The Bloggomist: Today’s Dish/Yesterday’s Spam
Lifestyle Opinion

I wasn’t expecting “Risotto With Squid Ink and Ricotta” to pop up when I typed in Christmas + news into a Yahoo! search engine. Maybe I should have used Google, I don’t know. Regardless – this little pearl popped up as the first on the list of featured holiday recipes from the New York Times.

At first I scoffed. “Squid Ink Risotto” has sort of a silly, magical ring to it, bringing to mind Harry Potter rather than Pete Wells, or any of the newspaper’s other exalted Dining editors.

As I read down the list of delectables, the Squid Ink dish stuck out sorely amongst the other holiday cuisine featured – classic dishes just dripping with holiday spirit, such as Louisiana Gingerbread, Moroccan Leg of Lamb (reminds me of Nativity), Glazed Holiday Ham, and simply put, Eggnog.

Then my own snobby, unreasonable, Eurocentric hypocrisy struck me. Who am I to judge Squid Ink and what constitutes a real Christmas recipe? My own family never followed any discernable Christmas food traditions, at least not in any Anglo-Saxon sense. We never had ham, or turkey, or … whatever it is you’re “supposed” to eat on Christmas.

But we did have duck. Juicy, fatty, uniquely-Chinese duck. Usually pot-luck style at the house of some seemingly random Auntie/Uncle.  Stir fry took the place of potatoes, and glass noodles and onion pancake stood in for biscuits and rolls. Instead of Christmas cookies, we would usually enjoy my mother’s famed almond letters pastry, which I just learned is apparently some Michigan woman’s Christmas tradition as well.

And squid ink, apparently, is not that exotic. Foodies are familiar with it, and you can actually purchase jars of it if you’re crazy. Also, allegedly, Filipinos are no stranger to squid ink.

“It comes out when you cook the squid,” my boyfriend said. “Duh.”

Hello Kitty Menorah

So there you go. Holiday stereotypes dismissed, Asian stereotypes re: weird food reaffirmed. And lastly, this week’s best site – www.urlesque.com

Spreading the holiday cheer, Urlesque.com (“Exposing bits of the web”) generally links and compiles content from other sites into one convenient forum. They have a fantastic collection of holiday content, including:

(1) Sketchy Santas

(2) The 27 Craziest Menorahs

(3) Weird Christmas Trees

(4) Top 5 Videos of Non-Traditional Christmas Songs

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To see more from Jennifer Chen, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/jennifer/

via EM Staff, 17 December 2009 12:25pm | |