I'm a barbarian.

Am I supposed to cook dinner? We just had lunch, but I can feel the idea of dinner hanging over the house. Husband is downstairs, writing Christmas cards. I haven't started on mine yet. I am upstairs straightening out stuff on the computer, doing a little editing, thinking about today's poem, wondering what I could possibly do for dinner? I'm a good cook, but he doesn't much like my cooking. He's Japanese. I am not. We have different ideas about what makes a proper meal. I'm of the stew and soup and casserole school, with maybe freshly made cornbread or biscuits or a hot loaf of bread. I also love any kind of pasta. You can do anything with pasta. But, he was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes a couple of years ago and so has cut back on refined carbohydrates - bread, pasta, potatoes - my three basic food groups. What he likes are Japanese meals - seven or eight small dishes, each with it's own sauce. He loves, and I don't blame him, the table set with twenty dishes, and hashi (chopsticks) and chopstick holders and sauce cruets and sauce dishes and the order of the dishes - there is an important order to them, nothing like the order of ours except that we usually have salad first, and they usually have rice and pickles last. And, they consider pickles a vegetable. I consider them pickles. And, I have no odorless way to grill a semi-dried mackrel. Our friends in Tokyo have a state-of-the-art Japanese stove with its own special fish-grilling drawer with its own air sucking device to vent the fish burning scent outside the house. They also have a remotly-controlled Japanese bathtub. You can turn it on from a panel in the kitchen (you keep the bath filled - do your soaping outside of it and use the tub only for soaking), it will heat up to body-cooking temperature and stir itself, then keep itself just right until you're ready to use it. Pretty nifty. So, they have all these gadgets for living the Japanese life. We don't.

Mrs. Y., the wife, has walls and walls of cabinets and cupboards crowded with tiny dishes, flat ones, oblong one, round ones, some shaped like eggplants or leaves, others looking as if they'd been woven by the elves from twigs. She has platters and bowls, large and small; trays and stands, and even European stuff - mostly Limoge and Beleek tea cups and saucers. To the eye of an American housewife, nothing matches. There is no proper set of china. And, that's the idea, and that is reflected or reflects what and how they eat.

They like to say that they eat with their eyes. And they must, because portions are small. It might take some marinating, then some drying, then some basting while cooking and the preparation of a particular sauce with five or six ingredients, to present a finger-sized piece of broiled fish. Nothing is as simple as it looks.

So, when I make a pot of Tortilla Soup with luscious chunks of avocado and a bright squirt of lime for dinner, he'll eat it. He'll even say it's good. But, he'd rather have a tiny broiled fish and one baby turnip; some clear soup in a cup-sized red-laquer-ware bowl with three leaves at the bottom; a domino-sized piece of home-made tofu; a fist-sized bowl of rice and a child's tea-set-sized dish of pickled mushroom (just one) and a quarter-sized slice (just two) of pickled radish.

You'd have to eat with your eyes to get filled up on this kind of meal. I like it. But, not as much as he does. And, I feel sorry for him, obligated to cook Japanese when I can, because he's in a strange country. Indeed, he thinks it very strange. And, I'm in my own land and can have all my comfort foods without much going out of the way. But, I do like my chicken with dumplings, my pot roast, my macaroni and cheese, my enchilada casserole, my moussaka, my lasagna, my. . .well, everything and lots of it. Which proves I'm a barbarian!