Chopped up turkey

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I went to the Whole Foods in the Upper East Side after work tonight to pick up an 11.15-pound free-range whole turkey in preparation for my early Thanksgiving feast this weekend. My oven is a sad, small Manhattan oven, so there’s no way I’d be able to roast the bird whole. So the last few years, I’ve asked the butcher at the meat counter to cut it up for me. This year, I came to request it to be chopped up, and the meat guys behind the counter said the butcher had already left, but they’d cut it up as best as they could. But they warned me that they’d never cut up a turkey before, so to not be too disappointed if the pieces didn’t turn out too pretty.

“Isn’t a turkey really just an over-sized chicken?” I asked the meat guys quizzically. “You guys cut up chickens all day, right?” Yes, they do.

It came out fine. I also made sure they cut up the back bone and put it back in the bag. “You want the back bone, too?” Damn right, I do. I’m not paying for a whole turkey to then have them take away the freaking back bone. That’s for my future stock.

Then, I lugged my big bird all the way home along with a pint of eggnog ice cream on sale. I only walked about ten blocks back to my apartment, but I already felt strained carrying this bird, along with a five-pound bag of flour and a two-pound bag of sugar. As I walked down to my street, I remembered all those years when I prepared Thanksgiving feasts at my Elmhurst apartment, and I went all over Manhattan to multiple stores (because of my food quality anality) and brought all my foodstuff supplies back to my Queens apartment. I never thought much about the inconvenience of buying things in one borough and carrying them back to another. I just did it because it had to be done. Now, I’m spoiled for convenience and dislike carrying weight in general.

It’s interesting how times have changed in my life. And in the next stage of my life, I may have a car and drive groceries instead of carrying a grocery bag even one block.

Dead yeast

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I love making bread. There are few things more amazing to me than the smell of fresh bread being baked in my oven at home, especially when that bread is either eggy, buttery, or a delicious combination of both. Unfortunately, since I’ve moved into this apartment over three years ago, I haven’t made a real yeast bread. The closest I’ve come to using yeast in this apartment was using it for appam earlier this year, and that, while edible, was a disaster in terms of how long it took to cook.

So for whatever reason, I bought instant yeast years ago, and I had no idea whether it was still alive or even how to test it. I know how to test dry active yeast, but I had no clue on how to test instant. So I did what anyone might do and just proceeded to use it in the challah recipe I wanted to use for my early Thanksgiving celebration this weekend, and I convinced myself it would work.

And then after two “risings,” I took photos and compared the before and after. I wasn’t sure if the dough had really risen, or if it was just my eyes trying to make me believe it did. It seemed too stiff and not airy at all… And the final verdict? The dough baked into a hard long brick. And I had a big mess to clean up after and no edible bread to eat.

I’m never buying instant yeast ever again. And the remaining instant yeast packet, which I bought around the same time a few years ago, also went into the trash with my sad dead yeast dough.

Invitation prep

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Chris and I have spent the weekend going through wedding to-dos, writing out wedding invitations, preparing the envelopes, and going through the mailing address list. There were a few names on the list of people who are my mom’s friends who we didn’t have addresses for, and so I had to call my mom to ask for their addresses. This is one of the must frustrating things because my mom is honestly one of the most disorganized people I know. It will take her weeks to find a friend’s address because she has about five different address books in five different places, and she doesn’t even write all the addresses in those books. She writes them on random note pads that she leaves all over the house. This is not an exaggeration.

So I called her today to ask for a friend’s address, and she says, “Why are you sending her an invitation? She got laid off from her job a few months ago.”

Well, this isn’t really about job status, is it? It’s just our sending her an invitation, and she can RSVP yes or no or whatever she wants regardless of whether she can come. She’s a good friend of my mom’s, so I’m not sure why she wouldn’t want her to at least get invited formally.

“I don’t think you should send her the invitation,” my mom persists. “She has nothing to offer.”

I realize that in the majority of immigrant Asian families, people throw weddings expecting to bank it in and profit. I’m Westernized to the point where I don’t look at it this way, so regardless of whether she comes or doesn’t, gives money or doesn’t, I really only added her to the list because my mom asked me to a year ago. I did what I was told, and now I’m being told to undo what I was told to do.

