I’m a foodie
If you haven’t figured it out by now I am a bit of a foodie. I like to cook and I like to eat good food. I grew eating food that was always a little bit different from what my friends were eating.
My mother and grandparents were from Ukraine and the Slavic diet was very different. I don’t remember ever being at my grandparents when there wasn’t Borscht or chicken soup. Every dinner involved Zakuski, which in our case always involved, bread, butter (yes, it was so important it gets it’s own mention), pickles or cucumbers in summer, some sort of fish from a can, sardine, smoked smelts, smoked oyster or anchovies. Tuna, never! The adults had their Zakuski with shots of chilled vodka and when we were teenagers ours were too.
My grandmother’s take on more American food was hit or miss. Her pot roast and roasted potatoes was to die for. Her take on spaghetti, and I apologize for what comes next, involved cheap spaghetti and ketchup. It was an abomination but the left overs, noodles cooked in butter in a frying pan, ketchup added on the plate were the culinary equivalent of the French fashion term Jolie Le (ugly/pretty) or in this case good/bad. She made Salisbury steak but instead of gravy would spoon the pan drippings over them…it was much tastier than it sounds.
On Nantucket, in not Slavic land, the food was also adventurous. Eating raw scallops off the shucking knife comes to mind. Or the time Uncle Steve made Peking Duck…best I ever had. The first Sashimi I ever had was prepared by him. Fish he’d caught that morning and beautifully sliced.
Neither of my parents drove (my mom got her license in the late 1980’s and my dad never did) and when we took the bus to Boston, we’d stop in China Town. I could use chopsticks fluently by the age of five or six. I was so good at it that once a Police Academy classmate of mine, a former Marine Corps Captain and I were eating Chinese food for lunch. He looked at me using chopsticks and said something to the effect of; “Oh man, you spent some time in Asia”. Nope, just China Town.
I’ve eaten a lot of stuff that most people might think scary or weird. The Army sent me places and where I was supposed to win the trust of the locals. That meant eating their food. Think of how insulted you would be if you invited someone over for dinner and they wouldn’t touch what you cooked. Some of the best things I’ve had have been some of the scariest, baked catfish from Iraq has probably given me the life expectancy of three pack a day smoker. No matter. Street vendor food in Kosovo and rotisserie chicken in Mosul come to mind.
Yesterday, I went to game dinner, lunch really. I ate a lot of good food. Of the menu items, I passed on one so I could catch up with an old friend and one was tough but flavorful. Everything else was fantastic. The food was good but what made the meal fantastic was the company. One of my closest friends and academy classmates, another good friend and academy classmate and a bunch of cops whom I’ve known and worked with for almost twenty-years in some cases. Good guys one and all. We told war stories and recalled funny times and we laughed a lot. Food binds humanity. Meals shared is one of the best parts of it.