Month: July 2025

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I’ve Been Known to Smuggle Plain Yogurt Into a Restaurant

That there is a photo of white mountain yogurt, which is my new favorite yogurt.

Years ago there was a restaurant in Venice Beach called Hurry Curry. It’s gone now. It was one of those places where, between 9am and 9pm, you could walk in and Raj would hook you up with anything you might want that was your typical Indian fare, aloo gobi, palak or saag paneer, matar paneer, chicken tiki masala, vindaloo, you name it. You could get various levels of spice, but almost all of their food had a kick to it, and I was raised on Irish cooking, for the most part. I love cucumbers, but I’ve never been a fan of raita, because they’re too mushy in it. I had eaten yogurt in my life, but, if you grew up like me, the yogurt you ate was a crime against yogurt, Dannon. My mom bought one that was fruit on the bottom that was okay, but really, yogurt was always like a “when you really want a good sweet, but you’re too fat for one,” sort of thing, and as fat as I have ever been, and I have been quite voluminous, I ain’t never been that fat. LOL. Actually I am not even that into sweets. So why waste the sweets you are going to eat on freaking Dannon?. But Raj, the very sweet very large man in charge, gave me some plain yogurt to try as a way to cool down the spice.

Raj made the yogurt from scratch. Raj was probably 20 years older than me, and his entire family was back in India. Raj was here hoping to make enough money to send them back there so that his kids could do well in life, and he hadn’t seen his family in the same room as him in about ten years when I met him. Raj was illegal, and he could not go back to visit and hope to come here again easily, especially after 9/11. But he owned Hurry Curry, and he was beloved in the neighborhood.

Raj’s yogurt was slightly warm, as he took it from the pot on the stove, and runny. Dannon’s was only runny if it had gone over. Raj’s yogurt had a tang to it, but not sour, and so soft and smooth. It was delicious. Raj taught me how to make it by taking home some of his yogurt, and heating up milk on the stove, letting it almost boil, cooling it down to room temp., and then pouring in Raj’s yogurt. (I am not a food scientist… please do not consider this a “how to” on yogurt making. It is a reminiscence from 20 years ago.)

Raj had a little “fatherly” crush on me, I think. I was not a petite person then, and he thought I was just the cutest, plumpest thing outside of his wife in India. He always used to put extra cheese cubes in my saag paneer. Oh, man, was it good!

Indian restaurants, in general, in my opinion, have the best yogurt going. I am not a fan of yogurt with sweet things in it. I like it plain. And, actually, I have to make another tangent here to rave about Turkish manti.

Turkish manti can most easily be described as tortellini filled with meat and presented with a creamy buttery garlic yogurt sauce on top, but the kind I had was made like that, and then “soupefied” (it’s my word, I created it!) with some of the pasta water. The ones I see photos of on the web have missed this (IMHO) crucial step. I once had a little group of Turkish graduate students I’d become friends with, and they took me to a restaurant in NYC that served manti, which they said is normally a food not served in restaurants, because “Only Mama makes it.” And then they had Mama send some, somehow, frozen like a brick, and they made it for me at home too. I don’t eat a lot of meat these days, but if someone put a steaming bowl of manti in front of me, especially if it was soupefied, it would be impossible to say no.

Back to the yogurt, because I want to tell you about white mountain yogurt, which I found at Sprouts. I’m not gonna lie. I bought it because of the beautiful glass jar. I am a jar lover, and a jar hoarder. I mean it’s endlessly reusable! And this jar is beautiful.

May they never switch to paper or plastic! Imagine those flowers you are going to buy yourself sticking out of this damn jar! Wow! Imagine the terrarium you could make in it! Imagine the leftovers, like something soupified, you could store in it after you have pulled a Gene Simmons and somehow gotten your tongue all the way down to the bottom of the jar. This yogurt tastes exactly as I remember Raj’s tasting. It is thin in spots and thick in others, but a good shake of the jar makes it more uniform. It has that silky thin texture and absolutely perfect taste. It is, so it says, Bulgarian! And, just like that, another country on my “wish I could visit” list. I want to go!

Which brings me to tangent #2: Immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

I found a photo of Raj! God bless the internet!

What a cutie!

And here are some photos of Hurry Curry!


Wasn’t it beautiful?

