Mi2Sweets – Small Bites

01/16: Small Bites

A few years ago, it was decided that the time had come for my feisty ninety-two year old grandma, who had been living on her own for more than fifteen years, to move back in with my mom. There had been one too many close calls involving incinerated congee, burnt stew and a near-stroke episode involving the ninety pound grandma dragging a twenty pound sandbag across her doorway to prevent the rain from flooding in her apartment. My mom and aunts took on the task of clearing out her pantry when moving day finally came. What they discovered was a staggering number of recycled Mary Ellen jam jars–at least forty alone filled with rice. The total jar count hovered around seventy.

Mom just shook her head and mumbled something about my grandmother being a pack rat, which is kinda like the pot called the kettle black considering the decades old collection of toiletries in her bathroom (yeah mom they haven’t made that mouthwash since 1983). My aunt, however, attributed grandma’s jam jar fixation to her need to not be wasteful, to save every last bit in case of an emergency. Maybe she’d transfer the last half cup of rice from her rice bin into a jar, buy a new bag, and forget to finish the rice in the jar first? Or, as I suspect, she had what I term that “Chinese hoarding instinct.” It comes partly from living through hard times (in her case I suppose WWII) and also a need to be “prepared.” You never know when you’ll need that last bit of rice or that recycled jam jar for that matter.

As frivolous as I can be–and these days I can’t afford it–I have quite a bit of that “hoarding instinct” in me. I don’t, like my grandmother, have a plethora of recycled jam jars filled with various dry goods. I do, however, seem to collect alot of snack foods–storing them in zip loc bags or securing them close with tiny bull clips. What can I say, I like variety. I’ve never been the type of person who could just eat an entire bag of say potato chips in one or two sittings. Like my grandmother, who incidentally also used those jam jars to display a seemingly endless selection of snacks, I’m a nibbler. I have been since kindergarten, when she’d plunk down that daily little plate of assorted treats for me to savor while I watched an afternoon of cartoons.

Now, I suppose I could just buy a snack size of something, maybe in a variety pack, but then I like to choose my own variety. I never know when I’ll have a hankering for those cheese crunchies from Trader Joe’s, followed by an English chocolate-dipped digestive biscuit. And those things don’t come in small packages.

When I was studying in England my American cohorts and I would head into the village Sainsbury market to stock up on packaged “bickies” or cookies for those long study sessions. Invariably, after about a day or two, my friends would be pounding on my door to tap into my stash of bickies because they knew I was “hoarding” them. I never could get them to understand that it really wasn’t so much about saving the bickies for a rainy day (and we had a lot of those) as it was about me wanting to have a variety on hand so I could nibble at will. Sure it was a kind of portion control, but I think it’s more about my taste buds getting bored with eating too much on one thing. And since I hated wasting food, I just saved it.

I can fully appreciate the appeal of “minis,” especially desserts. Why eat just one big one when you can have a bunch of little ones? I find myself thinking in those terms more and more lately, which is a little ironic since I’ve spent the better part of my years as a pastry chef in restaurants making huge batches of stuff. When someone asked me for a recipe, I usually had to force myself to scale it down.

I wouldn’t turn down a big sloppy hot fudge sundae or a fat slice of hot apple pie a la mode, but sometimes eating a few mini versions is the best way to have your cake and eat it too. In my case it saves me from both flabby taste buds…and flabby thighs. Hmm…maybe that’s how grandma kept her girlish figure?

Posted January 16th, 2009

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