Thoughts on Food…

Pat’s birthday is coming up this week so I decided to consult my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook for a cake recipe that I could whip up and I found myself getting lost in the pages of colorful illustrations while I salivated over certain foods that I no longer eat on a regular basis or have access to. It’s interesting how foods are so closely connected to memories that you have and you can remember certain dishes that you used to eat or make that remind you of a certain time in your life. Some things I haven’t cooked for myself since I’ve been down here such as steak (only at it once in a restaurant), salads with lettuce due to the fear of brainworm (except in reputable restaurants and then it’s not even a real salad…more like large leaves of lettuce as decoration), and then there’s the products that you couldn’t get your hands on even if you wanted to (oddly, mushrooms basically don’t exist down here in any form…except maybe canned and then they’re ridiculously expensive). I think about proscuitto and how I would wrap it around asparagus for a dinner party, cook up filet mignon as an everyday dinner, and purchase broccoli regularly (I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve eaten broccoli since I’ve been here). I sometimes drift into thinking about foods of my childhood and wonder about it…like how my mom used to make orange roughy and would broil it, leaving the oven door open a crack and squeezing lemon juice on it, how we would have “cheap chicken” one of my favorite dishes which was basically boneless leg quarters (a “cheap” cut of meat) with bbq or hoisin sauce baked in the oven, and there was also Monday’s after dance class when we would get KFC and Buckmann’s doughnuts as a treat. This of course not to be overshadowed on the occasional fresh whole lobster that Mom would bring home that we would each make a mess of our plates with (my favorite part being the claws rather than the tail…oh and those puke yellow innards are pretty tasty too…). When I think about these foods of my childhood I realize just how old I am. When did I get to be 25 years old? Time sneaks up on you pretty quickly and surprises you. You try to think in the way that you thought when you were a kid, in high school…assuming that it wasn’t all that long ago, but you have to remind yourself that you graduated more than seven years ago! After high school I think the time flies and you change but the changes aren’t obvious and you don’t recognize them readily. I can’t tell you where I thought I was going to be in seven years the day I graduated high school but it probably wasn’t Bolivia. I never was very good at the “tell me where you think you’ll be in 10 years” game anyways…one year or two years ahead is all my little brain can handle. I think these days stability in your life is underrated. In our parents days I think they would have said something like…10 years after graduating college I hope to be in a steady job, married with a few kids, and a homeowner. I will be taking the kids on trips to Disney World on their summer breaks and spending my free time on my hobbies such as fly fishing and basketweaving. I doubt many graduating college kids aspire to that nowadays…not to say that it’s not what we want, but these days there’s about 1000 things we’re supposed to do before we get to that phase. Everyone (well almost everyone) wants to travel and see the world (and in many cases, live abroad), climb up the corporate ladder (most everyone has either changed companies or jobs 3 years out or at least looked with the serious intention of jumping ship), and enjoy life as a young person living in a big city, such as New York. Is this the correct order of things? I wonder if the people that are well-established now in starting their families and settling down will travel the world and satisfy their need for adventure and freedom later on when they’re retired with an empty nest. Is a better time to join the Peace Corps when you’re retired and have the freedom to really enjoy the experience as a two year vacation from your previous life, without having to worry about what the next step is afterwards or how it will look on your resume if you decide it’s not the thing for you at this point in your life? I’m not the kind of person that looks backwards very frequently, but maybe it’s because it’s kind of scary when you do, I have a bad memory and was just thinking the other day about someone I used to work with (just 3.5 months ago) and couldn’t even remember their last name (was trying desperately to conjure up what their chat id was on MindAlign) and then even things in Bolivia…I haven’t been to the grocery store in about 3 weeks and couldn’t remember what the name of it was. Ai ya! Sometimes I think it might be because I’m not exercising my brain enough down here…but trust me, I read plenty of books and try desperately to remember Spanish words when I’m speaking with people. Ahhh…quick, take the GMAT and GRE before your brain completely fails you!