Right before I moved back east, Raj had a heart attack. At the time his wife was able to visit, and was coming to take care of him. Of course, she couldn’t stay any more than he was supposed to have stayed. I don’t know the real story of why Hurry Curry is gone. I was having my own very real life crisis at the same time, so I could not even attempt to keep connected. I hope he closed because he went home to his family. I know he always wanted to. I’m mean, Los Angeles is great, but his family wasn’t here, and he always wanted to return to them. The immigrant situation in the USA is a problem of our own making, in my humble opinion. If you want to move here from England, you have a much easier time than if you want to move here from Mexico, or India, or many other places. The way to move here is not standardized or the same for each country. Many Americans, long before the current mess of an administration, married immigrants only to find there was no way for their spouses to get citizenship, and they left the USA for their spouses’ home countries. But many countries are not safe to go back to at all, and so people go “underground” because they fear harm back home. But really, if home was safe, and your family was safe, you would probably prefer to be in your home. I’ve met and become friends with many international students, and none of them wanted to stay. They wanted to go back to Turkey, to Vietnam, to Eastern Europe, to Mexico. And it breaks my heart, every day, to see what the current administration is doing to my fellow humans. A person who happened to be born in Columbia, or Haiti, or Yugoslavia, or Sudan is no different from me. They may like different foods, or have different spiritual beliefs, but we all have the same dreams: happiness for ourselves, and, as we have them, for our children. Stephen Miller and his goons are as wrong and evil as any other proponent of monoraciality in history. He would deny us our friends from other places, our family from other places, and our food from other places too. I see what is going on today as simple cruelty that is out to hurt people like Raj. And why? What for? I don’t buy the whole “crime & rapists” stuff, and I don’t buy the “they’re using all the resources so we don’t have enough!” The Republicans keep cutting aid programs, which is why we don’t have enough. It’s got nothing to do with poor children from this country or any other.

This article really moved me, and gave me some small insight into a world I don’t know anything about. “A day in the strawberry fields seems like forever”

I hope people who judge immigrants harshly will take a moment to read it.

Anywho, as a woman who loves to eat, and quite likes spicy food, but can also collapse into an asthma attack if it is truly spicy, yogurt has saved my ass too many times to mention. I’ve been known to bring my own (small plastic container secreted in handbag or coat pocket) if we’re going for spicy food at a place where I don’t expect them to have any… like a Korean restaurant. I’ve never not been grateful for being introduced to non-English, Irish, or Italian foods. Diversity is one of the things I most enjoy in the world. I can think of one of my favorite and most challenging students, and young guy named Mole (pronounced mole-eh! like ole!), who introduced me to, you guessed it, mole sauce! But that’s a story for another day.

I hope that Raj recovered, and was able to go back to India to live happily ever after with his family. I can’t thank him enough for all the good food, for being so kind, and always so tickled to see me (he always came from behind the counter to give me a hug), for thinking I was cute, and for teaching me about plain, and delicious, yogurt. Go try some white mountain. You can drink a shot glass of it: it is so liquidy and delicious. Take a shot of probiotic bliss and toast to your own health, mine, and Raj’s. And buy yourself flowers to put in the jar after you empty it!

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Give Me Back My Patriotism

From the time I can remember, whenever I belonged to any group, I was, what my brother would call, a rah! rah!

My brother was definitely not a rah! rah! But, in his defense, organized things, like church and school, weren’t always that welcoming to the distracted kid who looked like he would have preferred to be anywhere other than there, and he would have.

I remember so clearly many aspects of 1976. I wore one of those mop hats Betsy Ross and the like wore, because my class was so often engaged in colonial reenactments at malls and nursing homes. I remember my friend, Krissi, who had Mr. Griffin instead of Mrs. Wentz, and her whole class did a huge lip-syncing performance, and Krissi got to be Elton John while another girl, who I was very jealous of, got to be Kiki Dee. Damn!

But my class was relegated to what Mrs. Wentz liked, and that was patriotism.

Well, that wasn’t that hard for me. I loved fireworks, something which, I must admit, years of dog ownership as an adult have soured for me. I loved barbecues in the back field with all the dads playing softball against all the sons, even if it did mean that the other daughters and I were stuck being beer-bringers, cheerleaders, and trash-picker-uppers. I was so proud a few years earlier for the Battle of the Sexes, where Billie Jean King roundly kicked Bobby Riggs’ old ass. I believed in feminism from the door, as much as a new human could. But the guys were not at all happy about Billie Jean King. They were pissed, and embarrassed, as if each one of them was Bobby Riggs. When our working class neighborhood had those ball games in the field I had an understanding that the guys needed those ball games. Those dads needed to clobber their young sons, and they needed their wives and daughters to cheer them on. 

I have the photo of Converse at the top because we wore Converse and Keds, my brother and me, and I had a pair of Converse, I think they were Converse, in 1976 that were stars and stripes, and I loved them. I had a patriotic T, and I put crepe paper in my spokes, and biked in the 4th of July parade, learned all the patriotic songs (I was able to sing all the words to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” just last night at the Hollywood Bowl), and I loved America. 

