Winter Joy Retreat-Day 6: Food and Laughter

I'm participating in an online writer's retreat, thanks to Nina Badzin's blog. The topic is "Edible Memories," so all the posts will be about food. I will try to post every day to keep up, but there are some I might come back to later, depending on my schedule and when inspiration strikes.

Due to Hanukkah and a busy week (so far), I'm still behind, so please bear with me. Thanks!

Sunday's Topic:
Let’s hear about your food and laughter moments -- the tears-streaming-funny ones, the line-between-laughing-and-crying ones, the circumstances that linked your experience of a certain food to laughter forever.

There have been so many moments where I equate food with laughter. I'd like to share a few of them here.

*Pieces of E.T.: Once when I was visiting a close friend at her childhood home, we made pasta and put chopped up garlic into it. Her dad saw the garlic and asked what it was, so she said "pieces of E.T.." This is still really funny to me and I can't put chopped garlic into pasta anymore without thinking of that.

*Weird mint frosting cake: With this same friend, I once made a cake that came out all messy in the end. It tasted fine but looked dreadful. We decided to frost it anyway and used mint extract in the frosting. I can still picture and taste that cake now and this was back when we were 15.

*Messy kids: I have this one friend who is clearly not a parent yet because kids getting food all over their faces and hands grosses him out. He says that when he has kids, he'll make them eat outside and then hose them off. So I enjoy taking pictures of my kids when they are super messy and then tagging him when I post them on Facebook. I'm hoping that one of these days, they'll just cover their faces and hands in chocolate and then hug him. (At least my youngest could get away with that,)

My friend is lucky he wasn't there this time...

*Tandoori chicken: My husband used to make this really good chicken dish using a package of Indian spices. He called it Tandoori, but I don't remember exactly what it was. Just that it was delicious. In any case, there are two funny stories that go along with it.

1. We served this at a Shabbat meal where my husband was telling everyone about this incident that occurred during our first Pesach in New Jersey. It involved a man bringing a stolen shopping cart with a stolen statue to the host's home as a gift for inviting him to their meal. The hosts, in this situation, were the Rabbi and Rebbetzin of our community (at that time...they left shortly after we did.) This one couple we had over really liked the chicken, so we made it for them again when they had their baby later that year. They sent us a thank you note mentioning how the chicken reminded them of the story about the shopping cart and the statue. Then they had some new neighbors of theirs ask us to tell the story when we hosted them at a different meal.

2. My younger son was eating the chicken for dinner, but the sauce was too messy for him. So he announced to us: "I don't like the sauce, so I'm going to lick it off." 


*Name mix-ups: There have been a few funny and memorable instances involving not understanding a certain name used for a food item.

1. When I was about nine years old, we went to this Japanese restaurant where everyone sits on pillows on the floor. The waitress came up to me at one point and said "Morty?" I had no idea what she was talking about and thought it was some food item she wanted me to try. Then she finally showed me the teapot and I was like "oh...more tea!" My family thought that was hilarious.

2. When I was in college, one of my friends came back from the salad bar and said "What's the difference between regular Italian dressing and local Italian dressing?" It took me a moment, but then I realized that local was really lo cal, but the words were written too close together. After that, I'd always ask if she got the "local Italian dressing."

3. When my husband and I went to a wedding, one of the servers had these weird looking appetizers on a tray. When I asked what it was, he said "chicka-nut-a-choke." I had to ask him to repeat it a few times before realizing he meant "chicken artichoke." I still don't know what that appetizer even entailed as it didn't look like anything resembling chicken or artichokes. My husband and I would go around saying "chicka-nut-a-choke" a lot after that.

*Braiding challah: A while back, I had a friend over to braid challah with me. She wanted to do a complex braid, and we looked online for instructions. The instructions were telling us to make it like a person and consider the strands either arms or legs. The whole process was so confusing and we ended up just laughing the whole time we were trying to braid. Then my friend had the idea to label each strand so she could figure out which to fold over each time. It worked though!