We’d pile in the Jeep, the cool car with the windows that unzip, and head down the flat streets with palm trees on either side. Past the rocky hills in the shapes of monks praying or the humps of camels, towards PF Changs, the new Asian place with the funny crunchy noodles and the “lettuce wraps,” which were basically tacos you ate in leaves. We were celebrating a birthday or the first day of school or the last day of school or it was just too hot to cook and we’d already had Taco Bell twice that week. We had a set order at PF Chang’s when I was little: their healthy lettuce wraps, wonton soup, honey chicken. Back then, I was 10 or so, living in Scottsdale, Arizona where it was hot as hell but still cold when you got out of the pool. It’s a dry heat, I learned later, experiencing the contrast first-hand as we settled into the jungle-like humidity of the American Southeast. I didn’t know that PF Changs, the local Asian place back then, would expand across the country and take on permanent chain restaurant status. All I knew was that lettuce wraps were too cool and the servers made the dipping sauce and we were eating something so different and funky, and that right there, that might have been the moment I first started falling in love with foods from different cultures, like healthy lettuce wraps and Szechuan chicken, with different tastes and textures than I was used to, with something other than tuna noodle casserole or chicken soup chicken or ground beef and gravy over mashed potatoes. And while I wouldn’t claim that that food was necessarily authentic back then, certainly not now, I’m still wild about those healthy lettuce wraps. The savory ground meat with crunchy water chestnuts and salty, spicy sauce work perfectly enveloped in the light, crisp lettuce cups. And with hardly any processed carbs to replace, I had to make a Whole30 version!
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