My parents were blue-collar, a machinist (later a gunsmith) and a telephone operator, and they raised us on church, and baseball games, and love and respect of elders, and turkey with stuffing, and all that stuff.

As I grew up, though, that fit me less and less. 

Sometimes, in my childhood, boys were just jerks, mean, violent. I never had a group of girls surround me on bikes and spit all over me, or throw worms in my long hair when it rained, or pick on my friend Richard, who was probably gay, and hit him, and hit me if I tried to stop them. But the boys did that. The boys told me I couldn’t play run-the-bases, or go in their fort, or go with them to the creek. Not my brother, my brother was always nice, but the boys the same age as me. In school the boys got angry when I got a higher score on the test, like it was a crime, and then would do something, “Race you to that pole!” to prove they could beat me. Or just knock into me in the hall, or hold my locker door closed when I was trying to get my books out. I loved my father and brother. I loved baseball and hockey and boxing. I wanted to hang out with the guys and the girls, but the guys weren’t usually welcoming, and they really didn’t want to hear my ideas on how to do things, at church or at school. And there were plenty of girls who were always ready to defend the guys being just as jerky as they wanted to be, if it meant they got asked to the prom. I also wanted to go to prom, but not that much.

As I grew up I was always more of a reader than most, and so I read the Sunday paper, and the Bible, and the school textbooks, and the encyclopedias that we had (I think we had through J), and the Atlas. I knew what the books said, and I knew what I thought about what I read. A lot of the guys hadn’t read, but they knew with certainty what they thought, and I had better not say different. And their girlfriends agreed.

In college, when I was living in an apartment near University of Pennsylvania, the neighbor guys threw ketchup and mustard on my apartment door, and banged up my bike locked up in the hall, because of my Geraldine Ferraro poster, which they tore down and tore up.  Guys were always telling me I had too much to say, and too many opinions, and read too much.

Much later, when I signed up to adopt from China, I joined a Yahoo group for adopters-to-be, and quickly learned that a vocal group of waiting parents were fundamentalist Christians, and they didn’t want anyone using rainbows for anything, or to adopt while gay, or to really like China at all, which was, in the views they often espoused, a bad place full of bad people whose children needed rescuing.

I watched the Watergate hearings as a small child. When the cartoons were over on Saturday mornings, I stayed for the hearings until my mom shooed me away. I was so disappointed in Nixon. I thought Ford was a kindly but ineffective man. I thought Carter was great; I wanted to meet him. I despised Reagan, and both Bushes, and I was thrilled about Clinton, but more thrilled about Mrs. Clinton. I was devasted when Bill cheated on his wife. 

I don’t know where I’m going with this except that, when I was young, I loved being a USA booster, and as I aged, I have felt more and more pushed out, like my kind of person wasn’t the right kind of American, and I’m white and straight! For those who aren’t, the pushing must feel so much more constant.

When I went to see Hamilton last fall, all my patriotism was re-awakened. My god what they did to get this country made! What they had the imaginations to plan for in the future, and what they were willing to give up to make this dream country!

But then, less than a month after I saw it, so many people voted for the wrong person. Now, I agree, we can compare and agree to disagree on John McCain and Mitt Romney vs. Barak Obama or the like. But we cannot do that on the current occupant of the White House. The man elected in 2024 has done nothing but egregious activities his entire adult life, and yet he brings out the patriotism in so many people, people, I would argue, who have no idea what patriotism is, and what it means to be an American in the America created by those founders whose stories are told in Hamilton. My father, who taught me to love baseball and boxing, and my brother, who taught me to love hockey and catch tadpoles, would have been horrified by elected officials being shot in their homes by a fake cop, and would have been disappointed in a president who could not bring himself to offer condolences to their governor. Where are men like them? Where are the real patriots? I feel like I’ve been in states of disbelief, grief, confusion, amazement, and panic since the fall election. I have moments where I want to take my small family, and our friends, and run for another country. But when you’re from the country that kicks everyone out, can you really ask another country to let you in?

I haven’t put out a flag for Flag Day or the 4th of July in years. I am an American patriot, but not for this version of America. And I wish I could have my pride and patriotism back. For me, it’s almost like the 4thof July has been sucked into “the upside down,” where everything I’ve loved about this country has been changed to its most perverse opposite. I know that what people like me lost from our country we lost in tiny little pieces, from, in my lifetime, the pardoning of Nixon foreword, in the name of trying to give space to two sides that are really not equal at all. As the short and fantastic film Here Be Dragons says, “Math class doesn’t give equal time to 2+2=5.” But we did. I lost my patriotism, and many lost much much more. I don’t think it’s something barbecue or patriotic sneakers or colored explosions can fix.