DHB #8 (#11 in 2008)

Since the winner of my V-Day contest wanted the heart ornament (I’ll post pictures of it in a little bit, after it’s had sufficient time to get to her in the mail…), I got to use the cute animal spoons! Last night the dining hall randomly decided to celebrate Chinese New Year five days too late…(it was kind of weird; I have no idea what their reasoning was…) The food was better than usual, and they had more authentic dishes (ha gow, siew mai, char siu bao, custard bao, fun se with wood ear, roast pork, pepper shrimp, etc etc) but it was still not of very good quality (for example, the skin on the roast pork was burned beyond recognition). Long story short, I ended up with four tasty potstickers for today’s lunch.

Contents: Tomato slices seasoned with black pepper, pork potstickers, tangerine, heart-shaped apple jelly

Some other views:

Top…

Side…with spoon (I love these spoons; they’re so cute!)

I tried to use the elephant spoon for the apple jelly b/c somehow I’ve never got used to the idea of sucking the whole thing out at one go (what you’re supposed to do, and what I grew up doing), but it didn’t work — the stuff is made to be eaten in one bite, not with a plastic spoon. 😦  Oh well.  I’m sure it will come in handy for things like applesauce and almond jelly in the future…

– s.

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Playing With My Food

It’s been a really good week, especially for writing — crazy, yes, but good. Today I had a really nice time writing in the morning, and a great Levinthal session, and last night I led a creative nonfiction workshop [about food – the photo above was the one I used for the flier background; Wilbur dining has had some really pretty, red-tinged golden delicious apples recently and one night I decided to play around with carving shapes out of the skin to reveal the white flesh beneath it…]. I was particularly nervous about it (I haven’t seriously written any creative prose in about a year…), but it ended up going REALLY well. Only three people showed up, but we had an awesome discussion about Angela Balcita’s essay “Dumpling,” and got to talk about some aspects of the politics of Asian American subjectivity for writers of Asian American descent. There’s a pivotal moment in the essay when the kids at the lunch table make fun of the younger Angela’s lunch, and for the first time, ever, in a workshop or writing class that I’ve attended – everybody said, “YES! I know that moment! It’s happened to me before, too!” This, I think, is part of why having an identity/interest specific group like O.T. is so important – we get to connect both on the experiential and on the creative level, which is something that doesn’t happen as often in regular-old-Joe workshop settings. It was a great turning point for our group, I think – it really opened a lot of doors that we haven’t been willing to explore before (the poetry workshops we’ve done in the past have been more distanced from our own experiences; I think Balcita’s essay was a good choice because the subject matter is so temporally and experientially close to us as a group of young writers). I hope we get to do more discussions of this type next quarter.

Wilbur Dining’s gotten boring again, so when they had strawberry shortcake the other night I decided to play with it:

It’s really bad; I’ve been eating more dessert than usual lately because I gave up sweet drinks for Lent and I think my body craves sugar…meaning it drives me to eat a lot of fruit – which is good – and also a lot of dessert…which is not. Kind of missing the point, I think. I should try to be more careful. Anyway, it turned out looking kind of dastardly and bloody…I was amused by the irony of it. I guess you could call the image a real “heartbreaker”….[har-dee-har-har….yeah, what an awful pun…okay, I’m done].

– s.

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