Month: July 2019

This was meant to be a consolation meal. Back when I thought I’d miss a big party with D where the invite said the dinner menu would include shrimp and grits, I was feeling pretty mopey. It’s one thing to be 3,000 miles from your honey, and another to be 3,000 miles from your honey AND the most perfect food combination that humans ever invented.

Grits are one of my favorite mushy carbs, and mushy carbs happen to be my favorite category of food. Rice, porridge, oats, polenta, risotto, I love the cozy embrace of all of them. A spoonful of hot cheesy grits is like taking off your bra and putting on your fluffiest pair of sweats after a long day, or if it’s an East Coast summer where you are right now, like taking off your bra and firing up the ac after a long day. And is there anything better than the sweet crunch of a first bite into a big prawn? No, is the answer to that! Shrimp made well is both crispy on that first bite and then juicy and tender on every subsequent one. The combination of those two contrasting ingredients together is an actual love story.

But as much as I love shrimp and grits, I actually try to avoid it. I’ve been trying to return shrimp to its status as a special occasion food, and discourage myself from thinking of it as the everyday item it’s seemed to become in food media over the years. Having a tiny understanding of the environmental impact of overfishing influenced my feelings, as did this vital AP investigation on the actual slave labor which powered, and very likely still props up, the industry. So I try (and regularly fail, let’s be clear) to avoid shrimp. I usually do okay, or whatever, just fine enough not to hide under my bed all day though what kind of metric is that? But then again, I’m still eating plenty of meat, buying bagged snacks, using single use plastic for produce at the grocery store, and generally clogging up the oceans with the detritus of my convenience-focused life. Sometimes I’ll see people going nuts on gourmet sushi dinners and I’ll think fuck, if THEY can happily gorge on the last of the planet’s edible seafood, why can’t I? And it’s usually only after 10 minutes of that kind of stewing that I check myself and realize I need to log off. 

I’m pretty sure this environmental guilt and gourmet food jealousy and my uneven attempts at seafood asceticism have only ratcheted up the mystical allure of shrimp and grits in my food imagination. The thing is saddling oneself with personal environmental guilt feels like both a scam–what we need are huge structural changes from corporations and governments–and also, truly overdue. What if we DID unite to turn away from single use plastic? From our cars? From keeping the office thermostat at 65F? From eating so much goddamn delicious shrimp? It’s not everything, certainly, but it’d be something. 

So what’d I do a few weeks ago? I slowly went about acquiring the necessary ingredients for this dish. The grits were already in my cupboard, the shrimp and the bacon weren’t. Bacon! I haven’t even gotten to bacon guilt. And then I made this dish. And you know what the funny thing is? D ended up changing my ticket so I could stay and I made it to the party after all. I had my shrimp and grits twice, and you know what? Both versions were just okay. (I overcooked my shrimp! They were as chewy as chicken hearts!!) The brisket they served at the party was even better. And I felt so much sorrow for our planet with every single bite I took.

A few weeks ago D and I were still blissed out after coming back from the dreamiest stay with my aunties (Aunties, I still owe you a thank you card!!). In my wonderful aunties’ Sonoma County oasis we got to visit chickens and pluck freshly laid eggs out of their beds, pick borage and nasturtium flowers for our dinner salads, sit around blind taste-testing wines (main takeaway: my palette is awful) and talk about our experiences of queerness across the generations. There were blackberries picked off the vine, there was barefoot star-gazing, there was showering outside in the morning shade with the scent of plums underfoot. When I say dreamy, I mean dreamy. 

At their table, D and I, the youngsters of the weekend, threw around the label “queer” casually. It’s an easy term for us to use, reclaimed as it’s been by our generation of activists and public figures. But, D and I noticed later, that my aunties refrained from using the word. “Queer,” D and I understood, is not the same word to all people in the LGBT universe. My aunties told us stories of living through the Briggs Amendment era–of colleagues walking in their local pride march but with paper bags over their heads, a mind-reeling image to me. And we also got to laugh about our species’ enduring love of lesbian typology. 

There’s so much we owe our elders, so much that they lived through that I can barely even fathom, and also, a lot that’s still the same. We may use different labels for our identities, but my aunties generously told us about how they too, even now, continue to grapple with how they understand themselves. Their openness was a real gift.

We left for San Francisco with a care package full of frittata and coffee cake, shiny wisteria seeds that our aunties said burst like rockets out of their pods, yellow plums that dropped down on us while D and I sat in their hot tub. On the drive back to the city and all full up on love I felt a stirring resolve to be good to my community the way my aunties were to me and D. 

It’s something I thought about for the rest of the weekend. Somewhere along the way we’d also squeezed in a trip to Berkeley Bowl, and so had plenty of veg and the best of stone fruit season stashed in D’s fridge. I nearly cried tears over the beauty of black velvet apricots. What sexy fruit. 

How will I be good to family, community, young people who are coming up now? 

Back in the city that Sunday morning D and I woke up a few minutes before the Women’s World Cup final and turned it on from bed. We squinted at it on D’s phone, not bothering to move to a larger screen. I, having just come upon my new favorite hobby, gushed about Megan Rapinoe, while D got up to fix some coffee, and a while later we finally sat down to breakfast. We watched the last of the game with the frittata from my aunties on the table in front of us, and I couldn’t help smiling at the scene: two queer people making out over leftovers from our lesbian aunties with the Women’s World Cup on in the background.