Here, I'll try to write about food.

Last night we made a big dinner that included fried tofu spring rolls, a Thai red curry, and this bastardized pad thai recipe from my favorite cookbook that uses such exotic condiments of the sultry orient as Domino brown sugar and Hunts ketchup. The recipe is reproduced here. There were homemade oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies afterwards. (When Kaitlin and I cook Thai food in our house, we have a little tradition of ending the meal with a dessert from Heartland America to symbolize the hope that the West will one day establish full cultural hegemony over Thailand, thus avenging the affront to European colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia constituted by Siam's independence during that era.)

Anyway. Despite the inauthenticity of the above pad thai recipe, it's a pretty fantastic dish that I am hereby recommending to you. It combines three excellent vegetarian protein sources that can be somewhat boring on their own -- eggs, peanuts, and mung bean sprouts -- into a coherent stir fry of noodles and vegetables that's flavorful and rich and extremely filling without being heavy or greasy. I've tried making more traditional renderings of pad thai with tamarind paste and whatnot, but I've yet to find one that comes out as good as this...in my opinion. Arguably that's because I'm an American and thus my diabetes-prone palate is calling out "I LIKE KETCHUP GIMME MORE KETCHUP". This may be true, but I think it's also because it's a great recipe that just works.

Because I'm not a vegetarian, I usually substitute fish sauce for the soy sauce in the recipe (the original cookbook recommends this). You should do this, too, even if you've smelled fish sauce before and thought it was disgusting. You're not wrong -- it IS disgusting. But it's also amazing. Fish sauce is one of those alchemical ingredients that's stomach-turning in its concentrated form but that when used in just the right way and in the right proportions ends up cementing and centering flavor in an way that imparts the very essence of certain foods (much like nutmeg or asafoetida)*. And apparently, it is made by fermenting fish in brine until they literally dissolve. Which makes me wonder -- can this be done with other creatures besides fish? Could we make a fermented chicken or pork sauce that's made of dissolved animal flesh and that would keep at room temperature? I'm assuming that if we could, there would be an Asian culture that would have done so already.

*I was really wracking my brain for a humorous musical reference to throw into this parenthetical aside as well. Can you think of any that would fit the bill?