Smelly Food

During the first semester of my first stint at a Master’s degree, when I thought I might want to be a counselor (it took me a year to decide unequivocally that I didn’t), I had a roommate who didn’t like stinky food.

This was a problem, because I love food that can best be described as “pungent,” and besides that, I had just moved back from over five years of living with, eating with and caring about people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (and lots of other places, but those places places probably have the most pungent foods of all the countries of origin with whose refugees and migrants I had been working). I doubt, if I made Indian food for an Indian person, that they would think it was very authentic, but at the same time, I don’t think I’m so bad at it, and it’s one of my favourite cuisines to cook. My Madhur Jaffrey Indian cookbook which Uncle Ted bought me for a graduation present after college (along with a bunch of other things) is definitely the most dogeared and oil-splashed of any other such book I own.

But during this first semester of the first stint of grad school, every time I sliced an onion, my roommate would shove open all the windows in the apartment and open the door, too. Even in the middle of winter. We were in Denver, so . . . sometimes it got a little cold in there. These actions would make me want to ramp up the smells (25 cloves of garlic!–just kidding) just because I found them so intolerant and annoying. I guess you could say we didn’t have the best of relationships. We were both students in the counseling programme; probably we’d have been wise to go to counseling together for our own domestic peace . . . although that didn’t occur to me until right this second, honestly.

Ever since then, I have been sort of self-conscious, but also a little stubborn, about the food I eat. I like onions and garlic and spices and blue cheese, and back when I was dating around, I’m not going to lie, but food tastes were kind of something I was on the alert about. If I asked someone if he liked “ethnic food” and he said, “Yes, Italian,” I’d want to investigate a little more because Italian isn’t usually what I’m talking about. Unless it’s squidgy seafood. Once I asked my non-seafood-eating date if he’d be okay if I ordered a plate of pasta with baby octopi and calamari on it, and he said he thought he’d be sick. We’re still friends, but we didn’t date anymore after that.

“My man” doesn’t have to have the exact same tastes I do, but I’ve always preferred someone who was “not a picky eater” and willing to experiment with the range of taste-palette expression. The Boyfriend fits the bill quite nicely in this area (he doesn’t really like Indian food, but he’ll eat it if he has to), but I think last night we both came close to opening up the windows.

Back when I was going through my initial cancer treatments, I signed up for a share with a CSA (Consumer Supported Agriculture) farm run and owned by the family of another previous roommate with whom I had a better relationship. The idea was to pump up my intake of fresh, organic cancer-fighting vegetables, and I’ve been getting a box a week from them mostly ever since. I love this, but every once in a while something shows up in the box which I am unable to identify. The first time they sent me a daikon radish, I’m not sure what I thought it was, but I threw it in my juicer and my head almost exploded when I took a sip. I had to dump the rest of the juice out.

This year the farmers have been doing a great job of sending out a weekly newsletter, complete with recipes utilising the ingredients in the boxes, and so I was introduced to this recipe. I made the pan-fried Daikon Cakes once already, and both The Boyfriend and his daughter received them favourably, so I decided to make them again as a side-dish last night when I was cooking for him. (Usually he cooks for me and I clean up, so this was kind of a big deal.)

I prepped the pancakes at home, and here’s the thing. Daikon radish is pretty much the pinnacle of smelly food. I grated it in my mother’s food processor and put it in the fridge for half an hour, and when I opened up the fridge, it (the fridge) smelled like the contents of a baby’s diaper. Then you add an onion and garlic to that. By the time I was done mixing it up, my entire house smelled like the contents of a baby’s diaper. The only reason I kept going was because I had already tried this once before and discovered that somehow, in some way, the end result of this tastes really good.

I put the baby-diaper-content-smelling mixture in an airtight plastic container, said goodbye to my stinky house, and headed over to The Boyfriend’s. “Watch out,” I said. “This stuff smells horrible. I mean horrible.”

“How bad could it really be?” he asked, alluding to his admittedly nastily aromatic dog.

I opened the container.

“Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

Miraculously though, once again, they turned out tasting really good, and in the end we didn’t have to open any windows. Kissing was right out for a while, though.