Cooking Confidential

In one of my all-time favorite movies, “It’s A Great Feeling”(1948), broke working girl Doris is collecting brochures from the racks in a travel agency. She asks the agent, who obviously knows her, what looks good this year? Indulgently helpful Mr. Agent, who has obviously dealt with her before, makes his recommendations. “Don’t you remember?”, Doris mildly reproaches him, “That’s where I didn’t go last year!”

My life in a nutshell: Well, I’m back in the rooming house business once again (has it really been almost 12 years?!) , now that we have already not moved to Rio or New Delhi this fall. Ironically, having put the house on the market meant that we were temporarily closed for renovation– so now it’s full steam ahead with a house full of Taiwanese dentists here for a special one month exchange program. As a little-friend-of-all-the-world type, I do enjoy most of my boarders, but when you’ve been doing this as long as I have, certain general traits, especially those of specific nationalities, for better or worse, do stand out. I’m sure there are adequate numbers of morose and negative people in Taiwan, but my Taiwanese guests are almost without exception happy positivists. And they do love good food. My current guests have loved my various CC breakfast offerings– oatmeal rolls, banana bread, coffee cake–, but were down right excited over the blueberry muffins this morning.

It always surprises me when people ask me if I make dishes from the cuisine of my guests’ home countries. My answer? They’ll be eating_____cuisine the rest of their lives, why would they want a poor to mediocre version of it here? Especially in the case of Taiwan, which is has a tradition of really good basic home cooking in restaurants as well as the average home kitchen. In fact, my guests seem to especially relish meals that contain familiar foods or flavorings, but in a completely unfamiliar context. Rice and pasta dishes are foods that Chinese love, and that intrigue and gratify them when served at my very American table. Last night, “Kent”– Americans just can’t get a grip on the correct pronunciation of Chinese names– asked me to give him a small plate of food, since he’d had a rather large lunch. Well, he so enjoyed my standard formula brown rice “pilaf” , topped with a piece of baked salmon with lemon and dill, with a generous spoonful of mushroom sauce (bechamel/white sauce with vermouth) over all, that he just had to have seconds! (see a first cousin once removed of this meal in my CC dinner diary #1).

In fact, my darling dentists are so enamored of cuisine chez Nelson, that they’re bringing their cameras to the table for their own dinner diaries. Stay tuned– they are going to send the pics to us and I’ll post them for you.