It’s Super Bowl Sunday, so I’m naturally drawn to thinking about the main reason for the day: no, not football. Nope, not commercials. Huh uh, not gambling, not commercials about gambling, and not the halftime extravaganza. Nope, I’m thinking about food, obviously.
If you got that one wrong, you needn’t feel bad. I used to think that the day was about football, but then the once-successful football team I rooted for decided to take the 21st century off from winning. Their last appearance in this national holiday tradition was in 1991. Commanders is not only a boring name. It’s also ironic.
I guess I eat when I’m discouraged.
On Saturday I was at the grocery store trying to do the weekly shopping so that my wife, who had to work that day, could drop one thing from her list. Of course, this failed, because I’m male, and I forgot to inform her that I was making this noble gesture. We were parallel shopping.
So, we both came home with the rare Super Bowl parlay: Doritos, Fritos, and mini hot dogs. But that’s not what I’m thinking about on Super Bowl Sunday. I’m thinking about daal…or dal. Both spellings are acceptable.
Yes. I’ll explain. So, food was on my mind yesterday because it was Super Bowl Eve, but that specific food was on my mind because the night before, we had gotten take out from an Indian restaurant, and I had ordered daal. This surprised Nancy. It sort of surprised me, too, but when I stopped to consider the reason, I thought it probably had to do with an experience in kindergarten. No, not kindergarten in the last century; I’m talking about kindergarten last week. I had been in Ms. T’s class the week before, (no, not the wife of Mr. T. That would probably be a last century reference, too. I’m just calling her Ms. T. because I try not to use full names in my entries in case the people don’t want to be associated with the kind of free-form babbling that I call blogging. Come to think of it, I don’t know the real last name of the real Mr T. either. Ms. T. could be married to the Mr. T from the A-Team, but I’m betting against it ). Anyhow, Ms. T. had read a book called Bilal Cooks Daal, about a kid who introduces his neighborhood friends to his favorite food. One of the kids in Ms. T’s class, R., was so excited that his teacher was reading this book. He helped her with her pronunciations, and he kept a running commentary throughout the read aloud session, confirming some of the details and countering others with the “real facts about daal.” I was so impressed with his knowledge of the ingredients, because as with many Indian dishes, there are a LOT of ingredients…and because R. is 5. He described how his family’s daal tended to be darker than the yellowish daal described in the book. He said it had to do with the variety of lentil, not the amount of turmeric. His classmates all nodded, as if that was what they were thinking, too.
At dinner on Friday I was relating this to Nancy (I’m using her name because she is already associated with this free-form babbling that I call blogging…by marriage), and it led me to discussing my own experience cooking daal in Poughkeepsie. I had recently graduated from college and was making $3.15 per hour at a private reading tutoring operation. We were located in a strip mall on Route 9. That $3.15 was the result of three raises in five-cent increments over the course of my 6 months of employment. My career was on a remarkable trajectory. These are not important details, but I am including them as hints of how old this memory is. It contrasts nicely with the current labor dispute in Major League Baseball, where one of the points of contention is whether the starting salary should go up to $670,000 (per year, not per hour, but still) or stay at the meager $570,000 as set in the old collective bargaining agreement. Anyhow, the $3.15 per hour was okay, because the room I rented in Poughkeepsie only cost me $150 a month. I got a really nice furnished bedroom and full use of the kitchen in an incredible old Victorian house. The woman who owned the house had recently retired from IBM, and her husband had died a few years earlier. She needed someone to mow her lawn, shovel her walk, and sometimes take care of Myrtle, the miniature poodle she had rescued.
Myrtle had issues, but that would be a digression.
The real subject of this entry is Norma. I feel that I can use her name here because as someone who has died, she probably won’t mind being mentioned on my blog. Probably.
I really liked Norma. She was almost fifty years older than I was, but we became friends. I miss her.
I’ve been blessed with a lot of mentors in my life, but Norma is one that I’ve never written about. Sharing a kitchen with her was an education. She never cooked for me, but she demonstrated how I could stretch my slim paycheck. Aside from breakfasts, I was completely inept in the kitchen. I think Nancy is still traumatized by a dinner at my apartment two summers before, in which I served her a frozen pizza topped with sliced hot dogs in place of pepperoni. No, the pizza wasn’t still frozen when I served it. I knew to put it in the oven for 12-14 minutes before serving. But the hot dogs…
I remember Norma teaching me how to make a huge batch of spaghetti sauce on Sundays. Kindergartener R. would probably like me to mention that in addition to garlic, onions, basil and oregano, Norma liked to add a little sugar to offset the bitterness of the tomato paste. I’d then divide my mega batch into meal-sized portions and freeze them. I felt rich with all those sauces stowed away.
She taught me how to make chili (also in huge batches). I had no idea you could hide a little chocolate or even some coffee in a batch of chili.
She expanded my breakfast repertoire by teaching me about shirred eggs and the use of sour milk as a substitute for buttermilk in my pancakes.
She also showed me how to grow my own alfalfa and mung bean sprouts in mason jars with cheesecloth over them. There’s something about growing your own garnishes that can actually make salad appealing to a 21-year-old hot-dog-topped-pizza eater. (That was some tricky punctuation, as I didn’t want to imply that I had placed 21-year-old hot dogs on top of myself! That would be crazy).
Which brings me to daal. One of Norma’s daughters lived in Pakistan at the time and had taught Norma how to make a lot of Indian/Pakistani dishes. Clearly, Norma could see that most Asian cuisine was not in my zone of proximal development. Still, she thought I might be able to approximate the daal that she has learned to prepare.
She was wrong.
But I always appreciated her belief in me, and I’ve always appreciated when someone else made a really good daal.
So, on this Super Bowl Sunday, I’ll be watching football and commercials, and commercials about gambling sites and commercials about gambling apps and commercials about what to do if you or someone you know has a gambling problem, and I’ll be watching the halftime show, and I’ll be eating lots of mini hot dogs.
But I’ll be thinking about my old friend Norma, and wondering if someday soon I’ll be ready to try making some daal.
FiveHundredaDay 