Apples and Candy Corn

Libby Dulski

9/16/16

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: Bich Minh Nguyen (Ch. 1-9)

Reading Review #2

I read the first nine chapters of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen in two sittings. Throughout my first reading, I found myself reaching for the stash of assorted fruit my suitemates and I have slowly been hording from the cafeteria. Nguyen describes fruits as if they are candy. Throughout the reading, fruits have a sacred meaning for Noi, Bich, and Anh. Pomegranates, mangoes, persimmons, apples, pineapples, and many other types of fruits would be placed upon the altar before Buddha as an offering. All of this fruit would be presented to Buddha before anyone could eat it. Bich describes this as a “lesson in patience and desire. We were eating gifts every time” (19). Bich seems comfortable with her grandmother’s traditions and she takes solace in the practice of presenting fruit to Buddha before it is methodically cut and peeled into symmetrical pieces by Noi.

As I continued reading, I found myself craving my favorite types of candies. While reading the constant lists of sweets and candies, I could not help myself from taking out a bag of candy corn, and, alarmingly, I finished the bag.

It was clear that throughout Nguyen’s youth, she tried hard to assimilate to American culture and tried her hardest to fit in. One passage stood out to me in particular about school lunches. Nguyen describes “the anxiety of what to pack [for lunch] … every school week” (76). She felt a constant pressure to blend in with her classmates. Nguyen describes that the key to school lunches was “to have at least one shining element: a plain sandwich and baggie of potato chips could be made tolerable with the right dessert snack” (76). The fact that there was so much pressure and anxiety surrounding something as trivial as school lunches is unthinkable for me. When I was in primary school, I hardly thought of my lunches because they were always packed by my mother. I guess my mother cared about me almost as much as Holly Jansen’s mom cared about Holly.

A short (pun intended) passage that I felt a connection towards and smiled at was when Nguyen describes Tiffany née Truoc. She describes her as “almost tall enough not to be considered “so short,” which is the comment Anh and I were used to getting at school- “You’re so short!” followed by some tall person trying to use our head as an armrest” (114). Being half-Japanese, I am rather short: People often comment on my size and say things that are not meant to be hurtful like “it must be the Asian genes,” or “look at how cute and Asian-sized you are.” What does “Asian sized” even mean? However, this passage made me feel connected to the piece because I often feel alienated by my semi-short height.

Overall, the first nine chapters of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner has been a pleasure to read, and I am excited to finish the book and continue to eat bags of candy corn and an endless supply of apples hoarded from the cafeteria.

Do you have what it takes to eat grass?

Libby Dulski
CYOA Reading

Everyone loves ice cream; this is a scientific fact. However, many ice cream lovers seem to quickly turn away at the thought of vegan ice cream: Why is that? I have a love-hate relationship with vegan food as I am not a vegan. My best friend Charlotte is a die-hard vegan, and she recommended Ben & Jerry’s new vegan ice cream.  Veganism is such an intriguing topic for me because I have spent many breakfast, lunch, and dinner dates with a devout vegan. The fact that someone can avoid, and wants to avoid for that matter, all animal products is amazing to me. The video clip that I would like everyone to watch is an entertaining video of children (the most honest critics in the world) eating vegan and regular Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. As Charlotte has claimed, the vegan ice cream tastes the same, if not better, than regular Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I hope this clip will help everyone to start thinking about just how many animal products people consume on a regular basis. Is it possible that people could avoid all animal products (like dairy in ice cream) and still receive just as much flavor and satisfaction for vegan equivalents?

http://video.bonappetit.com/watch/can-ben-jerry-s-non-dairy-ice-cream-taste-test

Libby Dulski Reading Response #1

Libby Dulski

Reading Response #1

“The Reporter’s Kitchen,” Jane Kramer
Secret Ingredients

“The Reporter’s Kitchen” by Jane Kramer captures my attention in the first paragraph. In her “way too small, nowhere to put anything unless the stove goes” (159) kitchen, Kramer immediately illustrates how her two worlds of cooking and reporting collide. She describes the kitchen as a place where “soup… never tastes the same as it did the day before, and feeds the voice that, for better or worse is me writing, and not some woman from another kitchen” (159). It is clear that cooking inspires her to write.

This reading has a pleasant uninterrupted feeling of flow as the reader follows Kramer’s experiences with cooking and cooking’s connection to her writing. I thought that Kramer’s reference to her beginnings with food like her mother’s “spinach soufflé… [and] overcooked turkey” (159) was a nice way to introduce the reader to Kramer’s first memorable experience with food. These little details about her first encounters with food made the piece endearing as the reader has insight to Kramer’s experience with food. Throughout Kramer’s piece, the reader glimpses memorable encounters with food such as Kramer’s experience with her father, housekeeper, and brother’s most memorable cooking experiences. Every detail the reader receives about Kramer’s cooking experience shows how these events lead her to eventually write about food and love cooking.

Everyone has their own first self-cooked meal locked away in their memory. For Kramer, it was a tuna curry dish. For me, it was my mother’s chili recipe (which was not half-bad). Kramer “started cooking when [she] started writing” (160). After making her tuna curry dish, cooking and writing were forever connected. While making that dish, she realized that “while whatever [she] did say wasn’t going to be the last word on the poetics of domestic violence, it would be [her] word” (160). Cooking sealed the deal on her writing.

I enjoyed Kramer’s connection to madeleine cookies throughout her piece. It showed that as she grew as a writer, and consequently a cook, her love for madeleine cookies had diminished. “Dream cookies” also seemed to play a large role in her life as she made them at different stages of her life. Certain foods seem to follow Kramer throughout different parts of her life: This is intriguing because certain patterns arise in all lives, for Kramer, the patter is cookies and cooking.

As the piece progresses, Kramer shows that cooking is her own sort of muse. Everyone has certain traditions or muses that help them write. For me, I find that listening to dubstep helps clear my head and allows me to write. For Kramer, slow cooking “the kind of cooking where you take control of your ingredients …Cooking like that- nudging my discorded thoughts into … a good risotto simmering slowly in a homemade broth- gives me confidence and at least the illusion of clarity” (163).  Her connection with food with writing inspires me to find a better muse that dubstep music to help inspire my own writing.

Kramer’s connection to different pieces of her writing to food towards the end of the reading was a delightful part to read. Her connections to making a chicken tagine when she is writing about French politics, or when she talks about making choucroute whenever she writes a piece related to music, and even cooking rabbit when writing about art. Making these little connections between the piece of work and what she enjoys to cook is clever and beautiful.

This reading showed a connection between cooking and writing for Kramer. Although she talked about her own experiences with food and writing, I couldn’t help but feel inspired to cook myself. And perhaps write about my own experience with failed chili.