Olof's Worst Meal Ever

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 29, 2018] ©2018

Recently I noticed a recipe in AARP Magazine for Kimchi Stew which I cut out for Olof. I noted that Kimchi Stew combined his two least favorite foods – kimchi (popular with his first wife) and tofu – into what would be his Ultimate Worst Meal.

OK, maybe penultimate worst meal.  When we lived in Sweden, we were determined to try everything, including a sour fermented herring called surströmming. I think the best approximation of the smell would be rotting corpses awash in a massive sewer backup. The recipe is as follows: “This dish is prepared from the small Baltic herring, which is salted and set aside for a rather long time. When the souring process (a process of controlled rotting or fermentation) has got under way, the fish is put up in hermetically sealed tins, which are distinctly swollen by the time they are ready for sale.  A pungent aroma – delectable to some, repulsive to others – fills the room whenever a can is opened.  By ordinance, the year’s supply of sour herring may begin to be sold on the third Thursday in August, and this signals the start of festivities.” 

OK, so already you’re wondering where the words “delectable” and “festivities” come into this. Putting a sales embargo on this year’s “crop” until the third Thursday in August is a brilliant feat of marketing. 

While it is not polite to make fun of another country’s semi-national dish, surströmming is not a universally loved food even among the Swedes, who, as the description above suggests, either love it or hate it. 

American neighbors had purchased a can of surströmming at the local fisk hallen which had been residing in their fridge just waiting to be shared with guests they hoped would leave.  Er, no, with equally adventurous friends. So one Sunday night, we opened the can at our house. 

One thing became very clear: this is truly raw fish.  Efforts to think of it as simply Sushi Gone Bad were in vain.  But we were all determined to go through with it, buoyed by the knowledge that Swedes had been eating it for centuries, and that we had a reservation at an Italian restaurant at 8:00.  To eat surströmming, Americans have to suspend all previous knowledge and instinct, along with several millennia of good sense. It goes against everything we know to eat stuff from an (a) bulging can that (b) screams botulism and is (c) both raw AND rotten and that (d) smells like a global plumbing disaster, and (e) is really slimy, never mind has an (f) high risk of explosion, and that (g) - despite (a) through (f) - we should embrace as a delicacy.

Eating it right off a cracker with a dab of onion and a bit of sour cream as the purists do (and we did as well) apparently takes years of training, and quite possibly Swedish genes. One can also bury it in a casserole of potatoes (proportions something along the lines of 200 to 1).

Surströmming is  definitely an acquired taste which neither Olof nor I acquired while in Sweden.  But we hadn’t been big fans of  herring in general when we arrived and came to love non-surströmming varieties.   

We discussed over the table what the history of surströmming might be.  It’s obviously been around a long time (literally and figuratively).  It would definitely have been the ultimate economical olden times party food.  (One can feeds 50 because the other 49 aren’t eating it.)  Herring is certainly plentiful so even in times of famine, there’s always going to be fish.  In fact, that is Olof’s personal theory about it all: that during the long harsh Swedish winters when food was scarce, this was the fall-back food. It was eat this or eat your children. (In my view, it must have been a hard decision.) 

We could imagine what life was like during those times: “Hey, kids!  We’re having surströmming again tonight! (And for breakfast, lunch, and dinner tomorrow.)  Hmmm, isn’t this just totally yummy?  Oooh, and this batch tastes particularly rotten – just the way mommy likes it!” Apparently salt (for curing) wasn’t widely available and  the production of this stuff required only a small amount of the then-precious mineral which allegedly slows down the actual rotting process in favor of fermentation.

Because the cans are fermented and bulging, they cannot be taken on a commercial airliner in carry-on luggage as the cans could explode if the cabin lost pressure. (Some airlines have apparently classified it in the same category as shoe bombs, an act that Swedish aficionados of this raw fish grenade term “culturally illiterate”).  If a pilot thought he had problems with cabin pressure, it would be nothing compared to the passengers throwing open the emergency exits and bailing out of the plane at 35,000 feet.  

