2004-06-07 11:31:18青色猶豫
The girl beneth Paul
Ferina has a great palette; she is definitely a gourmet. She knows exactly what she wants and how she wants it. She, too, embraces fine cuisine with an open mind; however, apart from being open minded, she also analyzes and tastes critically. She can tell you when something tastes bad and why. Very often, her opinion is dead on, and maybe we have a lot of arguments with many other things, but when it comes to food, we always see eye to eye. If she is reading this right now, she will flat out disagree with the part where we see “eye to eye,” and bring out the “noodle incident.”
She caught pneumonia once, and she was very ill. I decidedly to make a Chinese chicken soup flavored with dry scallops and shitake mushrooms. It was a good soup until I decided to turn the leftover soup into chicken noodle soup. In Chinese cooking, when one makes a chicken noodle soup, the broth and the noodles are cooked separately, and to serve the dish, one can simply mix the drained noodles with the soup. That was not what I did. Whenever I made Western style chicken noodle soup, I always cooked the noodles in the broth, and the result was having a starchy and cloudy soup. Without thinking, I did exactly how I had always made the soup, the proudly presented a bowl to Ferina. She took one look at it and said,
“Why is the soup so cloudy? How did you cook the noodles?” She knew exactly what I did, but she still gave me the benefit of the doubt.
“I cooked the noodles in the soup.” I replied.
She questioned, “What? You call yourself a cook, and you don’t know this? Do you cook your pasta in your sauce? Never! So why do your ruin your perfectly good soup by cooking your noodles in it?”
This was the part where we saw eye to eye. Realizing I just made a very silly mistake, I was very mad at myself – I should have known better. We looked at each other quietly for a few seconds and burst out laughing at the same time. A part of me wanted to throw the whole pot away, but I would be wasting too much food, so we agreed silently that we would eat what we had and laugh about it for the rest of our lives. Remember, I am not trying to portrait Ferina as a fastidious gourmet; rather, I want to highlight how observant and analytical she is. The noodle incident taught me a very valuable lesson: I will constantly remind myself that I do not know everything, and there is always someone who will know a lot more than I do.
Of course, she did appreciate my effort; after all, she was not being picky and ungrateful. As funny as the noodle incident was, it revealed how deeply she believed in me. She wanted me to be the best cook I could be, and she would not hold back when I needed that additional shove to climb closer to the mountaintop.
She caught pneumonia once, and she was very ill. I decidedly to make a Chinese chicken soup flavored with dry scallops and shitake mushrooms. It was a good soup until I decided to turn the leftover soup into chicken noodle soup. In Chinese cooking, when one makes a chicken noodle soup, the broth and the noodles are cooked separately, and to serve the dish, one can simply mix the drained noodles with the soup. That was not what I did. Whenever I made Western style chicken noodle soup, I always cooked the noodles in the broth, and the result was having a starchy and cloudy soup. Without thinking, I did exactly how I had always made the soup, the proudly presented a bowl to Ferina. She took one look at it and said,
“Why is the soup so cloudy? How did you cook the noodles?” She knew exactly what I did, but she still gave me the benefit of the doubt.
“I cooked the noodles in the soup.” I replied.
She questioned, “What? You call yourself a cook, and you don’t know this? Do you cook your pasta in your sauce? Never! So why do your ruin your perfectly good soup by cooking your noodles in it?”
This was the part where we saw eye to eye. Realizing I just made a very silly mistake, I was very mad at myself – I should have known better. We looked at each other quietly for a few seconds and burst out laughing at the same time. A part of me wanted to throw the whole pot away, but I would be wasting too much food, so we agreed silently that we would eat what we had and laugh about it for the rest of our lives. Remember, I am not trying to portrait Ferina as a fastidious gourmet; rather, I want to highlight how observant and analytical she is. The noodle incident taught me a very valuable lesson: I will constantly remind myself that I do not know everything, and there is always someone who will know a lot more than I do.
Of course, she did appreciate my effort; after all, she was not being picky and ungrateful. As funny as the noodle incident was, it revealed how deeply she believed in me. She wanted me to be the best cook I could be, and she would not hold back when I needed that additional shove to climb closer to the mountaintop.