The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [117]
“Nyo dza,” he wrote. “I think that’s the name of the beef tripe at dim sum with the turnips and Chinese spices. Or else the other, smaller kind of tripe that mom likes, but I don’t.” Then, thinking that I was planning on making one of these delicacies, he offered to look up recipes in some of his old Chinese cookbooks.
“I think there’s one in Pei Mei’s,” he wrote, referring to the brightly colored, circa-1960s cookbook with the prim woman in a traditional high-collar dress smiling on the back flap.
I wrote back, explaining the menudo dish and the recipe from Mike’s grandmother-in-law, tactfully leaving out the part about the controlled hangover experiment. My dad replied with a by-the-way warning: “Once or twice, I have eaten tripe that tasted yucky. I do not know if this has to do with the stomach acid from the inside of the animal left over. You will want to wash it thoroughly, and probably, it needs to be soaked in a chemical opposite of acid for a period of time before it can be used, but I don’t know what.”
Great. I would have to keep this in mind, though throughout my own, fewer years of eating tripe, I had never experienced an off taste.
I crashed my bike the week before the menudo brunch. I was riding home from a dinner party at Kara’s, and it began to rain as soon as I got on my bike. When I was only a few blocks from home, I got too close to a curb and scraped my front wheel against it. In a combination of the slippery conditions and my carelessness, I toppled sideways onto the sidewalk, kissing the pavement pretty hard. While the bike and my right hand caught most of the fall, I busted up the inside of my lip pretty badly and sprouted a nasty purple bruise on my chin the next morning that lasted a week and a half.
Matt injured himself that week as well. While apartment sitting for his friend (who was in the hospital with a broken ankle after a driver had clipped her on her bike), Matt was attacked by her cat. The cat’s deep claw puncture struck a vein in his wrist, which became infected and swelled up to the point where he could barely walk without the slight movements of his arm causing him pain.
That Friday night, before Mai’s birthday party, I went to Matt’s after work to make him dinner since it pained him to cook. I brought some salad greens, apple, gorgonzola cheese, and a crusty baguette for a light dinner on his rooftop. I tossed up the salad, and we sat and watched the sun drop and the sky fill with a dusty purplish hue, set off by the Manhattan skyline. A short while later, Jordan, Karol, and a few other friends joined us, and together we spent a long night celebrating no particular occasion.
The next day, both Jordan and I were hungover and moving at an excessively slow pace. It started raining that afternoon, and by the time I got out of the subway that evening to go to Mai’s party, there was a furious rainstorm. I got lost trying to find the building and ended up soaking wet even though I’d been holding an umbrella the whole time. The rain was so fierce, and coming at me from all directions, that I took every chance to duck into an alcove or underneath an awning, shivering in my thin long-sleeved shirt. When I finally arrived at the party, my clothes were dripping, my hair was matted to my face, my glasses were fogged from the stuffiness indoors, my chin was yellowish purple, and I had a preexisting hangover.
“Hey, are you ready to get hammered?” Aaron greeted me from across the room.
I couldn’t actually step over to him to say hi, as it was too cramped in the small apartment to get by. I smiled wanly. On a round table, an array of sushi-stuffing ingredients was set beside a bowl of sushi rice and squares of nori seaweed wrappers for make-it yourself maki rolls. On the kitchen counter a couple of bottles of hard alcohol accompanied some juices, soda, and a blender half filled with orangish slush. Just what I needed for a second hangover, I thought.
As it turned out, cocktails were just what I needed to lift my body from the hard knocks