There is too much happening this week, and we may well be eating bags of Cheetos in the back of the car every night. Except Thursday. I’m making soup on Thursday.
This space would hold our weekly menu plan if I had an idea of what it might be.
Let me tell you about the two funniest things that happened to me this weekend.
My brother’s dog is a labradoodle, and the place they board her when they go out of town asked if they’d be interested in breeding her. So they did, and a few months ago she had seven puppies. The breeder has two puppies left, and she’s now offering them at a significant discount. I texted some friends who’d expressed interest to let them know, and I got a text back that said “Who is this?” Turns out I’d transposed two of the numbers in one of the phone numbers. I apologized and jokingly told the wrong-number guy I knew where he could get a discounted labradoodle if he was interested. And he was. This will be my favorite wrong number story if he ends up buying a puppy.
Poppy has been watching a lot of old episodes of “Saturday Night Live,” and she has justly fallen in love with Stefan. She keeps saying “This place has everything!” and tagging “Dan Cortese” to the end of the list of wonderful features of whatever she’s describing. We’ve been talking this weekend about places we might like to go for spring break, and I made the kids brochures for the places we’d discussed. (I know.) On the intro for the Pittsburgh brochure, I wrote “This place has everything! Museums, baseball, Dan Cortese!” This evening Poppy said something about it, and I wondered what Dan Cortese is up to these days. So I looked him up, and it turns out he was born in a suburb of Pittsburgh! That place really does have everything!
We were at Forbidden City, the culinary capital of my childhood. I was around 12 years old. I’d just finished a bowl of steaming hot Sizzling Rice Soup — the only vehicle through which I’d willingly eat vegetables — and was about to tuck into a plate of Mongolian beef. Despite years of effort on my dad’s part, I’d been ordering nothing but Sizzling Rice Soup, Mongolian beef and Red Pop at Forbidden City for about a decade.
Dad usually had either mu shu pork (my brother, step-siblings and I always crowed in horror when he applied the “poison sauce”), the palace beef (“It’s almost just like Mongolian beef!” he’d tell me. “Just try a bite!”) or the Mandarin Jumbo Shrimp. That visit, it was the shrimp.
I don’t know what was different about that day. Was I hungrier? Was I maturing? Was I just trying to prove that I really didn’t like anything?
I suspect it was the latter, and the first taste of Mandarin Jumbo Shrimp proved me wrong. The shrimp was crisp and juicy, coated in a sweet and tangy sauce with a little bit of heat. It was heavenly. I almost wanted to try something else, just to find out if everything on the table was as revolutionary as the Mandarin Jumbo Shrimp.
I did not try anything else on the table. I don’t know if I even admitted that the shrimp was delicious. I went back to the Mongolian beef that night, but that single bite of Mandarin Jumbo Shrimp had changed the way I looked at food.