“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”
The doctor says no surgery. It won’t change a thing happening with my back. He is, instead, referring me to the pain clinic hoping they’ll find solutions which are quick acting and will allow me to walk longer distances.
I think the news buoyed my spirits. Tonight I’m having friends over for dinner, and usually on the day of the dinner, I start to regret the invitation purely because of my back. Today I am raring to go.
I have a list. I always have a list. I also have a flow chart, and I am already behind my time. Talking to my sister did that. She wasn’t on any list.
Dinner will be Indian Chicken and Cashew Rice and a side of green beans for color. I don’t want to get your taste buds aroused but appetizers are blueberry, feta and honey-caramelized onion naan pizza and honey prosciutto with gouda on flatbread. For dessert I’ve already made my dark chocolate cream pie.
When I was a kid, I would have laughed if you had told me I’d be eating Indian food. Now it is among my favorites. Traveling has opened up my mind but even better it has extended my palate. I have eaten the oddest foods I would have cringed just looking at when I was young. Buying a live chicken for dinner would have grossed me out. Chicken comes in packages from the supermarket. Killing and plucking are not necessary. In South American I ate what in the United States are pets: Guinea pigs. They were tasty. In Finland I have no idea what I ate. The second language is Swedish. I just ordered what looked good.
I didn’t even know foods like hummus and falafel existed. I ate Wonder Bread not pita bread or lavash. The most exotic bread I ate back then was Italian scali bread.
On my first trip back to Ghana, I couldn’t wait until I had fufu for dinner and kelewele for a snack. They were my Ghanaian comfort foods.
Morocco was my last trip before the two and soon to be my third trip back to Ghana. Though the country is in North Africa I wasn’t eating African food. I was eating tasty, varied and delicious Moroccan food. Some of it I knew as I could translate the French names but others I chose by appearance. I never made a bad choice.
Part of the adventure of going somewhere different, somewhere new, is eating unfamiliar and maybe even unrecognizable food. That it is sometimes in a foreign language helps.
When I get to Ghana, I want kelewele and those round donuts the small girls sell. I love that in a far different country than my own I have favorite foods which don’t come from stores but from aunties, as older women are sometimes called, who cook and sell the food along the roadsides.
Stop the car!! It’s dinner time.
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This entry was posted on April 9, 2016 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: blueberries, cashew rice, chocolate cream pie, dinner party, flow chart, friends over, Guinea pigs, Indian chicken, lists and more lists, live chickens, no surgery, pain clinic
Both comments and pings are currently closed.12 Comments on ““Life is a combination of magic and pasta.””
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keepthecoffeecoming.blog 
April 9, 2016 at 1:24 pm
Dayyyyum, girl! That’s great news. Anytime surgery’s off the schedule is a good time. Now it’s up to the pain clinic – and be sure to ask about the McKenzie exercises.
If you’re doin’ the old ‘Up & Atom’ preppin’ for dinner, you’re in good shape. You use lists? I never do. That’s why I forget stuff when I go to the grocery. It’s okay tho’, ’cos it’s an excuse for another trip back to get more stuff – and forget other stuff. Everything works out …
Are you kidding!? Blueberry – feta – honey-cararmelized onion naan pizza? Say it ain’t so. The dark chocolate cream pie is (pardon the descriptor) just the ‘icing on the cake.’
My reaction to eating Indian food was probably a lot like the one you describe. That all changed when my daughter and SIL took me with them to dinner at Bombay House. It’s such an excellent Indian restaurant. Whether you get the buffet or order on-menu, y’ can’t go wrong. It was there that I first tried goat, and aside from it being a much bonier meat than others I’ve had, it was excellent. They make a tomato & butter sauce I’d love to get the recipe for … maybe I should ask one day … ? They also serve tandoori naan bread …
Never had Ghanaian food … if I find a place here that serves it, I’ll give it a shot. VietNamese, Chinese, Thai, Bulgarian, Mongolian, Japanese & Korean – all these are cuisines my daughter and I have investigated when we were doing our weekly ‘restaurant crawl.’ Maybe we need to do a search for Ghanaian. I’ll try anything – once.
