An Explosive Subject

I'm not the religious type, but I strongly believe in karma. If I have an intensely negative thought about someone, it almost always boomerangs and kicks me in the butt.

Case in point was an incident today at school.

I brought a bean & cheese burrito from home to eat before class.  Extremely hungry, I marched across campus to a building with a microwave in the hallway. I figured it would be a lot less busy there than other locations such as outside the library. And I was in no mood to wait.

But when I opened the door to the long hallway leading to the microwave,  I saw someone standing before it. Dammit.

Waiting my turn, I was filled with overwhelming, irrational impatience. I sure hope the girl with the Tupperware bowl of soup couldn't read my mind.


Despite the disgusting condition of the microwave's interior, I plopped my burrito inside.

I turned to the dial to a minute and 15 seconds hoping that would be enough to get the burrito piping hot.  The seconds ticked down ever so slowly.  It felt like one of the longest minutes of my life.

Then boom. 

I opened the microwave door to see my burrito splattered against the side. It shot out of the wrapper like a grenade. I guess I deserved that. And yes, I cleaned up the mess.  (Unlike many of my predecessors. Maybe they need to worry about their own karma.)

Stuffing myself for a good cause.

Today I was a volunteer at the Taste of the Nation fundraiser in Culver City. It is an annual event where many of LA's top restaurateurs and other vendors pass out samples of food and drink - all of which is donated.  Proceeds from ticket sales go to food banks and other services for people having trouble making ends meet.

Some might ask 'Why not just donate the money directly to food pantries?'  It is a legitimate question, but the reality is that many people will only help out a good cause if they get something out of it. Attendees in this case get to gorge on a lot of delicious food and drink.

Volunteers such as myself also get to make the rounds stuffing ourselves with some incredible food.  Would I still volunteer if I didn't get this privilege? Honestly, probably not. There are very few truly selfless people in this world. But events like Taste of the Nation help us do good even as we help ourselves  - to dish after dish. In the end, what's wrong with that? Nothing in my opinion.

How Sweet It Is….. Sometimes

One of my happiest childhood memories was my grandmother taking me to the candy counters at big department stores in Memphis, Tennessee—the city where I grew up.

At that time, department stores had very nice candy counters. Their gleaming displays of candy were arranged in a very nice way. My grandmother would periodically take me to these candy counters, and the candy I always gravitated to was fruit slices. These were half circles of jelly-like candy. At that time, they came in four flavors: raspberry, lemon, orange, and lime. My favorite two were the raspberry and lime. They were designed to look like real fruit slices, though, of course, real raspberries don't come in that shape.

I don't know how many years my grandmother took me to these candy counters, but it must have been a good ten years—let’s say from age four to 12. I'm not really sure, but it remains a special memory.

Fast forward to today, decades later. When my birthday was coming around, I began obsessing over those fruit slice candies. I went to every candy store near my house, entering with great anticipation. But none had them. The glazed-eyed clerks had no idea what I was talking about.

Then I remembered a candy counter that sold them at the Farmer's Market in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. Even though it was miles away from where I'm living now, I decided to fight the traffic. After all, it had been years since I had any of these fruit slice candies.

But driving, there were a million traffic jams along the way, and I kept telling myself to turn around and go back home. Still, I persevered and pressed through until, finally, I made it to the Farmer's Market.

But when I got to the candy counter and saw the outrageous price—something like $19 a pound—I thought about turning around again. Then, I thought, "It’s your birthday. You may as well get some."

So I got an assortment, including one my favorites, the lime. But then when I bit into one, it wasn't lime at all. It was green apple. I was so disappointed. It totally spoiled my food memories.

On top of that, the candies were way too sweet. These days, I generally don't eat a lot of sugar. So it was kind of a sugar shock.

I guess the bottom-line is, our memories of food can be sweet, and sometimes we should just live with those memories.

https://soundcloud.com/alfordla/fruit-slices

You don't have to be British to be a Limey.

I really dig limes. I like lemons too. But there is just something about a lime that has an extra zing

With most of our limes here in the US coming from Mexico, I'm really happy that the farmers there recently put up a fight against drug cartels trying to muscle in on their income. Farming is hard enough without such interference. 

Meanwhile, this disturbance made the price of limes triple at my local supermarket. I didn't buy any for a couple of months. Thankfully, the price has since returned to normal. I hope the situation for the farmers stays normal, too.

Back when I lived in Korea, there were two foods I craved - cheddar cheese and limes. Neither was easy to obtain then - and only at exorbitant prices.

So when I took a vacation to Thailand, I was practically jumping up and down to see limes not only everywhere, but incredibly cheap. I bought a big bag to take back with me to Korea. But after disembarking from the plane, I looked at an intimidating sign announcing that all agricultural products MUST be declared. 

