What do they call Chinese food in China?
Food.
I grew up on authentic Mexican food (northern). I am not Mexican and our immediate household wasn't run as Mexican, but my extended family is Mexican, so lots of family meals dominated by Mexican cooking. My great aunt ran one of the best home-cooking restaurants in southern New Mexico, and I ate there often while visiting my grandparents for the summer.
I spent my college years in Michigan and Massachusetts, in the seventies, before regional cuisines had made their way nationwide, so opportunities to eat Mexican food were sparse and questionable. When I did eat it, I was tempted to ask myself: is this good Mexican food? The answer was always no, of course, encouraging me to disdain it.
But something inspired me to ask a different question: is this good food? Quite often the answer was: yes! And so instead of a miserable experience, thinking of how short my meal fell from the Mexican idea, I would enjoy myself, thinking of how well it met the goal of being a good meal.
I just took a twelve pound brisket out of the oven after coating it with a mixture of dijon mustard, liquid smoke, salt, pepper, and garlic powder, then slow cooking it for twenty-one hours. Will it be as good as the Texas BBQ brisket I love so much? Not at all. Will it be delicious, tender, satisfying, and feed me for around twenty meals? It will do a very good job of all those things.
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