Christmas Goat

Dear Family,

I thought I'd fill you in on my work and days around Christmas time.  It has been wonderfully busy at Buca di Beppo; it always much nicer to work at a restaurant for tips when you have many people to tip you.

As with many restaurants in America, our entire kitchen staff is of Mexican descent (on the east coast there may be more kitchens largely from Ecuador, according to Anthony Bourdain).  Our chef and cooks prepared a Mexican roasted goat for the employees working on Christmas day.  It was quite good--it did remind me a lot of lamb.  It was also quite spicy, and our chef has reminded me how much I adore spicy food (which I have held back from since Liam and Crispin were born).  I remember eating the hottest wings ever with dad at Huskies Bar in Storrs right when I was done college.  I remember when Ray had a hot sauce collection, including a potent Jamaican hot sauce.  I remember getting hooked on Vindaloo in the Indian restaurants of Alexandria and ordering the hottest green curry possible in the Thai restaurants in Evanston, IL.  Before all that, I remember being in high school with George Coplit and Mark ?, being at a pizza restaurant, and having Mark's father challenge me to eat straight red pepper flakes.  I remember my blood pressure dropping a great deal that way.

In any event, our Chef Martin has brought hotter and hotter peppers to our employee meals and has enjoyed my willingness to try them.  Today he brought spicy Thai peppers, which cleared my sinuses tremendously.

My sinuses needed to be cleared--I came down with a fairly nasty cold on Christmas day.  I always prefer to be active and working when sick, rather than resting or vacationing, so perhaps the timing of the cold was just right. It also seemed to tie in with two great audio books I have been listening to in the car.

The first was Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children , narrated by Lyndam Gregory.  I have never read Rushdie and picked this book because it seemed the only literary audiobook available at the time in the library.  It was fantastic.  The first person narrative was well wrought, and Gregory brought all the accents and dialogues of various parts of India to life.  It was a bit over the top in a wonderful way.  The main character, Saleem Sinai (sp?), is able to use telepathy to connect with all the children of midnight--children born in the hour of midnight on the day of India's independence in 1947--because he has such a clogged sinus, much as I had and am recovering from.  When his parents finally sent him to surgery to have his nasal passages cleared, he lost his magical powers of communication.

The next literary audiobook I could find was The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, which I have never read.  The narrator was Donald Sutherland.  It would be hard to imagine a more stark contrast in style and narration between Rushdie and Gregory's excited Indian accents and the existential yet potent monotony of Hemingway and Sutherland.  I cherished the experience of hearing the Hemingway tale, and it made working at a restaurant with a pretty nasty cold seem pretty easy work compared to being a Cuban fisherman with cuts on your hand trying to bring a massive Marlin in and having to stab and harpoon and club sharks trying to eat your catch.

Cheers,

Bill and William