Dim sum for Thanksgiving—not as unique as it sounds

It turns out that neither going to the Smithsonian nor going out for dim sum for Thanksgiving is such a unique idea after all.  The American History Museum was packed with families yesterday and we had to take a ticket and wait in line at the dim sum restaurant, which was still overflowing at 12:30 even though it seats 150 people.

I would love to make dim sum a new Thanksgiving tradition. Dim sum personifies my number-one reason for eating out: to eat things I cannot (or will not take the time to) make at home. (Perhaps I could master one or two of the dishes there, but the beauty of dim sum is the constantly changing variety). We ate sticky beef noodle crepes, taro root dumplings filled with mushrooms and a savory sauce, radish cakes (which don't taste like radishes at all, more like sticky rice and bacon), steamed buns with pork, shrimp dumplings, stuffed bean curd, and more. It was fun to get to select the little trays of food off the carts the Chinese ladies wheel around the tables.

There's one little problem: PE sat through most of the meal with her eyes moist, her lips puckered.  We thought she would like dim sum since she loves tofu (but only if bland and uncooked), rice and dumplings. And she has loved the idea of dim sum since reading Dim Sum for Everyone when she was in preschool. Alas, the food was just too exotic for her.  She wouldn't touch the sticky noodle crepe, which was really just a long steamed dumpling; she ate the steamed bun until she hit the center and found a slice of onion; and we had to keep the shrimp dishes on the other side of the table so she wouldn't have to smell them. The only thing she finally ate was the stuffed bean curd, whose center was like the center of a meat dumpling. She pulled off the bean curd skin and ate the inside.

It's hard to enjoy a meal when one of your fellow diners is unhappy and hungry.  And, though he ate a share of the food, TA was soon stuffed, leaving D and me to eat more radish cake than we wanted; we were too full for the steamed Chinese broccoli when it finally came around (our meal was missing a vegetable).

I'm not sure there is a lesson in any of this, if this means we'll have to crawl back to more traditional fare from now on, so that everyone will eat and be happy. Maybe we'll try again at Thanksgiving in a couple of years, when PE might not be so picky, or we should go there some other time, with more adventurous eaters as our dinner companions.

Thanksgiving dinner in a Chinese restaurant?

Despite what I said in my last post, how cooking Thanksgiving dinner usually gets me out of my post-summer cooking doldrums, a few days ago I decided that I really don't want to cook on Thanksgiving this year.

Though I've loved making Thanksgiving dinner in the past—mostly because I can't think of a better flavor combination than turkey-cranberry-pumpkin—I haven't be able to bring myself to buy a turkey or even a turkey breast at the grocery store this year, much less order an organic turkey from the local Amish market or natural foods store weeks in advance.

My hesitation became clear last week when I read the comic Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! in the Sunday comics. (See the whole comic at:  http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20081123/ltmrkt081123.gif ).

I already spend a portion of most evenings in the kitchen cooking dinner and another portion of the day cleaning the kitchen (I don't have the cleanest kitchen in the world, but I manage to get the dishes off the counters and loaded or washed by the end of the day). How can it be a true holiday if I am in the kitchen most of the day? And with just the four of us for Thanksgiving this year, it was hard to justify so much work for just four portions. Plus, I always find Thanksgiving pots and pans the worst to scrape and wash, taking longer than a normal day's wash.

So we are planning to head to the Smithsonian's newly reopened Museum of American History, then out for dim sum (if we can find it), or anything else that might be open. I am thinking this might be a new tradition for us, a thankful-to-be-liberated-from-the-kitchen day.

Still, if the weather turns out to be horrible, or I change my mind and become suddenly nostalgic for a more traditional Thanksgiving, there is a can of whole berry cranberry sauce and a small can of pumpkin in my cabinet, and part of a frozen chicken in the freezer, from which I could surely pull something together. Maybe I only need to know that I don't have to stay in the kitchen all day this Thursday before I can head back there with a spring in my step and a sense of freedom in my heart.

A 50/50 (organic/non-organic) compromise

I’d like to eat only organic food, but I don’t (as I've said in previous posts)--not only for cost reasons, but also for lack of accessibility and convenience.

