Author: F C

Happy New Year 2008

Happy New Year 2008! Thanks for being part of my life this year. As usual in my annual messages, I give you a few statistics and offer a short essay.

Stats
Miles on a plane: 12,705 (down 84% from last year, but will make up for it in 2008)
Miles in a rental car: about 1,300
Miles in a Zipcar: 784 (including 206 km in Toronto, Canada)
MB of email: 1,304 (up 24% from last year, mostly spam)

Cities Visited: Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, Toronto, Cincinnati, Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas

Heroes and Mentors
My fiancée’s dad was showing us how to make dumplings – you know, the kind you can get in Chinatown, 5 for a dollar, boiled or fried. He’s a retired Chinese chef, so it was easy for him to whip up the filling (ground pork and the cleaver-minced fresh shrimp meat for that homemade touch) and roll the skins from scratch.

Now, the filling is not difficult for anyone that can follow a recipe. The hard part really is the crimping — making sure that the filling stays inside the skin when boiled and fried. In the standard scalloped dumpling, he can seal in 9 to 12 beautiful ruffles. Then just as quickly using the same materials, he can switch it up with the Shanghai style xiao long bao, and then move on to Cantonese siu mai. In the span of a half hour, he pumps out 4 trays of these tasty morsels. In some ways, it was almost supernatural.

Is it better to be a hero or a mentor? They are both people that you look up to, and they have skills, characteristics, or achievements that we wish we had. But they are not the same. The difference is that heroes are people who are set apart from normal people, while mentors are people that are close to you.

I searched for references to this relationship and many cites point to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”. Formally trained writers are familiar with this template for the universal story, or “monomyth”, which is illustrated in the Star Wars series of movies. One step in this journey (“Supernatural Aid”) focuses on the mentor-hero relationship: Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, or Yoda to Luke in the Empire Strikes Back.

In these stories, it is the hero that gets things done, but it is the mentor that makes it possible. It is also not unusual for one to become the other: Obi-Wan is the hero of Episodes 1 to 3, but becomes the mentor in the original Star Wars movie (Episode 4).

This year I was fortunate to revisit the mentors from my past, family and friends who in the course of time our paths have drawn away from each other, and perhaps making them into heroes. I was also able to meet some of my heroes in person, and discover that they are people too!

Getting back to dumplings, at first I made meager attempts to imitate the proper sealing technique, but at best it looks like a raw mutated Jamaican beef patty. He encouraged me to keep trying, saying that I could do it, and over time I got a little better – not pretty, but the two parts of the dumpling kept together.

Due to my incomplete knowledge of Chinese, there’s a lot I don’t know about my fiancée’s dad. The one thing I know for sure is that in the universe of dumplings, he’s both a hero and a mentor. Let’s be both heroes and mentors – they need to be kept together too.

Resolutions
Last year’s resolution was to join the YMCA and learn how to swim. We were successful in joining the YMCA, and I did make it to the pool once, but quite frankly I can’t say that I know how to swim with any confidence. I didn’t get it together with organizing lessons, and then I messed up my left ankle (you can read about my second degree sprain at https://www.triscribe.com/wp/archives/1340) which took until this month to fully recover. I’ll try to complete this one this year, as well as the other one, to marry my sweetheart (for those that have been counting, the engagement has been going on 2 years) this October 11, 2008. Here’s to an awesome year for you – I’m looking forward to it.

Please send me any updates to your contact information. I’ve also given in and joined Facebook, so please look for me there and challenge me to a game of Scrabblous sometime. Thanks again!

Chinese Americans at Jewish Restaurants for Christmas

[Catch up posts for Christmas, I Am Legend, and the Stage Crew reunion to follow.]

For some reason this year, much has been made of the traditional Jewish American affinity for Chinese restaurants, especially at Christmas. (See YouTube, Jennifer 8. Lee, and NPR). No one has talked about how much Chinese people like Jewish food.

My dad got me hooked at an early age, as he was good friends with Freddy the bagel guy, and spent many a weekend in the back of the store kicking back Nedicks orange sodas and watching the bagels boil into nice dumplings before being baked to chewy perfection. I probably know more about appetizing than any Chinese person ought to know. The day my sister was born, Freddy came and picked us up from school and took us home. P-‘s neighbors were all Jewish growing up; she can get mean cravings for latkes.

OK, it’s usually nowhere as cheap as Chinese food, and it’s certainly in the same league health-wise,with their wide variety of fatty, high carb and fried foods. However, also coming from a culture of survival, you can count on Jewish food to be prepared with meticulous precision, creatively using ingredients, with nothing wasted that is edible (at least permitted under kashrut laws). Also, having no dairy works out for us lactose intolerant folks.

First stop this past week was at the newly reopened 2nd Avenue Deli (now at 33 St. between 3 Avenue and Lexington, around the corner from Koreatown). Warning: 30-45 minute waits for a table are usual, even at the time I went at 3 PM. I hear the line was 100 deep at lunch time. Good thing that they are now open 24 hours. Our waitress (as well as about a quarter of the staff) was Chinese. My usual – matzo ball soup (lighter in color than Katz’s, but fluffier), and a hot pastrami sandwich. They are exactly the same as before. A meal will set you back $20 or so, but what are you waiting for? The 2nd Avenue Deli is kosher certified by a Conservative rabbi, so while no dairy is served, it is not strictly kosher as Orthodox standards goes, and then there is the issue of being open on Saturday. But hey, we’re Chinese, so that’s something somebody else has to deal with, while we eat. Way Recommended if you don’t need to ask too many questions.

The day after Christmas, P and 4 of her high school friends (all Asian and female) went out with one of their old teachers (who is Jewish) to Grille de Paris, a French restaurant located on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. They are under strict glatt Kosher supervision, and the other patrons were obviously very observant. We sure made an appearance there, although I guess it’s not any weirder than Jewish people in a Chinese restaurant.

Bowls of garlic bread were put out to begin. P had the pre fixe of fatush salad (traditional), eggplant napoleon (tasty breaded eggplant slices somewhat like that for eggplant parm), beef shish kabobs with vegatables, and a chocolate mousse (I shared it – it was a bit sweet, but I liked it – P thought there was too much of the non-dairy creamer in it). I wanted an all mushroom all the time meal, so I had the tri mushroom salad, which was large, tasty and fantastic, french onion soup (was really wishing for the melted cheese) and fillet Wellington (pretty good and full of red wine and mushroom flavor, but under Kosher rules, the meat cannot be bloody, so it has to be cooked to at least what we would normally call medium-well, so be forewarned). A piped stack of mashed potatoes (using obviously real hand-mashed potatoes, not reconstituted potato flakes) was accompanied by a trio of snow peas, peppers and onions which would be familiar in a stir-fry, all well-sauteed. We asked one of the servers to take our picture at the table at the end of the meal. He cracks a joke: “say ‘meat’, not cheese -we’re a meat restaurant”.

While it isn’t Le Cirque, there were plenty of delicious food, and they put a lot of effort in service and presentation (see the photos in the flickr strip). Even though it’s perhaps the only Kosher French restaurant in the city, it’s not a take it or leave it situation – it’s actually not bad. Recommended if you’re avoiding dairy.