Peas and Rice and Tinkerbell

For dinner on Monday night, we made up these rainbow colored, star-shaped pasta we had picked up from the local Indian grocery store. I boiled some water, threw them in, and did the things one does when making regular pasta and when we drained them, they were absurdly salty, gluey and generally horrible.

I usually add a dash of salt to the water to raise the boiling point and cook the food faster, and I thought that I must have used more than I realized and it had been absorbed by the pasta. However a (belated) look at the nutritional information on the bag showed that they were only superficially similar to Western pasta, with each serving having a full 50% of the recommended daily allowance of sodium. We didn't know what these things were, only that we had just cooked something to which Ramen noodles were a low sodium alternative.

So we knew that these pasta were somewhat different from the kind we were used to making, so we figured they'd have a special method of preparation. I googled the name of the product, Trupti, but it turned out to be a common name. I was telling this to Jen and we both looking at the package and we both had the same thought at the same time.



"Trupti's not the name of the product..."

"...it's the name of the brand."

"They seem to be called 'fryums'."

"Do you think we..."

"...fry um?"

Heh. That was indeed the case. We also found a blog dedicated to vegetarian Indian recipes in the course of our search, so, bonus!

I thought back to grade school about Melissa and Jen's peas and rice adventure from...I want to say 4th grade? I have memories of two otherwise very smart girls frying up some peas and rice without cooking them first, an event that was talked about for years afterward.

Lily enjoyed them, as it turned out, (I'm pleased that she's trying new stuff, but it's not like rainbow colored star shapes are a hard sell. On the other hand, she usually decries anything more nutritious than a dinner of Ring Pops as "yucky",) and Jen and I slathered enough alfredo sauce (with fresh basil!) on ours to make them tolerable.

Speaking of Lily, she was doing something slightly naughty over the weekend, and Jen raised her voice. After that was over, Jen left the room and Lily said to me, "I love mommy, but I'm mad at her right now. I'm not mad at you because you're more calm."

I was really impressed that she was able to make and articulate that distinction at her age, and I was also impressed by the maturity she showed in reaching that conclusion. It reminded me, of all things, of Peter Pan. Tinkerbell goes through extremes of emotions, and this is explained in the context of the story by saying a fairy is so small that she can only hold one emotion at a time. So when she's mad at someone, she has nothing to balance it out. Little kids are like that, to a certain extent, and I'm happy that she has the wherewithal to understand the emotions she's feeling at any given moment aren't the totality of her feelings towards mommy.