Like Water For Richie

As a child, I fondly remember the smell of my grandmother's cooking as I'd come in from several homoerotic coming-of-age experiences with my boyhood friends in Guam. She made the kind of food that filled you with a sense of nourishment and love. It wasn't like my mother's cooking, where it tasted like bitterness and loathing. Before my grandmother passed away, she wrote down several of her favorite recipes for me and I decided to make an easy one yesterday.

Chicken Kelaguen is a perennial favorite at parties in Guam and my sisters and I have been known to consume massive amounts in a very short time. It's that good. It's marinated chicken, cut into small pieces and seasoned with lemons, onions, and peppers. A lot of people who aren't Filipino or Chamorro tend to shy away from this food just because of how it looks.

I didn't pick a great day to start cooking. Unfortunately, I began my culinary crusade in the midst of one of the biggest hangovers in my life. I'm starting to believe that nothing productive can be accomplished when you're hungover. I went drinking with a bunch of friends and I thought I was Superman because I was able to drink so much without getting wasted.

That didn't matter to me! I was determined to make my gran proud, so I continued the fateful journey in my cramped little kitchen. The chicken was overcooked, I had to substitute a leek for a green onion, and I ran out of lemons. I also didn't have a suitable container to put all of it in, so I had to use several small bowls. It was a disaster! To me, the chicken tasted very bland and disappointing. Was this a metaphor for my life?

I've heard that the stress and negative energy that you feel is transferred into the food that you cook. Could that have been why my mother's cooking always tasted very different from my grandmother's cooking? Was my haste and lack of preparation the principal cause of the terribly-tasting Chicken Kelaguen that I made?

I'll have to test this theory by making the dish again, but I'll have to prepare all the ingredients ahead of time. I will also need to be in a better mood. I'm usually in good spirits after an intensely sweaty sexual encounter. People may not want to try my food after I tell them something like that because they'd always be wondering where my hands had been prior to that!