So, Kimchi Stew, I think you’ve met your match. 

 John's face after his first bite

Olof's face after his first bite

Sonia's face after her first (and only) bite

The Barbarian Invasion

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 22, 2018] ©2018 

If there is one thing we can observe about our five young beloved grandchildren – fondly referred to by my husband as “the destroyers of peace” -  it is that they have just as much energy as they have ever had, but we have way less. 

We recently had them for a three-day weekend with their dads.  Our daughters-in-law were supposed to come too but one daughter-in-law, a teacher, had just been promoted to principal of her school so her work year started early.  The other daughter-in-law had just returned from a fun but exhausting two-week family vacation to the east coast. She said she hoped I wouldn’t be offended but there was nothing that would make her happier than three days Home Alone.  I wasn’t offended at all. I remembered the feeling well.

Now what was different about this visit was that without the organizing influence of the two moms, things got a tad chaotic.  The kids’ rooms at our house looked like cyclones had hit them.  We have a pool, which was a godsend in the stifling heat, but beds and floors were a sea of clothes, shoes, and wet towels.  There were probably more red solo cups strewn around than the morning after a fraternity kegger. 

I’ve long since learned to only buy the smallest size water bottles.  Every evening I did a sweep around the house to collect the two dozen or more containers that had been opened, had two sips taken out of them, then abandoned.  My potted plants were really grateful. 

And then there was the issue of everything in the living room ending up on the floor.   We have a really small house, just one small living room, no family room.  The sofa has throw pillows, some chenille throw blankets, and our assorted stuffed Swedish moose collection.  But still plenty of room for people. Within 30 minutes of the grandkids arriving, every single item on the sofas is on the floor. 

The upside, however, was huge.  There was a lot of brother love between my sons, never mind some serious cousin bonding.  This is the age those bonds need to be made.  My sons spent a lot of time in their youth making adventure movies with our very low-end movie camera, and it was heartwarming to watch the cousins filming similar movies with their iPads.  They had some amazing special effects in theirs.  I asked one of my grandsons how he had done one of them and he said, “Easy. With a green screen.”  I have absolutely no idea what that means. Elementary school kids know this?

During down time, I played a DVD of my kids’ old movies which I had managed to save and have transferred from VHS.  The grandkids loved seeing their fathers, not much older than they are now, making movies in the exact same backdrop.

There were definitely some visible changes in the times.  Right after breakfast, three of the kids were glued to their iPads listening to…I have no idea. 

 I had saved some of the toys that my sons used the most and love seeing them get a second life with the grandkids.  Wood blocks.  Lincoln logs.  Matchbox cars and a floor mat to run them on.  And small toy guns.

When I was a child, I can remember my toy pistol-toting brother and his friends playing “cowboys and Indians.”  I can assure you that cowboys and Indians would now be profoundly politically incorrect.  In fact, school children the nation over no longer sit “Indian style” on the floor but sit “cross cross applesauce.”  No idea what applesauce has to do with it other than it rhymes with cross cross. 

All of my kids’ toy guns were former cap guns.  I can remember all manner of shoot-em-up games going on in the front yard with the neighborhood kids, sometimes just using thumb and fore finger instead of actual toy guns.  But given the epidemic of shootings in this country in recent years, the guns suddenly took on a really bad vibe to me.  They’re now in our trash bin.  An era that needed ending.

After three really fun but utterly exhausting days, the assorted families packed up and departed amidst a lot of hugs, final movie edits, snuggles with our dog Lily, and weepy goodbyes, leaving Olof and I to survey the debris field of our home which we elected to ignore in favor of falling face down on top of our bed for a serious nap. 

When I pulled back the covers later that night, I was delighted to find a note written on two paper napkins from my eight-year-old granddaughter: “When will you come to L.A.?  I miss you. Avery.”  She drew lots of hearts on it too. 

You can overlook a lot of wet towels, goldfish crackers, and Solo cups for that kind of gratitude.

