Today got the best of me. The plan was to fry some chicken for lunch, a nod to the myth of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s favorite meal. The motivation was my daughter, giving her a moment in the middle of our Monday to celebrate our culture- surrounded as we are by everything but what I know as soul food, here on Maui. I feel a responsibility and a love for my comfort foods that I am excited to share with her, especially at this age- five- where she is defining her own preferences. Her father's food goes down easy. She is all in on anything Italian. The inherent romanticism of his culture and our wildly popular Italian restaurant make it easy for her to jump on the rustic wagon of her dad's people. But I want to light a fire in her for soul food, too. Can one day change anything? Today, my intention was to try. But carried away with simultaneous domestic and professional responsibilities of cleaning and calls, I never did make it to the supermarket to pick up the whole chicken or the buttermilk, the flour or the Lawry's seasoning salt to make it happen. Instead, we grabbed a quick lunch at Star Noodle, a kind of pan- Asian utopia and a far cry from the kind of cuisine that we are taking about here. Resigned to udon and ahi, I was relieved when I suddenly remembered the kimchi wings on the menu. I even blurted out, "It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I'm having the wings!" when our server asked me what I wanted for lunch. Granted, my daughter looked at me as if I'd presented a riddle that she needed to solve. I got a blank stare from my husband and a smirk from the waitress. But when my plate of deep fried and glazed wings dropped, I was satisfied. And when my little girl asked to try one, and let out a, "Yum!", my best efforts felt like enough.
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