i win at ridiculously simple recipes
Jun. 24th, 2007 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxI just made the second best pancit I've eaten in my life. And I grew up on Norfolk naval base, so I have eaten a lot of pancit. The best pancit evah? Made by a place in the food court at Waterside. No, really.
Anyhow. Pancit always makes me think about this. About half of my friends until they booted me out of public school in 3rd grade were half-Asian. Half-Filipino, half-Korean, half-Samoan, half-pretty-much-anywhere-there-was-a-US-naval-presence. It wasn't until like college that I realized that was one seriously complicated racial situation, naval housing. Military housing is where the blue-collar folk live. All these boys who join the Navy in their teens, travel around the world, meet exoticised Asian women, bring them home and have cutting-edge (given that you couldn't take a non-white warbride home until the sixties or seventies or something) multi-racial families while retaining pretty conservative working class views on the world.
The military is interesting like that. I wonder how much of my own perspective is colored by growing up with normal being... you know, that.
Of course, at the time, I was FIVE. So what I knew was that all my friends' moms, unlike mine, could cook. They made pancit and lumpia for kids' school things - white people dig pancit. Even my non-cooking midwestern mom picked up a few Filipino recipes.
Package of the thin windy rice noodles (in non-Asian grocery stores, they're called "rice vermicelli", cause apparently we won't buy them if we can't connect them to some utterly different pasta?)
Roughly two handfuls each of:
Cut up carrots
Celery
Snow peas
And one handful of chives (I usually do green onion, but whatevs)
About 1/2 lb of shrimp (I use cooked, cause am lazy)
Tablespoon of olive oil
Fresh ground pepper
Teaspoonish amount of chopped garlic
An undetermined amount of cilantro & curry powder
Assloads of lemon juice and soy sauce (er, "to taste", I suppose)
Open one end of the noodle bag & fill with water while you chop & sautee about 3/4 of your veggies in olive oil, garlic, cilantro, curry & pepper. Add shrimp. Add first installment of lemon & soy. Cut noodles up & throw in pan with everything else. Add about 1/4 cup of water & more soy/lemon. Add rest of veggies. Cook till noodles are chewy but not too limp.
Anyhow. Pancit always makes me think about this. About half of my friends until they booted me out of public school in 3rd grade were half-Asian. Half-Filipino, half-Korean, half-Samoan, half-pretty-much-anywhere-there-was-a-US-naval-presence. It wasn't until like college that I realized that was one seriously complicated racial situation, naval housing. Military housing is where the blue-collar folk live. All these boys who join the Navy in their teens, travel around the world, meet exoticised Asian women, bring them home and have cutting-edge (given that you couldn't take a non-white warbride home until the sixties or seventies or something) multi-racial families while retaining pretty conservative working class views on the world.
The military is interesting like that. I wonder how much of my own perspective is colored by growing up with normal being... you know, that.
Of course, at the time, I was FIVE. So what I knew was that all my friends' moms, unlike mine, could cook. They made pancit and lumpia for kids' school things - white people dig pancit. Even my non-cooking midwestern mom picked up a few Filipino recipes.
Package of the thin windy rice noodles (in non-Asian grocery stores, they're called "rice vermicelli", cause apparently we won't buy them if we can't connect them to some utterly different pasta?)
Roughly two handfuls each of:
Cut up carrots
Celery
Snow peas
And one handful of chives (I usually do green onion, but whatevs)
About 1/2 lb of shrimp (I use cooked, cause am lazy)
Tablespoon of olive oil
Fresh ground pepper
Teaspoonish amount of chopped garlic
An undetermined amount of cilantro & curry powder
Assloads of lemon juice and soy sauce (er, "to taste", I suppose)
Open one end of the noodle bag & fill with water while you chop & sautee about 3/4 of your veggies in olive oil, garlic, cilantro, curry & pepper. Add shrimp. Add first installment of lemon & soy. Cut noodles up & throw in pan with everything else. Add about 1/4 cup of water & more soy/lemon. Add rest of veggies. Cook till noodles are chewy but not too limp.
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Date: 2007-06-25 07:10 pm (UTC)it's also interesting to hear about your childhood normal - so different from my own.