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Street Food – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge, welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. Back when I was a teenager, I was a meat and potatoes guy. Meat and potatoes, this is a common phrase in English and in American English, meat and potatoes. What does that mean? Well, let me demonstrate what it means.

In my family growing up, every Sunday we would have a meal. My dad would cook out on the grill in the backyard. So he had a grill with charcoal and he would cook out on the grill. And almost every Sunday he would make a hamburger for me, or maybe a couple hamburgers. So I always wanted to eat hamburgers, right? That was my favorite kind of food.

Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers, every Sunday I had hamburgers. In fact, at that age as a kid and teenager, I probably would have eaten hamburgers every single night. So every Sunday my dad would cook out and make hamburgers for me and then for himself and my mom and my sister he would make a steak. For some reason, I didn’t like steak. Even though they’re both beef. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But that was my thing. I loved hamburgers…hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers.

After he cooked out the hamburgers we would come inside and sit down and have our Sunday meal. So in addition to the meat we would usually have potatoes, either a baked potato, like a whole baked potato, one for each of us, or french fries, fried potatoes. So we had a meat and we had potatoes. And then usually we had some kind of vegetable. I think my favorite vegetable at that time was green beans. I liked green beans, which are kind of long, as you might imagine, green-colored beans.

And that was my typical Sunday meal, week after week after week after week after week, for months and months and months, years and years and years, growing up. And in America we call this a meat and potatoes diet. It’s a very simple diet and there are large parts of the country, especially the middle part of the United States, where people eat a meat and potatoes diet mostly. As you might guess, it means at most of their meals they have a meat, usually beef of chicken, and then a potato, baked potato, french fries, right.

Now this also has a more general meaning, meat and potatoes, and it just generally means a very simple way of eating, kind of very similar foods. And in general it means what we would call bland foods, bland.

Bland means foods that do not have a strong taste, right? They’re not spicy. They’re not super sour.

They don’t have a, y’know, a strong smell.

So, y’know, chicken, hamburgers, potatoes, they’re very bland foods. There’s nothing wrong with them. I still like those foods. But they don’t have…y’know, they’re not very spicy. They’re not very strong-tasting foods. They’re very mild or, as we say, very bland. So meat and potatoes food, it’s kind of bland food, and that’s what I grew up eating. So in addition to meat and potatoes, maybe green beans, corn, and that’s about it. Not a lot of variety. And certainly very, very bland.

As I got a little bit older, around 17, maybe at the age of 18, I had my first girlfriend. And I remember one day my girlfriend invited me to go to dinner with her family at a Chinese restaurant in our town, in Georgia. And I had never eaten Chinese food before. In fact, I had never eaten any kind of Asian food before.

I think the only kind of food that wasn’t strictly meat and potatoes might have been some kind of Italian food. I maybe had had some…we had spaghetti. My mom used to make spaghetti or lasagna, two kinds of Italian food. But again, fairly bland. No strong taste. No spiciness, nothing like that.

So I didn’t know what to expect. I go oh, I’ve never eaten Chinese food before. Her family would go to this restaurant all the time. Now in this town in Georgia, Marietta, Georgia, there were not a lot of Asian restaurants, not a lot of Chinese restaurants, at least at that time. I don’t know about now.

So I went to this restaurant and her family, they were friends with the owners, the Chinese family. So I remember we walked in, right, with the family, and I looked around and right away it seemed so interesting and different because the decoration inside was quite different than what I was used to.

There was this big golden Buddha at the entrance. They had all these red lamps hanging in the restaurant. They had this nice dark wood for the tables and the chairs. And they had, y’know, little paintings with Chinese calligraphy on them, the Chinese writing. And, of course, the smell of the place was different. I could smell the spices, those Chinese spices.

I walked in and her family said hello to the owners and we all sat down at a big table and because they were friends with the owners, the owners said oh let us, we’ll order. We’ll give you the best food that we have here at the restaurant. I was excited but also, honestly, I was a little worried, a little concerned because I just wasn’t a good eater. In other words, I wasn’t used to trying lots of different foods. I was used to just meat and potatoes food, very bland, simple food.

So we sat and waited and I looked around the restaurant and for me it was quite interesting and exciting.

In fact, it was probably my first experience, my first taste or connection with another culture, a culture from another country, certainly one much different than the United States. So I was excited, waiting, waiting, not knowing what to expect. What would the food be like?

