THE AMERICAN DIET

If you buy your child boba milk tea drinks, you can forego cooking them dinner. They're full, jazzed up, enough energy to run circles around the teevee set instead of simply sitting quietly in front of it, and they'll grow up to be as plump as the average overfed Midwesterner.

Naturally I have tried boba drinkies.
And I can't stand them.

The human digestive system was not built to deal with soft gummy balls. It does, however, easily handle steamed rice flour noodles, such as 腸粉 ('cheung fan'), with any number of tasty fillings -- pork, chopped charsiu, beef, shrimp, oysters, cooked chicken, even turkey after a holiday when you're wondering what to do with that carcass before it starts turning grey or green -- so, after having wasted so much time during the middle of the day that it was too late to do my laundry, I headed down to Chinatown for a snack.

I've found out that shrimp, three or four times a week, aren't bad for you. Yes, they are high in cholesterol, but considering that the average American usually has two or three eggs and an equivalent number of bacon strips with their lard-fried hashbrowns, as well as a side of fries and a soda with lunch or dinner, plus a dinner roll slathered with butter, I figure I'm still way ahead of the game.

You know, if you slathered that dinner roll with a nice chunky salsa, it would be far more exciting, and taste better too. Plus it would help you digest those damned tapioca balls.

Steamed rice flour noodle rolls are, by comparison with the standard American meal, practically health food. As I'm sure my doctor (she's Cantonese) would agree.
And they're absolutely delicious! Especially with hot sauce.


By the way: It's beastly cold today. Windchill factor and all that. I should have worn a sweater over my shirt. Plus the breeze made it difficult to ejoy smoking my pipe. Tobacco isn't nearly as much fun when global warming wrecks the weather patterns.

I'll blame Ron DeSantis for this.
I mean, why not?



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