The Trouble with food

The Trouble With Food ©

By Michael Casey

The trouble with food is that we all eat it, if we didn’t eat it there would be no problem, but we’d all starve, so we eat it. In our house we have East meets West cuisine, Birmingham to Shanghai food. As you know my wife is a Shanghai girl, so our two bilingual daughters  have “bilingual” diet too, though to be honest they eat Eastern diet 80% to 90% of the time.

The Shanghai diet involves lots of chicken and fish and of course 50 shades of rice. Which means my daughters are very slim, they have not inherited my Irish big build, I hope it also means that they live very long lives.

I used to say as a child that I’d love to live till I was 100, with the Chinese connection that would be very useful, as my wife will live another 60 years and my girls another 90 years. I just hope there is enough money in the pension pot, though I have very high hopes for my girls so I think there will be. My youngest daughter has already decided she wants to live in a cottage and she has reserved a rocking chair by the fire for me already.

But back to food, snacks are a big thing in our house, my Shanghai wife has a sweet tooth, so if you are eating the right thing all the time you can indulge in snacks. Be warned though, Eastern snacks can be either very very sweet, or totally bland to our Western tongue. Sometimes you do need a degree in Oriental languages to know exactly what is in the fridge, on the Eastern side of the fridge, or in the biscuit tin.

Korean snacks can be very nice, I must confess, we did actually have a priest called Fr. Jacob who was Korean. Then there are Chinese and Japanese snacks, it really has opened my mind and taste buds to a whole new dimension. Here in Birmingham we have a few great places to shop for Far Eastern food, as well as the best curry houses in the world if you just want Eastern and not Far Eastern cuisine.

Behind me in the living room the smells of chicken and rice fill the air, they have just finished watching The Hunger Games, now they are eating their rice and chicken. And yes the sauce is everything.

Ten years ago when Ma the mother in law was here for the birth of our daughter, she came for both births, a local very rich Chinese lady hounded her for her chicken recipe. Chinese love their food, the rich lady could afford anything, but the one thing she wanted most of all was Ma’s chicken recipe.

Food fills us all up, it brings smiles and it deepens friendship and love, so it’s a great thing. Food to fill us, but more importantly food to share and enjoy. If I’m lucky I’ll get the slops from my 3 girls, I had my own dinner earlier so really I’m not allow to have any of theirs.  

Food is a voyage of discovery, it’s like discovering you have a tongue, when you did never had one before. Well for me it was like that, moving on from kebab and chips to all kinds of Chinese stuff.

My wife did actually cook for me on my Birthday, though I was sent out 3 times to get more ingredients, the spice of life I suppose, without any actually spice. I think she cooked egg fried rice for me but with tomatoes in it and something else. That led to marriage and children and family, so be careful what you eat.