Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Dinner 4

Better with Age?
Most foods are perishable. Fruits and vegetables rot after a week and leftovers rapidly become left in the trash as the days go by. Even canned foods implode or grow black fungus after ten years. But then there are cheeses that become riper and tastier as they age. And wine or rum which peak after an extended number of years. Or that Chinese delicacy, that egg that gets buried in the ground for 50 years. Different foods get better over time. We must determine which ones.

This creamy potato leek soup recipe is at Pinch My Salt.

I bring up the aging of food because I wonder if the same rules apply to people. My dinner guest for the evening is old. Not just older, but old. 59 (almost 60) years old to be exact. At first, I was worried about me, my safety: he might be a creep or try to do something to me. He might be rotten produce. But as the evening wore on I realized I should be more worried about his safety rather than mine.

Take Your Time
From the moment he walked in until the moment he left, my dinner guest barely paused as he told me his entire life story. This proved to be a problem because it's difficult to eat while chattering away. My guest ate soooo slowly. And I ate rather quickly. Even while restraining myself, I had already finished my soup by the time he took one bite. But I had already learned so much about him. He is a natural healer. He uses techniques like acupuncture, herbal medicines and twelve others I had never heard of to heal chronic conditions and athletic injuries. His voice was low and raspy and kept fading out as he periodically convulsed into burps and hiccups. He apologized and said that he should take a hydrochloric acid pill. He explained that most people that have stomach pains after eating or heart burn are not actually suffering from an acid surplus but rather an acid deficiency. When even a little bit of acid is introduced from food, it causes pain, but this can be equalized by taking HCL pills. Hmmm...I doubt it would cure the lack of a stomach-heart, though (see Dinner 3).

I baked this talapia with pesto, and added spinach, mushrooms, red pepper, and white onion to the quinoa and topped it with Trader Joe's cilantro dressing.

Go On
Nearly an hour had passed and we hadn't even moved on to the main course. I was starving. Desperate. Finally my guest finished his soup and we started on the salad and fish. It was cold of course. He said he didn't mind cold food. I suppose he better not because with the way he ate, everything would be cold by the time it reached his mouth.

But now we got to his love life. Epic. He eloped when he was in college because his father wouldn't support him if he married. He hid it from his father the rest of his life. My guest's wife died during child birth but his son lived. He decided he couldn't support the child at the time so the boy's god parents adopted him, telling him that his father had died in a car accident. My guest periodically spied on his son: he watched him with binoculars at sports games and sat at the table next to him at restaurants. The boy grew up, got married, had a kid and then sadly, all three died in a car accident.

And on...
But that was only the first love of his life. There were five. I'll skip a few and get to the fifth. He had an affair with this woman for fifteen years, during three of her marriages! During her first marriage, she flirted with him and one night they were making dinner and were going to go out dancing. She cut her finger badly while making chili rellenos and bled everywhere even though she ignored it. My guest finally convinced her to go get stitches and he figure the night was over, but they came home, finished the meal, still went out dancing, and then slept together for the first time. The husband was out of town. All of her other men knew about my guest. Their relationship was accepted, and in some cases even encouraged. It ended when she finally settled down with the former gay lover of a count.
Plantains fried in butter and cinnamon and served with tapioca.

And On
We went into the kitchen to get desert. He seriously almost fell over when he stumbled around and almost bumped into the refrigerator. I was definitely concerned about the old guy. He wasn't drunk though, he has chronic fatigue syndrome and all the sitting had destabilized him.
He got himself together and talked while I fried up our desert and we finally got to his relationship with men. He'd had periodic fuck buddies throughout his life but had never really had a male lover. The closest it came was this much younger man that lived with him for five years. The guy had a personality disorder, couldn't hold down a job, and had been homeless for a long time. My guest took him in and helped to stabilize him. They developed a daddy-boy relationship that was non-sexual but loving.
The minute the last bite of desert disappeared, I immediately started making my good-byes. He was a nice guy, but I could not take anymore listening. As much as I love stories, I had zoned out several times and was yawning inconspicuously every few minutes. Dinner was over and it was time to go (very slowly, of course).Thoughts Over Dirty Dishes
Maybe it's not how old something is, but the combinations. A perfectly aged wine will go great with fresh caught fish, but an old healer did not mix too well with little, stomach-heart me. It's unfortunate that I can't seem to find the right combination: last week's no-show, young sex fiend or this weeks much older, compassionate cuddler (what else could he have done with his non-sexual house boy of five years?). Neither one is even remotely appetizing. Luckily, there are many more recipes I want to try and many more dinners with people to meet.

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