The Conch Girl Project at Fort Collins

Recipe for Stacy A’s Kitchen:
Vegetarian Longevity Noodles with Shanghai Scallion Sauce

• It’s Stacy’s 61st birthday, as marked on her kitchen calendar. 
• She left you a present, and a slice of ginger cake in the fridge. This is your first time receiving a present on the day of the project. Two peaches, a poem about them, a patterned dish cloth, and some textile tools and handmade embroidery. A group of material poetry. 
• The dish that holds the cake is from Italy, as signed at the bottom. There are other items in this kitchen indicating that the owners are big travelers, or at least, culture explorers: Hokusai’s The Great Wave pattern on the drying cloth hung by the oven handle, but you can’t easily find any condiments that you are culturally familiar with. This beautiful house and kitchens and delicately arranged interiors are starting to make you feel stressed, as you want to make something grand, but you feel that it’s beyond your skill level. 
• Three drawers of spices. Wow. 
• The fridge is full of produce and clearly arranged. The left crisper is for vegetables, and the right is for fruit. All meat is in the freezer. There are films on the top rack in the fridge. Another fellow image maker. 
• A custom made rack for the bottom of the kitchen sink. Never saw that before. Pretty clever!
• The cat in this household is named Mochi. So sweet and friendly, asking for pets so much, and reacts to you when you call her name. 

• Stacay and Bill welcome you in when you show up. They open the door for you while you are walking to it. They show you in, and around the space related to cooking. Aside from the main kitchen space with the induction stove on an island, there is another baking pantry near their washer and a door to the garden. They even showed you the garden, where chives, pomegranate, apples, and raspberries are growing. 
• Tis the season for apples to fall in Fort Collins. Sometimes you hear one falling on the roof. The apples on the garden ground reminds you of how mangoes fall everywhere in the summer days of Foshan. And in high school one of the chores students do is to take turns to sweep them clear from the playground. You remember collecting huge baskets of mangoes and disposing of them, as they are not suitable for human eating. You wonder how apples are collected and dealt with here.
• In your process of figuring out where things are, you constantly get surprised about what are in stock. You start to realize that this is the kind of kitchen that you don’t have to cook around limitations, which is how you usually cook in this project. Rather, you can just set a menu and look for what it needs, which are almost certainly guaranteed to exist there. But too many options can be difficult too. 
• On your first attempt to go take some photos in the garden, you got scared back by the neighbor's dog, who looks like the dog in the Dulux commercial you saw when you were a kid. They include the dog to try to say that it’s safe for pets and kids. Well, here you are, not sure if some pets are safe for you. 
• Wait till the dog is gone. Go out to the garden and cut some chives. 
• For birthdays, the Han Chinese make Longevity Noodles. It is said that you shouldn’t bite and break the noodles before they enter your mouth, because they symbolize your longevity. You can’t find noodles in this kitchen (you find one package of “Chinese noodle” seemingly written in Japanese much later, tucked away in the pantry), so you decide to use the vegetables to make “noodles,” and try a new sauce you saw yesterday.
• Completely fail the new sauce. Relapse to the Shanghai scallion oil you know well. Start off again to seek soy sauce and eventually find it. Though there is only 1 tablespoon of it left. 
• You witness your first Colorado rain in this kitchen. 
• End up spending 5 hours there. 
• You only notice the giant painting on the dining room wall when you serve the plate. Turns out the girl in it has been staring at you this whole time. 
• You can’t find any pens or paper, or you will write down “Happy Birthday!” and leave a note. 
• Say goodbye to Mochi and leave, finally.