Mmm Smells Like Home

There’s not many times I find myself thinking: man, this tastes JUST like it does back home.

Everything here taste’s different—even when theoretically it should taste the same. Coca Cola taste different, Sprite taste different. The peanut butter is different. The chocolate’s not that good, but we still eat it because we’re away from home and it makes us feel better. Almost every food tastes different here. I tried to make biscuits…different. My cookies, different. I’ve just now got all the kinks almost worked out and food that I make are starting to taste like (or close enough) to how it does in the states.

Now that’s not always a bad thing. I do tend to love Peruvian food. There’s nothing in the states that tastes like my favorite plate here: Aji de Gallina. The fruit here tastes better, the veggies taste better (well ok I still don’t like olives). That’s probably to due with how fresh they are. But tonight I had a taste of home. We ate soup for dinner, no big deal usually. It’s almost always the same when it’s the “dinner time soup.” Its rice, chicken, and a mix of veggies and potatoes. It’s always good. Tonight it was better. Not because my host mom did something extremely different. I’m sure only one ingredient changed. Green Beans are in season.

They were cooked so long that they were that brown-green color of pond algae. Which if you think about it is actually a really gross color for anything other than really well cooked green beans. I’m not sure what it was in the soup, my host mom doesn’t use butter )my host dad doesn’t like it), but when I had a spoonful of green beans (intentionally just to see if the taste was the same) I had a flashback to Bullocks. Bullocks is a barbeque place near my house that I used to love(for those of you reading who’ve either never lived in Durham, or who live in a cave in Durham and were unaware). Unfortunately due to either a change in cook staff or a change in management, I’m not sure which, the family favorite has fallen a little bit out of favor, its just not like it used to be.

But I remember how it used to be: Steaming hot hushpuppies that had just the right ratio of onion to sugar served with honey butter in those little plastic tubs by the basketful. I always got the BBQ with a rotation of sides, it depended in the night of course. There was the sweet corn, baked apples, green beans, lima beans, black eyed peas, cole slaw, well the list just goes on and on, but those are the ones I remember. The corn, green beans and apples being my favorites of the list. The BBQ came out hot, just right—Eastern North Carolina style (the only way in my book). Then we topped off the BBQ high with a Tootsie Roll pop that you bought for a quarter by the cash register.

Half of Bullocks still had that smoked filled, donw home dinner feel, the other half was only lacking the smoke. The line to get in was always long on a Friday night. My family and I probably have eaten there enough Friday nights in our lives to fill a calendar year—ok that could be a slight exaggeration, but it’s at least half a year. I’m not sure how many years its’ been since I’ve eaten at Bullocks. Like I said, we stopped going when the food changed. But tonight, those green beans were JUST the same. That green-brown, slow cooked to death taste. It was amazing. When my host mom asked me if I liked the soup, I said yes and thought for a second to try and explain Bullocks, and the familiar taste…but then figured it was too hard to explain to someone outside of the BBQ Culture. Maybe one of these days I’ll figure out how I can make a campo-pig cooker and try and explain it to them by showing them…till Google and I hit gold, I’ll just have to settle on old memories and wait until Late 2010 when I can get me some of Eastern North Carolina’s best--probably homemade by a Mr. Tom Myers out back of his house if I play my cards right.