Finally, the food came, boom, boom, boom. They put down all the food and they put down a dish in front of me, it was chicken cashew, chili chicken cashew. So it had pieces of chicken and this sauce that had cashew nuts and then it had these kind of brownish red chilis, big long ones. I didn’t really know what they were, honestly.

So I got some rice, put it on my plate. And then I grabbed the big spoon and I put some of the cashew chicken onto my plate as well. And at that time I didn’t know how to eat with chopsticks so my girlfriend at the time, she kind of taught me the basics of how to use chopsticks so I started, y’know, trying to pick up the food, which was also this exotic experience for me at that time.

So after a few failed attempts, I finally figured out how to pick up a piece of chicken and ate it and, oh, it was pretty good, pretty good, right? It had a much stronger taste than I was used to because the sauce had a little bit of spiciness in it because of the chilis and, y’know, a little bit of sweet, a little bit of sour. It surprised me at first. I wasn’t sure if I liked it but then, y’know, I ate a few more pieces and I realized oh, this is pretty good. I think I like this.

Well, then I put down the chopsticks because it was hard to eat with them at that time and just grabbed a fork. And I grabbed one of the chilis and I popped it in my mouth. It was about this long, alright, so that would be about 4 inches long, I suppose, maybe that’s 8 centimeters, something like that. And I popped it in my mouth and just started chewing it. Chewed it up really well and swallowed it.

And then there was a delay of possibly 30 seconds to a minute and then my mouth started to burn. At first, my mouth started to burn just a little bit. I got just a little bit of a burning feeling in my mouth and I thought, oh, what’s that? It felt a little uncomfortable. I grabbed a glass of water, took a sip, swished it around my mouth which means I kind of moved it around my mouth, and then swallowed.

It cooked off my mouth a little bit and I thought, I’m fine. But then, just a few seconds later, the burning came back even stronger. And it kept getting stronger and stronger and soon it felt like my whole mouth and tongue were burning, were on fire. I was like, ahhh, I started panicking a little bit. I grabbed the glass of water and tried to drink the water and swish it around my mouth again and then swallow.

That only helped for a couple seconds while the water was moving around my mouth, swishing around my mouth, it helped. It cooled off my mouth. But as soon as I swallowed, a couple seconds later my mouth was once again burning and on fire. Then I started sweating. I started pouring sweat. And the burning got worse and worse.

And I had never experienced this before. I had never eaten spicy food before. I had never eaten a chili before. So I was actually, kind of funny now to think about it, but I was scared. I thought…I thought something was wrong. I thought that maybe I was hurting my mouth, that something would be damaged or injured.

So I quickly got up. I was kind of embarrassed, pouring sweat. And I stood up and I quickly went to the bathroom. I didn’t want her family to see me, y’know, panicking and sweating and spitting water. So I ran into the bathroom, turned on the sink and started putting water in my mouth as fast as I could and swishing it around my mouth again and then spitting it into the sink. And then again and again and again and I thought maybe I can wash out the burning feeling, whatever was causing the burning, the chili.

But as maybe you know, if you’ve had this experience, water doesn’t help. In fact, water often just seems to make it worse because the oils of the chili, they get stuck on your tongue and your mouth and oil won’t…I mean water won’t wash away those oils. So I kept doing it, doing it, doing it and nothing changed, it just kept getting worse and worse.

And I finally started panicking, I was like, oh, what’s happening? So I quickly kind of half ran back to the table and I told my girlfriend and her family, I don’t know what’s up, my mouth’s burning, my mouth’s burning. I don’t know what to do. I tried with water. And they could see that I was sweating and they all started laughing and thought it was really funny. I wasn’t amused at the time, didn’t think it was funny at all.

But anyway, they kind of laughed, and they said, “Don’t drink water, don’t drink water, just eat rice. Chew up the rice and kind of move it around. Press it against your mouth. Move it around your mouth, then swallow. And then do it again and again.” So I did, I grabbed a big spoon of rice, chewed it up as best I could and then started moving it around my mouth, putting it on my tongue, rubbing my tongue against the rice.

