Offbeat
Meet Felice, Creator of the World’s First Linux Birthday Cake
My roommate Felice is neither a typical Harvard student nor a typical pastry maker. When I first saw her, she was powder pale, with a green mohawk, combat boots, and no eyebrows. This will be interesting, I thought. Maybe we can do each other’s makeup.
We lived together entirely by accident – my roommate and I at the time were looking for some more people to make a room of 5. She gamely agreed.
Felice turned out to be the brainy lovechild of a punk rock Betty Page and The Odyssey’s Homer. In between translating ancient Greek texts for her senior thesis and poring over orgo homework, she watched a constant stream of L-word spinoffs and brutal slasher flicks.
One day, she’ll be a surgeon, a programmer’s wife, and proud mommy of the cutest pet rats ever.
Felice and her boyfriend, Yuvi Masory, hacker extraordinaire
Felice ended up being my favorite roommate my strange, wild junior year. The five of us in that doomed rooming group were an unlikely melange of misfits – “a flophouse” she aptly described it – and it wasn’t long before chaos swept our cinder block duplex.
One by one, like an Agatha Christie mystery, the room fell apart.
One girl left, amidst a swirl of unanswered questions. And then there were four.
For the rest of us, latent problems became crises. Annoyances became vendettas. I was literally scared to return my room, and when I did, I locked the door and braced myself for collateral damage. By spring semester, the bickering reached a fever pitch.
I spent most of my semester either in class or hopping from one food event to another, spending more time in Boston in a month than most Harvard undergrads do in all four years.
And then there were three.
Felice ended up being the mediator; her room was the bunker, the common room was no man’s land. After she listened to everyone’s problems with saintly patience, we laughed about the black comedy unfolding. In between complaints, I wrote my anthropology essays in her room decorated with 50′s pinups and queer icons as she Skyped her long distance boyfriend.
In a school where people frequently hide their insecurity beneath a shiny veneer of ambition, Felice was refreshingly genuine about both. She didn’t dye her hair funny colors because of some calculated counter culture attempt. She just liked dying her hair.
And she understood, perhaps better than anyone else I’ve met, about what it means to feel profoundly, deeply different without apology. She was silly and joyful about her quirks and didn’t bother to hide them.
She doesn’t collect business cards. (While I have so many lining my tote bag.) She has the same insecurities like everyone else, but doesn’t fall to unwitting flashes of cruelty when she feels down. It’s refreshing.
So when she takes a stab at baking, it is infused with an equally individualistic sensibility.
Yes, that’s a birthday candle betwixt her rouged lips.
For her programmer boyfriend’s birthday, Felice made her favorite stalwart Linux enthusiast a cake shaped like the operating system’s logo. Earlier, we had dropped by IHOP for dinner while he showed me his flashcard generator program, executable via the command line interface.
Different can be beautiful, and delicious.
Flushing Mall’s Improbable Statue
There are some things in life that can only be elegantly described as “WTF?”
This statue (with me hamming it up on the left to convey scale) was found in Queens’ Flushing Mall en route to the Flushing Mall Food Court. Photographer Robyn Lee was equally perplexed.
Yes. WTF indeed.
Crowdsourcing my blog entries
A cool photo my friend Sam took that I'll put here for no real purpose other than looking good in it.
Hi denizens of the Internet, Asian women, unseemly lovers of Asian women, Harvard students, and their ilk:
I want to try something out.
Actually, I want you to figure out what I should try out.
After all, you know better than me what to do with stale cake, why Chinese food is so damn cheap, why I’m wrong for eating innocent whale flesh, and where to grocery shop in Boston.
So I want you to leave me a comment below – it’s easy! it takes two seconds! – letting me know what you want me to write a blog post about.
Have you always wanted to hear what I think about pickup lines? The best places to study in Harvard Square? What that molecular food class at Harvard is like? My picks for hair products, chopsticks, lip glosses (I have many), cookbooks, nonfiction reading, or best-looking celebs?
Whether I’ll do another beauty pageant? My favorite self-tanner? The thrills of slurping Cantonese-style congee?
Part of this comes from realizing that an awful lot of you like to click the “life” tab on the navigation rather than the “food” tab. If you want to hear about life… let me know what topic you’d like to hear about.
I can’t promise that these will all get done ASAP, but I’ll get around to all of them eventually.
A few ground rules:
1) Nothing inappropriate, based on my judgment. I like the fact that my parents and employers read this.
2) Nothing horribly expensive.
3) Um, if I think of anything else, I’ll put it here.
Please! If no one leaves me anything to write about, I’ll eat my foot. Mmm, foot.
Small Asian Girl vs. Pasta From Hell — East Coast Grill’s 100th Hell Night
There are nine circles in Hell, and I am determined to make it to the last, torturous one.
I wade through the murk of the river Styx, then step over the cold, bloated bodies that populate the circle of Gluttony.
Finally, I make it to the Ninth Circle. The red finger paint on the window reads, “BEWARE: Eat at your own RISK.” Sinning souls jockey for space at the bar while yellow strips of caution tape flutter over above their heads. I pick up a menu which has subheadings like “Lucifer’s Liquid Coolers” (spicy cocktails) and “Entrees from Hell” (eclectic dishes with the zing of Cajun hot mustard or bird chile-lemongrass broth).
