I often told my wife that I married her to have adventures, and she scoffed at me, “I don’t ski. I don’t bungee jump. I don’t skydive, or drive race cars.” Nonetheless, it was true, and most everything was an adventure with her. Take something as simple as eating.
She was an excellent and adventurous cook as well befits the chemist that she also was. She would often make dishes for the first time ever and serve them to guests, almost always to their amazement when she admitted that she’d never made the dish before. When we lived in Albuquerque for 6 months, she taught herself to make chili colorado, and we also had our first Indian food (ironically, despite the location, East Indian, not Native American), discovering among other dishes the delightful gulab jamun. Gulab jamun are fried dough balls made from milk solids and semolina. They are soaked in a syrup flavored with cardamom, rose water, saffron, and cloves. The cardamom sold me, and Sharon was a sucker for anything with roses. Also she had a genetic pre-disposition for spherical pancakes because of ableskiver, the Danish equivalent, from her great grandfather the Danish baker (who actually was from Denmark).
She would sometimes get possessed by her great grandfather’s spirit. Once she woke me up at 3 am saying, “I can’t sleep. Let’s get up and bake cookies.” So we did. One year for Christmas presents, she (with unskillful assistance from me) made a hundred dozen cookies. They made great gifts for an extended family whose wants and needs you were not really aware of. They wouldn’t get thrown in a closet and forgotten after all. The big hit was the springerlie, an anise and vanilla flavored cookie. Sharon’s authentic recipe called for a special ingredient as a substitute for baking powder. I can no longer remember what it was, but we had to go to a pharmacist to get it IIRC. It was a different sodium based compound. The springerlie were a huge hit, but, as my brother complained, they were great but so hard that you had to chip them off a bite at a time, but their taste made them irresistible. I contributed a secret I learned from my grandmother. You put a slice of bread in with them, and within a day or so, the cookies suck the moisture from the bread, softening them.
Once when Sharon and I were up in Chinatown in San Francisco, one of our Chinese friends tried to freak us out by ordering squab for us and, after we ate it, pointing out that squab is just a polite name for pigeon. After that every time a pigeon landed on the sidewalk in front of us in Chinatown, I annoyed Sharon by saying, “Here pigeon, tasty, tasty pigeon.” We would try almost anything. FYI sea slugs are just as disgusting as they sound, but candied jellyfish isn’t bad.
When Sharon and I were first married, I remember us going out with a couple of my friends to a Chinese restaurant. My friend noted that he always got the cashew chicken. Sharon ordered something with sizzling rice which they ignited table-side for us by pouring alcohol into a very hot pan and then ladling it out. My friend was appropriately impressed, saying, “Of course Sharon would order something like that.”
One of the things Sharon did was always search the local college extension classes. Most such classes were just what you might expect, but sometimes they were for the leader to share cultural experiences in a way you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. When we were in Albuquerque, there was the class on novels set in New Mexico, and the class on llamas, but I digress. At UCSD where Sharon was in graduate school, the chemistry department had many post-docs from all over the world, China, Japan, Switzerland among them. The head of the department would throw parties that allowed the post-docs to show off their normal cuisine, and, at one of them Sharon had gotten her first taste of caviar, but had not been overly impressed. When an extension class showed up that touted itself as all about caviar, taught by a restaurant owner from Georgia (the one in the Caucasus, not the US state) where caviar comes from, Sharon decided that she wanted to see if there really was something special about caviar.
Unexpectedly enough, the front of the restaurant at the address where the class was held had signage proclaiming it The Lone Star Barbecue with a much smaller sign saying Sasha’s, and it was as surreal as you would expect. There were paintings of cowboys and other western scenes, poker hands pinned to the ceiling, and a samovar on every table. The owner and class instructor explained that he and his partner had spent their first few years in the US in Texas, and they weren’t sure if a Russian restaurant would be a hit in San Diego, so they compromised. For lunch the restaurant was The Lone Star Barbecue, and for dinner it became Sasha’s serving Russian cuisine. Each table was supplied with a bottle of vodka. Our host marked the level of vodka in the bottle with a black marker, explaining that Russians sold vodka by the inch rather than the glass, and they would measure the level when we were done. He also led us in the first toast of the night, explaining that a Russian’s first toast is always to the chair, because it holds you up. He led us from the typical caviar you found in the local stores, up the ladder of taste and authenticity, to beluga to salmon (pink caviar), and finally to authentic sturgeon caviar, the most expensive. The beluga was probably what Sharon had already had, and the lowest on the quality ladder. The salmon caviar (with the distinctive bright pink eggs) was pretty good, but perhaps not worth the price, we decided. Of course, it was the most expensive and truly authentic sturgeon caviar that Sharon decided was definitely the best, and the only one that truly justified the reputation that caviar has.
Musings of a Restless Mind 