Sunday, October 23, 2011

Cake in a Bag

"Cake in a Bag" refers to 12 years of school lunches.

I might be hurting myself here by admitting that my mom made my school lunches every day right up until graduation. I know most kids took over that responsibility in the 6th grade, but I'm sure if I lived at home I'd still be bringing "Cake in a Bag" lunches to uni. 

My mom will be the first to admit that she wasn't Stepford material when it came to making our lunches. But as disorganized as she always was, it was infinitely better than letting my dad make you a sandwich. I think I was actually given a jam, Cheese Whiz, Marmite, ham sandwich once (you'll notice the overuse of condiments, refer back to "The Kitchen" post). 

So let me explain this a little better. The reason why I have dubbed lunches prepared by my mom "Cake in a Bag" is because absolutely everything went in one. And I don't mean nicely wrapped and placed in brown lunch bags. I mean plastic sandwich bags.

My earliest memory of these bagged lunches is way back when we still lived in Nova Scotia. I must have been five or six. My mom had sent me to school with half a jar of applesauce dumped into a zip-lock bag. I was so made fun of for it that I put it back in my rabbit-shaped knapsack and ate it back at home.

Another lunch, more common in my high school days, was the build-your-own hot-dog in a bag. This was a two-bag lunch. The first zip-lock would contain the cooked hot dog and bun, the second would contain all the condiments. Ketchup, mustard and relish would be squeezed into a bag and left to mingle together until noon. Once my friends and I had made our way to the cafeteria, I would have to turn the bag with the unhappy-looking mixture inside out and wipe it onto the hot-dog. People noticed.

Then there was the grocery bag, bagged lunch. There are two versions of this. One version is the makeshift sandwich bag. This is a grocery bag, knotted, then cut above the knot. The second is the more complex double tied, stacked lunch.

For example, let's say, if I was sent to school with a samosa and sauce, the sauce would be dumped into the bottom of the bag, the bag would be knotted, the samosa placed on top, and the bag knotted again.

Step one: untie the first knot, get samosa. Step two: untie second knot, rub sauce-covered bag on samosa. Step three: eat as your peers watch in disgust.

Now, the most famous of all bagged lunches, the one that really seemed to make an impression on people was the favourite "Cake in a Bag". 

"Cake in a Bag" was a constant throughout my whole school career. If we had cake at home, for some reason, we would also get some in our school lunches as a special treat. So, if we had your standard birthday cake with icing at home, my mom would cut off a huge piece and stuff it into a zip-lock.

On some unfortunate occasions, the bag would be overstuffed and burst open in your knapsack, covering everything in chocolate and butter icing. Not having a lunch box, these bagged lunches would hastily get thrown in with your books--getting pretty squished up--and becoming pretty unidentifiable.

Maybe the reason Cake in a Bag is the most famous of the Biagi lunches is because of the way you would end up eating it. Since my mom was usually too rushed to remember a spoon, we would end up squeezing the now mostly liquidized cake into our mouth, like a tube of toothpaste.

Unfortunately, these are the habits that seem to get passed down from parent to child: like the time I was working in the A-Team office and took my surprise birthday cake home by squishing it into large zip-lock as confused coworkers and producers looked on. How professional of me.

One of the downfalls of being brought up Biagi is that you eventually begin to think this is the normal way of doing things. It isn't until you notice the wide-eyed stares are that you begin to question it. In other words, until it's too late.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Kitchen

Or, the land of surprises.

And not good surprises. No fresh apple pies or shiny new appliances. That wouldn't be very Biagi. No, these surprises are more of the Steven King variety.  

Including but not limited to: Freshly boiled(or boiling), skinned and bleached animal bones drying on the kitchen counter. Stiff, dead birds lining the windowsills. Dried out fish bodies on top of the microwave. Tarantulas. Maggots. Larva. Pet lobsters. Microscopes hovering over whatever insect caught dad's attention that day. Jars preserving animal parts or ones simply labeled "DO NOT DRINK". Liquid nitrogen tubs conserving fish sperm. You get the idea.

Whenever we kids visit home, the first time we walk into the kitchen we instinctually brace ourselves. After we meet the new pets(if we're lucky it will be a new fish, other times it will be one of the cozy creatures mentioned above), the real test of bravery comes in opening the fridge/freezer door.

