~ Sunday, January 14, 2007 ~

Hammer/Nail Syndrome

The birthday weekend finished off with a visit from Rambam and his lovely lady, and then a trek north to see Mr. Fodor & Co.
The Fodors and I went to dinner at a vegetarian soul food type place in Harlem, where Mr. and Mrs. Fodor sat across from each other and I got to sit across from (and gaze lovingly into the eyes of) the adorable Fodor Jr., who has the largest smile in the world.This was him a year and a half ago, as photographed by Mr. Fodor. He's got more hair and teeth now, but the smile is the same.

The place is vegetarian, as I said, but they are also serving soul food, which is apparently a hard thing, because soul food turns out to lose a lot of its punch if you only serve collard greens. As such, the place uses tofu and TVP and seitan and suchlike to make fake meat, including these slightly creepy fake shrimp things that were ornamenting the broccoli-and-fake-shrimp dish that I ordered. Not only does this fake shrimp perfectly capture that sick-sweet taste of rotting meat that made me dislike shrimp even before I gave it up for kashrut reasons, but the texture and consistency was disturbingly shrimp-like, too. Kinda springy, you know? And a little bit dense and unyielding? When you haven't eaten meat in a while, the sensation, even the mistaken sensation, of oh-my-god-this-used-to-be-alive is powerful, and not pleasantly so. I had a bite or two of one piece, and that was all for me.

Fortunately, Fodor Jr. had no such prejudices. "Dimp!" he demanded when he spotted some of what he'd been eating from his daddy's plate on my plate, too. "Shhhhrrrrimp," I said, and fed him a little slice. "Dimp!" he said again. Conversation from that point on was catch as catch could, because there's only so much I can do to concentrate on adult dialogue when a little voice in the background is going, "Dimp! Dimp! Dimp! Dimp!" with increasing desperation. I kept on feeding him shrimp, one little slice at a time, until there was none left on my plate ("No mo dimp," he remarked) while Mr. and Mrs. Fodor supplemented his meal with bits of beans, peas, and rice pinched from their plate and placed directly into his little fingers or his not-so-little mouth.

For dessert, the Fodors had bought two slices of cinnamon-raisin-banana bread, and they gave F. Jr. pinched-off bits of raisin and crust, which he also seemed to like. I had passed on the banana bread, but Mr. Fodor wanted me to taste it, to see what I was missing. "Here, try some," he said, and pinched off a little piece to place into my fingers, only he wasn't joking. I guess when you're a parent, everything begins to look like a kid.

Current Music: They, Jem

~ prattled by Miriam at 9:57 p.m. [+]

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