SALT RICE

The bookseller usually has a cheeseburger and fries with a glass of putrid rotgut red, I will always have a mixture of Fanta Orange and Coca Cola with icecubes. Years ago I also would drink the putrid rotgut red, but it finally got so ghastly that I just couldn't do it anymore and switched to soda. When we leave, if all goes well, we'll end up someplace where he can have a Guinness followed by a Jameson's straight up, and I have two glasses of tea.

This, you will understand, is a pubcrawl we have been doing regularely for many years. There were times when both of us ended up unintentionally consuming much liquor.
Due to the malign influence of a Taiwanese woman who kept on pouring.

She retired a few years ago.


I had stopped consuming alcohol some years before that. My abstinence was not to discourage her, and I doubt that she even really noticed.


The bookseller frequently has cheese waiting for him when he gets home. I don't, but there are usually come cookies in the teevee room, which actually would have gone well with the tea I had earlier, but very few bars offer bicuits with your hot beverage. And actually, I have teabags in my coat pocket because most bars do not have acceptable tea either.

Before I headed over to C'town to smoke a pipe while waiting I had already been there earlier for a late lunch. Fujian Fried Rice (福建炒飯 'fuk gin chaau faan'), which is NOT what you'd expect, kaimpeng (鹹飯) such as Fujianese in the Philippines do, but actually a typical Cantonese preparation including chicken, ham, chopped mustard greens, conpoy, and shrimp, somewhat gravied, on top of egg fried rice. Chachanteng food.

A preamble to a pipe filled with a red Virginia mixture smoked while wandering down Battery to catch the bus home at a point where it isn't rush-hourcrowded yet. Spent most of the ride back surreptitiously scoping out a woman's extremely pretty mouth and face from my seat. Yeah, um.


At the place where the beverages were consumed I noted the dissonance of the bar tender's tattoos versus the maidenly jade bracelet she wore. Her aunties and other kin have probably criticized the tattoos (such a 'white' thing!) while praising her for being a proper Chinese girl with her bracelet; it shows off fine bones and an elegant wrist.

You'll never catch a decent man with those tattoos!
Which is probably precisely the point.
Good men can be boring.



NOTE: Kiampeng (鹹飯 'haam faan', Fujianese pronunciation "kiam-png") is usually pork, lap cheung (臘腸) and dried shrimp (蝦米 'haa mai'; ebi) with other things sauteed with garlic and vinegar, sugar, ground pepper and soy and/or rice wine splashed in, mixed with glutinous rice, mustard greens (which can be either 芥菜 'gaai choi' or 油菜 'yau choi', both cultivars of the same vegetable), chopped scallion, and cooked till the rice is done. Add peanuts before serving.




==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================