If not for shitty parents, I'd be a virgin. Forget about married.
I was on my third date with this girl back in my single days and her parents called. She warned me they would so I didn't care. I was told that not answering was not an option. When she told me this, she had the look of someone who spotted a tsunami in the distance.
The call came.
The blood drained from her face.
It was just a daily check-in but it sounded like she was on cross-examination. She had to constantly, and distressedly, fend off interrogative questions before they turned into beatdowns. Surviving the conversation depended on her interrupting before her mother's criticism destroyed her self-esteem completely.
She was darting from one end of her apartment to the other and gesturing wildly for me to get seconds of the food she cooked.
Bewildered, but not wanting to make things worse, I did. When I turned around with my seconds, I saw her bolting towards me. She kissed me full on the mouth and used her free hand to give me a taste of the next course. I could her hear mom's voice coming through the phone while we were doing this. She was berating her daughter with about as much hatred as a parent can talk to a child.
My night only got better when she hung up.
But if you asked me whether I would prefer a normal, boring girl with loving, perfect parents, my answer would probably be no. Quirky people are more interesting to me, even if they're not traumatized. Darkly funny people are more interesting to me.
Got a creeply uncle you had to run away from? Then we'll probably get along.
It's the same reason Puerto Rican cuisine will always be in my top three choices of cuisine if you were to offer me a bunch of places to go. There are a lot of interesting things going on in even a simple starter. I will pick it nine times out of ten.
When I bit into my empanada, I did something I rarely do with food nowadays: I looked at the filling. I was trying to discern what that complex, slow-cooked flavor was. Both the ground beef and the shredded chicken made me do this.
I have had empanadas from a lot of Caribbean and South American restaurants but none were as good as these. When I had the paella, I looked down at it for another reason: It was so fucking pretty. Check out my photo and you'll see.
I make and sell my own bread now, something that took me almost a year to perfect, but I STILL haven't figured out how to perfect a simple tomato-infused rice. I don't know what else was going on with this dish, and there clearly was, but it was phenomenal.
Paella isn't supposed to be overpowering or it'll obscure the seafood. But it must be flavorful and lightly seasoned. This paella delivered on all counts and not for one second did I give a nanometer-sized shit that it didn't contain chorizo or chicken.
It didn't need it. It takes serious skill to put different kinds of seafood in a dish that must be served hot and not overcook one of them. It takes even more to let the seafood sing without being drowned out by overpowering tomato and ruined by overcooked rice.
It was like a little buffet. I'd take a bite of those resplendent little jewels of rice grains as a primer and then pair it with whatever piece of seafood I was in the mood for next. I never mixed seafood in one bite. It was like eating a bunch of little seafood tapas.
Back and forth I went between lovely squid, toothsome shrimp, briny clam, and sweet lobster.
I didn't even notice how full it made me until I ordered dessert. Don't let the size of the paella serving plate fool you. It's a lot of food. Paired with a crisp, white Chilean wine, I was in such a happy place, I wanted to belt out 'Santa Maria' at the top of my lungs right there on the patio.
I got more empanadas and an absolutely perfect tres leches cake to go. They were gone as soon as we got home, before I even took my shoes off.
Take a lesson in both dining and dating from me: Shun the boring.
Embrace the colorful, the quirky, the varied.
The complex. Oh man, the complex.
Half the fun is never being able to figure out what makes it that way. read more