Kitchen Chaos (17 page)

Chef Antonio comes over—to the rescue, I hope. “
Chicas
, what are we doing here?” He shows us a better potato-to-pasta ratio, but our pierogi still wind up looking like uneven, slightly sickly nuggets, not the gleaming, appealingly chubby ones that other people are making. I'm a little relieved to see that both the Newlyweds and Henry and Errol are having some trouble, although not as much as we are.

Looking over at Lillian and her mom, who are very quiet today, my heart sinks. Whoa, I have to admit, Lillian's pierogi are beautiful. I notice that she's the one shaping them, rather than her mother. That's unusual. Her mom seems less comfortable with the rolling pin and has moved on to sautéing onions for the topping. But Lillian? Her hands are quick and precise, and she is making perfect dumplings.
It doesn't look like she's been shooting much video today, though.

Our onions are also cooking, but my mom's eyes are streaming from chopping them, and it gets worse every time she stirs the pan. So she doesn't. Stir them, that is. Our onions blacken, which seems ideal for our hard little pierogi nuggets.

Next up: Longevity noodles, or
chang shou mian
, as Lillian's mom tells us (at least three times). This seems a little easier. Mom is relieved.

“Now we're talking, right, Frankie? Pedal to the metal, as Dad likes to say.”

We cook the egg noodles just fine and set them aside. Then we heat up some chicken broth, soy sauce, sesame oil, spices, and cornstarch (okay, that lumps up a bit, but whatever—nobody's perfect). Then we crack the egg over the hot soupy stuff, trying to make it ooze through the tines of a fork, like Chef is showing us.

“Whisk,
chicas
,” he urges, “whisk.”

Instead of making thin little strands in the broth like everyone else's, ours clumps. We pour the soup over the noodles. Uh-oh, looks like we skipped the step of rinsing and separating the pasta. Great, our long-life soup is a steaming, tangled-up mess. This can't be good luck.

But when we get to the orzo, we do better. We just boil the little ricelike pasta, then chop up peppers (our old friends!), olives, and capers, crumble some sour feta cheese, mix up some lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, and spices and stir it all up in a bowl. The less actual cooking the better, apparently. I look around the room. Our dish looks as presentable as anyone else's! As everyone brings their food to the large table so we can all eat together, I turn around to high-five my mom. This stuff isn't easy for her, and she really does try hard.

Oops! I guess I spoke too soon. Mom was just supposed to be turning off our burner on the large, communal stove. But instead, she's holding a flaming
pot holder and racing for the sink. People are looking up from either wrapping up their cooking or starting to eat, and then they're half laughing, half shrieking. Javier has come over to the table to eat, along with Cole and Angelica—so we have quite the audience. Lillian's mom just looks horrified.

Oh well. For a minute there, just a minute, we seemed almost normal.

I'm dreaming about hanging out in Golden Gate Park with Sierra when the smell of fresh
you tiao
wakes me up. It was a good dream—Sierra and I were playing Frisbee with her dog, GoGo (
gŏu
is the Chinese word for “dog”), who's sort of like my stepdog (or was, I guess) since Katie is allergic and my parents will never let us get one. Thinking about Sierra and GoGo makes me homesick all over again, but it's hard to feel totally depressed when there's
you tiao
waiting downstairs.

In China
you tiao
is a street food that you buy from a cart on the way to work or school, but it's hard to find in America—even in some Chinatowns—so my mother makes her own. The literal translation of
you tiao
is “oil stick,” which doesn't exactly sound appetizing. But they're actually long, thin pieces of fried dough, like a straightened-out doughnut or a Mexican churro. My mother turns up her nose at them, like she does at almost anything fun, but my father, Katie, and I could eat them all day. There's nothing like a fresh
you tiao
—hot and greasy in your hand, then crisp, doughy, and sweet on your tongue—to chase away the blues on a Sunday morning.

I race down the stairs.

In the kitchen my mother hovers over the stove with tongs in hand, waiting until the dough has been sizzling in the oil just long enough to achieve the perfect balance of crispiness on the outside and melt-in-your-mouth softness on the inside before plucking it from the pot and laying it on the paper towels that
are waiting on the counter to sop up the extra grease. At the table my father is hidden behind a Chinese newspaper and Katie leans over one of her massive textbooks, ignoring the untouched slice of melon on her plate. They're both drinking coffee, one of the few American habits my father has picked up in the twenty years he's lived in the States. Whenever I remind him of it (like when he's going on about how inefficient the subway system in New York is compared to other big cities like Beijing or Shanghai), he says there are Starbucks all over China now too, as if that's some kind of stamp of approval for his liking the nontraditional Chinese beverage.

My mother transfers the
you tiao
to a plate and carries it over to the table. My father and I don't even give her a chance to set it down before we each grab a steaming hot
you tiao
and drop it on our own plate, sticking our burning fingers in our mouths to cool them down and sucking off the fresh grease. I take a bite of mine and close my eyes so I can fully
appreciate the flavor. When I open them again, my mother is about to put a
you tiao
on Katie's plate, but Katie waves it away.

“Don't you want one?” I ask, holding mine up. “They're really yummy.”

Katie shakes her head firmly. “Too greasy. Do you know how many calories those things have? Or what they'll do to your complexion?”

