Food, Glorious Food
If you’re fortunate like we are, food is one of life’s greatest pleasures. That’s why there are so many songs about it, like “Cheeseburgers in Paradise” and “Banana Pancakes.” There are endless cookbooks and websites and literature and shows and competitions dedicated to food and cooking. One of my all-time favorite novels that was made into a movie is Like Water for Chocolate which weaves together culinary traditions and recipes, Mexican history and romance. Talk about a perfect trifecta by my standards.
Food and cooking were an important part of my family growing up, too. We weren’t standing around the kitchen telling stories like the book I mentioned above, but our cuisine reflected our family history in a big way. I grew up with arroz con pollo, stamppot, nasi goreng and matzoh ball soup on regular rotation. For the uninitiated, those are Colombian, Dutch, Indonesian and Jewish foods. We were a pretty interesting family, culturally speaking.
My Oma and my mother were both good cooks, and we enjoyed big family dinners fairly regularly. Holidays were festive with delicious aromas and a feast that makes me drool to remember. But I myself didn’t grow up cooking. I don’t remember being encouraged to be in the kitchen often while food was being prepared. In fact, my contribution to meals through my teenage years was heating up Swanson TV dinners in the oven. In my defense, I actually thought they were pretty tasty at the time. But it wasn’t until I was married that I started trying my hand at the stove.
Initially, Hubby and I ate a lot of ramen. Just ramen. Or Kraft mac n cheese with hot dogs, or baked potatoes and hamburgers. Pretty plain American fare, starving-student stuff, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone and was just glad to have some grub on the table. But that didn’t last longer than it had to. We were living in Tucson, Arizona, and I fairly quickly learned to make a pot of refried beans for tostadas. I called and asked Mom for her arroz con pollo recipe and made it pretty often.
Then we got a real kitchen and had three kids in quick succession and that changed everything for me. Now cooking seemed more important, as making sure the kids ate healthy foods became imperative. Hubby and I formed a little assembly production line every Sunday to cook and freeze baby food, and I also discovered the crock pot, a wonderful invention for working parents. I’d fill it with vegetables, beef and broth in the morning and come home to smell dinner just waiting to be served.
As the kids got older, I wanted them to have a well-developed palate and began perusing the Settlement Cookbook my mother had passed down to me, which up until then had been gathering dust on a shelf. In there, I found some of the recipes of my own youth and began to cook in earnest. This cookbook had a lengthy Table of Contents that went beyond food prep. The first chapter was called Household Rules and Table Placement and there were other sections called Airing out a Room and Removing Stains. It had pages with tables of cooking times for everything imaginable like different cuts of beef and different fruits. The index alone was twenty-five pages long. Each chapter had a set of General Rules and there were early nutrition facts and measuring equivalencies I have not forgotten to this day. It was a perfect first cookbook and became my kitchen bible. And later when I was teaching my kids to carry on this tradition, it became theirs as well.
When the children started getting a lot of homework, they sat at the counter to work on it while I cooked. It became a lovely way to connect and chat as we all did our late afternoon tasks. It was hard being a working mother who valued a gourmet meal every single night, but somehow it worked. We have great memories of all five of us talking over each other and passing bowls around. Because it was so hard sometimes, I had a “mom hack.” When I was overwhelmed, I chopped a lot of onions so I could cry in front of the kids without scaring them. We ate a ton of onions some weeks.
Now the kids are all grown up and I’m happy to report they have become next-level foodies. They use the hand-typed cookbooks my father and mother each put together, and love to try new food.
Even more fun, our grandchildren love it too. Just today I got a photo of our six-year-old grandson in Spain eating jamon out of a paper cone while his nine-year-old brother consumed a fancy avocado and corn and tomato toast. At Seder last weekend, our eleven-month-old gave patent approval to matzoh balls. Our other eleven-month-old recently got her own order at a Mexican restaurant because she was trying to eat all of ours.
It makes my heart happy to see them all enjoy food as much as I do. In thinking about it, I’m not sure if it’s just one thing about food and cooking that give me joy. I think it’s the whole big picture: the colors, the fragrances, the tickles on the tongue, the chatting with friends or family who are enjoying too, the sated feelings of getting exactly what you’re craving. As I said in the beginning and can’t say enough, we are truly fortunate. To have available the quality and types of food we can access is such a gift to be treasured, in my opinion. Bon appétit!