kai

Apparently the sense of smell is very closely linked to memory, and although we spend a lot of our time using our senses of sight and hearing to engage with the world around us, it is smell that can jolt the memory most abruptly.

For me, I find a lot of my memory is also linked to another sense: taste.

Different kinds of kai remind me of specific experiences and people.

Tonight as I type this I am eating a small bowl of raspberries - fresh raspberries - from a punnet I picked up at the supermarket earlier this evening. I bought them because as soon as I saw them I remembered Nana. I suppose I was thinking about Nana because it's getting close to her birthday... I found a hilarious card for my cousin whose birthday is on the 15th and I always link his birthday with Uncle Mike's five days earlier and Nana's three days before that. It's October birthday season and Nana's was first in the lineup.

My Nana was amazing and awesome and all of those other things that words just can't describe, even though even saying that is a cliche, and she loved raspberries. I like very much that these were her favourite berries - they are kind of humble and not dramatic but also not dime-a-dozen. They're delicate but still pack a strong flavour. They remind me of her.

My fingers smell of garlic - really strongly of garlic - plus a bit of ginger. I've been marinating some steak for some Pasifika-style chop suey I'm making for a reading group which is gathering tomorrow night... I've realised I'm missing some food from home, but am also just missing cooking for a large group of people (if six or seven counts as large) so it has been so so great to boil potatoes and eggs for potato salad (I would add beetroot Kuki style, but they don't tend to like beetroot much over here - so wierd!), get the steak ready for chopsuey, and check on the rice, chicken drumsticks and the closest thing to kumara. Yum!

Prepping the kai tonite, I can't help but remember the time I cooked a similar kai a few weeks after I'd moved to Ithaca in 2000, when I invited some mates over to eat so I wouldn't be forced to eat kai for six people by myself and I don't know how to cook this kind of food for one. (I doubt it can be done.) They trooped up the stairs in my apartment in N Geneva St, looking a bit unsure about what was to greet them on the table (such kind souls, coming to make me feel less homesick, having no idea what I was going to cook), and then managed to chomp their way happily through all of it! (Even though they were a bit doubtful that so many forms of carbohydrate and meat can work together - I served it all with bread of course haha - they were won over to the kai and loved it.)

Raspberries and chopsuey. These are my memories. This - this strange combination - is what makes me who I am.