dishes her grandmother made were described with distaste and resentment--I only wish I could be so lucky as to sample half of the foods she described. I had my own turn at distaste and resentment, though, when she described the various processed, packaged, and fast foods that she revered as an unattainable ideal. As the daughter of a working mother who was also quite a poor cook, I am all too familiar with these “American foods,” and my attitude towards them is little less than disgust.
It was shocking and sad to read, over and over again, Nguyen’s impression that true Americanism lay in the consumption and familiarity with these sorts of fatty, unhealthy foods. The story of the child who boasted about eating at McDonald’s three times a week was especially poignant--how can something that sounds so disgusting to me be so exciting for her, a child who lived a mere 20 years and 150 miles away from where and when I grew up.
The beauty of Nguyen’s writing was that in spite of all of these differences of opinion between myself and her, her memoir was extremely relatable for me. I could understand how her ache to belong could cultivate itself in such a way. I could understand her longing to fit in with the blonde, pig-tailed children around her. And, although I disagreed with it vehemently, I could understand how her need for approval could lead to such an obsession with American foods. It wasn’t Nguyen that I was upset with in any way, it was American culture. Because any society which encourages children to gorge themselves on candy, cookies, ice cream, and processed foods just for the sake of fitting in is, in my opinion, flawed beyond comprehension. All I can hope is that it is not flawed beyond fixing.
As I read stories about Nguyen’s early childhood, I was struck by how much she equated fitting in in the United States with eating the “right kinds” of food. She talked many times about her obsession with such “American delicacies” as Hamburger Helper, Toll House cookies, and Wonderbread. Reading such an intense and detailed narrative about a young immigrant’s obsession with finding her American identity through unhealthy, processed foods only affirmed my pre-existing opinions about America’s poor reputation.
Reading Nguyen’s memoir felt backwards to me. I was shocked when the Vietnamese dishes her grandmother made were described with distaste and resentment--I only wish I could be so lucky as to sample half of the foods she described. I had my own turn at distaste and resentment, though, when she described the various processed, packaged, and fast foods that she revered as an unattainable ideal. As the daughter of a working mother who was also quite a poor cook, I am all too familiar with these “American foods,” and my attitude towards them is little less than disgust.
It was shocking and sad to read, over and over again, Nguyen’s impression that true Americanism lay in the consumption and familiarity with these sorts of fatty, unhealthy foods. The story of the child who boasted about eating at McDonald’s three times a week was especially poignant--how can something that sounds so disgusting to me be so exciting for her, a child who lived a mere 20 years and 150 miles away from where and when I grew up.
The beauty of Nguyen’s writing was that in spite of all of these differences of opinion between myself and her, her memoir was extremely relatable for me. I could understand how her ache to belong could cultivate itself in such a way. I could understand her longing to fit in with the blonde, pig-tailed children around her. And, although I disagreed with it vehemently, I could understand how her need for approval could lead to such an obsession with American foods. It wasn’t Nguyen that I was upset with in any way, it was American culture. Because any society which encourages children to gorge themselves on candy, cookies, ice cream, and processed foods just for the sake of fitting in is, in my opinion, flawed beyond comprehension. All I can hope is that it is not flawed beyond fixing.
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