We’ve lived in San Diego for 6 years.
Moving here from Detroit I had little doubt we’d get access to great Mexican food. Truth be told, Detroit was mostly lacking in ethnic food options, so moving somewhere with a lot of ethnic diversity was a big win.
But a pleasant surprise in moving here has been discovering the incredible food from Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam.
I’m in love with pho. (pronounce like the first half of the “f” word) Pho is a simple Vietnamese dish, the base is a bowl of hot vegetable broth and noodles. You flavor to your personal taste with a plate of veggie condiments and a cut of meat. I like raw beef, the thinly sliced steak is served raw but cooks in the hot broth at the table. I’ll let Anthony Bourdain explain to you why it’s one of the best foods in the world.
The star of the show, in my opinion, is rooster sauce. Formally known as Sriracha by Huy Fong Foods, rooster sauce helps you flavor relatively bland pho as hot & spicy as you’d like it.
Sriracha is a Thai chili sauce that is a perfect mix of flavor and heat. Yes, it’ll absolutely make everything it touches hot. But it’s full of flavor, too. A small streak of Sriracha in my bowl of pho is just enough to bring all of the other flavors, the broth, the meat, the basil, the fresh jalapeño, and the sprouts together.
Settling Into Mid-Life
I’m 38 years old.
When I was 19, half a lifetime ago, I remember my psychology professor at Moody explaining the mid-life crisis. “You start to approach 40 and you realize… life is half over… and it’s not turning out the way you’d hoped. And you panic.”
And you know what? I can look around at some of my cohort, folks I graduated high school and college with, and think: Yeah, they are settling.
By your late 30s you’ve experienced some triumphant moments and tasted true failure, maybe even the depths of misery. Maybe a marriage didn’t work out? Maybe you screwed up professionally? Maybe you thought you could live like the soul-less cast of Friends into your mid-30s without ill-effect?
Plenty of people sail through their 20s without curve balls. But no one gets through 38 years of life easily.
I understand settling. I do. I know it’s easier to find a manageable job, a mortgage, and look forward to a bi-annual trip to Florida.
But I didn’t dream of that as a 16 year old. I didn’t wake up for work at 3:30 am and go to class until 9:00 pm so I could settle for less.
Screw the mid-life crisis. I’m not settling any more now than I did then.
I don’t want to be a greying dork in my 40s who buys a Corvette to look cool.
Settling might be for some, but it’s not for me.
The Fight for Spice
Over the past few years Huy Fong Foods, the maker of Sriracha sauce, has been in a fight for survival. Their plant in Irwindale, CA had been under attack as residents complained about the odor produced in the manufacture of the famed rooster sauce. In response to complaints the local government labeled them a public nuisance and reserved the power to force them to close their doors.
The plant has been there since 1986.
It wasn’t that they were doing anything new or different, though their sales have increased every year.
It’s that they had new neighbors.
See, the problem isn’t the success of Sriracha. The problem is that their community has become inundated with settlers with nothing else to do but complain about the smell.
Their lives in the suburbs are disturbed by the success of rooster sauce to the point that they wanted the plant closed.
And you know who won? The spice.
This is the problem of the mid-life crisis: When you wake up and the smell of where you are living is making you crazy you need to know something important: The smell has always been there.
Don’t blame others when you’ve settled for something less, that’s misplaced care.
Instead, go after the dreams you had in 1986.
Fight for your spice.
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