“Did you remember to put on the invitation that you want cash only?” my mom said. “You don’t need junk gifts.” I wanted to grind my teeth.

My family is too complicated.

Bullying

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This afternoon, we went to see Hasan Minhaj’s show Homecoming King at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village. The show goes through his immigrant family’s path to coming to America, how he met the sister he didn’t realize he had, and the bullying he faced because of his Indian heritage in school. During the talk back session after the show, he and a film director are discussing bullying in schools in general and why they both think institutions and people in general need to acknowledge it more and do something about it.

It made me sad to remember how Ed used to be bullied. He was a pretty easy target since he wasn’t particularly athletic, was skinny and not that tall, and of course, he wasn’t confident. He was bullied by classmates, even by a teacher at his elementary school who used to hit him. He was defenseless and didn’t know that it was wrong and that it shouldn’t have happened. And even if he did tell our parents, what would they have done? Would they have even defended him and went to the school to have it addressed given that our own father bullied him?

Every day there’s something to remind me about Ed and the injustices he faced. The question now is, what can be done to change similar situations for kids who might face a life just like his?

Thai in Midtown East

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Tonight, Chris and I went to his friend’s apartment in Midtown East and ate takeout Thai with a bunch of their mutual friends. Two of the friends were relatively new, so one of the friends was describing how we’d all met and how our lives have changed over the last four years since they met. We’re engaged, one of them is married and has a child on the way, and two of them are “the same,” as in, single without any realistic prospects for romantic relationships in the near future. This isn’t really the future that the three of them had envisioned for themselves four years ago.

Chris’s pregnant friend is actually due the week after our wedding, which pretty much means that she and her husband won’t be able to come. It’s a sad truth, but that’s life. We can’t all coordinate our lives to make sure we can always be there for each other at our biggest life moments. It makes me sad, but it’s just another reminder that we should all just live our own lives and stop living it for other people or around other people’s schedules.

Paranoid personality disorder

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The last time I was home, my mom went off at me for hours even after I was in bed at 10am to get ready for work the next day to tell me that Chris treats her and my dad “like dirt” and has zero respect for the two of them. The reason for this was that she claimed that Chris had never once in the last three years ever offered to pay for a meal for her and my dad, and that he just expected my parents to get the tab every time, except for that one time at In N Out Burger, which she says was a massive insult. The irony behind all this is that Chris has paid for many things for them, including vacations to the Grand Canyon and Vancouver, yet, she seemed to have forgotten all of that.

So given that this incident happened, I’m not sure I want Chris to see my parents before the wedding. He’s planning to go to San Francisco for work in two weeks, and he asked if I wanted him to go see my parents. My knee-jerk reaction was no unless he was adamant to pay the bill at whatever restaurant it would be at. He got annoyed at it, saying he refuses to play my mother’s games and that she always fights him for the bill anyway, and so it’s a lose-lose situation. “Why don’t you just do what you would normally do and not do everything as a reaction to your mother’s potential responses?” the therapist said today. It’s a valid point. So maybe I should just let him go see them.

We went through the DSM and came to the conclusion that my mother is almost a textbook example of paranoid personality disorder. She’s constantly distrustful of everyone and anyone, is hypersensitive and misinterprets compliments as backhanded insults. She holds grudges for every little thing that happens to her and always perceives herself to be the victim. Someone is always “hurting me so much,” as she always says. The examples throughout the course of my life are so many that I can’t even go through them all.

The therapist thinks that as part of my process for empathizing, I should keep this disorder model in mind when dealing with her and recognizing that it doesn’t make sense to act rationally with someone who is not rationale. But I’m not sure if I really think that will help me because Ed and I always thought she had some sort of disorder. With something like this, it’s nearly impossible to treat, and it’s even harder when the person doesn’t recognize that she has the problem. So it will never be acknowledged, treated, or cured. It’s an impossibility.