It seemed to help a little bit. I swallowed it. Then I did it again, then I did it again. Finally, after a few minutes more the burning got a little less and then a little less and then a little less. Ahhh. And I felt this great sense of relief. Her family continued to laugh at me and make fun of me and actually for several years after that they would joke about that experience and how funny it was that I ate the chili. And then they told me, “Don’t eat the chilis. Don’t chew up the chilis. They are just to add taste to the dish, but don’t eat them directly. They’re too hot.” Lesson learned.

So that was a tough experience. It was an interesting experience. And after the burning went away, y’know, I continued. I ate the rest of the meal. I enjoyed it. And even with the burning, even with the chili story and the chili experience, it was a powerful experience for me. The new tastes, the new smells, the new sights of the restaurant. And yes, even the burning sensation. It was all new and exotic.

I can’t say for sure but certainly it was one of my earliest experiences with a different culture, a culture much different than the United States. And I believe it was probably one of the inspirations for my desire to travel later in my life, right? It just all seemed so new, so different, so amazing.

Now, of course, now it’s…I probably would go back it would just seem like a normal Chinese restaurant, no big deal. But at that time it was so new, so fascinating, the whole thing. Such a different experience from my normal meat and potatoes way of eating and way of life.

Many, many, many years later, I was in Bangkok, Thailand, just…had just arrived in Bangkok, Thailand.

And I was wondering one of the side streets of Bangkok and I came upon an area with a lot of street vendors, people who are selling on the street. And they were food vendors so they were selling food, little food carts all along the streets. This is one of my favorite things about Bangkok, Thailand.

Bangkok, of all the cities I’ve visited, Bangkok probably has the best street food and the most street vendors. So I…I felt again that feeling of wonder, right? Because it awakened my senses, it awakened my mind. The first thing that I noticed was just that my visual sense, my eyes seemed to wake up because there were so many colors, right?

All the different colors…some of the vendors were selling fruit and they had papayas and pineapples and strange fruit that we don’t even have in the United States, of all different colors…reds and pinks and, y’know, oranges and whites. It was fascinating to me. Some were selling noodles, like noodle soups with little balls of fish and meat. And, of course, there were all the people dressed all different in all different colors. All the different shapes and sizes and decorations of the food carts.

My sense of hearing was also awakened. You could hear the food cooking at many of the food stalls or food carts, right? The kind of sizzling of oil as oil heats up and kind of makes that crackling sound. And then as they throw in the meat or throw in the veggies. And all the street vendors and the customers talking with each other, all different languages, of course, lots and lots of Thai, but there were also foreigners there and they were speaking English with all different kinds of accents, dressed all differently.

And then finally, of course, I decided well I’m going to get some noodles. I got some noodles. And I ordered the noodles, they were very cheap, and I got to watch the vendor cook the noodles right in front of me. So they put in the oil, again that crackling sound, right? And then they threw in an egg and they fried up the egg and chopped it up and threw in some vegetables then threw in some different spices and threw in the noodles, some chilis, some vinegar, some little bit of sugar.

They started mixing them all up and you hear that clackity-clack, clackity-clack, clackity-clack sound of the spatula. Spatula is like a flat tool used for cooking. Using the spatula, flipping the noodles around.

And then boom, put it onto a little Styrofoam plate and they gave me these two little sticks to use as chopsticks to eat them.

So I paid it. It was just super cheap, less than a dollar, US dollar, and went over and sat down on the curb. The curb is the area where the sidewalk drops onto the street. So I sat on the curb and ate the noodles. They were fantastic, y’know, they had this nice spiciness to them, a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of sour.

One of the things I love about Thai food in general, that combination of sweet and sour and spicy. They do a great job, and salty, too, and they mix all four of those together in this great balance. When it’s good, it’s incredible. And the noodles were very good, a great mix of all four of those flavors for less than a dollar.

I can still see it now. Sitting there, eating my noodles, sitting on the curb of the street. Watching the people go by, the traffic, the sights, the smells, the sounds. It was a magical experience because all of my senses were alive and open. A sensory feast, we might call that.

And as I think of that, I realized that, y’know, food…obviously the main function, the practical function of food is to nourish our bodies, right? To provide nutrition. And my meat and potatoes diet of my youth certainly did that, provided nutrition for me to grow up, for me to be healthy, for me to be strong. So nothing wrong with that diet, meat and potatoes.

