signal boost, and thoughts
Apr. 13th, 2011 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardVia rydra_wong, from Vegan About Town
"I am pleased to announce that I am hosting Potluck #2: Comfort Food. Submissions can cover anything you like, and you do not have to stick to the theme! but please remember that we are trying to talk about intersections. Potluck is, after all, intended to be a carnival for multicultural and intersectional discussions of food, including but not limited to food discussions intersecting with disability, gender, sexuality, fat, animal rights, and cultural and racial issues. How many times have you gone to eat your comfort food, only to be told it's gross and weird and disgusting? How many times has advertising told you that your comfort food is wrong and terrible?"
So this turned up on my dwircle this morning and I went, "Wow, that's really appropriate." Because I've been eating a lot of comfort food this year, though I didn't really articulate it as such until March 11, when I was running around and crying and trying to get in contact with my relatives and trying to get a phone, when I made my roommate go with me because I didn't want to be wandering around in hysterics and tears in a neighborhood I didn't know when it was coming on dark. And she said, "Let's go to Kyoto for dinner, since we're up here anyway." So we went to dinner, and I ended up getting tekkadon, miso soup, hot green tea, and green tea ice cream. And that was what I needed. That was exactly what I needed. If I'd been home, I probably would have been crying into a bowl of curry-and-rice with salt and vinegar potato chips stuck into it like grave markers, and that would have been comfort food too.
I grew up eating Japanese food, but it wasn't the only thing I ate, and sometimes I wasn't very fond of it. Miso, for example -- that we had a lot, and I would fish out the little cubes of tofu, eat them, and give the broth to my mother. It wasn't something I would eat by choice, but I realized that day at Kyoto, clutching the bowl of miso soup they'd given me, that this was the food of comfort, of home, of family. And I realized why I'd been making, and eating, a lot of food with Asian flavors this year -- the first time I'm living somewhere on my own with a kitchen. It's not the food I grew up eating, but it's comfort food. The flavors are what's there. The idea that, somehow, eating gyoza or white rice or miso is a tie back home, to my family, to the generations that came before me. I've had a really stressful school year. Food helps.
So, yeah, I think I'm going to try and write something for this potluck. I think there's a flip side to the Japanese flavors = instant comfort part two, embedded somewhere in me experimenting with Scandinavian flavors and recipes this year.
Coincidentally, as I write this I've been sipping miso soup out of coffee cup. (It's instant, organic, and non-Japanese; the flavor's not quite where I'd like it to be, but it's better than nothing.)
rydra_wong, from Vegan About Town"I am pleased to announce that I am hosting Potluck #2: Comfort Food. Submissions can cover anything you like, and you do not have to stick to the theme! but please remember that we are trying to talk about intersections. Potluck is, after all, intended to be a carnival for multicultural and intersectional discussions of food, including but not limited to food discussions intersecting with disability, gender, sexuality, fat, animal rights, and cultural and racial issues. How many times have you gone to eat your comfort food, only to be told it's gross and weird and disgusting? How many times has advertising told you that your comfort food is wrong and terrible?"
So this turned up on my dwircle this morning and I went, "Wow, that's really appropriate." Because I've been eating a lot of comfort food this year, though I didn't really articulate it as such until March 11, when I was running around and crying and trying to get in contact with my relatives and trying to get a phone, when I made my roommate go with me because I didn't want to be wandering around in hysterics and tears in a neighborhood I didn't know when it was coming on dark. And she said, "Let's go to Kyoto for dinner, since we're up here anyway." So we went to dinner, and I ended up getting tekkadon, miso soup, hot green tea, and green tea ice cream. And that was what I needed. That was exactly what I needed. If I'd been home, I probably would have been crying into a bowl of curry-and-rice with salt and vinegar potato chips stuck into it like grave markers, and that would have been comfort food too.
I grew up eating Japanese food, but it wasn't the only thing I ate, and sometimes I wasn't very fond of it. Miso, for example -- that we had a lot, and I would fish out the little cubes of tofu, eat them, and give the broth to my mother. It wasn't something I would eat by choice, but I realized that day at Kyoto, clutching the bowl of miso soup they'd given me, that this was the food of comfort, of home, of family. And I realized why I'd been making, and eating, a lot of food with Asian flavors this year -- the first time I'm living somewhere on my own with a kitchen. It's not the food I grew up eating, but it's comfort food. The flavors are what's there. The idea that, somehow, eating gyoza or white rice or miso is a tie back home, to my family, to the generations that came before me. I've had a really stressful school year. Food helps.
So, yeah, I think I'm going to try and write something for this potluck. I think there's a flip side to the Japanese flavors = instant comfort part two, embedded somewhere in me experimenting with Scandinavian flavors and recipes this year.
Coincidentally, as I write this I've been sipping miso soup out of coffee cup. (It's instant, organic, and non-Japanese; the flavor's not quite where I'd like it to be, but it's better than nothing.)