Moody Foodie

I’ve had a contentious relationship with tuna fish pretty much since I was born. It was a favorite of my father’s, and he would eat it with homemade “Russian dressing,” aka ketchup and mayonnaise… a horrible goopy pink that still makes me want to hurl when I think about it.

First, there’s the CAN. What that’s good, besides sweetened condensed milk, comes from a CAN?

Then there’s the smell… might as well pop open a can of CAT FOOD!

Canned tuna is for shipwrecks, the Apocalypse, and extreme financial hardship, not enjoyment.

When I was five, my older, obnoxious cousin Glenn used to babysit for me. He was seventeen, and so was his friend, (read, henchman) David that always accompanied him.

Glenn was the type of older boy who wasn’t happy unless he was making someone miserable. In this telling, that someone is me… cute, tiny, pigtailed, 5 year old me, who just wanted some Cheez Doodles before having to go to sleep while the sun was still up.

But could either of those tall dudes just help a girl out? Hand me a bag of crunchy, cheesy goodness from the unreachable-to-only-me top of the fridge? No.

Instead, they devised a hidden gauntlet, forksful of anonymous foodstuffs covered in ketchup, that I’d be forced to ingest even if I cooperated.

In hopes that some form of familial piety might just kick in at the last second in this homegrown New Jersey sociopath, so cavalierly put in charge of my parents’ only daughter, at the time, I went along, with a five year olds’ pathetic optimism, and opened up for the “airplane.”

I then thoroughly soaked both Glenn’s and David’s white canvas Converse high tops with a stream of bright vomit, as the first forkful was none other than my arch nemesis, canned tuna. At least they didn’t make me clean it up, and stopped the torture directly, realizing they’d gone too far.

At school, in the lunchroom, I was unlucky enough to be seated alphabetically next to the yuckiest girl in school, (kindergarten, remember,) who brought the same sandwich to school every day, tuna salad on Wonder Bread, and the same amount of it somehow ended spat into my milk by accident or by design no matter where or how strategically I placed my yellow Snoopy thermos.

Fast forward to Honolulu, 1996. I’ve just moved in, again, with my longtime, now former, sweetheart, and the woman could make a gourmet meal from an old pair of shoes and a wish.

We’ve just been to an open air market where freshly caught fish was being sold, and while I was getting a pound of shrimp she thoroughly instructed me how to choose, she picked out a beautiful steak and a few filets, to cook and save, and we get home and I head upstairs to sleep, as I have a performance later. And I know fuck all about fish, anyway.

I come down for dinner around 6, and she’s cooked and made a beautiful sandwich with a piece of the steak and fresh butter leaf lettuce, fresh, deep-red, heirloom tomato, homemade mayonnaise, (which, with fresh eggs, olive oil, sea salt, fresh ground white pepper, and a splash of balsamic vinegar, is a completely different animal from that muck in a jar,) fresh basil, and a gorgeous balsamic reduction.

I hold the sandwich lovingly to my face and inhale…

The bread is homemade hearty grain, and next to it on the hand-thrown blue ceramic dish is a big handful of homemade fries with homemade herbed ketchup.

I almost cry, because it’s beautiful, and so fresh it’s still warm from the grill.

I bite. My head falls off. So delicious, honey, thank you! I say. I feel loved.

I chew, bite, enjoy, repeat, actually putting the sandwich down between bites, turning my plate before me to eat with my eyes as I chew, breaking for a fat golden-brown fry with dried parsley/garlic ketchup.

Sip of fresh mint lemonade, lift my chin to the evening wind coming in from the open sliding glass door off the lanai.

Sun is dipping as I finish, suddenly realizing I just had mystery fish, as delish as it was. I didn’t ask what kind of steak she got, as I was off buying shrimp at the time.

So I ask, Babe, what was that fish? It was incredible!

Tuna, she says.

I start laughing, then crying, then both, memories of all kinds flooding back to me.

My dad and I had our first inside joke of many around the same time as Glenn and David were my, um, babysitters. Our joke was that, even though I said I hated tuna and the news, (I was five, life was all about Bugs Bunny, and my dad lived for Cronkite,) late at night, I’d sneak into his and my mom’s room and put earplugs in their ears, nose plugs on their noses, then sit on the floor and eat tuna while I watched the news.

I exclaim to my then love, that was my very first tuna sandwich!

I had never in a million years dreamed that the grey, dead, stinky crap in a can that somehow everyone seems to love originated from that ripe, plump, pink, tender flesh that might easily have sustained The Old Man, Santiago, and his friend the shark, had he chosen a different spot to fish, maybe.

I can’t in good conscience choose one kind of food as my favorite, over another, as I’m a well-travelled foodie with a mood disorder, so it really depends upon the day and the amount of serotonin in my noggin.

And while I’ve traveled plenty, and have loved paella in Barcelona,

a fat Muffaletta with a side of alligator sausage and beignets and cafe au lait from Cafe du Monde for dessert in NOLA,

and falafel with thick yogurt cheese and the Yemenite heat-treat szchuch in a small apartment in Jerusalem, most of my palate was broadened domestically, with the aid of my former sweetheart, an artist of every kind.

