Making friends over garlic
Last week I was
at the grocery store. It was supposed to be a quick dash in and out kind of a
trip. I only was needing a few last minute items to make paella and yes, I wasn’t
planning on eating it alone. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about see my
earlier post – ‘Come to my house for paella’ 1/5/19) So I head over to grab a
head of garlic and encounter a problem. There’s a young women – maybe 19 to 20 years
old -blocking my way. She’s standing there with a perplexed look on her face,
in one hand a head of large garlic and in the other one of those boxes with two
smaller heads. Pausing for a moment, I’m debating what to do. Grab the garlic
and run? Politely ask her if she needs help? And then she asks me what’s the difference
between the two garlics besides price. Uhm, okay, now I’m sucked into her world
for a moment unless I want to be really rude. Fine, I give her some vague
answer about how I think the larger one has a better flavor but that may be because
I grate or chop it because the cloves don’t fit into my garlic press. Oh no,
now she looks like she’s going to cry. What in heavens name did I say that was
so bad? She half chokes out, “What’s a garlic press?” This is when I know my
day has just gone completely sideways all because I dared to enter the produce
section. Because there is no way I can leave this poor girl in this state. Nope,
I have now got to get to the bottom of why in the world she’s trying to buy garlic
when it’s plain she have no clue what she’s doing. After some gentle probing on
my part, her whole sob story comes out – and I do mean sob. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen someone crying so much over garlic before. Onions sure. Garlic, no,
not so much. Turns out she was raised by a single mom who worked several jobs
and felt home cooking was throwing something in a microwave. The poor girl’s
boyfriend, on the other hand, was raised by a stay-at-home gourmet chef. Yikes.
Thus, here she was trying to impress her boyfriend by making a meal instead of
bringing takeout for a change. Seems the internet had not been as helpful as
she had thought it was. This I can fix – I can’t save the world but I can save
this meal for her. I give her a few pointers as we walked through the store
getting what she needed, including a few substitutes to make things easier
(chopped garlic in a jar). We go through the checkout together and I give her
my number. Never in a million years did I figure she would ever call or text
me. She had her humiliating meltdown in a store in front of me – why would she
want a reminder of that? However, to my
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