weekend update

We have held the notion that a person that is a little different from us is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Yet an extraterrestrial visitor, 

looking at the differences among human beings, would find those differences trivial

 compared to the similarities.” 

Carl Sagan

While searching through the archived files of my brain box this week, I came upon the yellowed  scraps of this old argument:

Maybe you're the sort or professional or armchair anthropologist or psychologist who's pegged out firm territory on this philosophical scale;  if you are, feel free to offer insight to those of us whose convictions are less certain. My own ideas slide back and forth on this spectrum as energetically as if I were a confused skater on a banana peel covered roller rink.

It's just that I was raised to avoid voicing strong opinions.
No, maybe it's just my nature to be indecisive.
Or maybe both. Or maybe neither.
Oh whatever.

The thing is of course, that we can never (without doing  long term and illegal-in-most-countries studies on small children) really know the exact proportions of recipe that resulted in each us, can we?
 All we can know for sure is that
1. There are a lot of different kinds of weird in this world

and eventually, most of them
will show up for dinner.

and
2. Somehow, the where of you and the when of you shape, in a profound way, the who of you.
This is perhaps why people who are well-aged and well-traveled are so very interesting: maybe the where of you expands with travel, while the when of you expands with time, causing the who of you to expand too.
 In a good way.
And maybe sometimes in a not so good way: I have begun to notice that aging, and visiting places that specialize in great food, also has a way of expanding the, er...what of me:

Me, last Wednesday:
"Wow! Yes! I think I need to try that pastry! and that
warming sugary caffeinated beverage! and that lovely desserty thing!
and that  beautiful fried looking thing!"

Yep, that's how it was. And I didn't even have to hop a plane. I only had to hop in my car and drive 20 minutes from my home to a suburban Asian market. Which happened to be next to a Korean bakery. Where I bought almost every previously untasted item that the boy behind the bakery counter told me I'd like.
 But it was a quest for kimchi that had prompted this trip, so after a shrimp spring roll and a sesame ball and half a rice cake and a bite of pork pastry, I headed to the grocery shop.
Where I felt a little,well, foreign:

"excuse me, um, I'm looking for, um, kimchi?"

Note this, kimchi seekers: If you're lucky enough to have an Asian grocery near you, be prepared for an aisle of pickled everything. Picked tofu, pickled quail eggs, pickled lotus root, pickled peppers, pickled freaky things you never heard of.

The pickled cabbage also known as kimchi is not on that aisle.

Me, reading labels up and down the aisle for twenty minutes
without spotting anything kimchi.
I eventually had to (gulp) ask.

As it turned out, the pickled stuff of other cultures is unnervingly like the pickled stuff in my own culture- sometimes it's on the shelves of an aisle, and sometimes, for no discernible reason,

the pickled stuff is in the fridge. Go figure.

This, when kimchi allows itself to be bagged as well as hunted, is what it looks like:

And this is what it looks like when it's stirfried into what would've been Shrimp and kimchi fried rice, except somehow I left an Asian grocery store without remembering to buy a bag of rice, so dinner became Shrimp and kimchi fried rice noodles:

Absolutely, totally worth the hunt!
plus, baby bok choy for less than $1 a pound!!!
(Beaut new Japanese china plate too, isn't it? Thanks mom!)

No kidding! Kimchi is amazing! What a find! It's fantastic flavor makes any other saucing or seasoning welcome, but unnecessary. There's a possibility, according to the internet, that kimchi may be in the refrigerated produce or deli section of major chain grocers. That would be great, because a jar of kimchi in the fridge means that dinner is only a bowl of leftover rice, some protein pieces and a few vegetable bits away.

The Thai coconut ribs were a plateful of pros and cons:
con: one has to remember to do the hard work(cutting apart the ribs, steaming them, blending the marinade) the day before serving.
pro: the hard work all happens the day before serving.
con: the marinade is a little fiddly and time consuming
pro: the marinade is fantastic
con: the ribs have to be steamed before they overnight in the marinade.
pro: the ribs are pre-steamed, so there's no guesswork about doneness once they're on the grill.
Here's what they look like:

Honestly, all the cons were forgotten at  first bite.
This is a seriously wonderful recipe.

Bobby Flay's shrimp and grits was a wonderful cheesy indulgence:

But it just seemed so....complicated. Any of you native shrimp and grit-o-philes, is this down home country comfort food really supposed to be this complex, or did I get it all wrong? 

Funny, I've lived in the South for nearly half my life, yet there are times when the customs and cooking of Southern America still seem foreign to me.

But that's okay. 

That icky fish-out-of-water feeling is one

that every human knows.

Still, I hope this week, you find it easy to embrace the unfamiliar-

that new classroom, the new job, those new people,

with the sort of curiosity that cancels fear;

 the sort of compassion

that draws you near

to the out-of-place others around you, 

and the sort of courageous grace that helps you say, "It's alright,

I'm a bit of a stranger here myself."