Honey Mustard

            Honey mustard: Its peculiarity doesn’t lie in the melding of sweet and spicy or in its designation as a dipping sauce, spread, AND salad dressing. It’s in this sauce’s sheer variety. Different ranch dressings differ slightly in taste and consistency, but in the end, ranch is just ranch. It’s white, specked with spices and it tastes like only ranch can. Hidden Valley tastes cheep while home-made ranch can be a cathartic experience. However, it’s still frickin’ ranch! Honey mustard, on the other hand, can seem to make up its mind about who exactly she is. Sometimes, the sauce is vaguely sweet, with a nice, toned down mustard kick, other times the thick, sticky mess would hold the name, “mustard honey” much more appropriately. Still, in other instances, what’s called “honey mustard” resembles neither part of its composite name (wtf?). No one seems to agree. What parts mustard and honey constitutes the right ratio? What exactly makes honey mustard?

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs with a Puerto Rican family. That means rice and beans. Lots of rice and beans. And being embarrassed when my mom would talk to me in Spanish as I peered through Captain Underpants in the gym on my elementary school book fair days. And riding my bike by the ticky tacky homes on a blistering summer day, chasing down the sound of “Do Your Ears Hang Low” ringing in the air. And lots of ignorant Mexican jokes that didn’t apply to my heritage at all. Once, a good friend’s mother asked me if Puerto Ricans ate tacos and burritos. I had to keep myself from screaming at this otherwise kind woman (mainly because I was sitting next to her daughter in the back of her van. “No, tacos and burritos are more boarder food. Its Tex-Mex. Puerto Rican food is very different.”  

Being Latino in a well-off, predominantly white suburb parallels being an 18^th century time-traveler working management at Best Buy. I learned that my home culture and my school culture were very different, but who the hell was I? Where did I actually fit? My mom would often bash American cuisine and cultural idiosyncrasies. “We aren’t Irish, why would we celebrate St. Patrick’s day?” She’d question when March came around. “These Americans don’t know anything about dinner parties. They play board games all night and everyone’s out the door by 10:00.” But her “us and them” dialogue conflicted strongly with my grade school kid desires to fit in with my peers, whose home lives seemed so foreign to me.

Throughout High School, I played around with the recipe. I’d listen to Reggaeton to feel in touch with my roots. I learned the basic steps of merengue and salsa at quinceañeras by reluctantly dancing with the older women whose husbands would rather sit and converse. These steps became a way to impress my friends with my ethnic-ness, convincing the skeptics about my roots despite my pale skin. Puerto Rican culture became my honey. I spent my four years and Naperville Central High School testing how much of it to mix into the mustard seed suburban culture I’d learned in school. Other students went all out. They became their home cultures fully, wearing flags on their clothing, spackling their vocabulary with Spanish phrases, or working comments about their exotic escapades into every conversation. As high school trudged on I realized that I only need a dab of honey. Representing my family’s culture is important and simply sharing my knowledge with others at appropriate times is sufficient. After all, my culture, the culture of my peers and the people who’ve surrounded me for most of my life, is that of the middle suburban class. I’m honey mustard. Mostly mustard (with a dab of something different).

The Perfect Grilled Cheese

The perfect grilled cheese is easy to achieve. The secret? Heirloom tomatoes! These non-commercial variations of the fruit tend to be a little sweater, which contrasts well with the salty sliced cheese. Heirlooms vary in flavor between strains, so get ready for a taste adventure! If you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or specialty supermarket that carries these coveted fruits, slice up some Roma tomatoes instead.

Nestle the tomato wheels between two slices of your favorite cheddar cheese on two slices of wheat bread. Why wheat? Am I suddenly health conscious? Of course not. Wheat bread tastes better when steeped and fried in oil. But wait! Don’t close that ‘wich up yet. Sprinkle some onion salt and cumin powder over the tomatoes for a tasty twist.

Cover the bottom of a pan in a thin layer of your desired frying oil. Canola is a nice, fairly healthy option, but coconut oil provides a nicer flavor. Set the range to medium and heat the oil with one minced clove of garlic and a pinch or two of cumin seed. Watch the pan carefully. You don’t want the garlic to burn, leaving your sandwich with a resiny bite. Heat for five minutes and remove the garlic and seeds from your pan to the best of your abilities. To make your life a little easier, you could use garlic pounder and ground cumin instead.  Place your sandwich in the pan and turn the heat up to medium-high. Cover the pan to insure that the tomatoes warm sufficiently and that the cheese melts fully before your bread turns into a hunk of oil-sodden charcoal.