Kids' room debris field

The best reward of all 

Has Technology Become Too Technical?

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 15, 2018]  ©2018

I’ve been using computers, printers, and scanners for several decades now so you’d think I’d have the hang of them.  But every new version becomes increasingly unfriendly and unworkable.  Am I just getting stupider?  No, don’t answer. 

My personal theory is that technology has just become too technical.

When I had to replace my 2005 3-in-1 printer-scanner recently – a machine that was so user friendly that I never had to read the instruction manual – I ended up returning two of its successors as being so utterly user-hostile that I simply couldn’t make them work.  It goes without saying that there is no longer an instruction manual and that the machine itself is entirely icon-driven rather than using words.  I suppose this is so the machine can be used across many languages but in actuality ensures that no one on any continent can actually figure them out. 

On-line help doesn’t speak English.  (Actually, human help doesn’t either.) That is to say, you have to know the technical term for your problem or it can’t help you.  (I once discovered – or Olof did – that the problem I was trying to fix was “icon overlays.” Why anyone would even need to overlay an icon is beyond me but suddenly my screen was riddled with them.)

Not too many years ago, if your computer was working fine on one day and you didn’t mess with it, it would be working fine the next day too.  Not anymore. 

There are infinite numbers of things that can go wrong with your computer. And Microsoft thinks of new ones every day. They’re called “updates”.  Unsolicited updates and undesired upgrades are the curse of the modern world. They guarantee that whatever worked before will never work again.

If you change one teeny weeny little thing on your computer, it’s like the butterfly in Australia that flaps its wings and causes tornados in Kansas.  Trying to fix that problem changes enough things to add monsoons in Asia. 

Error messages, meanwhile, are a cruel psychological test. The one thing you can be assured of is that whatever it says is NOT the actual problem.

One thing I’ve learned over the years: electronics are sentient beings.  Technical gadgets sense fear and totally take advantage of it.  Laugh if you will, but I have found irrefutable evidence over the years that while computers like to jerk around people like me just for the fun of it – it knows deep in its little microchips that I am afraid of it – they themselves are terrified of actual techno-geek people like my former work colleague, Dave, or my engineer husband, Olof.  As soon as they sit down in my desk chair, the printer that wouldn’t print color for me suddenly produces brilliant rainbow images, or the document that wouldn’t format correctly miraculously prints exactly how I’d been trying to make it print for the last FOUR HOURS. 

I really do try to fix these problems myself.  For most new software, there IS no tech support other than “community groups” for which you are dependent on the kindness of totally inept strangers. My experience with community groups is: 

(1) nobody answers your question

(2) lots of people answer your question but none of the solutions help

(3) I can’t understand any of the solutions

(4) the solutions will mess up my computer to the point that the original problem will seem insignificant.

Personally, I think there is a lot that could be done to standardize electronics. For example, if I were President, I would make it a law that all documents have to be fed either face up or face down.  

If an electronics company had asked me, and inexplicably they never do, I would help them design a computer that real people, especially aging non-technical but really nice people, could actually use.  The Clairvoyance Model.  Your computer would get to know you, realize that those nasty keystroke commands that are the boon of techno types, but the bane of the techno challenged, should be ignored at all costs.  The Clairvoyance Model would quickly learn that you have the frustration tolerance of a gnat.  It would sense when you are so aggravated with your computer that you are ready to drag it out to the driveway and run it over with your car.

My one hope is that Alexa, the voice-controlled Amazon robot that everyone except me seems to own, will ultimately become the tech support that seems to have globally disappeared.  Maybe she has connections with Microsoft that we mere mortals don’t.  Unlike tech support, she’ll actually answer.  No hold time!  “Alexa,” I’ll say, “my ruler disappeared from my Word documents after the last update. Please find it and put it back.”  Or maybe, “Alexa, please install my new “self-installing” (ha!)  printer before I give up and throw the effing thing in the pool.” And it will be done.