So while I’ve never been to Ethiopia, I have lived within walking distance of Fairfax Ave in Los Angeles, where lives the neighborhood known as Little Ethiopia.

I adore the soft round pancake-like, fermented, delicious injera, made from teff, a grain similar to amaranth, laden with mouthwatering mounds of pumpkin stew, legumes, ginger, carrot, potato, green beans, cabbage, lentils, split yellow peas, garlic, and, before the vegans staged a coup on restaurants everywhere, tons of butter.

I’ve never been to Peru either, but I have been fed expertly prepared lomo saltado (by my former love, who was born and raised in Lima.)

Lomo saltado is a quickly cooked meal of sliced beef steak, tomatoes, red onion, fries, and rice, seasoned with soy sauce and aji amarillo, a piquant yellow chili paste that adds just the right kick.

She also made me papas a la huancaina, a potato dish with a thick, rich yellow sauce.

Our favorite Peruvian hole in the wall in LA, Mario’s on Melrose and Vine, makes the best hangover cure, a mussels soup called chilcano de chorros, that is as delicious and nourishing as it smells when the steaming bowl is set in front of you.

If you prefer your mussels cold, you’ll want chorros a la criollo, open mussels with a spicy onion relish.

If you’re lucky enough to find a place that makes them, follow it all up with Peruvian donuts, called, “picarones,” served with fig syrup, for dessert.

Spending time in Miami, rehearsing for my time spent as a showgirl on cruise ships,

I had Sundays off, and would sit outside on the Lincoln Road Mall, sipping cafe con leche and eating delicious Cuban pastries.

One day, I looked for lunch, but could only find open a Brazilian barbecue place, whose siesta time offerings were meager, and consisted of a small plate of grilled chicken hearts on a skewer.

Being very hungry and quite curious, I indulged both feelings to a snack that felt like it could cure the collective anemia of a small town, so rich was it with the cold hard taste of iron.

Once, in Juneau, Alaska, with the legendary ex sweetheart, I enjoyed a bowl of small steamed clams, with lots of garlic butter. An hour later I began to hallucinate from whatever was in those clams!

Visiting a dear friend in France proved to be a culinary adventure in the most unexpected ways! I, an LA girl, found myself at a hopeful little joint called Taco Loco, which made the worst tacos I’ve ever had.

Later, after having walked what felt like the entire city of Paris, watching our group grow ever larger each time we stopped to knock and pick up yet another friend, after about 30 or so stops, and after we’d been smoking hashish laden hand rolled cigarettes for hours, we showed up at a tiny Chinese restaurant.

In the corner were two older women, seated at sewing machines, both, turning out new cloth napkins, one after another, in bright red fabric.

The youngest of the three women there greeted us and seated us, then locked the door and turned the sign, as we filled up the entire place. As the only American in the bunch, I kept quiet and observed, sure this must me a run of the mill evening in these parts.

The young woman who seated us just began to bring us food. Nobody ordered a thing.

Soon the tables were covered with mushroom dishes, beef and duck with vegetables, piles of long curling green beans with garlic, dim sum, and rice.

Tea and beer flowed freely, and the tiny place was filled with the smoke from “les pitards,” the hand rolled stony cigarettes.

I moved to NYC and lived there for a few years. My first job was at a swanky cafe located between Carnegie Hall and Central Park… if you enjoy fine caviar you probably know the name… Petrossian, purveyors of smoked eel, Buche de Noel, and golden green, deep winter osettra, which tastes like tiny, magical walnuts.

Growing up in blah, small town New Jersey, my fare was simpler, very domestic and utilitarian, made by busy hands occupied with four children and an impossible husband, my father, a tyrant of the most unpredictable sort.

I remember clearly the loud clatter of the large Corell dish as it banged but didn’t smash (much to my father’s chagrin,) against the wall when he saw the pizza bagels my mom had made for dinner one night, and used the kitchen wall next to her head for target practice.

I remember the tacky Formica dinette set in our tacky 1970s dinette, in crappy boring backward suburban New Jersey, where, if I had stayed planted, I’d surely be laden with brats by now, instead of getting to be an auntie and choose when I’m at my best to be around the young people in my family.

I love to cook, and to experiment.

I’m proud to say I’ve never once ever stuck exactly precisely to any recipe. I always find a way to make it mine.

To this day, one of my proudest moments was getting an eleven year old boy I was a nanny for not only curious about nasturtiums and other edible flowers, but he actually requested a salad sprinkled with them, then ate every bite.

Food is the most basic thing that connects all beings. We all need it. Whether we reach for a big bag of Cheez Doodles on top of the fridge, or for a perfectly triangular, dripping with hot olive oil piece of pepperoni pizza, or even a can of tuna, we all need to eat.

Awww, man! And me all out of Cheez Doodles!