 

Wedding guest anxiety

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It has to be because I went to what was arguably the best wedding of my life this past weekend that I am now having wedding anxiety. Last night, I dreamt that I met all three of my bridesmaids for lunch. While we’re sitting around a table and eating, I announce to them that I’ve decided to call the wedding off. As their faces change from smiles to total confusion, I take out a sheet of paper with a list of at least ten to fifteen different reasons for why we’re no longer getting married. A few reasons on this list include that we’re no longer communicating, we’re not open about our feelings, Chris is having an affair with some woman in Sydney, and we’re no longer having sexual relations with one another. My friends have no verbal response, but their faces say it all.

I woke up and told Chris about my dream, and he said my subconscious is going crazy. Yes, it certainly is.

Wedding debrief

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I talked to my mom on the phone today since it was my first full day back from Europe, and she wanted a full download of the wedding events. I told her about everything from the food to the DJ to the fireworks, and of course, she said, “Wow, both their families must be rich!” I think if I told my mom that a couple got married in a haystack that she’d probably respond the same way. She wanted to know how much time exactly we spent with Chris’s parents, and if we gave a “decent” amount for the wedding, which is her way of trying to ask how much money we gave as a gift. There was no direct reply to that.

When it comes to money and how much people make, my mom tends to always assume that everyone else is rich except for her and my dad… and me, and that I tend to give too much to people who either don’t deserve it or need it. But she’ll always frame the questions as though I should be giving more. That’s the trap. So if I were to tell her an amount that seemed hefty, she’d respond and say I would go broke spending money that way on “everyone,” and then proceed to get mad at me. It’s the cycle of no-win situations when you are dealing with someone who likely has some sort of paranoid personality disorder. Everything is malevolent and a reason to be angry and suspicious and distrustful.

“Stranded” in London

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The last time we got stranded at an airport because of a missed flight due to connection delay, we were given barely $25 for dinner and breakfast, and a hotel stay at the airport Crowne Plaza in Chicago. Yesterday, our connecting flight from Heathrow to JFK was delayed to the point where it didn’t make sense for us to get on the plane, so we took the airline up on their offer to stay at the Renaissance hotel at the airport, accept dinner and breakfast vouchers at their very plush hotel restaurant, and $800 USD each in airline credit for the inconvenience. Apparently this type of reimbursement is due to British law with delayed and cancelled flights in the U.K. I could get used to delays and cancellations with reimbursements like that.

This also meant that I finally got to see London and set foot in the United Kingdom, even if I only got to see the city for about four hours. It was the most glorious delay and accident that could have happened, and an unexpected ending to our France trip. The only thing missing was crumpets.

Bastille Market’s poulet roti

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I’ve been hyped up to go to Marche Bastille on our last Sunday for the last several weeks in great anticipation of our French version of the Last Supper in Paris: poulet roti from the famous poulet roti woman at the market, along with chicken-fat-drenched tiny yellow potatoes. Poulet roti is just French for roast chicken, but this roast chicken is marinated for two days in sesame, soy, and a large variety of herbs, then roasted on a rotating spit over tiny little yellow potatoes. I’d read about it on multiple food blogs as the thing to eat when visiting Marche Bastille, so I knew we had to have it.

When we picked the chicken up and I ripped into it with a sad random spoon we had in our bag and my fingers, I knew we had made the right decision. The skin was crackling, crunchy and very complex tasting and flavorful. It was sweet and slightly salty and herby all at once. The flesh of the chicken came apart quite easily, and the dark meat was perfect. The breast meat was tasty, but the star of this chicken was clearly the skin and the dark meat. It even came with its little giblets on the inside cavity; that’s something you don’t normally get when you buy roasted chicken in an American supermarket. Americans can’t really handle their giblets. I wanted to inhale the entire chicken, and I almost did since Chris’s dad doesn’t like to eat with his hands, and Chris’s cousins shied away from eating that much.

It was a sweet finale to an end in France. I practiced a lot of French here, was received more happily than I was last time, and bought enough chocolate, butter, caramels, and pharmacy products to last me the next year. I can’t wait to come back and eat the rest of France.