Eating Brave

Here's something most people don't know about me: I'm an ethnic food poser. I make all this noise about loving a wide range of cuisines, but when it comes right down to it, I still find strange food scary.

My sweet husband, who is suspicious of all things spicy and most vegetables, makes it easy for me to look like I have a sophisticated palate by comparison. My children, unfortunately, have followed and even surpassed him in this vein, to the point where their spouses will one day curse my name because they won't eat anything happily besides macaroni and cheese and gummy bears. Jack cries if you give him chocolate.

So around my house I can pretend to be urbane and adventurous, but truthfully it only goes so far. I'll tell you, for example, that I really like Indian food. What I really like is about three Indian dishes. And I only like them because I showed up at the Indian buffet down the street from my house (because that's who I am: the kind of girl who probably likes Indian food) and proceeded to freeze at the buffet line like a deer in headlights until a chuckling old Indian woman put a bunch of stuff on my plate and made me try it. Lo and behold, it was delicious. And now I like curried chicken, chicken tikka masala, and some potato-cauliflower-pea thing. (Hard to repeat-order that last one.) That gives me enough breadth to be able to pretend that I'm a lover of Indian cuisine, and to toss my hair and roll my eyes at Mark when he asserts that he'd rather have oral surgery than go to the buffet at the end of the street.

Problematically, however, I tend to buy my own hype. This leads to such acts of folly as including "Try 5 new varieties of ethnic food" on my list of 40 things. My culinary experience runs about a mile wide and an inch deep, so finding 5 new cuisines has been a challenge. Once I come up with a prospect, I forget until I'm actually looking at a menu that I have to find dishes that don't contain tofu, green sauce, scary-sounding peppers, soy, or unfamiliar sea life, among other restrictions.

So this five cuisines thing has turned out to be more of a challenge than I'd anticipated.

I have managed to knock off three, though. Last fall my friend Sue took me to a Persian restaurant...we've covered that. All winter this task lay dormant, but in June I dragged my family to a Hungarian festival in nearby New Brunswick, NJ.
At the festival I approached a tent with some authentic-looking options. (Read: signs written in Hungarian.) I nervously bantered a little bit with the woman behind the table, but she found me not at all charming. This may be because I was so visibly out of my element. It may also have to do with the fact that she didn't speak English. Finally I pointed a sausage-looking thing, which she put between two slices of rye bread. I handed her some money, she handed me some change, and after doing the math and checking the menu, I determined that I was eating kolbasz szendvics. I have a feeling that this translates to "kielbasa sandwich," but it was at a Hungarian festival, darn it. I'm counting it as new.
Somehow it was both dry and kind of greasy, and I won't be asking for it on special occasions, but otherwise it was perfectly palatable; I'm always relieved when the unfamiliar turns out to be safe.

I made a little more progress on this front today, but that story is going to have to wait for a bit. I need to make dinner for my kids. Macaroni and cheese. :) Stay tuned.