But the thing is, I realized, that food can do more than just nourish our bodies. Because food can also nourish our minds and our senses. It can open us to new worlds. Y’know, that experience with the Chinese restaurant, number one, of course, y’know, I’ve got nutrition from the chicken and from the vegetables, but much, much more than that.

Y’know, it awakened my senses, right? I walked into the restaurant and immediately my sense, my visual sense, my sense of sight, was entertained and stimulated with the different decorations and colors, different than what I was used to. And, of course, the same with my sense of smell, the different smells of the spices in the restaurant.

And, obviously, of course, my sense of taste in that case with that super spicy chili that I ate. But it certainly got my attention. It woke up my mouth. It woke up my taste buds, woke up my sense of taste.

And in fact, even now, when I was sweating, it even affected my, y’know, physical feelings in my body, my body sensations. I could feel it in my body, the pain in my mouth. There was a pain there and then I was pouring sweat.

But it’s such a memorable experience for me because it affected so many of my senses. And because it affected my senses and gave me such powerful stimulation and new kinds of input, it inspired my mind, right? It kind of inspired my mind. It woke me up to appreciate that there were other cultures, other parts of the world that might be interesting and that might be worth visiting and exploring. Food, therefore, had an effect on my life well beyond just nourishing my body.

And, of course, a third aspect of food in all cultures is that food is also a means of connection, of socializing, right? We all tend to socialize around food. Maybe it goes back to when we were cavemen and cavewomen sitting around a fire, y’know, eating food together as a tribe, as a family. And we still have these kind of experiences in our lives, right? Where a family comes together to share a meal. It provides an excuse, a reason to come together and connect together and to share together.

So food can have a much deeper way of nourishing us that goes beyond just the body. It goes to the senses, the mind, and to our, y’know, social being, our way of socializing and connecting with other human beings. And we lose sight of that sometimes, I think, in modern life with our fast food culture and mentality, y’know, just trying to grab food quickly, eating by ourselves. I do this. It’s not a good thing, I think, but, y’know, sometimes I get busy.

I’m working hard and I’ll just, y’know, eat by myself. Sometimes I don’t even sit down to eat. I’ll stand up.

I’ll grab some food quickly from my kitchen or maybe from some restaurant that’s fast. And then I’ll just eat standing up by myself. And as I’m eating, I’m not even noticing the food really, right? I’m not looking at it. I’m not noticing the colors. I’m not taking a moment to smell it and notice the smells. And I’m not hardly noticing the taste. I’m just…chew it up, down into my stomach. I’m only using it to nourish my body.

But when I eat that way I’m not nourishing my senses, I’m not nourishing my mind and I’m not nourishing my connection to other people. And I think that’s a tragedy. I think that it’s something that I want to change. I want to use food more as a means to nourish all of me, not just my body. And I encourage you to do the same.

In one of my VIP lessons I talk about creativity and how if we want to be creative, we want to have new ideas, innovative ideas, right? Different ideas, different than what we already have. Well, how do we do that? How do we do that? If we want to do that, how? Where do new ideas come from? Can we force ourselves to have new ideas?

Well, you’ll get that lesson and you’ll hear the details of it, but one way we get new ideas is from getting new experiences, new sensory experiences. The senses are our eyes, our ears, our mouth, right? Our nose, right? The sense of smell, the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of touch, taste.

It’s by having new sensory experiences, new tastes, new smells, new sights, that we wake up our mind and that helps us to be more creative. When we get new experiences, new sights, new sounds, new smells, new tastes, new sensations in our body, we get new raw material for new ideas. Those are the raw materials of creativity.

The other thing is that when we have these new sensory experiences we wake up our eyes, we wake up our ears, we wake up our mouth and nose and the sensations in our body and we feel more alive. If we just keep, y’know, eating the same foods again and again and again, seeing the same sights again, again, again, hearing the same sounds again, again, again, etc., then what happens is we become dulled.

Now this is just the way our eyes and ears and taste, sense of taste, and all these things work. That if you keep getting the same stimulation, the same thing, you notice it less and less and less. You appreciate it less and less and less. The intensity of the experience becomes less and less and less.

And so that’s where we get in our life this feeling of this kind of dullness sometimes where everything is just the same all the time and we don’t quite feel as alive as we used to.

