7 Days of Thanks

Friday: Today I am thankful for cusines of the world. Tonight I went to eat with one of my colleagues from work. We chose the India Oven, a restaurant that Cool Guy and I have frequented. The food there is excellent, and one hint is that many of the tables are filled with East Indian families. Anyway, as I ate my aloo ghobi and prawn korma I was reminded of something my mom said once. I was cleaning out a purse that belonged to my deceased grandmother and found a grocery list on which was listed "spagety". My mother was amused too, but she pointed out that the notation actually meant elbow macaroni, because her mom would never have cooked anything so exotic as spaghetti with Italian sauce. The fact that her mother had branched out to any kind of pasta at all from the cooking she learned in her Scottish immigrant mother's kitchen was quite a leap. Then my mom got ethnic by introducing spaghetti and Italian sauce to us children. I ate my first "Mexican food" at a Taco Bell in Utah while going to college. So, we learn to expand our culinary lives bit by bit. It is a shock now and then, to still meet people who've never eaten Thai or Indian food which seem so ordinary and American to me. But I've lived for many years in parts of the country where a variety of immigrants live and opening a restaurant is a popular way to earn a living. Anyway, I'm thrilled to have experienced the food variety the world has to offer. And I'm still a fan of the old menus my grandmother taught my mother to cook.