Home Cooking

My son, daughter-in-law and grandson are all are in Thailand this month, visiting my daughter-in-law’s family. This is her first visit home in seven years, and her family’s first time meeting Connor, so I’m sure it has been a fun-filled and exciting time for all of them. We’re keeping tabs on the visit via Facebook and smiling because most of the pictures involve eating. As my daughter-in-law reported this morning, “Eating is the national pastime in Thailand!"

She posted photos yesterday of some of her mother’s home-cooked specialities. “My favorite foods my mom makes!” she captioned the photos. “I've missed them so much!” 

It’s true, we miss those favorite home made foods, especially the ones we most associate with our childhoods. Growing up with two southern cooks in my house (my grandmother and my mother), as well as two more across the street (my great-aunt and my great-grandmother), there was certainly no shortage of home-cooked southern style goodness on our table. 

I grew up in an atmosphere where food equaled love. Great care was taken with every meal, every loaf of bread baked, every pie crust rolled and crimped at the edge, every cookie slipped hot and buttery off the sheet. My mother and grandmother’s day was devoted to domestic duties, so nothing was ever rushed or hurried. From fried chicken to grilled steaks, everything was prepared and served with love, a way of nurturing the body, but also the soul. 

It was also a time when we didn’t worry about what we ate. There weren’t daily news bulletins warning us away from all our favorite foods, no internet posts about the evils effects of fat or sugar or carbs or gluten. We ate what tasted good, we enjoyed it, and maybe most importantly, we didn’t feel guilty about it. When I was a child, I ate hot buttered toast (often made from thick slices of my grandma’s homemade bread), crispy fried bacon, and a steaming cup of milky coffee every morning of my life. Dinners were often more fried goodness: platters of chicken, golden brown and crispy on the outside, meaty and juicy on the inside; tiny, melt-in-your mouth lake perch, heaped on a platter, drizzled with lemon wedges, and gobbled up one after the other. Side dishes were potato salad, classic macaroni salad, baked or pinto beans, black eyed peas, wilted spinach with garlic, eggplant or okra (fried!).

My mouth waters at the memory. 

So, yes I miss all those home cooked favorites. They’re nothing like the dishes my daughter-in-law craves, and I’m quite sure her favorite foods are healthier than the ones I grew up on. But home cooking, as we all know, is about more than the sum of its parts. Because while I miss the aroma and taste of those meals, I miss even more the sight and sound of my grandmother bustling around in the basement kitchen of our house, wiping her hands on her ever-present apron. I miss seeing my mother working alongside her, preparing salad or vegetables, setting steaks out to marinade and eventually put on the grill. I miss us all sitting around the white formica table, my grandfather at the head of the table, my grandmother sitting nearest the stove, jumping up and down like a jack-in-the box to refill someone’s plate, add another batch of fish to the fry pan, or remove a fresh pan of biscuits from the oven. I miss being the center of attention while I told stories of my day at school, especially enjoying the reactions when the stories involved those classmates whose behavior was less stellar than mine. 

I know I’ll never taste anything like those foods again. My cooking skills (such as they are) were learned on my own. You’d think with two fine “home-cookers” in the house, someone would have taught me something. But there seemed to be a silent consensus between my mother and grandmother that I wouldn’t need to cook, that I was destined for “more” than a life in the kitchen. If I was hanging around aimlessly in the kitchen, instead of encouraging me to help with the meal, my grandmother might say, “Go up and play the piano for us while we’re cooking.” My mother might shoo me out of her way. “Go read your book, honey,” she’d say, giving me a gentle shove. “We’ll call you when it’s supper time."

Consequently, while I don’t mind cooking, it’s not an activity I’m passionate about. Most of the time, I do prefer eating at home to eating out. Most of the time I’m happier with the small portions of things I make for myself. I enjoy experimenting with new recipes, but since I’m feeding a staunch meat-and-potatoes Irishman, there’s not much room for exotic variations to the menu.  I imagine most of my son’s home cooking memories relate to things his grandmother (my mother) made for him: Shepherd’s pie, spaghetti and meatballs, turkey and stuffing, pot roast. Chocolate cake with caramel frosting, pumpkin pie with whipped cream. 

Comfort food of the highest order.