 Bearer of nightmares


Now, since my mother hates to keep food in the house, food-wise the fridge is a wasteland of condiments. Unfortunately, it's not just food that's kept in our fridge.

A Biagi fridge staple is the maggot filled ramekin. The theory is that dad will collect the larva(to feed to his fish) before they become flies and swarm the house. That's the theory. Only too often do we open the fridge and find a ramekin dish swarming with flies. A sight enough to kill even the biggest condiment appetite. At this point, we barely even register their existence and eat away.

Again, because of our mother's hatred for keeping fresh food in the house, mostly everything gets stuffed in the freezer. This means that if we want to eat anything beyond spoonfuls of mayo, we have to go freezer digging. 

One time, as I prepared some pancakes, I asked my friend Baillie to get out the ice cream. Looking over my shoulder towards a strange noise, I saw her standing there, clutching a dripping, blood soaked bag. This bag, no doubt, contained some sort of roadkill my dad peeled off the street and stuffed in our freezer.

In fact, my dad so much loves to collect roadkill and stuff it in our freezer that we have several ice-cream tubs marked "Dead Stuff" laying around. Julian has been known to hide the roadkill on the streets near our house in bushes so my dad won't drag it home. And, if the roadkill is too large for our freezer, my dad will gift it to a friend because, hey, who doesn't like to arrive home and find a dead raccoon draped across their doorstep?

(Everyone)

Our Kitchen of horrors is often the focus of many heated arguments between my parents.

One time I walked into the house to my father demanding to know why my mother "won't learn to be a supportive wife and help [him] build a damn freeze drier!". Her lack of excitement about his new way to harvest even more(!) animal carcasses clearly devastated him. Like that was part of her vows.

My brother just witnessed my mother being scolded for putting my father's worm collection on the deck, accidentally resulting in the worms' deaths. How could a decent person put worms, living creatures, out in the cold like that? As they probably had families and a mortgage.

With a Christmas visit scheduled, I can only imagine what new surprises await us in the Biagi kitchen. No doubt they'll odd, frightening, or just a basic health risk. I don't think it's a coincidence we all have amazing immune systems. But I guess that's just one of the many perks of being brought up Biagi.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

The Time the Boys Almost Went to War

And I'm not talking about Afghanistan.

Now, with Afghanistan out of the way, what other war would two young Canadian men participate in ? There isn't one. That's the point.

Back in March 2008, Colombia and Venezuela were on the brink of war, threatening to drag other South American countries into war with them. The Colombian military had crossed over into Ecuador and murdered 16 guerrilla FARC fighters. This really pissed off Chavez, and he sent thousands of troops and tanks to line the border between his country and Colombia. The news troubled my family. My father was born and raised in Colombia, my mother lived there for 8 years, both Julian and I were born there, and Daniel was fake born there.

As much as this news troubled the family, my parents being who they are, couldn't resist the temptation to have a little fun at my brothers' expense. So they e-mailed them and told them they would soon be shipped off to battle, of course.

vs.

Who would you put your money on?

Military service is compulsory in Colombia. This led the boys to believe the Colombian government would, in the midst of a huge scale war threat, track them down in Powell River/Victoria and force them into the front lines.

The boys eventually got in touch with my parents on the phone. Mum and Dad quickly realized that Daniel and Julian were taking this war situation seriously. As any responsible parents would, they confessed their joke and put the boys' minds at ease.

Oh wait, no they didn't

They convinced them they were definitely going to war. Soon too, my parents expected. It was their patriotic duty as well as the law. Consequences for not going would be inhumane. They were definitely going to war.

This, of course, was complete bullshit.

This, of course, was unknown to my brothers.

It was hard not to hear the concern in their voices when the subject was brought up. It had been a while since either of them had been on a hike, and now they were expected to fight guerrilla jungle-dwellers with machetes. I bet Julian now wished he had participated when my dad taught us the basics of knife fighting.

Sadly, it didn't take Daniel or Julian long to conclude that they would most likely not be drafted. After they came to this conclusion, you can bet they denied ever having entertained the idea in the first place. Although I'm sure it came as a relief when the confrontation between the two countries basically amounted to nothing.

I'm not really sure what possessed my parents to convince their sons they were going off to war and, certainly, their deaths. But they thought it was hilarious. I guess that's just what you have to learn to expect when you're brought up Biagi.