Chew The Right Thing

I was going to write that I wonder who will be reading this now that Jess is back east and Kittee is in South India, but then I got a lovely comment from Kamutflake girl yesterday! My little, almost-one-year-old niece's favorite food right now is puffed Kamut! Well, before she tried some veggie booty!

Yesterday AA and I were invited to a house dinner at our friends' Jennifer, Mark, and Margarita's house. Their house currently has 8 people living in it, and they have it set up where each mate cooks dinner one night a week so that all housemates can eat a communal dinner every day! I would like to come to Mark's Monday one night soon, but for now I have only been to Jennifer's Thursday.

She made a curry -- which was perfect because she and curries hold a lot of mystery for me. Whenever she says that she is making a "curry," it can mean so many different things, so I was excited to watch. We helped her peel and chop ginger, those pink mountain rose apples I mentioned a few posts ago, and a bunch of other stuff, and I watched in awe as she added her different ingredients to the wok. I love to watch other people cook: the techinques we use seem natural to us, but when you watch someone else cook, you see how highly personalized the act of cooking is. Very nice.

It's serve yourself there, and I was first to fill my bowl as I was right in the kitchen when the announcement was made. I put a thin layer of perfectly cooked brown rice at the bottom of my bowl and piled the curry inside, topping with some seasoned cashew nuts. I took a seat at the table and started muching down, chewing and chewing to curry nirvana.

It was only when I was 1/3 through my bowl that I realized no one else, save M & M's young son, had started eating yet, waiting to say a quick note of thanks for the food and for everyone coming. No one said anything to me about it or made me feel uncomfortable at all, but it made me wonder how I could allow my excitement over the curry to so overtake me to not notice. And it made me think that if I can't take a moment to think about the food before I eat and to take stock of my surroundings, then I am either too focused on the food and not the company or I have allowed myself to get too hungry. These are just some preliminary thoughts from a tired brain.

After eating and hanging around talking for a while, some of use headed down to First Thursday to see our friend Sarah's prints at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. We missed Sarah by a few minutes, but we got to see one of her prints, some paintings, plush, and some book art. But then we walked into an adjoining room and checked out the Gingerbread houses that were entered in the Rip City Gingerblaze of 2007. One of the organizers was there, talking to Jennifer about the winners of the contest, pointing to one that was "the only one created by a real artist . . . the rest are amateurs," a mushroom house that neither of us especially liked. My favorite didn't win any prizes except the one in my heart: Radio Raheem's gingerbread jukebox (pictured above). It was called "Chew The Right Thing."