Not the same

[beetiger]

It's snowing like anything, so no one's left the building for lunch and Donna the cafeteria lady's nearly run out of food. I've gotten the one thing she has left, which she has billed as "Maryland crab and corn chowder". Only it hasn't got crab in it. It's got surimi. That's "imitation crabmeat" or "crabstick" for those of you not up on the technical names of weird foodstuffs -- those sticks of pollack and stabilizers, rolled so that they flake in sort of the way fish does, dyed red on the outside. I'll forgive you if you don't know the word, as the only place I've really seen it in use on a menu was in a Kosher sushi restaurant, where I suppose they wanted to make extra sure their customers knew there was no crab on the menu.

I actually like surimi quite a bit. California rolls are high on my list of favorite snack foods. When I was a young person, I used to eat chunk surimi with cocktail sauce all the time, pulling apart the layers of white with my chubby little fingers. When I'm feeling protein-deprived, I'll still do this. But the stuff should not be used in cooked dishes! It's dreadful in crab soup. It's indescribably horrid in stuffed mushrooms. It loses its texture entirely, and it's like eating flavorless strings of cotton.

Most "substitute" foods only work in some of the realms that their authentic counterpart inhabits. Butter "spreads" don't work well in cooking. Nutrasweet falls apart entirely in baked goods. You won't want to use fruit-based fat substitutes in delicate foods like croissants. Hummus may "substitute" for cheese in sythyry's healthy breakfast diet, but I wouldn't make a quiche with it.

When we were at my mother's house for New Year's, at one point my mother laughed and proclaimed that lediva was "another Vicki". I have no idea what she meant. Was it the fact that she and I were having some sort of a mini-debate using largish words, the details of which I've forgotten? Was it the fact that we were both talking over my mom's boyfriend, not allowing him to get a word in on the topic? Did she see the same sort of spark in each of us that we see in each other, some deep commonality or strangeness? Did she think she could love lediva like a daughter? Or was that just her way of saying that she didn't understand the conversation at all, but was sure that we must?

Comments

Re: Free to Be Me

[fenton.livejournal.com]

Somewhere (that I found within the past year or so), I still have an audio tape of that. I really need to pull it onto a computer, clean it up, and burn it to CD before the tape gives up the ghost...

(Actually, it's in relatively good condition, for a tape, it just has the inevitable hiss and audio artifacts).

Hooray for Atalanta, indeed.