By Any Other Name

While a great many ugly realities may be laid squarely at the feet of economic globalization there is one positive for which I am of late unrelentingly grateful. My workplace, populated as it is by an extraordinary collection of émigrés to the U.S., has provided me a number of escape routes for dealing with Brainiac’s allergy situation and his attendant sudden inability to eat darn near anything. When my colleagues and I are not breaking into spontaneous choruses of We Are the World after staff meetings, we’re sharing lunch and recipes. It’s not at all unusual these days for a man born in China to show up in the cafeteria with homemade pierogie or, say, for me to bring extras of my latest batch of pho to pass around. Of course, in the way of multiculti knowledge share, we each add our own special touch to whatever dish is on offer. I regularly scandalize my Indian-born colleagues with my insistence on preparing chana masala in a slow cooker and those pierogie are more often accompanied by a bit of lime pickle rather than fried onions and sour cream.


I’m not making as much pho these days what with the whole beef-free thing going on and all. There have been frustratingly large numbers of other dishes that are also no longer on the family menu and I confess that it’s been getting me a bit down. (Someday I will tell you about the tears – copious – that resulted from the salad I now call the Chickpeas of Death.) In sharing my misery, loving company as it does, with co-workers the other day I realized that I already had access to all the knowledge I needed for dealing with the challenge of feeding my husband in this, our new normal. Knowing that most cultures do not eat the volumes of beef, pork and wheat to which we’d become accustomed, I merely had to make the leap from the abstract to the personal. So I did what anyone in that situation would do…I dug my spoon into a friend’s wheat-free, soy-free, and meat-free lunch, declared it delicious, and demanded the recipe.

Which is how I came to be buying a large sack of sabudana - known to me as tapioca – at my favorite Indian grocery. The dish shared with me at lunch that day turned out to be 100% allergen-free (at least for Braniac – given the presence of peanuts your mileage will seriously vary on this point and may actually come to a screeching halt) and amazingly delicious for someone whose only exposure to tapioca was via puddings from a long-ago childhood. As with the aforementioned peirogie and chana masala, I expected that I would not follow the directions precisely but would likely filter them through my own culinary baggage/heritage. Even executed in my own Western-style kitchen, I expected deliciousness and just the thing for feeding to a man who is tiring of borders, culinarily-speaking.


This is not my sabudana*. This is what my sabudana was supposed to resemble - little individual grains of chewy, nutty, spicy goodness. What actually appeared in my pan to was translucent, gelatinous, quivery, alien, and not generally good looking. We all agreed the taste was excellent but...no one could bring themselves to eat all that much of it. I texted news of the failure to the friend who gave me the recipe in the first place and she diagnosed too much water, too much oil and too-coarsely ground peanuts. So, put us down as work to be done.

In the meantime, I'll be in the conference room, working on my very best Cyndi Lauper impression.

* (This is not my picture and I don't know from where it came originally. If it's yours, let me know and I'll take it down or give credit, whichever you prefer.)