It was a lazy weekend afternoon, and I was seven years old. I had just spent the entire morning playing hard outdoors, circling the cul-de-sac on my pink and white Barbie rollerskates and trying to teach myself to come to a stop without leaping off the sidewalk onto someone's lawn. Sweaty and invigorated, I burst into the cool quiet of the kitchen to see what my mother was doing. She had something simmering in a pot on the stove and was rummaging straight through her spice cabinet, humming a church hymn.
"What are you making?" I inquired while trying to simultaneously scratch a scab on my knee and swat a fly that had managed to result me indoors.
HOT DOG FLAVORED
"Dinner for my girl," she replied. My mother's voice was teasing, which all the time seemed to emphasize her Vietnamese accent. She glanced down at me with a fond smile.
"What is that?" I asked
She had pulled a small package of some seasoning from the depths of the spice cabinet and was shaking it generously onto a plate of raw chicken breasts. It looked like salt (which I loved) with tiny flecks of yellow in it.
"Garlic salt," she said, turning to me and retention her hand palm-side up. I copied her, and she shook the package lightly over my palm. I licked the tip of my finger and gently dipped it in the garlic salt, then transferred the tiny grains to my tongue.
It was magnificent.
The garlic salt dissolved faster in my mouth than quarterly table salt (possibly because its pungency made my salivary glands go haywire), leaving behind a savory afterglow that vaguely reminded me of ramen noodle soup. After running my tongue along every crevice of my palm until the saltiness had been licked clean away, I held my hand out for more.
"No, you need to eat something," she told me. "You can't just eat salt!"
Ha! How wrong she was! Yet sadly her words were true, because I couldn't do what she wouldn't allow. No one seemed to understand my total devotion to salt, my craving for it. If permitted, I could precisely have consumed an entire shaker of salt - gently savoring it fleck by slight fleck until my tongue was raw. I felt I could never have enough.
As if sensing my plight from his center by the grill in the backyard, my father came into the house bearing an aluminum foil-covered platter. The smoky-sweet scent of grilled meat wafted from below the foil. "Lunch is ready!" he hollered, even though hollering was unnecessary because we were less than twenty feet away.
I watched him set the platter on the kitchen table, wary. If it was steak, I would be in trouble. Steak was evil. When eating a bite of steak, the first two chews were acceptably flavorful, but after that it morphed into a bland, gum-like substance that made swallowing it impossible. It was like chewing on a wad of matted fur. Or so I imagined.
As luck would have it, my father came bearing hot dogs, not steak. I breathed an audible sigh of relief and allowed him to plate up a serving for me. Nestled within a soft bun, the hot dog seemed sad and lonely, but condiments were an issue for me. Ketchup tasted good but soaked the bun and left it undesirably mushy. Mustard was a joke - a flavor so terrible I was convinced that mustard fans must have been brainwashed at some point in their lives. Sauerkraut and relish were "acquired tastes" that I had yet to acquire, and the chili/cheese combo endorsed by my brother held no request for retrial for me. Too messy, too soggy, too much. I contemplated my unadorned hot dog for a moment before realizing that a new, very enticing condiment had just been introduced to my life.
Without request or waiting for my parents' approval, I took my plate from the table and went directly for the garlic salt that my mother had left on the counter by the stove. I remember the weight of it in my hands as I twirled the lid off and sprinkled it carefully onto my naked hot dog. Decorated with the garlic salt, it resembled a sunburnt appendage with some strange spotty disease. I didn't care. Back at the kitchen table, I ignored my parents' nauseated expressions, sat down with my creation and took a large bite.
Heaven.
Hot Dogs and Garlic Salt HOT DOG FLAVORED
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