xi hong shi chao ji dan

This is my christmas present to every one back home. It's a Chinese recipe that's tasty and appallingly easy to make. In English, just call it tomato-egg.

• Go out and buy a wok if you don't have one. Get with the program. Wok is an essential cooking tool.
• Lightly oil the wok with vegetable, peanut, canola or soybean oil. I know, I know you're wondering what happened to the guy only cooked with pork fat, butter or olive oil. Trust me, I have my reasons.
• heat the wok on medium high. Fry two eggs. Scrambling is best and leave the eggs slightly undercooked.
• Set aside the eggs in a bowl.
• Add one chopped leek.
• Let the leek cook on it's own for only a few seconds before adding two coarse chopped tomatoes.
• Add a bit of sugar, and a bit of salt.
• Continue cooking the tomatoes until they get nice and stewy. Stir frequently.
• Then add the egg to the tomatoes, stir and cook for a few more minutes.
  
• Serve over steamed rice, you foreign devil.
  
  Posted by otis at 04:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

earnest and helpful

Class was minutes away from starting, when my TA, Amy II, walks up to me. She had the usual TA look on her face: one of grave earnestness.

She said to me, "you know the little boy, Richard?"

"Yes," I said, expecting her to tell me that he had dropped the class. Richard was learning very slowly, as were most children in this particular class. Richard's pronunciation though, was exceptionally horrible. I do not spend a lot of time drilling Richard. There are reasons for that. Reasons that are obvious when he is happy or when he is trying to bite another student. Richard has no teeth. Many sounds are simply not available to him.

Richard and I, I feel like we have an understanding. He's not ever going to be a star student and I'm not ever going really get on his case about it. No teeth, you know.

Still if his parents feel like he should wait until a time when he can produce a nice "the" to continue with English education.

"His father has died." she said.

"oh," I said, totally, reasonably unprepared for such news. It did not take long for my brain to be filled with sympathy for a little boy and thinking through of consequences.

"Is he coming to class?" I asked the question, more than half knowing the answer.

"Of course," said Amy. Chinese TAs are from a friendly, earnest, naive planet. It's just not the planet you or I are from.

"That's ridiculous." I said, probably choosing a word outside her vocabulary.

"Maybe you could give him some fatherly advice," she tells me. I am overwhelmed by having to contemplate so many disperate things so quickly: anticpation of a drop, sympathy for a boy, the madness of his relatives and now the bizarre psychological malfunctioning of my TA.

Richard is not of my quickest students. Even so, I'm not sure I know more Mandarin than he knows English.

My absurded brain had a brief, grave image of myself and a five year old sitting down.

"Spoon," I would say to him.

"Monkey," he would respond sadly.

I would nod and pat his head, "lambstick, lambstick."

He would look up, as if to ask why, but would instead ask, "is it a banana?"

"No. It isn't."

I did not know how to answer my TA, and did not.

sis

So my little sister has graduated from college. I would love to give her a bunch of wise older brother advice, but unfortunately she would know better than to take it from someone who spent a year and a half doing post grad work at the university of Starbucks.

What that means is that I will have to get her a real present. I can't skate by on advice.

Believe me, I tried. I spent a whole month trying to think of good advice for my little sister now that she's being pushed out the womb of college. Except for one sound, specific and now totally moot bit, I came up dry.

The trouble is that the sound decisions I have made make for astoundingly modest advice. These are gems like

*Don't move to Turlock.
*Don't let wasted junkies sleep on your porch
*If it sounds like a pyramid scheme, it's probably a pyramid scheme.
* If you know how basic statistics work, it makes you smarter than 95% of the country and probably smarter than any given president elect.

What I've learned from the poor decisions sounds, in retrospect sounds quite obvious.

*Never be the most fiscally sound person on the lease. Especially if you aren't fiscally sound by any conventional definition.
*Never move in with a seventh day adventist, a communist, or a chihuahua. If you absolutely must pick one of the three, go with the communist.
*Try not to get a career by accident.

The nice thing is, advice is probably a gift she doesn't need. A remarkably self-sufficient girl, she can probably make the most of her lack of obligations. I look forward to hearing about how she does it.

in the grocery store

me: We need to think some sort of joke along the lines of, "what's more useless than a Chinese cop?"

Claire (looking slightly puzzled as she inspects a bag of milk): They can't be that useless. There are like however many million of them.

me (long pause, furrowed brow, then comes up with suitable punchline): "I don't know but I bet it's pretty useless."

Claire: Yeah, in my bed, certainly.

me: I said, "cop" not "cock."

Claire: Oh. That too.

homesick and wistful mix

Old 97's Curtain Calls
Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Tom Waits - Gun Street Girl
Nuetral Milk Hotel - In an Aeroplane Over the Sea
Billy Bragg and Wilco - California Stars
Los Lobos - Good Morning Aztlan
Josh Ritter - Golden Age of Radio
Gillian Welch - Revelator
THe Mountain Goats - See America Right
Sleater Kinney - Call the Doctor
Modest Mouse- Never Ending Math Equation
The Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane
The Shins - Gone for Good
Tom Waits - Cold, Cold Ground
Jesus & the Mary Chain - Just Like Honey
John Hiatt - All The Lilacs in Ohio
Nick Drake - Day is Done
Gillian Welch - Barroom Girls
Blur - Coffee and TV
Wilco - Via Chicago