REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST - FOOD

What have been your favorite meals in your life? What do you remember?

Thanksgiving turkeys with stuffing. Jano's creamed onions - only once or twice a year. 

 Auntie Monna's "ambrosia" - fruit cocktail and marshmallows.

Christmas hams. Jenny's marzipan. Marilyn's quiches - and Elf's.

Mama Jano's lentils and ham soups at 1 am on the 1st day of the New Year - the culmination of New Year's Parties

Mema Grandma's clam chowder with clams she dug herself

Nantucket blueberries in pancakes with berries we children picked, wearing tin cans on strings around our necks.

Strawberry chablis soup on a steamy hot night in New York City at a jazz bar.

Daddy's Soul of Arabia soup - featured in Yankee Magazine - apricots and so much more.

Tapas at a Spanish bar with an extraordinary olive oil like no other - sitting outdoors in a cafe in Bangkok.

Lobster with Carol Sorgenfrei at the restaurant under a New York bridge - Queensboro maybe.

The best cheesecake in the world - JUNIOR's in Brooklyn when I lived walking distance from there and to BAM

My first glass of wine in a restaurant after ballet studies at La Crepe with Daddy and others from the AMNH - the crepes were good too!

The biggest buffet lunch ever at a hotel on the North Shore of Oahu when we lived (loved and were happy) in Honolulu - my ex biting into a cream-cheese filled crepe and sighing. Meanwhile, surfers were scaling huge waves just outside the window. Did that brunch several times!

Delaney's in Manhattan - an amazing steak as reward for driving across the US with Daddy from Seattle to New York

Most recently, Thai seafood with Mr Pom and Indian curries with Ajarn Steven.

I am sure there are others that may come to mind.

What tastes do you remember?

Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

WHAT'S FOR DINNER?

What did you eat for dinner? I am so curious. My mother is 95 years old. She has been allergic to many foods - especially nightshades - and has been careful about what she eats. I know what she doesn't eat - tomatoes, eggplant (one of my favorites!), potatoes. I think she is mostly off glutens as well, except for the occasional cake baked and decorated by my amazing baker / acupuncturist / jane-of-all-things handy / artist sister. 

So what to eat? Tonight I looked up onions, potatoes and eggs as that's what I had in the house. And found the "how to" for a frittata. So that's what's I'm eating now. Microwaved frittata.

I guess my eating habits can now be classified as "flexitarian." I am trying to avoid eating mammals though the craving for a chain-manufactured beef burger can be irresistible. And I occasionally mistake pork dumplings for shrimp bao. Chicken and seafood of various kinds - and a lotta veggies.

What do you eat? I see so many people exerting control over their diets - to the point of near madness. 

Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

COOKING TIPS & TRICKS

So many little tricks to good cooking. What did your mother teach you? Your grandmother? Your dad, uncle or grandpa? Who fed you?

Some tricks I've picked up over the years. There used to be a TV tips show (trying to remember the name - not Hints from Heloise but like that).

TO KEEP SODA FROM GOING STALE - Just simply turn the bottle on its end before putting it back in the fridge. The deflated bottle will inflate and stay that way until the next time you want a drink.

VEGETABLES - Below ground "root" veggies should be started in cold water, then brought to the boil. Below ground examples: potatoes, sweet potatoes, 

• Beets. Carrots. Radishes.Rutabaga.Turnips.

https://www.healthcastle.com/root-vegetables-are-full-of-good-carbs/

But above ground veg is to be dropped into boiling water, then when the water reaches boiling again, it can be reduced to simmer. That's true for pasta too.

Above ground: peas, beans, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower.

Will add more as I think of them.

MICROWAVING  Almost everything can be cooked in a microwave; there are even recipes for cakes and cupcakes. The main thing is ONLY use plastic or ceramic dishes, NEVER anything with metal.

Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

REMINISCENCES OF ENGLISH TEACHINGS PAST - CHINA

Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

I have been teaching for a long time, maybe 50 years off and on. When I came to Asia in 2005, I had never taught English as a Second Language before. I was plunged into teaching adult Chinese engineers and medical professionals. But from the very first class, I realized I really did know how to do the job.

China at that time had amazing internet access to the world (not so much anymore I am told). Having almost no resources in the steel-and-iron factory city where I was stationed, I had no choice but to search the internet for how to teach English for beginners.

There was urgency and importance to the teaching of English. The doctors and nurses in the local hospital were providing Western medical treatments to the best of their abilities. Annually, American doctors from Florida would come over to share the latest in cardiac care. There needed to be correct understanding from both sides. Patients' lives were at stake.

The engineers worked in the dangerous setting of the steel mill. The equipment was provided by the German company, Siemanns. Germans would come to China to instruct the Chinese engineers in the use of the machinery = and both sides would communicate in English. Again, there was a real necessity for precise comprehension on both sides. We would hear periodically of factory workers at the steel mill dying in accidents. Workers' lives were at stake.

For me, it was sink-or-swim. I felt so blessed to have good internet access and to discover the world of English language resources available then. It took every bit of my past teaching experiences in the US and Japan and of my years of theatre work to try to figure out how to teach English in the Gobi Desert of northern China's Inner Mongolia.

I learned a lot! But I realized I did not have the full skill set. 

So on the day after the biggest sandstorm in 20 years hit, I knew I could not continue to stay in Baotou. I knew that I needed more training in TEFL - Teaching English as a Foreign Language. So I went online and found an American-run school in the gorgeous city of Suzhou not far from Shanghai where a few months later I went to do a full diploma. But that's another story...

Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

THE END OF A MARRIAGE

A short story inspired by watching the Korean Drama "World of the Married" 

How can I convey to you that knowingness, that sense of unreality, at the moment of the end of what I thought was "our marriage" but was really just "my marriage" which I lost?

It was midnight and I was standing in a telephone booth in the middle of an open square surrounded by low wooden houses - in Kyoto, Japan.

I called my husband in New York. We both lived and worked at a university there and stayed in the faculty wing of a student dormitory. 

I was studying Japanese dance in Kyoto that summer - so totally foreign to my years of Western dance but so surprisingly comfortable to me. People I met that summer would say things like, "Welcome back! I think we met in a past life." Dressed in full makeup, wig and $14,000 kimono for the final recital after weeks of sweaty work, a professional male performer looked at me in shock. He said, "Except for the blue eyes, you are Japanese."

And the man who was my husband told me that night over all-too-memorable long distance call that a graduate student --  a lovely blonde girl whose big breasts I had envied, a young woman who had been cleaning our apartment for us and had been inspired to arrange all the books by size on the shelves - so not the kind of brain that I understood - this woman had moved into our apartment. She would share the rent. And unspoken but later confirmed, she would share what had been "our" bed.

And the wave of knowingness came up. I knew with deep certainty that it was the moment of the end of the marriage. And at that very moment, I heard the sound of bells. Through the square came a parade of maybe 25 children. It was midnight - why were children out at that hour? They held up a box on poles on their shoulders. Inside I understood was a god who was being transported from one shrine to another. 

A god passed by me...or passed me by.

Like me, I thought then. Transported from who I was - or at least who I thought I was - to an entirely new set of circumstances. 

I stood in the phone booth caught between the two worlds: the American life I had known in New York and the strange world that I barely knew but loved in Japan. I did not and could not understand either one. 

I did not know where in the world I would ever fit. Or where I would ever find home again.

--- April 3, 2023 remembering a day in November, probably in 1992.