The ChaCha...Text Message?

You are at a barbeque at a friend’s house, where hot dogs are served. You’ve always wanted to know what is in a hot dog, but not one person at the party has a cell phone with internet access. You’ll just have to remember to Google it when you get home, right?

Not anymore. As long as you have a text messaging plan, you can text all of your culinary questions to CHACHA at 242242. Within a minute, you’ll have your answer.

Hanging out one night, my friend Big Ry and I are wondering just that – What is in a hot dog, anyway? We are not eating hot dogs, but drinking wine. Still, we need to know the answer. Enter CHACHA. We text “What are hot dogs made of?” to 242242, and the response takes seconds:

Hotdogs [sic] are generally made of meat, meat fat, a ‘cereal filler’ (bread crumbs, oatmeal, or flour), egg white, and spices.

Cereal filler, huh? We hadn’t realized. But this question was too easy for CHACHA. We want to stump the system. What to ask? Sea salt is on my mind, as I had just sampled several varieties at Boordy Vineyards…Aha!

“Where is Himalayan sea salt cultivated?” we type wickedly.

This time we receive several ‘We are working on your answer’ texts. Finally, the consensus arrives:

This unique form of Himalayan salt is harvested as a pink crystal in the Himalayas under the earths [sic] surface. It is cultivated in its pure geometric form.

Then a follow-up text: “Gr8 Question,” they say! Ah, CHACHA stumping success!

Later, I’m wondering who these CHACHA answer gurus are. I’m picturing a room full of people and computers, the Google homepage continually flickering on and off every screen. I decide to Google our hot dog question to see what I find.

The information on HowStuffWorks is nearly identical to the answer we received.

Still, CHACHA is a fun party trick – Big Ry and I were entertained for a good ten minutes – and a valuable resource for those who need to know what is in their hot dog now.

Standard text messaging rates apply, according to Big Ry.

Vegetable Frittata

When I was young, it was important to my mom that I ate eggs. Maybe that’s because eggs are the perfect food, an ideal combination of protein, fat, and a few carbohydrates. Or it could be because they were inexpensive sources of nutrition. Whatever the reason, she would always make them “really special this time”, i.e. adding a squirt of ketchup on the side.

But I have always hated eggs.

With one exception. I enjoyed eggs when I was 7. Having spent the night at a friend’s house, I didn’t want to be rude when her mom made eggs for breakfast the next morning. I ate them and clearly remember enjoying them. But then I got sick. I couldn’t keep those eggs in my stomach.

For the next 23 years, whenever I have been near eggs, the smell and texture trigger that sick feeling in my throat, exactly like that feeling I had in childhood. I refuse to clean pots that eggs have been cooked in. It’s that bad.

But as I become more interested in food, my dislike for eggs is upsetting me. My breakfast options are cut in half. I can never be a judge on Top Chef; they often top their food with eggs.

To get past this, I decide to treat myself like a toddler – introduce eggs into my diet ten times. But, unlike a three-year-old who might wait until the tenth serving to try a bite, I will take a few tastes of each dish.

Jeffrey Steingarten overcame his food phobias when he became the food critic of Vogue:

“I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness,” Steingarten says in The Man Who Ate Everything.

This is my inspiration. I can at least try to like eggs. If I’m successful, I will have expanded my meal choices.

So it seemed like the culinary Dalai Lama was pointing me to The New York Times Dining & Wine section a couple of weeks ago, where Mark Bittman’s recipe for More-Vegetable-Than-Egg Frittata sat, patiently waiting for a non-believer like me to join, in baby steps, the followers of Those-Who-Love-Eggs.

With this recipe in hand, I am ready to take a couple of bites of an egg dish that, really, is mostly vegetables.

I take three bites of my finished frittata (a success, I think!). Bite one, all I can taste is vegetables. Bite two, I get a bit of egg taste. Not so bad. The third bite? All mushy texture. My throat jumps to attention, remembering its role. I am done.

But this is a good start. I will rip the Band-Aid already and prepare ten egg dishes for ten toddler tastes of my most challenging food phobia. One down. Nine to go (or maybe four to go, because 10 egg dishes…well, that’s a lot).