Gourmet

I have been dreaming of the Christmas Carob Cookies my mommas made me. While quite tasty, they do pale in comparison to the lovely little treats that came in my Advent Calendar. Each night in December (that is, each night until they shipped me off to Puppy Camp for the holidays), one of my mommas would open the next door on my cardboard calendar and pop out a tiny dog biscuit before bedtime. They plan to save the calendar and refill it with more homemade snacks each year.

My momma C considers herself a bit of a gourmet. She use to be a cheesebuyer before doing the videography thing and then becoming a CPA. After a hard week of number-crunching, Momma C takes great pride in being able to name all the cheeses at a party - a weird party trick, I suppose, but a surefire way to screen people for who you REALLY want to spend your evening talking. People that know their cheese (or at least appreciate it) are just good people.

The trouble with cheese is that the good stuff tends to be a little pricey, so "knowing cheese" gets to be a snooty thing if you are in certain crowds. The precious farmhouse, so-called artisan stuff can run from $15-25 a pound. Of course, if you cut out premium cable (which my mommas have) and going out to eat every night at the Applebees, I think you can splurge every now and then on some premium stuff (what happened to Tyler Florence?).

On the other hand, my momma will forever be known for her ability to appreciate both "high" and "low" culture. She is perhaps the only cheesebuyer to extol the glories of pasteurized cheese spread (c'mon, who doesn't like Laughing Cow and those little processed wedges from Germany. A little cloud of caraway heaven?). Please note that Momma C (or, "The Big Cheese" as her business cards use to say) also almost had a car accident while trying to eat Kraft Spray Cheez from the bottle while driving. Really. Think, windshield.

Momma C will always remember a story her dad told her when she was little about how his family use to looooove processed meat from a can (corned beef, Spam, etc.). They always had to have fresh food growing up in the Philippines. You know, vegetables, fish, rice. For special breakfasts, they had the imported stuff like Spam. For Christmas, they had Virginia ham and Queso de Bola (the big red Edam ball especially marketed to the Islands). Growing up in Maryland, Momma C ate the now readily available Spam at least once a week. (I think I'd love the stuff if Momma B wasn't a gosh-darn fish-etarian...)

Once, while working in restaurants, Momma C was inspired by the Annual Spam Contest and made a Spam and Cheese Soup. I hear it was too salty.

All and all, I don't care what my mommas eat, as long as they don't eat me. This may seem a little insensitive, since Momma C is a first-generation Filipino-American, who suffered through decades of being taunted with "Dog Eater" cries. She use to think this was just an outdated epithet though, and was saddened to see on the Dogster Blog that, despite its being illegal, hundreds of dogs are still eaten in the Philippines every day. Every day! (And I get to sleep in the master bedroom!) It is a multimillion peso "underground" industry there (roughly $1.1M US). Of course, as wretched as this may sound to most Americans (who spend many more millions of dollars on dog toys every year), I'm not sure most can cast the first stone with the monster steaks on their dinner plates. Or perhaps monster steaks wrapped in bacon. Or with those ducks stuffed in chickens stuffed in turkeys. I suppose, humans, with their superior intellect, also "won the right" to eat puppies too.

I am not a vegetarian. Despite the repeated announcements from my Momma B that, unlike a cat, I don't have to eat meat, I do eat seafood and, on occasion, other meats. I do not mean to cause a stir. (I tried to eat a chicken bone once, but Momma C wrenched it out of my mouth just in time to get her hand chomped.) I just hope that folks take the time that I do to wonder were the food came from before gobbling it down - whether it was a gift from a deity, or grown through the back-breaking toil of migrant laborers, or with the sacrifice of a happy turkey that grew up under a pecan tree in Alabama without getting poked full of drugs and hormones. I am compelled to bring up the musing of the old canine in Kafka's "Investigation of a Dog." (Momma C shared this with me while she was at Duke.) The dog had spent his entire life wondering from whence his food came. He's totally oblivious of humans and believed that he needed to water the ground to make the food come (sometimes "from the ground", sometimes "from the air"). While the philosophical pursuit consumes him, I at least see his appreciation for the vittles, knowing he mustn't tempt forces by quiting his ground-wetting rituals.

Momma C has started back on the chuck wagon (quite literally) but thinks she can fend of the Gods of PETA (or at least Reese Witherspoon and the Baldwin bros) by appropriating the Native American ritual of thanking the animal soul before consuming its flesh.

Now, is a blanket thank-you to all the souls okay or must she be able to discern each little soul that may have gone into, say, a sausage and address each one?