Italy Mian

I am my parents' daughter, and therefore it is natural that I should love food. My parents are both wonderful cooks, and they are always trying new recipes and perfecting old ones. It's funny to think that when I was a kid, my sisters and I generally ate dinner with the babysitter before our parents came home, because by the time I was in high school we had moved to having dinner together every night, even though everybody was so busy we often didn't eat until eight or nine.

Recently (and yes I am well aware of how lowbrow I've been lately, leave me alone) I was reading my friend Lili's copy of Cosmopolitan (and also The Scarlet Pimpernel! And also How to Be Really Defensive About Your Intellectual Capacity!) and it suggested that one write down all one's favorite restaurants and pick randomly when going out to dinner, to avoid the inevitable "Where do you want to go?" "Where do you want to go?" So I did.

There were nine.

We eat out at least once a day.

Also, we have a tofu dish every day. Yesterday we tried to come up with all the (non-meat) tofu dishes offered by the local restaurants. There's mapo dofu, riben dofu, jiachang dofu, gong bao dofu, and tieban dofu.

We eat one of these five tofus just about every day.

So although I love Chinese food, you can perhaps understand why sometimes it's an effort just to think about dinner. Perhaps it is also excusable that I went out for Italian Noodles this afternoon, just by myself, on a whim, all dressed up with earrings and lipstick and a skirt and smelling of my new ginger shampoo, which I keep in my desk so I can smell it from time to time. (This is not something I ought to do when other people are watching however because they do not understand.)

There's this place near the school called Casa Mia, run by probably the lonelist man in the world, a non-Chinese speaking Italian guy. I brought a book(a word book!), but when my food arrived I put it away so I could concentrate. There was bread, made with yeast, and I closed my eyes and focussed on the taste of rosemary and olive oil. Then there was spaghetti with tomato and basil - so simple - I would have taken such pasta completely for granted a few months ago - pasta, I would have sighed resignedly. But oh, such pasta! I will never take pasta for granted again.

When I go home I know I will long for egg and spinach dumplings and spicy gongbao dofu with peanuts and tiny numbing berries (called "ma"). Although the former, at least, I could probably make myself. In any case, that's the nice thing about being American, I think. You can have Italy noodles one night and jiaozi or paella or something the next. In China, it's just China. That's another reason to be excited for my Hobo Vacation in two weeks (riding the rails, stealing pies off windowsills) - I can find out what they eat in the south and get sick of that for awhile.