Chinatown

It has been a tough few months for my market ambitions here in Chicago. In truth, besides trekking to work, my city voyages have been few and far between. Finally, last week, I went to Chinatown to the mushroom-shaped market closest to the Cermak/Chinatown stop, the aptly named Chinatown Market. The market was bustling on a late Wednesday afternoon, and I knew I could not even begin to fathom its depths in just the 45 minutes I had before the train. But I got started examining strange produce and the unbelievable variety of chili pastes and hot sauces.

I decided to get the ingredients to try bitter melon stuffed with ground pork and a chile/bean sauce to mellow the bitterness of the melon. To Sam’s delight, I also brought home dumplings, green tea mochi, and rambutan—spiky looking little fruits, the size of plums. These last even the cashier didn’t recognize and had to ask others what they were. We discovered that they have a delicious, sweet, almost grape-like texture and flavor. We learned that these fruits that look like sea urchins are the apples of South East Asian, so we started planning a trip to Vietnam.

The stuffed bitter melon was delicious with its balance of bitter, sweet, salty, spicy Here’s my version:

1/2 lb. ground pork

2 T. soy sauce

1 T. chopped fresh ginger

2 T. chopped fresh green onions

2 T. chopped fresh garlic

1 T. lime juice

1 bitter melon, halved and de-seeded, then halved again.

Chili-bean sauce (store bought)

Combine the first six ingredients. Stuff into the melon and steam in a big skillet with a cup of water for 20 minutes. Check periodically to see if more water needs to be added. 

Serve with more green onions to garnish and chili-bean sauce. 

Commodity dating

This blog went up on The Christian Century website today:

The cover story of the November issue of the Atlantic is about why women don't marry. On the back cover of the print edition is an advertisement for engagement rings. This doesn't strike me as an accident.

Here's the logic of Kate Bolick's article: There are fewer "marriageable" men, so women are having to tough it out on their own. The crux of her argument comes five pages in:

If dating and mating is in fact a marketplace--and of course it is--today we are contending with a new "dating gap," where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players.

But what about that "of course"? For me, that's the heart of the problem.

I am the same age as Kate Bolick, 39, and we share the same profession--writing. In terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomics, we likewise inhabit the same approximate sphere (although her part of that sphere is probably way cooler and more interesting than mine).

I married my husband at the young age of 24. She has spent much more time in the dating "game" and is still looking around. Following the logic of the article, I won something in that game and she lost something, but I just don't see it that way.

My husband and my marriage are not prizes, lottery tickets or possessions. I did not win or purchase him in the marketplace of courtship. She did not lose in the marketplace of life. I didn't bargain with marriage for my career; she didn't trade in anything. We use these metaphors all the time as if they don't have power, yet we forget that we are talking about are humans. "Dating and mating" is only a marketplace if we consent to being commodities.           

To think outside the marketplace is tricky in our society. We've been fooled into thinking that dating, weddings and marriage all revolve around buying stuff. My husband and I were quaintly determined not to be objects for each other. He did not buy me an engagement ring. I refused to wear white. I worried incessantly about buying into a bourgeois idea of marriage that meant that our commitment to each other was really about matching tea towels and a good set of pots and pans.

We had the idea--and we weren't certain we could live it out--that a deep relationship with each other could help us become better people, could somehow make us more free. There is nothing exceptional about this idea, and there is no reason to either gloat or apologize about having tried to live it.

At the end of her article, Bolick starts to look in a more promising direction: intentional community. So far, she can only see women in these communities, but if she keeps looking, I think she'll find men interested in figuring out how we can be human together. Meanwhile, let's remember that those "deadbeats and players" out there are humans, not possessions I collect as I move up an imaginary ladder. They have passions and ideas and stories. They have successes and failures. Until we start to see each other as something other than markers of our successes, we will be condemned to the dating game.

African yams and other adventures

Sam played a soccer game next to Lake Michigan a few weeks ago, and that gave us the opportunity to stop by a little African market called "Makola." It is called a "super market," but it is really a tiny place with a few tightly squeezed together aisles stocked with the basics of West African cooking. Facing my true dearth of knowledge about West African cooking, I decided to take the "one of each" approach when it came to the unknown root vegetables. Who knows what they are? I said to myself, but we'll try them all. I grabbed the smallest hairy tuber from of a pile of truly enormous vegetables. It was about 16 inches long and about five inches around--a mammoth of a tuber--with a thick, dusty brown skin.

As I continued to wander around, a man led me to the very back of the store in the corner where there were Ziplock bags of freshly made "kenkey," a fermented corn paste. "This is what we eat in Ghana," he told me. I took the smallest package I could find, which still wasn't very small. The clerk then added a tub of spicy shrimp paste to my basket. "About ten o'clock in the morning in Ghana," he said, "people will eat a little kenkey with some shrimp paste and then they won't need to eat for the rest of the day until evening."

That night, I heated up the kenkey and added the shrimp paste: a powerful taste sensation. The spicy shrimp paste--ginger, hot peppers, garlic and dried fish--was just to the edge of my spice capacity, and the peppers were something like a chipotle in their smokiness. The kenkey is a very dense cornmeal with a strong sour taste. I can't say that it was the most delicious meal I have ever eaten.  The sour and spicy fought with each other in my mouth, and I could only eat tiny bites at a time. Later a friend told me that of all the Ghanaian starches, kenkey was her least favorite. But I could see how it was good nourishing food that could take you a long way into the day.

Last night, I finally boiled up my enormous African yam--as I found out that my huge tuber was called. It pureed into a beautiful silky and light texture like my mother-in-laws creamy mashed potatoes, and will make a great base for soup or a starch for some kind of curry. I think I will try it with the shrimp paste and see if that goes better.

Release Day!

Today is the release day for See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity. One friend suggested I celebrate with a Godiva hot chocolate. Another suggested a drink called The Aviation. I admit I am stuck. It seems wrong to let a moment for celebration pass without some kind of acknowledgement. But I did eat quite a bit of Halloweeen candy yesterday. You see the dilemma. I am open to suggestions.

The South Forty

The next stop on my tour of southern Manitoba was Rachel's hometown of Altona. Rachel chose The South Forty for our breakfast. The South Forty is a very old-school diner with vinyl booths and worn carpeting. I could easily imagine Robert Irvine from Restaurant Impossible walking in and criticizing the 1970s paneling and the pressed wood tabletops. But the restaurant was run by a friendly Indian couple, and Rachel told me that once a month they do a killer buffet that brings in the masses, Mennonites hungry for chicken masala. 

I ordered something called "The Southern," partly because I was intrigued by the name. In the U.S. "The Southern" would probably mean grits, but here it meant pierogis. This still has me mystified. What "south" is indicated by potato and cheese pierogis? Is it the south of Poland--Krakow--where I first tasted pierogis? Or the south, and Polish, part of Chicago? I have no idea, but I'd welcome thoughts.

My disorientation continued as Rachel and I listened to a couple of old farmers in the next booth talking rapidly in a language I didn't recognize.

"What is that?" I asked her.

"Plattdeutsch," she said, grinning.

A "southern" breakfast in a northern town, in a restaurant run by East Asians, in a place where at least four languages are spoken readily. Fun.

If you want to eat off the beaten path, go to southern Manitoba.