Dinner guests last Thursday

These last few months, I've witnessed L's cooking becoming more and more bizarre. Last Thursday, he had invited some people to dinner. In anticipation for this event, L had given himself a haircut early that morning. He had shaved the whole front of his hairline so that is hairline began at the top of his head rather than at his forehead. The look was reminiscent of characters in Chinese martial art movies. In addition, he had shaved half of one of his eyebrows so that it was very thin (about 1/4 of an inch thick) while the other eyebrow was kept in all its bushy glory.

For dinner, he served shelled peanuts that had been sitting in his (extremely dirty) bathroom the week before, a dessert of baked cantaloupe and apples (skin, seeds, and all) mixed with water, and a moldy shredded chicken dish (he had scraped off the mold before serving it). The housekeeper had made a chicken dish as well, which was all I ate since she whispered to me that it was the only dish that was deemed safe (i.e., not touched by L). I could not even eat the bread because earlier, L had dropped the bread on the (very dirty) kitchen floor, picked it up, and continued cutting it up to serve.


Although I had warned two of the guests earlier in the evening of L's cooking, I was unable to warn the other three that had arrived later on in the evening. Despite my warnings, there wasn't a tactful way for them to refuse the plate of food that L offered them at dinner time. After about 20 minutes though, of watching some of the guests pick at their food, I offered to take away plates of food and dump the contents so they wouldn't have to continue pretending to eat the food throughout the evening.

The first supper

"L" was one of the best bosses I've had -- flexible hours, interesting work, and I learned a lot. He was kind, generous, and also a very decent cook. It was very nice having lunch and dinner with him as we worked on various projects together. A few months ago he started becoming very experimental with his cooking. Experiments that reminded me of the cooking disasters that Ruth Reichl's mother fed to her family and guests.

The first time I noticed the cooking starting to change was on an evening a few months ago. L had a friend who was looking for investors for a coffee venture he was going to start. We worked on a presentation and proposal for weeks leading up to the night. I assumed we would go out for dinner as usual when we had guests, but L said he preferred to do the cooking and entertaining at his home.

The soup he made was awful, but L's friend ate it with no grimace or complaints, so I assumed it may have been a culturally esoteric dish that I hadn't yet developed a taste for.

While I worked and prepared for the meeting, L cooked. The soup started off well -- he sauteed chopped garlic and onion in some olive oil. I noticed that he didn't peel the garlic or the onion, but it smelled good, and not all cooks are as fastidious as I can be. Then he added chicken to brown -- good quality free range chicken that I bought at the local market earlier that day. After the chicken was browned, he added water and let it simmer for a VERY long time -- about 5 hours. Throughout this time, he added other ingredients including vegetables, herbs, and spices. By this point, the chicken started to smell a bit funny as chicken can when it's over-boiled.

When it was time for dinner, I was very hungry and looking forward to trying L's soup. It was one of the strangest things I had eaten at that point. The chicken was very overcooked as I had guessed it would be as were many other vegetables he had thrown in there. I bit into 2-inch-chunk piece of root vegetable that I had assumed was a potato only to find my mouth chewing and trying to swallow a piece of ginger. There were broken bits of cinnamon too small to easily fish out, but too big to comfortably eat and swallow. There were also pieces of star anise that he had broken up. Just like the cinnamon, the star anise pieces were too small to easily fish out, but still too big to eat. And of course, the papery skin of the garlic and onions were an unwelcome surprise whenever they made their way into my mouth. There was also a lot of turmeric in the soup and an unpleasant sweetness from the addition of a lot of nabat -- Persian saffron rock candy. Despite this, I ate whatever I could with a polite smile on my face, all the while wondering why my boss would experiment with cooking on such an important business evening.