The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [119]
At the party, we met a few of Mai and Aaron’s other friends. Once my social powers were somewhat restored from the drinks, we even decided to tackle a board game. Board games, card games, and any type of game in general were a signature of Aaron’s from as far back as I could remember. In his closet there was a game called Guesstures. The concept of the game was similar to that of charades; each player drew a card and acted out the meaning of the word on it without saying a word.
“It’s like charades in a box.” Aaron shrugged. “It’s like paying for it instead of not.”
It turned out to be the perfect game for our group; out of the guests Mai had invited, several of them had limited English-speaking skills, and we were having trouble making conversation with them. But they all readily understood written English.
Jordan, myself, and two of Mai’s friends named Nao and Ho ended up playing for hours. The rounds were quick and simple, and it was funny to see the way people struggled and eventually interpreted ordinary words. I was on the floor laughing when Nao did his impression of hail, as I was also, when I tried to mime slug. After a few rounds, it was clear that Jordan and I were tuned into each other’s way of thinking and body language a lot more than either of us had expected. We nailed more correct answers than anyone else, one of us usually shouting out the word correctly within a few seconds of the other performing it. But Nao and Ho were pretty good at “Guessturing” too, and we didn’t stop until most of the other guests had filtered out of the party.
“We know each other so well,” I sobbed after nabbing a word Jordan was miming that had us all stumped for a few minutes.
At some point after midnight, Mai put out a wedge of Brie and crackers that she had forgotten about earlier. I naturally gorged myself on this as the night continued.
The next morning, I found myself with a classic hangover. Remembering the Brie and all those nori seaweed wrappers mixing in my stomach gave me a bad taste in my mouth and a want-to-wretch dread in the pit of my stomach. Plus, with all the different drinks around, I had forgotten to obey the golden rule of hangover prevention: Drink lots of water before sleeping. Now only the menudo could save me.
I pulled myself out of bed at ten in the morning, groggy and nauseous. I was grateful I didn’t have to touch or chop the tripe as I removed the covered stockpot from my fridge. I made the mistake of opening the lid right then and peeking inside, though. All the fat, which was stained bright orange from the chili powder, had entirely sealed the surface of the concoction, and after prodding it with a spoon in an attempt to skim some of it off, I realized that the soup’s liquid had turned into jelly.
I’d picked up another funky ingredient on my Chinatown trip. At the butcher shop, I’d decided that the soup base in the menudo could benefit from some pork bones, to mingle with the vegetables for a richly flavored broth (and to flavor the tripe as much as possible). But I didn’t see any bones in the cases, so without giving it much thought, I’d asked for a trotter—essentially the foot of the pig—instead. Once home, I took all my ingredients out and put them on the counter. The light pink, thick-skinned trotter definitely looked like the same limb that a living pig would stand on, except that roughly half a foot above the hoof, it had been sliced clean through the calf bone, revealing a circle of pink, red, and white swirls of bone and tissue at one end. I’d sunk the trotter into the center of the stockpot. The menudo squares, vegetables, garlic, chili powder, and cumin were already bubbling away. The trotter was too tall to be fully submerged, so I gave it a turn upside down, so that the hooved end was sticking a bit outside of the soup.
I would later discover that what I’d really made that morning was a spicy, tripe-studded aspic. A key ingredient in headcheese