My grandmother would probably chuckle at the current obsession with cooking - all the food-related TV shows, and even a whole network dedicated to Food. To her, cooking was part of her job as a farmers wife, one of the vital chores she did every day. The fact that she was extraordinarily good at it was a point of pride, but not something she saw as an unusual accomplishment. Like everything else she did, it was done out of love for her family, out of necessity for their wellbeing, to make them FULL - of love, comfort, and tenderness, all sensed with a generous amount of butter, fat, and salt. 

In her book, Home Cooking, writer Laurie Colwin says that “when life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is not four perfect courses, each in a lovely pool of sauce whose lovely ambrosial flavors are like nothing ever before tasted, but rather something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion - something that makes one feel, even if only for a minute, that one is safe."

That sense of safety and comfort is the one I most yearn for when i think back to mealtimes growing up. I think that’s the key to successful Home Cooking, no matter where your home lies on the globe. 

Life Goes On

“Each of us walks along a path with no sign of where’ve we been and no knowledge of where we’ll end up. The earth rises to meet the soles of our feet and out of nowhere comes a gift to support and sustain our awareness, which is our life. Some days the gift is a bite, and some days it’s a banquet. Either way, it’s enough.” from Paradise in Plain Sight, by Karen Maezen Miller I’ve not been sleeping very well lately, and there are some practical reasons for this. One of my little dogs has allergies and she wakes periodically in the night with a stuffy, sneezy nose. When she wakes, often about 3:00 a.m., I wake. And then I am restless and fitful until morning, my mind buzzing with thoughts, ideas, and always a running loop of my To-Do list.

Sometimes I leave my bed and go across the hall to the room that serves as my writing room during the day. There is a queen sized bed in this room, a bed covered with a quilt my aunt made me for a wedding present. The quilt top is cross stitched in an intricate floral pattern. She stitched every stitch herself, by hand,  then stretched the quilt top on the frame in her basement and quilted every tiny quilting stitch herself by hand. A labor of love, and one that seems miraculous to me, as I have neither the patience nor the talent for sewing. When I take my restless body and crawl under this quilt, I feel instantly comforted. It is the perfect heft to be warm yet not suffocating. It’s like being held close to someone you love, someone who knows just how to calm a racing heart.

Every time I pick up my copy of Karen Maezen Miller’s book, Paradise in Plain Sight, it falls open to the page that contains the passage quoted above. This small, elegant book is very much about finding meaning in the here and now, so I think there must be a reason these words appear before me so often. What are they trying to teach me?

On these bright and beautiful summer days, I am spending so much time immersed in the lessons of my past. This is not a bad thing.  While collecting and curating my writing for this book I am piecing together, this book that is like a patchwork quilt of the past eight years, I am beginning to see myself not just in part but as whole, see the path I’ve walked along for not just the past decade, but get a glimpse of what led me to it in the first place. One foot in front of the other, sometimes through soft mossy meadows, other times through thickets full of briars, the path of my Life in General has led me here: to this place where Life Goes On.

“Out of nowhere comes a gift to support or sustain our awareness, which is our life,” Maezen writes. “Some days the gift is a bite, and some days it’s a banquet.”

Life feels like a banquet to me these days. I try not to be smug about that. Or complacent. After all, I know about the dark side. I remember those few years ago when losses stacked up like dominoes and then began to tumble incessantly. But I’m beginning to see those moon-shrouded days as part of the path I had to walk to get myself to this place, a place where I feel as if I’m right where I need to be to take the next steps wherever they might lead.

The gifts that come to me are usually small - the sight of a hummingbird at the feeder, my little dog asleep with her head on my pillow, the gentle harmony of wind chimes in the breeze, morning coffee in my favorite chair. My husband’s fingers intwined in mine. My son’s voice on the phone.

A gourmet feast.

Your banquet will be different from mine. But if you look at your world with new eyes, perhaps you will find more than just a bite to support you on your own path. Maybe you will find the incentive to walk briskly rather than just putting one weary foot in front of the other. It won’t happen all at once, it won’t happen every day. One sweet morsel at a time. One sprightly step in front of the other.

This is how life goes on.

Another reason I’m having trouble sleeping is because I’m in the process of developing something deep down, a sort of spiritual growth spurt that happens only when the body quiets down and the busyness of life is stilled.  I think these nights under my quilt are part of what I’m learning, like everything on my path these days. They remind me of the love that surrounds me, the care and labor that goes into everything beautiful.

The way a hundred thousand tiny crossed-shaped stitches can- when you stand back and survey them whole- become a wildly spreading garden of flowers.