The Calcium Kid Quotes

Hearing the footsteps of his mortality made Steve all the more focused on family. We had a beautiful daughter. Now we wanted a boy. “One of each would be perfect,” Steve said. Seeing the way he played with Bindi made me eager to have another child. Bindi and Steve played together endlessly. Steve was like a big kid himself and could always be counted on for stacks of fun. I had read about how, through nutrition management, it was possible to sway the odds for having either a boy or a girl. I ducked down to Melbourne to meet with a nutritionist. She gave me all the information for “the boy-baby diet.” I had to cut out dairy, which meant no milk, cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, or cream cheese. In fact, it was best to cut out calcium altogether. Also, I couldn’t have nuts, shellfish, or, alas, chocolate. That was the tough one. Maybe having two girls wouldn’t be bad after all. For his part in our effort to skew our chances toward having a boy, Steve had to keep his nether regions as cool as possible. He was gung ho. “I’m going to wear an onion bag instead of underpants, babe,” he said. “Everything is going to stay real well ventilated.” But it was true that keeping his bits cool was an important part of the process, so he made the sacrifice and did his best.

They pop in the mouth, just like salmon roe! But inside... ... is the savory saltiness of seaweed!" "Those pearls are seaweed?!" But how?!" "Delicious! Not only is the pop of the pearl a fun texture, the salty, savory flavor of the seaweed melts seamlessly with the rice! I can barely stop myself! It's an addicting combination!" "Wait... how do you know that technique? Those pearls are seaweed extract gelled into a spherical shape. The only way to do that is by using a calcium-chloride bath and an alginic-acid gelling agent!" "What the heck?!" "That's food science!" "Yukihira pulled a page from Alice Nakiri's own book!" "I've experimented with this stuff before, y'know. When I was a little kid, anyway." "Wha-?! But that's-" "Convenience store Dagashi Candy?!" "Dagashi?! What's that?" Both chemicals are on the ingredients list! "It's what's called an educational candy. Kids play with that to learn how to make their own jelly pearls. I had a blast with it when I was little. I made lots of different stuff." "Dad, look! I made miso pearls!" "Aha ha ha! That's great! Now don't let any of the customers see that." "You can get both alginic acid and calcium chloride at any pharmacy. I used those, along with some seasoned seaweed extract and a little bit of ingenuity... ... to make these savory seaweed bombs- my own spin on the traditional seaweed bento!" "That's right! There were some educational candies in that pile of sweets he got from the kids yesterday!" "The transfer student used a food-science trick?" "And it was one he got off of a package of children's dagashi candy?!" "Hmm? What's this? I see something that looks like okaka minced tuna hiding inside the rice..." Mmmm! It's dried tunatsukudani! This, too, earns full marks for flavor! And its smooth, juicy texture is a wonderful contrast to the pop of the seaweed pearls!

I told her one of the few stories that she'd told me of myself as a child. We'd gone to a park by a lake. I was no older than two. Me, my father, and my mother. There was an enormous tree with branches so long and droopy that my father moved the picnic table from underneath it. He was always afraid of me getting crushed. My mother believed that kids had stronger bones than grownups. "There's more calcium in her forearm than in an entire dairy farm," she liked to say. That day, my mother had made roasted tomato and goat cheese sandwiches with salmon she'd smoked herself, and I ate, she said, double my weight of it. She was complimenting me when she said that. I always wondered if eating so much was my best way of complimenting her. The story went that all through lunch I kept pointing at a gaping hole in the tree, reaching for it, waving at it. My parents thought it was just that: a hole, one that had been filled with fall leaves, stiff and brown, by some kind of ferrety animal. But I wasn't satisfied with that explanation. I wouldn't give up. "What?" my father kept asking me. "What do you see?" I ate my sandwiches, drank my sparkling hibiscus drink, and refused to take my eyes off the hole. "It was as if you were flirting with it," my mother said, "the way you smiled and all." Finally, I squealed, "Butter fire!" Some honey upside-down cake went flying from my mouth. "Butter fire?" they asked me. "Butter fire?" "Butter fire!" I yelled, pointing, reaching, waving. They couldn't understand. There was nothing interesting about the leaves in the tree. They wondered if I'd seen a squirrel. "Chipmunk?" they asked. "Owl?" I shook my head fiercely. No. No. No. "Butter fire!" I screamed so loudly that I sent hundreds of the tightly packed monarchs that my parents had mistaken for leaves exploding in the air in an eruption of lava-colored flames. They went soaring wildly, first in a vibrating clump and then as tiny careening postage stamps, floating through the sky. They were proud of me that day, my parents. My father for my recognition of an animal so delicate and precious, and my mother because I'd used a food word, regardless of what I'd actually meant.