Or pity. Or boredom.
My children drink fizzy water at same clip I do. Our house files with rhe slithering hiss of them popping a can right before bed. We will sit in our wood paneled basement with the built in bar and hi fi stereo (Long defunct, set by a guy named Bud, the former owner) and full the air with opening cans. Save it's not shitty dad beer but generic fizzy water.
Never seen a pineapple fizzy water. That would make my son happy. For fall I once got a set of pumpkin spice fizzy waters. Those really crystallized all the hate fizzy water get save when you "scream peach through a desk fan in other room" you still can maybe get some taste of peach. The PS H20 had all the flavor of snorting pumpkin pie spice without any sweetness. My mom used to put pieces of pumpkin like bay leaves in her beans. Only the green Puerto Rican pumpkin mind you. The quintessential orange pumpkin did not exist there even imported.
There was also Puerto Rican lettuce, a frilly leafy kind grown hydroponically on the island. That one company had the lock on the market and it became the island lettuce, romaine or a head of Foxy always imported. Puerto Rican lettuce, the old ladies said, would make you drowsy.
I've also fooled people into Mami stories. These are tales of my mother solving problems and being an absolute bonkers person doing so.
"Do you have any more Mami stories?!" I would get from women too beautiful to be talking to me. Men too interesting to be seem with me.
One Mami story is more of a repeating moment, sort of a family meme that repeats itself over and over. Sometimes Mami would have the pressure cooker and be frying something on the stove at the same time! She would have a pot of rise going in background also beacuse why not?
To my mother (And to me. All ghoulish jokes aside I will never own one due to the fear. And it being 2023. Mostly fear, however) pressure cookers were death dealers. The Nazgul from Lord of the Rings? A pressure cooker for sure had to be one of those dark riders.
She would seal the lid and then let it cook while the spindle on top hissed and wheeled.
"Don't get close!" She would say if you got in even a four foot sight line of it. It tasted fear and sensed movement, a terrifying pastiche of several villians.
Only scarier thing than a pressure cooker was frying something. Which my mother did quite often. Porkchops (chuletas) or bistec empanado (breaded fried steak) or tostones, arañitas, or sorrullitos (fried plantains and or corn meal) or, rarely, almohabanas (rice meal cheese buns made with cake flour)....always something frying.
"Get out!" She would scream as she flung thawed meat and plantains into the amber oil. My mother resued oil until it was the color of Tang. And then it would pop and gurgle and belch grease. "Watch out" she would yell even if I was two rooms away.
But sometimes she would have both going. She would make this culinary version of Scylla and Charybdis and dare us to thread the needle if we wanted a glass of water or get to the backyard.
"Be careful!" She would then take a sharp suckimg breath like the gasp of air after seeing someone take a stumble "No, don't get close! Go away!" Talk to my mother and you would be safer in the core of Three Mile Island. Stuck 10 feet below the summit of Everest. Anywhere but in that kitchen.
No comments:
Post a Comment