Yo momma cooks like a Bengali!

Pretty slow shift at the front desk this afternoon, so one of the student assistants was helping the other find places to take an out-of-town visitor. Three years as an undergraduate here and he's never really been anyplace in Chicago. "You might as well be going to Bloomington!" I told him. Of course I had to butt in--they were talking about restaurants, after all.

It was when he asked about Indian food that the fun really started. The lines were drawn between Bombay Grill and Mount Everest and the other assistant and I found ourselves on opposite sides. Then his replacement came and it became a three-way brawl--though I had to step out when it became a game of "more North Indian than thou", which led to the inevitable smack talk about whose mother could outcook the other.

This amused my relief, who is from Bloomington, and we got into our own competition about whose mother was the worst cook. I opened with my grandmother's degree in nutrition from Fontbonne in the depth of the 50s, but he countered with his mother's dippy hippy cooking. Prepared foods vs macrobiotic madness? We came to agreement on the point that there are many different ways to take perfectly decent ingredients and make them all but inedible.