The Sophisticated Stoner's: Mini Maple Chik'n Bites

It's Saturday night and I'm all alone. My daughter is over at a friend's house for the evening. She's spending as much time with them as she can before she moves to Boston. It's going to be a change to not have her to cook for. It's been 22 years of thinking about what she's going to eat and if she's going to like it.

Cat was a breastfed baby. She didn't take to it at first and I wasn't very good at it either. I gave birth to her on a Saturday in a hospital in the suburbs of Taipei. I had moved to Taiwan 13 months earlier after meeting her father on an online dating site in 1999. He worked as an English teacher and I was attracted to him because he was different (Scottish and charming as narcissist usually are at first), on the other side of the world from where I lived and longed to escape, and I was at this horny stage of my existence. At 29, I now recognize it as my biological clock ticking and my animal-like need to procreate kicked in. It magically led me to Taiwan and in a relationship with a guy I didn't really know, but somehow decided after four months that I wanted to have a child with him. Yeah, that's how it went.

I found out I was pregnant by peeing on a pregnancy test picked up from a 7-Eleven on our way home from a weekend at the beach house we rented with a couple of G's friends. They'd spent the night drinking cold Taiwanese beer and shots of Japanese whiskey. G smelled like a corn chip and a bit of fermentation when I asked him to pull over to the side of the road so I could go pee behind a sand dune. I didn't want to wait for a restroom back home in our apartment that was hours away or to squat over some really gross toilet that someone else didn't clean. So, the sand dune was the logical choice to find out.

While I'm a vegetarian now, one of the things that I ate often throughout my pregnancy was fried chicken dipped in maple syrup. There was this place near the office where I worked that made these huge pieces of chicken that I would have over some rice and some Mrs. Buttersworth I got from the American store in Tienmu. Oddly delicious with a drizzle of soy sauce.

This is my delicious little bite that made me think of being back in Taiwan, pregnant, and life. It's going by and I'm watching it. I've done these past 52 years in my own odd way. Some of it has worked out and some of it hasn't. I'm trying to find what works and hope that I'll out some of the better answers for myself. I need to rearrange my office/guest room because it's making me want to scream.

Ingredients

1 piece of maple bread, toasted

2 Impossible Chicken Nuggets, air fried

1 tbsp cream cheese spread

1 tsp maple syrup

Frank's Hot Sauce

1. toast bread

2. air fry nuggets

3. combine cream cheese, maple syrup, and Frank's with a dash of sea salt

4. spread on toasted bread

5. top with two nuggets

6. enjoy

Staying true to me.