If you get the recipe for kelewele, would you post it here … ? Same for the fufu … never had either, but I’m up for a try.
It seems each city in the country has its own list of peculiarities, and New Orleans is no different … here’s a truncated list of things that say ‘I’m from N’Awlins, y’all!’ …
YOU’RE FROM NEW ORLEANS IF …
you’ve never heard of a dry county.
you don’t know what a county is.
you hear gambling is illegal in some other states and are surprised.
when you know what “LAGNIAPPE” and “LAISSEZ LE BON TEMPS ROULER” mean.
you tell people at college where you’re from and they automatically know you can drink more than everyone at the school put together.
you tried “Cajun” food somewhere else and thought it tasted like crap.
you reinforce your attic to store Mardi Gras beads.
your sunglasses fog up when you step outside.
your ancestors are buried above-ground.
you get on a green streetcar to go to the park and a red one to the French Quarter.
you take a bite of five-alarm chili and reach for the Tabasco.
you don’t learn until high school that Mardi Gras isn’t a national holiday.
you leave a parade with footprints on your hands.
you believe that purple, green, and gold look good together.
your last name isn’t pronounced the way it’s spelled.
you get aggravated when (1) people think Mardi Gras takes place in the French Quarter and (2) people think they can go to the French Quarter to get a ‘boob shot’ any time of year.
you know what a nutria is but still pick it to represent your baseball team.
no matter where else you go in the world, you’re always disappointed in the food.
you have to reset your clocks after every thunderstorm.
you’re walking in the French Quarter with a plastic cup of beer.
you eat dinner out and spend the entire meal talking about the other good places you’ve eaten.
you know what ‘K&B purple’ is.
you know what it means for food to come ‘dressed’ …
you ‘ax’ for things …
you see a van taxi with spinners.
you know your from New Orleans if you recognize at least one person in a parade.
you save newspapers for use as tablecloths at crawfish boils.
when you travel abroad, you pack 2 things: a bottle of Tabasco and a shaker of ‘Tony’s’ in your purse.
drive-thru daquiris — it’s not drinking and driving until you put the straw in.
you drive east to get to the West Bank.
you stand on the neutral ground at parades and have no idea what a ‘median’ is.
you know how to pronounce ‘Mignon Faget’.
pulling a baby out of a cake is completely normal.
you know that the Riverwalk is for tourists.
there is a color called “Bur-GUN-dee”.
the concept of a basement never crosses your mind.
April 9, 2016 at 11:33 pm
Richard,
I hate to have to go to the grocery store more than once when preparing a special dinner. I check to see if I have any of the items already then add what I need to the list.
I had to keep taking back breaks but I had planned them into the schedule.
The naan “pizza” was a hit. Two of my four guests chose it as their favorite. I really like the combination of the different tastes. The dessert was also a hit. My friends did all but lick their plates.
I first had goat in Africa and have had it here at a Caribbean restaurant. Sometimes it is fatty but mostly it is, as you said, a bit boney.
The only Ghanaian restaurants I know are in DC, but there must be others I haven’t found. Fufu is made with tuber yam which I haven’t ever seen in this country. Kelewele is plantain.
This is the recipe that fits my memory of kelewele’s taste:
http://watsuptek.com/recipewednesday-how-to-prepare-kelewele-spicy-fried-plantain/
I actually know many of those though I’m not from New Orleans. They have similar lists for New England. We save newspapers for the table when we have lobsters and steamed clams.
The evening was successful, and I’m exhausted. I’m going to answer a bit of mail and head to bed.