From here, continue as you would with any old, Kaft American slice-tainted grilled cheese. Fry each side of the sandwich until its golden brown, plop it on your plate, and enjoy it’s delightful simplicity. 

Linner Time

Family habits come and go, but one tradition remained strong in the Suarez household throughout my childhood: linner. When 3:00 came around on a Sunday afternoon, my parents became restless. The house stirred as they finally hopping in the shower after a noon spent with Time Magazine sipping on a fresh roast. “Get ready, it’s time to eat!” My mom’s voice echoed through the house, shaking the gunk still sticking to the corners of my eyes. My brother, Daniel, would fight for a few more minutes in bed, but my mom’s endured nagging always brought him to a grunting stand. On any mid-afternoon weekend’s end, Hunger struck the Suarez clan hard. 

Most families enjoy special nights out at Olive Garden or Outback once in a while, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. Endless breadsticks and bloomin’ onions become short-lived monuments to the week’s end. Chatter reverberates from salad plates and wine glasses in dining rooms brimming with fork-stuffed faces.  We had a different idea of this sacred suburban tradition: timing is everything. Sunday linner is the product of my dad’s abhorrence for waiting lists and my mom’s questionable eatery manners. So there are rules: 1) Wait out the weekend rush and beat out the dinner rush. Friday nights are good for pizza, but avoid the new Italian food joint. 2) Evade the church-goers. Those shiny-shoed, kaki-sporting smiles still high on halleluiahs clear out by 2:00 pm. And 3) If you aren’t in the car by 3:00, you don’t eat. When mom says its linner time, you better turn off the Xbox, grab the least smelly pair of jeans out of hamper purgatory and dart into the back seat of dad’s CRV.

For most middleclass suburbanites, mid-afternoon on the day of rest is for lazing around the football game or enjoying Scrabble with the folks while the smell of green bean casserole rolls through the sun-mottled rooms of home sweet home. For us, this meant empty restaurants and patient waiters. No running between bistros, spending two hours for a place with a wait time of less than one. No spit in our food when mom sends the prime rib back three times because it isn’t rare enough (true story). We sit in our booth thrones, in an empty dining room talking as loud as we please about the week past. The food is always hasty and hot and the flow of diet coke refills is endless. Our cups never go dry.

Free Food! At the ASA's Sights and Sounds

Food tastes best when it’s earned: This is false. There is, in fact, such thing as a free lunch. And breakfast. And dinner too. Neva Sheaffer lives by this mantra. “Do you know what a freegan is?” She once asked me in a string of twelve text messages (we’ve built up a pen-palesque relationship through texting). I had no idea. According to freegan.info, “Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumptional economy and minimal consumption of resources.” In other words, these individuals love free food.

“When does this end?” I groaned at Neva. We’d been standing for an hour and a half at the back of a room filled with shifting bodies, all sneaking looks toward the buffet at the back. The African Student’s Association romped across the stage for mostly unamused eyes. Pain rung my ankles and my calves became stiff clumps of dirt. Neva hogged a concrete column, shooting me a smile as she leaned, relieving the weight on her feet.

“Soon, I hope.” She grabbed my arm and nudged me closer to the food line. We laughed silently through our teeth, too scared to look around for dirty looks from other audience members.

Finally, the show ended and the master of ceremonies announced the food protocol. “Everyone who had to stand in the back through the show, we appreciate your commitment. You’ll get to eat first.” Our faces contorted, giving away our absurd level of excitement. We walked down past gleaming buffet trays filled with homemade dishes from all over Africa. “Would you like some of this?” Of course, I’d love to try some! “Any of that?” Yes, heap that on my plate. At the end of the line, my Dixie plate looked like an over-worked mule struggling to keep its spine from snapping.

We vacuumed down fork-fulls of plantains, spiced beef stew, and red rice, savoring the food as much as we did its freeness. No one bothered to even ask about the dish’s names. We simply ate, high with the feeling that, in some way, we’d beaten the system. After all, two hours in the standing room is a small price to pay for free food.ue relationship through textsionship through textss (we'a