Text 8848, 64 rader
Skriven 2006-12-15 21:09:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av DAVE SACERDOTE
Ärende: Immigrant's story 1
===========================
 -=> Quoting Dave Sacerdote to Jim Weller <=-

 DS> Good story.  Thanks for the crosspost.

Since his story seemed to be popular here I'll dig up some more.

Diep's Structurally Reinforced Meatloaf

Diep is a little older than me, also Amerasian, and arrived in the USA
when she was about 18, with her Vietnamese foster family. She is a very
tall, fair-complected, big-boned girl with a grace and radiance that is
rare. Just like me though, she has been prone to making a few mis-steps
whenever someone doesn't provide her with *complete and detailed*
instructions.        

That first year, Diep was sent to this very low-quality inner-city high
school that had surrendered the idea of teaching anything other than
low-grade vocational skills. So Diep spent half her day in ESL classes
and the other half in things like Institutional Cooking and Auto Body
classes. It was in the Institutional Cooking classes that she was
introduced to American dishes like Institutional Spaghetti and
Institutional Chili.

Diep enjoyed the spaghetti, and thought her family might like it as
well, and decided to make it for everyone at home. Unfortunately, she
got confused between the recipes for spaghetti sauce and for chili. She
produced something that was a little bit of both. (To a Newbie's Viet
eyes, the sauce and the chili physically resemble one another, have some
common ingredients and cooking processes.) So, into her spaghetti sauce,
Diep mistakenly added lots of red pepper flakes, lots of chili powder.
She did not have any Tabasco sauce so she dumped in some Sriracha hot
sauce. Still confusing the recipes for spaghetti sauce and chili, Diep
remembered that at school they had chopped some very large peppers and
added that to the pot. She did not have that kind of pepper, but assumed
that the best thing to do was to add an identical weight or volume of
the peppers she *did* have on hand. So she added a staggering quantity
of chopped Vietnamese hot chili peppers to the pot and let those meld
into her sauce.

I know about this because my godbrother had dinner over at their house
that night. He was surprised to find spaghetti served for dinner, and
concerned by what he saw at the table. Diep's brothers were all eating
the spaghetti, but their faces were deeply flushed and perspiring, their
noses were running, and they all kept getting up from the table to go
blow their noses. One of the guys warned my godbrother, in a breathless
wheezy voice, that the spaghetti was a little spicy. My godbrother ate
some, and says his face liquefied and melted off his head, just like the
bad guy at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Diep's sauce burned
into his skull 4 or 5 new and unneeded sinus cavities. No one made a
negative comment about Diep's spaghetti, and she never acknowledged it
wasn't exactly what she intended, but she never made it again.


Cheers

Jim, in Yellowknife




... Lobsters are really just big seagoing insects.
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