“Who cares?” I shrug. “Since when do you worry about that stuff? You're a stick and you've never had a pimple in your life.”

“Maybe not yet, but I'll become a pizza-faced pig if I keep eating stuff like that. And so will you.”

My mother drops her tongs loudly onto the counter, instantly getting our attention (not my father's, though—he's back to his newspaper and probably hasn't heard a word we've said).

“Nü'ér,”
she says, which means “daughter,” and she only calls one of us that when she wants to remind us how low our branch is on the family tree, “I made that
food with my two hands and the very best ingredients. You may choose not to eat it, but you must not be disrespectful. A simple ‘no thank you' will do.”

Katie looks down at the table. “I'm sorry, Mama.” She turns to me with an expression that she could have stolen right from Frankie's face. “
No thank you
, Lillian, I would not like a
you tiao
,” she says in an overly polite, sarcastic way. Katie and I aren't exactly best friends, but she's not usually outright mean either.

My mother abandons her pot of boiling oil and comes back to the table. She closes Katie's book and pushes her plate in front of her. “Eat your melon, Wei Wei,” she says. “Nobody goes hungry in this house.”

Katie rolls her eyes, then picks up her melon and takes a bite. “I'll take it to go,” she says, getting up and grabbing her book with her free hand. “I've got to go upstairs and study.”

“Big test,” my mother says when Katie has gone. Shocking. My sister goes to a high school for serious brains where they have a “big test” practically
every day. It sounds like torture to me, but Katie lives for that stuff. She says she “thrives under pressure,” but if studying on Sunday morning and choosing melon over
you tiao
is thriving, I think I'll stick to just getting by.

“I'll have hers, then,” I say, taking a second greasy stick of fried dough and savoring every bite. I know I'm lucky that I don't have to worry about what I eat. At least not yet, anyway. I can't imagine stressing about gaining weight every time I eat French fries or ice cream or my mother's delicious fried dumplings. I hope when I'm fifteen, I'll still appreciate a fresh
you tiao
instead of obsessing over how fattening it is or how it could ruin my perfect skin.

My mother takes off her apron and hangs it on the magnetic hook on the side of the refrigerator. “I'm going to the market,” she says. “I was thinking of making
chang shou mian
tonight.”

She picks up a sheet of paper from the counter. It's the recipe for the long-life noodles we made
in cooking class yesterday. Hmm. Is my mother—MeiYin Wong, the Queen of Chinese Cuisine—actually going to follow one of Chef Antonio's recipes?

“What's that, Mama?” I ask innocently, pointing at the sheet of paper.

She folds the paper in half and slips it into her purse. “Nothing,” she says. “Just a list. In case I forget one of the ingredients.”

“Oh. I thought maybe it was a recipe. You know, like the one from class yesterday.”

“You think I need a recipe to make
chang shou mian
?” my mother sniffs.

“No,” I say. “But Chef Antonio's recipe was really good, don't you think?”

“It wasn't authentic,” she says with a shrug. “But it was . . . interesting.”

My father actually pokes his head out from behind his newspaper. When it comes to complimenting other people's cooking, “interesting” is about as generous as Mama gets.

My mother leaves for the store, and my father gets up for a fresh cup of coffee. I smile to myself, feeling like I've won some kind of prize. My mother may not be grilling up hamburgers or making macaroni and cheese (yet), but following a recipe that wasn't handed down for fifty generations is a step in the right direction. A baby step, maybe, but definitely a step.

I'm still smiling when I reach for the last
you tiao
and discover that my father has the same idea. We laugh and split it. Baba folds up his newspaper at last and dunks his
yo tiao
in his coffee before taking a bite. I've never seen him do that before, but it looks pretty tasty, so I dunk mine in what's left in Katie's mug. Not bad. I'm really glad that at least my father can see that Chinese and American traditions make a good mix sometimes.

You know that old saying “Time flies”? Well, it must be true because this week totally had wings. On Sunday night I called my dad like always and told him about cooking class and how Mom practically scolded Chef Antonio for not including Nana's kugel as one of his examples. I said she actually threatened to make one and bring it to class next week, and Dad said she needs the practice because when he comes for Museum Night at my school, he's going to make
Nana's kugel too, and we'll have a taste-off with me as the judge. I told him that sounded like fun to me, but I didn't say that for Mom . . . not so much.

When my dad comes to visit, he always tries to set up some work meetings, too. If he turns a visit with me and Cole into a business trip, his company pays for it and he can stay at the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn instead of crashing with one of his old friends (which is kind of weird for him, since most of his old friends are friends with Mom). I like when he stays at the Marriott because it has a big pool, but it always feels strange to say good night at the end of the day and go home to our apartment without him. Before we hung up the phone, Dad told me he'd officially booked his room and I should get ready for him to beat me at the backstroke. This is an old joke—my dad can keep himself afloat, but he's never really bothered to learn how to swim—but it's funnier now that he actually lives near the beach.

Back to time flying: Frankie, Lillian, and I worked
on our project three afternoons this week, and we're making a lot of progress. Not enough for Frankie, of course, but she's on some kind of mission to put everyone else's projects to shame and blow Mr. McEnroe away with her creative genius.