April 9, 2016 at 2:47 pm
Having grown up in a home where paprika was considered spicy, I am not a fan of very hot food. I don’t see the reason to eat a pepper with the highest rating on the Scoville scale to prove your manhood. It burns going down and coming out. 😖 Food from countries like India are very hot because they needed the hot peppers to preserve the food from bacteria before the invention of refrigerators. Regardless of the heat I hate Indian food. I hate the taste and the smell of curry or any other Indian dish. When I go to Toronto my coworkers keep trying to take me to Indian resturaunts for lunch and no matter what they recommend it’s too hot and smells bad including butter chicken. The only thing I like is the naan bread. BTW Our training center is located near Bramton, a suburb of Toronto, which some call Bramptonstan. 😊
I have traveled extensively for business and I enjoy trying new foods but I can’t get past the smell of the stuff from India. When I flew to China on Cathy Pacific there were lots of Indians flying to India and they all ordered Indian meals. They were served first and when they opened their dishes the odor made me nauseous. I ordered Chinese dishes when flying on a Hong Kong carrier. The food in economy on a foreign carrier, other than British Airways, is very good. The Brits can’t cook on land much less in the air in coach.
Cloudy today with a chance of rain tomorrow and Monday with temperatures in the low 70s.
April 9, 2016 at 11:43 pm
Bob,
I am not a fan of very hot food either, but I do like a bit of spice. Ghanaians are lovers of really hot food.
Indian food is so much more than just curry. Lots of people think as you do that it is mostly curry and is always hot. It isn’t.
I like places where there are ethnic restaurants. In London SoHo fills my need for a variety of foods. I introduced my sister to Indian food there, and she is now a fan. Her town just opened one up about three or four months ago. I took her there for her birthday.
British food has improved so much over the last decade or so. There are wonderful restaurants.
In Iceland I had Icelandic game for dinner. It was delicious. My mother and sister had regular food you can find anywhere. I don’t get that. Part of the joy of traveling is tasting new food.
Cold is coming back.
April 9, 2016 at 2:55 pm
Sounds very delicious, have a great time!
April 9, 2016 at 11:47 pm
Birgit,
It was delicious from start to finish. I do love cooking new foods, and I only do that if I have company.
I had a fun night with lots of laughs!
April 9, 2016 at 3:28 pm
I hope the pain clinic can give You the help You need! They are usually great in those clinics so I’m sure You’ll get the help You need!
I ate chinese and italian food quite early in life so I think I would have tried any other kind of food if I could have found it. I think I thought all food from Asia would be more or less the same though 🙂
Finnish is impossible to understand, I’m not even sure the finns themselves actually understand what anyone says, they just sound much the sam when answering 🙂 🙂 🙂 and I’ve heard that swedish is hard to learn too, we build our sentences different than most other germanic languages. So I can understand that it would have been impossible to know what menues in our languages said 🙂
The most odd thing I’ve ever eaten is jellyfish soup, something big in China. It both smells and taste much like burned rubber 🙂
Have a great day!
Christer.
April 9, 2016 at 11:52 pm
Christer,
I also hope they’ll be able to help me. Sometimes my back hurts so much I could cry.
You make so many different meals for yourself that I do believe you’d be willing to try new foods. I think that some Asian countries share food tastes but also has food singular to their own countries. It depends on the spices and the way they are used.
I had the worse time in Finland so I finally bought a dictionary and pointed to the Finnish word to have conversations.
Okay, I may have to give that jellyfish soup a bit of thought before I try it.
Have a great day!!
April 9, 2016 at 7:12 pm
I went through college on cold lamb sandwiches, a bit greasy but definitely cheap.
Don’t eat lamb very much anymore
April 9, 2016 at 11:54 pm
MDH,
I really like lamb but know few people who do. It just isn’t that popular here. I buy chops occasionally as I can get just enough for me.
April 10, 2016 at 12:20 pm
That menu last night had my mouth watering. Sounds delicious.
Oddest thing I ever ate was pig intestines in a roadhouse in rural Japan. They were small sections, boiled, rubbery, not much taste, and yes, they had been cleaned before cooking.
Hope the pain clinic van supply you with whatever takes the edge off…
April 10, 2016 at 12:52 pm
Bill,
I am not a fan of rubbery foods like octopus. I did try Rocky Mountain oysters, but they tasted fine as they had been breaded and deep fried.
The chicken was delicious. I will make it for you when you come down next.
I got up to go to the bathroom last night and I was thinking maybe I’d used the litter box as it is much closer. I was in horrible pain grabbing on to what I could, but I did make it.