Chinese Version
10-09-2017

In the morning, my daughter who had just come back from a week-long camping trip and I went to the Country Inn Cafe in Almaden Valley for breakfast.

I ordered a set of fruit crepes, and my daughter ordered a chiken walnut waffle. She also asked to add bananas, instead of chicken, to the top of waffle and put the chicken on a separate plate. The chicken she ordered came along with a dipping sauce. I tried a piece of dipped chicken, it was crunchy with strong flavor of dipping sauce, delicious.

In the sunny autumn morning in California, while sitting next to a window in the cafe, I slowly enjoy my fruit crepes, beautiful and tasty, which awaken some sweet memories.

I asked my daughter: “Do you still remember that you introduced crepes to me, in Wurzburg last October?”

“Of course, I remembered. It was in a festival, I ordered a crepes from the street side mobile truck, because you asked me what are crepes.”

“Eating crepes always reminds me about a famous Chengdu dish, DanHongGao, which has a flavor similar to crepes.”

“Sure, the mild flavor of crepes just fits your taste.” My daughter was happy to extend the theory of crepes has the same flavor of DanHongGao for me, because she knew my taste very well.

I don’t like to eat very sweet food, because I grew up at a time where buying candy required government-issued coupons. For example, brownies are one of the popular party sweets here, and they are also my children’s favorite. However, I rarely eat brownies because they are too sweet for me.

My children love sweets, just fit into a folk saying: “Growing up coated with sugar.” Because desserts in the United States are usually very sweet, my children were well-trained to have a magnanimous attitude toward sugar from various parties starting from kindergarten.

While studying ancient languages in Germany, my daughter also noticed that American desserts are usually sweeter than the German ones. With the mindset of a historian, my daughter explained that during the Second World War, in the United States, citizens were not limited on sugar supplies, but in Germany sugar was mainly for the military and citizens had very limited sugar supplies. When I was little, we also had very limited sugar supplies. Therefore, nowadays, desserts in China and Germany usually aren’t so sweet as desserts in the United States.

The crepes introduced to me by my daughter carry a familiar Sichuan flavor.

Enjoying crepes in the United States is always a warm sweet experience for me, because crepes crosses my European, American, and Asian memories. Sweet food retains a sweet memory…

Little Episodes

1. The set of fruit crepes I ordered：

2. My son is faraway from home. The gardenias, which I planted for my son at the front of the house, were blooming happily today. Though the flowers have a delicate fragrance, instead of a summer aroma, I felt the fragrance carried the blessings of my whole heart.