Skip to main content

Creating Food

Read this interesting story about roadkill cook-offs. It is like a cooking competition like any other but has a specificity which makes it unlike others, maybe puts it in a league of its own

The Roadkill Cook-Off is Marlinton’s Coachella. Its Mardi Gras or Super Bowl. And Marlinton tries to have its snake and eat it, too: by leaning in to West Virginia’s stereotypes while trying to show there’s something more to the state than hillbilly caricature.

I watched The Menu sometime ago and reading this brought that movie to mind and what it made to caricaturize. The rat dropping themed ratatouille at the Roadkill Cook-off is at the opposite end of the kind of food featured in The Menu. 

There is a level of absurdity in both but ways that maybe the path to reconciliation in these difficult and divisive times. Maybe the two could look at the zaniness of what are each doing and find humor in the other's effort to be special. It may turn out things are not as far apart and impossible to bridge as it would seem at first.

Where the two worlds meet is the amateur cook with a flair for adventure and whimsy. I would call myself one of those. I like making dishes that have an element of surprise, take a staple and give it a little shake-up so it brings a smile on the face of the person tasting it. Small but valuable joys of cooking that always makes it so worthwhile for me.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more