Cleaning Out the Pantry
We made pancakes for Father’s Day breakfast, which led to Joe digging the pancake syrup out of the pantry (sorry dear, when I set the table I forgot that only I use regular maple syrup). As Joe pulls out the jug of maple syrup, he begins to laugh, the kind of laugh that’s not usually a good sign. He holds up the bottle of syrup and attached to it is a box of Thai noodles. Yuk. Go ahead readers, you can now say “yuk” and tell me how your pantry never has anything stuck together. How you don’t find little crumbs littering the shelves in your pantry, no old onion skins, no bits of cereal. Of course not, your pantry magically cleans itself out and stays spotless. I say that because no one in this household ever cleans out our pantry, unless the moon turns blue and I find a spare 5 hours to yank it all apart since no one else will do it.
So Joe holds up this bottle of pancake syrup, you know, the real kind, not that fussy old stuff they pull from a tree, and he pulls off the box of Thai noodles and proceeds to return them to the pantry. It’s no wonder that the pantry never gets cleaned, when certain members of this household are perfectly happy to put a pancake syrup-y box of noodles back into it. But since it was Father’s Day, I resisted my impulse to chastise him too strongly, reserving that for this blog post. I put the noodles on the counter and decided that they would be part of Monday’s dinner in order to use them up quickly.
So dinner was a recipe from the box of noodles, more or less. It was a pretty free form recipe for creating a Thai noodle stir fry. I cooked the noodles as directed on the box. Next, I sliced up some skirt steak and sauteed it in oil, added pre-cooked broccoli, a sliced cherry pepper, a can of water chestnuts, a few sliced green onions, fish sauce, and soy sauce. It was okay, not great, not terrible. It probably needed some aromatics like garlic and ginger. But at least it guaranteed that sticky box of noodles wouldn’t find their way back into the pantry.
Never Judge a Diner by Their Chosen Meal
What does this dinner say about me? You're probably wrong!
Growing up mom gave me the advice to “never judge a book by its cover,” which I quickly ignored for many years. I’d go to a restaurant and hear someone order a salad like Meg Ryan does in “When Harry Met Sally” and assume it was a picky eater. Or I’d see someone in the cafeteria at school who never ate anything but salad and assumed they were either just trying too hard to be skinny, or attempting to prove they were morally superior to the rest of us meat eaters. Then I learned the truth about food allergies and how serious they can be, and discovered the strict rules some religions placed on the eating of meat, and realized how harsh my judgements had been. My sister’s husband, David DeSteno, just published a book called “Out of Character” which questions the validity of the daily character assumptions we all tend to make. The book is based on years of research he and his partner, Piercarlo Valdesolo, conducted in his psychology lab at Northeastern University.
In this book they examine many character assumptions, with examples taken straight from the headlines following the missteps of celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, and Newt Gingrich. If you’d like to get a feel for their line of reasoning, you can start with this post on their “Out of Character” blog titled “You Aren’t What You Eat: Judging Character from Food”.
This book proves why mom is always right.
Why Didn’t I Think of This?
Did I ever tell you that I play with my food? I don’t mean juggling oranges (although my brother can do that pretty well), or pushing it around on a plate – like a little kid avoiding dinner might do. No, I mean that unconsciously I’ll deconstruct or rearrange my food when I eat it. It used to drive Louisa crazy, but I think she’s now amused by it.
For example, take the Oreo cookie. I’ll split it in half, peel off the cream and eat it, then dunk the chocolate cookies into whatever beverage I’m drinking. I know, some of you probably do that too. But how about a Hostess Cupcake? First the white squiggle is picked off the top and eaten. That’s followed by peeling off the chocolate frosting and downing that. Next the cake is divided in half and I eat the cream, followed by the cake. Still not convinced? Take a Mallomar cookie how many of you have ever had one of these – they’re one of my mom’s favorites – but don’t look for them now, because they’re a seasonal cookie. I press in the dark chocolate dome on top to create cracks in the chocolate that I can pick off to eat first. The big marshmallow is bitten off whole and devoured. Finally the base is dunked in my beverage. Too much dessert for you?
Let’s move on to mashed potatoes then. Sometimes I don’t even realize when I’m doing it, but the potatoes are pushed around into a block or rectangle, then I delicately cut off strips with my fork as I eat, keeping the shape uniform as I go. Or string beans get lined up in neat military lines and stabbed in small regiments with my fork. I guess by now nobody really wants to eat with me, do they?
My point is that someone like myself should have realized the potential in Armenian string cheese, but it took my friend Sheri to clue me in. I don’t really know how I missed this since I will peel layers off a block of mozzarella. But little did I know that Armenian String (DUH)! Cheese could be completely deconstructed into a pile of strings like you see in this photo. What a fun way to prepare food, and even better way to eat it.
Does anyone else have fun food ideas for me?