My late-Dad taught me that good things _ and good tasting things _ come in small packages.

As a kid, whenever I was too sick to go to school, I always felt a secret twinge of giddiness. Well, not only because I got to stay home that day, but because when my Dad came home from work, there would be a surprise. OK, maybe if I knew about it ahead of time, it wasn’t really a surprise. But to a child, it still qualified as one.

You see, my Dad kept a stash of new toys hidden away at the top of a hallway closet. Whenever I got a bad cough, or a fever that would give me creepy nightmares, he’d sneak off to that closet, and pull out a toy to surprise me with. A little doll. A wooden puzzle. A coloring book. A Snoopy figurine. He hoped that whatever he chose would make my pained eyes brighten. He always succeeded, too.

On lazy weekends, my Dad would sometimes make me shirred eggs as a treat. Oh sure, he’d fry eggs in a pan or make scrambled eggs routinely. But there was something extra special about having your own egg baked in its own little dish, topped with some Parmesan cheese, paprika, and a dab of butter. It somehow seemed more precious.

That’s how I felt about his foil-wrapped chicken, too. As a kid, I would help him fold the triangular packages of chicken marinated in a sweet-salty blend of hoisin sauce, soy sauce, Ketchup, and ginger. Unlike the version at Chinese dim sum restaurants, my Dad’s wasn’t fried; it was baked in the oven instead.

Of course, it would be easier to just cook the chicken in a pan without wrapping tiny portions of it in foil packages. But it wouldn’t be nearly as fun, not when the shiny packages emerge from the oven puffed up like Jiffy-Pop popcorn.

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