STRANGE THINGS CANTONESE PEOPLE EAT

For the second evening in a row she's in there mastering the Brussels Sprout. It is a mystery. Personally, though I spent a large part of my youth in the European country (the Netherlands) that grows far more of them than any other place, I am not so obsessed with these globular vegetables.
They're okay, I suppose. Sometimes good to eat.
But I have no personal stake in it.
I am not 'vested'.

These are not small experimental quantities either, but entire pan-loads. Please imagine how the house smells right now! Tomorrow, which is one of my days off, I shall need to open all the windows and air the place out thoroughly. Except for her room, of course. It's not that I want her to come home to stale farty vapours in her bedroom, but IF the windows must be opened, THEN pipe-smoking may and should take place.
Which means that I need to firmly sneck her door.
So that none of the pipe-smoke enters.
I am a considerate man.
Not evil.


But it would be forward of me to figure out how to open her window.


On the other hand, with any luck, while I am still struggling to remain asleep, she'll be clanging pots around in the kitchen at early dawn, frying herself up some bacon for a nice greasy all-American breakfast.

I like bacon, but it's a lousy wake-up food.

Great morning smell, though.

Perfume.


Despite her being a person of pure Cantonese extraction and familial environment, and having grown up in Chinatown in a not-entirely-English-speaking-household, she's very white in her sensibilities.
It's probably that streak of Lingnanese adaptability.
They are completely food-obsessed.


I should probably mention that she also experimented with avoiding gluten, like many other people I know. But that lasted only three weeks before she angrily and operatically concluded that white people were batshit crazy, humans had eaten gluten for thousands of years, why, it was the very staff of life, and far too much delicious stuff contained gluten that she couldn't understand how all these insane Caucasian gluten haters managed to keep from killing themselves maybe it was because they had no taste buds to begin with poor dumb brutes after all they kept eating white-folks food except for those times when they timorously ventured into Chinatown to order sweet and sour pork for crapssake stupid tasteless heathens!

Sweet and sour pork!

Good lord.


Meanwhile, the little round Belgian cabbages. Mountains of little round Belgian cabbages. Can't get any more whitey-white foodwise than that.
It is the epitome and paradigm of utter whiteness.
Culinary Caucasitude to the max.

Can't wait until she figures out how to make cavolini di Bruxelles con mollica di pane e colatura di alici.




Yeah, no. I can't figure out all these crazy people who have forsworn gluten either. Maybe they're just too, too special. Maybe they're embracing the spoiled brat within after all these years. Maybe it's "meaningful".
Maybe they should've been spanked more.




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