I’m told that poke is a dish of some sort but I misheard daughter the other day and thought she was describing yet another strange sounding American food dish as “umbali”

The strange look she gave me when I repeated the dish back to her spoke of misunderstanding. I was eating a pot of soup ( yes, soup in California ) on one of our last outings of the trip. It was chicken and barley.

She said “What’s umbali?” After I’d asked the same question. She spelt it out for me v e r y s l o w l y. Chicken and barley.

Incidentally poke is a Hawaiian dish of raw tuna cut up into pieces with onion and some say rice, though there are debates about that. I’ll stick with umbali.

Time I went home.