I’m in Cambridge’s Inman Square, home of East Coast Grill, who is setting their kitchen aflame for their 100th Hell Night (April 12-15, 2010). For three nights, three times a year, they serve the spiciest food that sadism can muster. For decades, the event has attracted spice masochists the world in the past quarter-century who come to sacrifice their tongues to flame.
I figured if there were any small Asian girl who could handle Hell Night, it would be me. I’m brazen with my applications of Sriracha to dining hall food. I’ve eaten Sichuanese hotpot in Chengdu, which essentially drinking scalding, spicy oil. In frustration over Thai dishes not being hot enough, I’ve literally eaten spoonfuls of fish-sauce laden bird chilies to the admiration of waiters and professional eaters.
photos by Sam Lipoff
But only the truly deranged ask for East Coast Grill’s mythical Pasta From Hell. It’s a dish so hot that they make you sign a consent form. A manager personally requested that I not eat it. “I’ll give you a spoonful for free,” he told me. “Please don’t do it to yourself.”
In the interest of research, I have to. I meet Satan to do the deed. His name is Dr. Pepper, and he’s wearing a felt hat shaped like a jalapeno. His shirt printed with cartoon flames and a string of plastic chiles is looped around his neck. Rasta-colored sweatbands encircle his wrists. He seems positively… genial.
There’s a hellish ingredient in what I’m about to consume. It’s called the ghost chili (naga jolokia) – as omnious as it sounds.
It is the hottest hot pepper in the world. It clocks in at about a blistering 1,000,000 Scoville units.
You do not eat it; it eats you.
Dr. Pepper brings over the orange form. It reads “Hell Pasta Consent,” and the final paragraph describes what I am about to experience after eating this pasta of lore:
“Close your eyes and imagine an angry Goliath Birdeater crawling down your throat, the irritating sting of its barbed urticating hairs penetrating the membranes of your tongue and esophagus. The large hairy spider reaches your stomach and sinks its fangs into your intestines… Hours later, it tears out the other end, alive.”
I sign my name.
My dining partners and I had sampled the merely very spicy dishes already without much event. (I was actually somewhat disappointed at the level of spiciness, although the steak and Korean fried chicken were all very tasty.) The pasta came, quivering under its thick application of seasoning. I twirled a generous, wide noodle around my fork and placed it in my mouth.
I chewed. Then I took another bite. It took about 5 seconds for it to hit me. But when it did, I understood what I’d signed up for.
Imagine the hottest habanero you’ve ever eaten. Imagine the rip-roar flash burn of a Jalapeno, the prickly Novocain of a Szechuan peppercorn, the sour sizzle-pop of a hit of Tabasco.
Then multiply that by hundreds of thousands.
Imagine an unchecked forest-fire flame searing your throat and tongue and the roof your mouth to a well-done cannibal’s steak. Water only prolongs your agony. Milk barely dampens the flames.
That, my friends, is the Pasta From Hell.
I barely survived three bites before I succumbed to tears, mouthfuls of cornbread, and half a glass of milk.
But other people were more extreme. The man at the table behind me shoveled the entire thing into his mouth in thirty seconds, then looking pale, ran outside to throw up.
He came back, concerned girlfriend in tow, and declared victory. He’d only thrown up the three glasses of water he’d chugged after the fact.
Dr. Pepper came by with a free t-shirt for the pasta victor and posed for photos. But I knew that the Devil would have the last laugh. Come tomorrow, his digestive tract would burn anew. What goes in, after all, had to come out.
Alligator, yak, and ostrich, oh my: Student Prince in Springfield, MA
You will never go to the Student Prince . First off, it’s a 90 minute drive away in western Massachusetts – so far off, you might as well be teetering on a fiery lip overlooking the nothingness of the end of the world.
Who knows what spiny, lantern-jawed fish are fit to survive so far from Bostonian civilization.
But I braved it anyway. I hoped to do the foodie equivalent of resume padding. It was the last night of February – and the last night that Student Prince would be serving exotic game meats. Lipoff had tipped me off on yak, bison, elk, alligator, and boar in hearty preparations.
The trip wouldn’t have been possible without Lipoff’s battered-but-spunky Peugeot, riddled with quirks. The seatbelt, for example, is backwards: you pull up from the bottom left to affix it above the right shoulder.
After a delayed start, we arrived, 90 minutes later, in Springfield, MA. Student Prince is unabashedly German, and there’s a pleasantly institutional feel to the place. (Meaning established, not infirmary-like.) You think about how many years it’s taken to accumulate the beer steins on the wall, the knick knacks and ski lodge-esque wood paneling, and the loyal clientele – primarily white and older on the night I went, a score of families bonding.
Travel is surreal: I remember the tired, cheesy desperation of the ferry that shuttled me across across the strait from Dover to Calais. This wasn’t hopping between England and France, but the past 90 miles in the Peugeot felt inadequate to match the impossibility of where I sat.