Some organic foods are more expensive (see post about organic grapes) than I can justify for the health benefit--I’m not sure it’s all that healthy to buy a couple of pounds of organic grapes and then munch on them with clenched jaw, stressed over the hole they’ve put in the family budget.

And, if I insisted on only eating organic food in restaurants, I would have to travel to downtown D.C. and eat at Restaurant Nora (America’s First Certified Organic Restaurant) or some other such fancy-pants restaurant, meaning that our family of four could only go out to eat once or twice a year. (And PE probably wouldn’t eat anything anyway, unless they offered organic chicken nuggets). Or I wouldn’t be able to eat out at all when traveling to rural North Carolina, where I’m from.

If I only ate organic, I'm afraid I would be like I was after I returned home from my first semester in college--I was a militant vegetarian and a pain in the neck to all. I refused to eat most of my family’s Christmas dinner. I didn’t eat ham or turkey, I wouldn’t eat the rolls because they were made with bleached flour. I probably ate the cooked vegetables (not even knowing the difference between organic and non-organic produce since it wasn’t readily available in N.C. in the 1970s) and maybe one of the whole wheat carob brownies I was always making and carrying around with me then. I remember my grandmother’s hurt look at this or another family dinner, when I again lectured her about the danger of bleached flour and she said, “I thought all food was good.”

Just that one comment had a huge effect on me later in life. I have tried to approach grocery shopping and restaurant eating with that philosophy. In the grocery store, I may steer my way past corn-syrup-laden food (except for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving…) but I will buy non-organic, canned pinto beans since the organic beans there often run a dollar more; I buy regular whole wheat sliced bread for school lunches when organic bread isn’t available; and I justify eating what I know is not going to be organic chicken or meat in a restaurant because I usually eat organic or free-range meat at home.

I call this approach the 50/50 compromise—what is, essentially, a half-a**ed approach to organic shopping/eating/living (but 50/50 is a nicer tag for our family readers). It allows me to eat almost anywhere (when we occasionally go to McDonald’s, I’ll guiltlessly eat salads or fish sandwiches there, not worrying where the vegetables or meat came from) and to buy groceries from almost any store. There are only a few items I rarely compromise on in the grocery store, like organic milk and free-range eggs. Out of the house, though, I’ve eaten frozen custard and IHOP pancakes, never giving it a thought about where the eggs and milk came from.

Fifty percent (or somewhere thereabouts) organic is better than no organic at all, I tell myself. Maybe only the super-rich and super-sheltered (or people who live on organic farms) can truly afford to be all-organic. The rest of us can do what we can, arriving at whatever ratio of organic/healthy food we can afford or muster, whether it’s 60/40 or 25/75 percent, etc. The 50/50 compromise has helped me think, within certain boundaries, that all food is good.

What We Ate: Aug. 11-15

Out of town all week, so we ate with family and in restaurants. When in North Carolina, eat... sushi?

The four-five reasons we go out to eat

Because are always trying to pay off loans or otherwise save money, we've stopped going out to eat on a regular basis. Around here (metro D.C.), dinner for a family of four at the cheapest restaurant (except fast food) runs at least $40, excluding tip. 

We don't go out to eat except for the following exceptions (which have continued to change over the years):

1. When we're out of town and can't make food for ourselves anyway (this is a justification for saving up all year by not going out around here so we can taste the local cuisine wherever we go).

2. It's someone's birthday--the birthday person gets to choose where we eat (though M. often opts to have D. make dinner for her).

3. D. is out of town, so to fight our sense of isolation without him, we go out to eat once, at a restaurant chosen by PE and TA, which means it's usually McDonalds, Quizznos, or Taco Bell.

4. If we're swamped with projects or work and have no time to cook--though, usually, this most often turns out to be take-out or frozen pizza.

(5. This isn't a family event, but D. will go out for lunch while at work or after work, to socialize with co-workers; and M. will sometimes go out to lunch with friends--both valid reasons, for us, to spend the money on a restaurant. We're only frugal up to the point of not being hermits/socially isolated).

D. and M. going out for dinner and a movie is a rare occasion these days, given that a dinner date with a movie can run around $100 here, if a babysitter is also part of the cost. We sometimes go for a movie with no dinner or go out for dessert and coffee, with TA providing babysitting services.