Lingbo Li
What’s your food story?
I wrote a piece for The Crimson this Thursday about my food story. It got more comments than my pieces for them normally would, and I was happy to hear that it struck a cord for some people.
Writing publicly about my personal life is always a tricky balance – what I choose to reveal is entirely truth, but an artfully constructed one that skips over the plot holes and protects the guilty. I’m sure you deal with the same issue every time you choose to tweet something, update your facebook status, or write about a date on your blog. There’s always an inherent danger – whether that’s annoying a friend, an employer, or your reputation.
What I choose to make public is very much deliberate. At the same time, I try to be honest as possible about what I do write about – even when it won’t make everyone happy, or is too acerbic for some. I don’t pretend to know what I don’t, but I’m ruthlessly analytical if I do.
“captain obvious” commented on column, writing: “Uhh, we all like food lady…”
Too bad CO misses the point by about two miles. We all enjoy eating food – it sustains us, after all – but I’m much more interested in how differences in eating habits highlight basic feelings of difference.
Did you feel alienated growing up? (I spent all of my time in front of the computer, basically. Great for developing my employable skillset; not so great for social skills.) Do you get frustrated when eating out with certain people or groups? How did your family’s food culture affect how you see food today?
What’s your real, honest food story?
Share it in the comments.
Piattini Gelateria and Match mini burgers
It’s Reading Period! I granted myself a free day wander down Boston’s beautiful Newbury Street, visit some fabulous friends, and eat some junk food… because I deserve it.
I have a good relationship with gelato. We’ve gotten along thus far – I had some truly makes-your-mouth-sing gelato on my brief stopovers in Rome and Paris. (Not as glam as it sounds, I was on a rowdy Topdeck tour that produced utterly cookie-cutter photo-op travel experieces.) I still fantasize about those heavenly fig and honey concoctions that I ate two years ago. So I was looking forward to some inventive varieties.
I saw recently opened Piattini Gelateria and Cafe and decided to give it a try. The super sweet waiter patiently explained every single flavor on the menu (rosemary honey, turkish coffee, fior de latte, thai coconut milk, chocolato scuro, frutti de bosco. And the sorbets were grape, mojito, limone, and pesca).
I sampled a chocolate with hazelnuts that wasn’t on the menu, which was so intensely rich that I decided on spoonful was enough. Rosemary honey felt like chugging floral-scented lotion, so that was a pass. Fior de latte (Amish milk) had the “lightness of vanilla without the vanilla flavor” – it seemed more like a fluffy absence of flavor than a flavor.
At an impasse, I gave thai coconut milk and mojito sorbet a go.
I think the major weakness of the gelato was that it wasn’t very cold – by the time I ate it, it had become soft and a bit melted. It also had a lot more air that I would normally expect. It seemed that chocolate flavors are you best bet here. I had been hoping for something deliriously coconutty, but rather, it was seemed more like run of the milk coconut ice cream.
The mojito had a nice sour, puckery note and icier, grainier texture of sorbet worked well with the flavors.
The bill for this small dish came out to $4.82. Plus tip, this ended up costing me about $6. My credit card felt a little sad.
I wish you had been a more transcendental $6 spent.
Oggi’s “to die for” slice of the day
Steak pizza with fried shallots? It sounded promising, and it was indeed pretty tasty.
The shallots added a lot of textural interest – plus they were kind of fun to eat, but didn’t actually add any positive flavor to the slice. They’d clearly been sitting on a pan for a bit, so they weren’t crunchy, and had been overcooked so they actually tasted bitter. As always, though, this place really kills it with their flakey, sesame-seed sprinkled crust. Divine.
I ended up not finishing the slice (I wasn’t that hungry) and gave it to this homeless woman with a broken arm who made me feel so sad that I wished I had just bought her an entire pizza pie.
[Photo Album] Hey, Remember That Time I Tried to be a Beauty Queen?
Me and the best Miss NY USA ever, Tracey Chang
Love her! Everything a beauty queen should be – smart, ambitious, and yes, gorgeous.
I am now paler and paunchier, four days after the fact.
This photo shall serve as photo evidence that I was indeed, for two brief seconds, ever so fit and tan. I’m a little scared by the ribs, but I think that’s just my oversize skeleton poking through.
FOBs need love, too.
Yeah, I had no idea why they had cadets there either.
There are just some things you don’t question.
Getting fat again
So I use “fat” in a tongue-in-cheek way. But I definitely spent the last few weeks watching what I ate, which meant no crazy banquet dinners, dinners of scrambled egg whites and vegetables, and the occasional helping of cheese dip, heaped high with guilt.
As a result, my stomach became a cast iron tank. My collarbone and ribcage took greater prominence. When I lay down, I marveled at how my skin stretched over my gently jutting hipbones. It felt like a lesson in skeletal anatomy.
So on my first day back on Planet Girl, I felt totally free to go on a carb-and-calorie rampage. I was going to eat EVERYTHING and ANYTHING I could possibly ever want to eat. I was going to ignore stomach pains. I was going to consume whatever was put in front of me, especially high in simple starches, sugar, and fats. I was going to try to undo whatever I had done to myself.
The night before, I’d made good work of a ginger-and-scallion lobster dish, a beef/pepper/pineapple stirfry, and a salt and pepper fried squid at Peach Farm in Chinatown. The verdict: the cooking was a bit rushed, and the quality suffered as a result. My dad commented on how slapdash the dishes seemed to be put together, although the beef stirfry was meltingly tender and delicious. Then I topped it off with a half a red bean bun as I stalked around on my 5 inch clear heels, bronzer still caked on my stomach, legs, and arms.
Lana Lingbo Li
I'm a world traveler / enthusiastic eater who's now blogging and producing videos over at HelloLana.com. Visit me there!
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