The Noodle

“Noodles, don’t noodles… You are too concerned about what was and what will be.”

This is the story of my life told through food, aka a chubby boy’s journey in search of the perfect bowl of noodles… I hope I never find it.

Prologue: First Encounters

I used to have bad teeth… more specifically, my whole mouth was a mess. The orthodontist showed me an x-ray of my mouth and I asked why he was showing me a dog’s skull. He told me that I had an overbite AND an underbite – I’m still not sure how that was possible. My…

Pastry

I’m a pretty narcissistic person, arrogant too. Like all narcissistic, arrogant, and yet self-aware people — I think I’m good at hiding it. I’ve said this many times before, probably to myself more than anyone else, but you need to be arrogant in order to write. Really to express yourself in any way other than…

Oatmeal

Food and eating is a huge part of everyone’s identity. Favorite dish, meal, drink, vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan; choosing not to eat something contributes to someone’s self food picture just as much if not more than what they do choose to eat. I feel that food became a large part of my identity early on. My brother was…

Мівіна

I cooked my first dish when I was five: loaf of bread, water, ice cubes. No idea why, I never ate any of it but I would do it again and again every Saturday morning. I was using the stove unsupervised to make pancakes by the third grade, crazy now that I think about it,…

Macaroni

While living in Ukraine I developed what I call ATFS or more colloquially — Afraid to Fart Syndrome. A year of diarrhea does not exactly impart a lot of confidence in the bowels. My condition came to a head while I was in a bus station bathroom taking a piss. I use the term ‘bathroom’…

Grease

A person’s life is a blur marked by a few moments that shine out. Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11, those older than I can point to the Challenger, Berlin Wall coming down… The Cuban Missile Crisis? I’m reaching now. Weddings, graduation, birth of a child, first day on the job, the last… The points of…

Family Size

My last couple years in High School my mother gave me $10 every week for lunch. There were these cookies that the Special Ed kids made every day that were sold two for $0.60. (Can I refer to them as Special Ed kids?) Since lunch was $1.75 that meant if I took a dime +…

Vodka

It was 7:00 in the morning and the sun was just starting to remind my legs who they belonged to. Ruslan and I had pulled over 150 kg (330 lbs) of fish out of the pond he had stocked the year before. He had done all the fancy work, dragging a net across the width of…

Gatorade

It was late November about 3:00 in the morning, so pretty goddamned cold. I had been pacing up and down Armitage for a good 20 minutes building up the nerve to try one more time. My left sleeve was torn, blood dripping down my hand, but I barely noticed as I hugged myself trying not…