Favorite foods of blond-haired blue-eyed asians everywhere

Two firsts today. And legitimate firsts not artificially fabricated like the ones the girl in Garden State tried to pull off, although recognizing and celebrating any first is better than not. The two California squatters and I ventured into Chinatown this morning for dim sum, which when you know what you’re doing (or have someone with you who does) is a guaranteed culinary odyssey and in this case, one of my ‘firsts’. On canal street, a veritable sea of Chinese men, women, children, and trinkets, we met up with two friends from work who know their way around the dim sum carts. One speaks fluent mandarin, and the other doesn’t but has a resume that suggests he should (president of the Chinese student association at Harvard). We broke fast at an enormous banquet hall on Elisabeth street. Cantonese women in brightly colored shirts with walkie-talkies guided the five us to one of the ‘prime-time’ elevated tables and within seconds perky purveyors of peculiar delicacies had approached us. We sampled so many strange (to me) selections that I won’t even try to describe them all, but they were delicious and probably as nutritious as anything else I eat. At any rate, the first notable ‘first’ at dim sum was eating ‘chicken claws’. Now ask me if I would prefer for them to be called ‘chicken talons’, and you know the answer, but either way, they were a far cry from chicken fingers. Feasting on the joints of a brittle battered chicken’s talon is not something I’d recommend for a first date, but it did make for a great ‘first’. I’ll have to bring my camera next time…

The second ‘first’ also originated in Chinatown. I acquired a dragon fruit, and spent a subway ride home ponder how good a fruit with such a cool name must taste. Dragon fruits, have a perlandrian appearance on the outside but are really only giant albino kiwis on the inside. Delicious giant albino kiwis.