  

Waiting in line at customs, I debated over and over whether to just push the bag deep into my suitcase and say nothing. But then with visions of incarceration for the importation of limes - never mind drugs  -  I  did the "right thing" and took my bag into a room marked for agriculture inspection.

The room was completely empty but for an elderly inspector slumbering in a chair.  His somnolent eyes grew wide as I approached. He took the bag of limes, went to a large metal sink, and turned on the water.

 I thought, 'Okay, so he's just going to wash them and hand them back to me.' But then he pressed a button that activated an industrial strength garbage disposal. And right before my eyes, my precious limes were ground to bits.  So much for doing the "right thing."

So these days, cheap of not, I never take limes for granted.  

Don't Make Me Puke.

I’ve come a long, long way from the picky eating days of my youth. But there is still one food that positively makes me cringe: onions. Cooked or especially raw, I can’t stand the texture. Interestingly, I don’t feel the same way about garlic which has a similar feel.

Clearly, this revulsion goes back to age 14 when I puked in the backseat of my parent’s car after eating a hamburger slathered in onions. Today, no matter how finely chopped, I will pick the onions out of a dish with my tongue leaving a small pile on the plate. So imagine my chagrin when a well-meaning but not the greatest listening student presented me with a gift. “For you teacher!” he exclaimed, opening a box to reveal a pizza covered in onions and mushrooms - my second least favorite food. A similar foible happened in Korea when my request to hold the onions and mushrooms from a steak was misinterpreted to mean more.  A lot more. Now that was a really big pile.

But here’s where it gets really weird: I do like the flavor of onions. For example, I can chow down on the breading of onions rings or eat onion flavored potato chips. Onion powder, in other words, doesn’t bother me.

So this got me thinking, why do certain people like or not like foods? For example, my grandmother hated, really hated, raspberries. Why? She had no particular reason. She just did.

My Cultural Awakening

I'd like to expound on my previous post. I never really thought about it until now, but working with my Nicaraguan and Mexican colleagues on the film shoot was a game changer for me - both culinary and otherwise. Without this experience, I may not have been open to teaching English in Korea not long after.

Portland, Oregon at the time was nearly 90% Caucasian. It was my first experience working side by side with people who could speak another language. Far from being annoyed by not understanding their Spanish, I found it intriguing.

Equally intriguing was the day we set up camp outside a Chinese restaurant. As I walked though the kitchen to fill up our water jugs, I looked with fascination at the cooks working their woks and chopping exotic vegetables. It was eyeopening, too, to see my Nicaraguan boss bantering with the Chinese woman who owned the restaurant. It was my first real insight that other cultures could connect  based on shared experiences as ethnic minorities,  or maybe just simply as people.

In the month or so we worked together, I really came to respect this Nicaraguan man as we moved  from location to location on the film shoot. He always remained calm and unruffled despite the pressure of pleasing the disparate tastes of a movie crew, not to mention the last minute changing of meal times  depending on how the filming was going. Movie catering, by far, was the hardest job of my life.

At one point,  my Nicaraguan boss confessed that while he enjoyed preparing food, he would prefer to do the engineering work he did back in his old country.

I better understand his frustration now that I teach English in Los Angeles. At one of my schools, many of the students are ethnic Armenians from Iran and Iraq. They left those Middle Eastern countries to seek religious freedom or escape violence. Among their number are highly educated doctors or other professionals who now have to start over. But when it comes to sharing food from their culture, they are the most generous around.

So from mangoes to dolmas, my odyssey of teaching and eating are deeply intertwined.

Madonna, Mangoes & Me

There was a time, not that long ago, when many Americans, including me, didn't even know what a mango was.  Now I can't live without them.

My first encounter with this fleshy fruit happened, of all places, during the filming of Body of Evidence on location in Portland, Oregon in 1993.  It was my job to slice mangoes every morning for Madonna, the movie's star.

I'm ready for my mangoes.

The producers brought in an LA based catering company to provide the food. This company, in turn, hired me, a local boy, to be third cook. The head cook was originally from Nicaragua while the second cook was from Mexico. On my first day, they told me to make up a fruit plate for Madonna and to be sure to include mangoes. I asked,  "What's a mango?" They must have looked at me like I was some kind of numbskull. But I quickly learned.

Usually, Madonna's assistant came to be pick up the plate. Then one day I decided to deliver it myself.  But just as I was about to reach the door to Madonna's trailer, her bodyguard came over and said he could take it in for me. Gee thanks.

For the rest of the film shoot, I was too busy working to get more than fleeting glances of Madonna coming and going.  In the end, the movie itself turned out to be a real piece of shit, but my love of mangoes endures.