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With the first blush on the candy corn, Halloween
is here, and so begins the holiday season: two glorious months of
guiltless gluttony.
In my family, food is the holiday. Although
we were raised Buddhist, we celebrated any occasion, sacred or profane,
that might involve food. We had the obligatory turkey, stuffing,
mashed potatoes and cranberry on Thanksgiving. We had no idea who
Jesus was, but Christmas was a good excuse for a big meal. “We
don’t celebrate Jesus. We celebrate Santa,” my mom reasoned.
(That Santa is a saint -- albeit a formerly pagan one -- was a mere
technicality.) And being equal opportunity eaters, we celebrated
Hanukkah too, chowing down on potato pancakes and applesauce.
Lent, we had no use for, but we dyed so many Easter
eggs that we ate them for weeks afterwards: sandwiched in toast
with salt and pepper, in egg salad with lots of mayonnaise, or as
a portable snack on long car rides. For Cinco de Mayo we had burritos
with homemade flour tortillas or deep-fried taquitos filled with
crunchy shredded beef, and smothered in guacamole and hot sauce.
One year for Halloween, my mom served hamburgers topped with a slice
of American cheese with eyes, nose and mouth cut out to look like
a jack o’ lantern. On our birthdays, we got to choose the
dinner menu. I always picked the most luxurious dish in my mother’s
repertoire: a rich, buttery shrimp scampi.
But the biggest holiday of all was New Year’s
Day. The one day a year when it paid to be Japanese American, my
entire extended family would gather around a buffet table laden
with sushi, lobster, specially prepared New Year’s vegetables,
potato salad, flank steak, fried chicken, tuna sashimi, chicken-on-a-stick,
sesame green beans, sweet black beans, rainbow finger jello, kinpiri
gobo (burdock root salad), devilled eggs, yokan (a pasty lima bean
confection), cha-shu (Chinese roast pork), fried wontons. Eating
started around 11am and continued in rotating shifts. And that was
just my dad’s side. Around 3 or 4 pm we’d pile into
the car to go visit my mother’s family and the whole feast
would begin again.
Far from an authentic Japanese New Year’s feast,
ours was a mish-mash of half-remembered Japanese cooking and 1950’s
American standards. I’ve since tasted more “authentic”
fare of nearly every stripe: the loveliest latkes on the Lower East
Side, roadside tacos bursting with carnitas and lengua, and my favorite
example of officially sanctioned East-West cuisine: sashimi topped
with paper-thin slices of jalapeño. I know that my mother’s
recipes were Betty Crocker-Del Monte-Kraft perversions of traditional
dishes. But I also know that despite their pre-packaged blandness,
they broadened my palette and instilled in me an adventurous appetite.
In honor of my faux multi-culti upbringing, I still
make (and savor) a recipe my mother found on a bag of Golden Grain
pasta: Mexicali Macaroni. One step up from Hamburger Helper, it
has next to nothing to do with Mexico or California, but it sure
is tasty.
Mexicali Macaroni
1/2 (8-ounce) package Golden Grain elbow macaroni
1 pound ground beef
1 small onion, chopped
1 green pepper, diced
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 12-ounce can whole kernel corn, drained
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
Cook macaroni as directed.
Brown meat, onion, and green pepper in large pan. Add chili powder,
corn, tomato sauce, salt, and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes. Pour
sauce over drained macaroni and sprinkle with cheese.
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