poor little mung beans

Because it’s getting hot, I decided to make sweet mung bean soup yesterday and dutifully submersed a half cup of mung beans in water overnight. I come back from work today and…they’ve sprouted! Little pale white mung bean pointy things sticking out of the beans!

I feel so bad that I’m now going to boil them alive and spoil their chance to live. Seriously, I feel guilty. What did mung beans ever do to anybody? Nothing, that’s what.

I think all the Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau I’ve been reading has driven me a bit nuts. I’ve resorted to cooking to make me feel better. The curious thing is that I don’t really want to eat what I cook, which is proving to be a windfall for Mr. P. He feasted on roasted eggplant, garlic-ginger edamame, pork dumplings (hand-made!), and mango popsicles this weekend. Philosophy makes me lose my appetite, but amps up my inner cook. Go figure.

During the hunt for recipes I came across this page on the cuisine of my hometown. There’s even a brief description of Re Gan Mian, which I’m going to attempt later this week (noodles served warm, with sesame paste, sesame oil, black vinegar, garlic, scallions, preserved vegetables, pepper, and chili sauce). It strikes me as odd that although Wuhanese food is well-known in China, almost no one knows it elsewhere. The fish and crawfish especially are astonishingly good. I think I’ll have a Wuhan theme dinner one of these nights.

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The Potato is not a vegetable; it is a tuber

the infamous veggie poster

I had one returning student during my first session at CTY this year. I knew she had been slandering me when I overheard another student exclaim to the other: “…and she, like, makes you eat a whole PLATE of vegetables at lunch!”

This fearsome reputation is wholly unfounded. Really. But I suppose it takes its root in my one veggie rule: each student had to eat one serving of vegetable(s) at lunch. A few carrot sticks: sure! A small bowl of salad: absolutely. But the announcement of this rule on the first day of class always causes a mysterious keening noise to emit from the mouths of my students.

The first few days of lunch had you piling leaves of iceberg lettuce or tomatoes on your plates. Then there were the spud-lovers: a plateful of french fries drenched with ketchup (or alarmingly, mustard). One girl I sent back into the cafeteria for vegetables came back with a single, insolent kernel of corn.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you, kiddies. I explicitly said: “lack of veggies leads to bowel unhappiness.” You ignored me and continued to kick your neighbor’s chair instead. And the happy results? One of you had to use the bathroom over 5 times throughout the day (I knew because I had to stand in the hall and wait for you to finish). Another one of you turned green suddenly in the bookstore and begged to use the bathroom; after finishing, you came up to me and said, frankly: “that was good because I have been constipated for 3 days.”

So I created the veggie poster. No to potatoes (baked, fried, or tottified), corn, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, etc. Would anyone out there like to debate whether or not corn counts as a veggie? Because I got a lot of lip from the kids about that.

The end result was that I struck terror in the hearts of children. Which, after all, is what camp is all about.