At Aldi I once bought a particular type of Red Lentil Rotini Pasta, and ended up falling in love with it and the suggested recipe at the back. I had bought it in an attempt to be healthy early last year, and had no idea how to prepare it as a dish, so it had languished around for a few months before I decided to try the recipe at the back of the box:
It turned out to be a winner! And the Red Lentil Rotini turned out to be a seasonal item from Aldi. Damnit! The next them I saw it, I bought 3 boxes, and now we are down to our last box. Trader Joe's sells Red Lentil Sedanini (looks like Penne), so I bought some to try. Today, I intend to cook our lunch with the Trader Joe's Sedanini instead, and keep the Rotini (just in case? To drag out the duration I can enjoy it's tasty healthfulness?).
Anyway the thought for this post came about when I was chopping up the ingredients a short while ago. If I'm making lunch (which isn't often, usually we do leftovers or something easy like oven Chicken Nuggets), I need to prep as much as I can before E is up and running about. Sometimes I do it the night before, but for today I just did it as I drank my morning tea. I was cutting up the salami when it occurred to me that it looked almost exactly like lap cheong, the Cantonese sausage, that I absolutely detest. At home sometimes my family would steam the lap cheong together with that night's rice, and then all the rice would have a tinge of lap cheong taste, URGH.
Now I'm not a huge salami fan, I like it enough and will eat it if it's in front of me, but I don't actively seek it out - but seeing how similarly they looked made me stop and pause for a moment to think about my identity. All confusing Singaporean-Upper Middle Class-Chinese-Went to UK for Uni-Immigrant in the US-Mother-American passing bits of it rolled up together. I was especially reminded of the 'American passing' bit yesterday when I was talking with the boss of a brush removal company, who we hired to get rid of stumps of all the bush honeysuckle that Jon and I cut down over months at the back of our house.
The boss was an friendly, honest, and nice guy. When he smiled/talked, your eyes were immediately drawn to his missing front teeth, which somehow increased his perceived friendliness. Anyway, after they had finish and were packing up, the conversation somehow went to food (his partner said he needed to run to the store to get pepper and cold beer), and he asked if I was ethnically Chinese after saying, "I know you're Native American" (obviously he misspoke, but you get what he means), before asking about what we cooked at home (reply: I cook American food because it is easier as you can just stick it in the oven. Chinese food needs 5 different dishes and so is harder to cook).
Now for me this is always a funny feeling, to have an American think that I am an American, something that has happened numerous times. It is simultaneously pleasing to me because it means the guise I have put on has worked, I don't like people knowing I am an immigrant because I don't like random people knowing my business and making assumptions about me. This is especially important when I worked as a teacher/substitute teacher, last thing you want is students getting distracted by you. But now I live in suburbia, and day to day interact with only people who are already familiar with me. Even though many of them know I am a Singaporean, and I find myself sometimes having to double think about the pronunciation of certain words in an American accent after the twin dumbing down of motherhood and Covid lockdowns, I take pains to make sure I am speaking in an American accent.
But then again maybe I am just overthinking things. The Singaporean accent is really not easily understood at all, and when I interact with others my goal is communication. That and I still don't want random people to know my business.
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