Life on a plate
Growing up in chinatown nyc in the early 70’s I remember a lot thing I never thought about till now.
Like never having an ac only a window fan, going out and playing in the streets or park without supervision or having a real curfew.
I also thought about the fun things that kids now will never see again for instance stoop ball, a metal bar jungle Jim
or like a heavy wooden nyc park high seesaw.
If you grew up in nyc and played on a seesaw with your friends you know you would try to do things like getting off fast while your friend was up in the air or trying to get the guy on the other side knock off or going really fast by jumping up and down and hanging on for dear life or trying to catapult someone or something.
Another thing we did was getting the fat kid on one side and 2 kids on the other yes I said fat kid back in those days it was normal to say things like that. Henry was our friend we called him fat Henry because there were 2 Henry’s.
We never discriminated against him and always rooted for him..in fact we love Henry especially playing Johnny on the pony!
Johnny on the pony was one of our favorite games to play but if you played it now it would create lawsuits and mothers would scream!
You had 2 teams the anchor would bend over and hug pole the next guy would bend over and hug the anchor guy till you had this chain of 8 kid or so looking a caterpillar now the object of the game was to collapse the team by running and land on the the back of the pony/caterpillar kids so you would run with flying leap and landed as hard as you could to knock them down!
When you had 8 kids on more on your backs then Henry would come charging in game over!
Another thing I never noticed was food..I ate what ever was on the table sometimes it was very simple food. I never noticed my parents trying to stretching a buck to save money so we ate a lot of rice and boxed pasta dishes.
There was this dish made from corn beef in a can that I used to love and still do! Yes I can make proper corn beef hash but this was something from my childhood. The one can can feed a family depending how many potatoes you put in it.
The meat by itself is a bit briny but adding potatoes would cut that saltiness , onion, peppers, tomatoes sauce, some olive and serving it over rice this is not a high end dish but it is special to me reminding me of coming home from the park and having a plate of canned corn beef hash over rice then watching get smart.