What we need in those situations, when we want creativity, when we want to feel more alive, we need new sensory stimulation. We need new sights. We need new sounds. Indeed, as we’re talking about this month, new tastes and smells. Food can be a way to wake us up, to help us feel more awake and alive, to notice our world more, to be more mindful.

In fact, food is a powerful way to do this and when we use food in this way we begin to also feed our minds with the food and then when we slow down and we invite others to join us we also feed our community, feed our family, feed our friendships, feed our connections. And this is what I encourage you to do this month.

Now you might be an adventurous eater. Maybe you just try any kind food, doesn’t matter. You’re used to trying lots of different foods. I’m that way now. As I said, in the past I was not but I am that way now.

But still, even for an adventurous eater, there are always new things to try. Maybe it’s a new kind of food or maybe it’s just a new restaurant, right? We all get in kind of habits and we repeat it. We have our favorite restaurants and we go back to them again and again and again.

I do that all the time because I know I like them so when I’m hungry I think, well, I want to the restaurant that I know. I know it’s good. I know I like it. Nothing wrong with that most of the time, but if you do that too often, too much, that’s when again you get in that…we call it getting in a rut, where you get stuck doing the same thing again and again and then your senses get duller and duller.

You don’t appreciate that favorite restaurant quite as much anymore. The taste isn’t new to you anymore.

It starts to get more dull. And that’s why sometimes we just need to go and try something new. And it might even be terrible. I mean my first Chinese food experience wasn’t wonderful, right? I ate the chili. It was kind of a painful, negative experience. But still it was interesting, super interesting. It woke up my sense of taste.

And I’ll tell you, the next meal I had, my next meat and potatoes meal, I actually noticed it and appreciated it more because I had a contrast. I could compare it to the Chinese food. So the old food I was eating suddenly seemed a little more new again. So this is why we need to get out and keep trying new things, whatever our age, it doesn’t matter.

You can try new types of food, right? If you’ve never eaten Ethiopian food, go to an Ethiopian restaurant and just order something. If you’ve never eaten Chines food, most of us have eaten Chinese food because they’re everywhere, but if you haven’t, go try it or try a different kind of Chinese food.

Or maybe you have a favorite Chinese restaurant, well go try some small little place in another part of your town that you’ve never thought to try before. Just walk in and try it out. And you can do this with any kind of food and that’s the second way to do it is just go try new places, random new places.

Just walk around your town or drive around your town and when you see a new restaurant you’ve never seen before or you’ve never tried before, stop, go in and eat there. Even better, bring your husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, or bring some close friends, or bring your whole family and just, you can make it kind of a thing you do once a month or once a week, whatever.

You go try something new, completely new. A new place. If you love to cook, you could do this at home.

Find some recipes online or get a recipe book and just make something completely new and different, something you haven’t made before or done before.

I especially encourage you to try those hole-in-the-wall restaurants. A hole-in-the-wall restaurant, it’s like a little tiny, usually cheap restaurant. Street food, it’s kind of like street food but a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, it’s usually in a building but it’s something that’s cheap, maybe it’s kind of hidden a little bit.

It’s not obvious. It’s not the big expensive restaurant that everybody knows. It’s some little small family place that maybe only a few people know about.

Sometimes those hole-in-the-wall restaurants are absolutely terrible and sometimes they’re amazingly good. So you just try. Take the chance sometimes, go and try them out and experience it together with somebody you care about. And whatever happens you’ll have an interesting story, an interesting experience.

If it’s terrible you still will wake up your taste and wake up your smells, your sense of smell. And you’ll have a great experience to chat about with whoever you go with, with your friend or family members. And you will feed your senses. So that’s the good thing about it. It doesn’t have to even be good. If it’s just different, it wakes up your senses.

So that’s what I want you to do this month is to seek out new sensory experiences, especially new food experiences. Try it once a week this month. Once a week go to a new restaurant or try a new kind of food or a new place. And don’t do it alone, go with someone else that you have a good connection with.

It might be your whole family, it might just be your spouse, it might be a couple of friends, whatever.

Doesn’t matter.

Go out there and wake up your senses again. Try a new place, a new kind of food, at least one time per week. So you’ll do it four times this month. And then, of course, tell us about your experience, share your experiences, share the funny, terrible stories, like my Chinese experience, and share the great ones as well. I look forward to hearing about your new eating experiences. See you next time. Bye for now.