I had a long evening at home on Monday, so I cooked a pot of hamburger curry. The cooking doesn’t take long, but the preparation does; it’s great for winter because the recipe makes a lot and it freezes well. The recipe I use comes from a Jaycee cookbook, but I was introduced to this type of curry long before I ever heard of Jaycees.
This particular curry isn’t Indian or Thai, but Japanese, and I first ate it when visiting in the home of my first serious boyfriend. His mom was Japanese and he loved her curry, so she made it often. It is like a vegetable beef stew with a mildly curried gravy, and it is served over rice. In other words, it’s exotic comfort food.
Thinking of that boyfriend made me think of other boyfriends, their families, and more food memories. My Gulfport boyfriend’s parents lived in Miami, and I picked grapefruit off the tree in their yard. I ate artichokes for the first time with my boyfriend in Gallup. In Paris, my Moroccan boyfriend introduced me to many tajines and couscous. A Frenchman once brought me farm-fresh eggs as an “I’ve missed you” gift, and a Mexican sweetheart brought me two liters of pure vanilla from his mom. One boyfriend’s mom was in the habit of assigning dishes potluck-fashion to anticipated attendees at family dinners, and it pleased me greatly to be asked to bring a broccoli-rice casserole for Thanksgiving one year.
Several of my boyfriends have been good cooks themselves--one of my best friends from college took the time daily to prepare elaborate Lebanese meals and often invited me to join him in the feast; he later trained to be a pastry chef on his way to becoming an Orthodox biship! Fortunately, what they enjoyed cooking was often very different from what I enjoy cooking, so one of us would be in charge of the kitchen and the other would function as sous-chef when we cooked together. It goes without saying that the sous-chef usually got the clean-up chores, too! But we created some wonderful meals together.
One boyfriend persuaded me to make blueberry cornbread after we returned from a blueberry festival. I wasn’t too sure how it would turn out, but with a little sugar in the batter it was fabulous. I am sure that I wouldn’t have thought of that combination myself, but it is unforgettable.
I have always enjoyed cooking, but I will never be as good a cook as my mom was. She cooked everything from scratch except biscuits, to her own consternation; she tried but never made scratch biscuits that measured up to her own high standard. For years, she kept a sourdough starter and baked bread from it every few days, handing it out to friends and neighbors while it was still warm. She was famous for her pound cakes and peanut brittle, and she canned every summer until the one before her death. The summer before that, she bought okra to make pickles and got the jars and the pickling solution ready, but then realized that she couldn’t see well enough to pour the solution over the okra in the jars. When my dad came in from working, he did the pouring and capped the jars. She made the best potato salad I have ever tasted and, even though she told me exactly how she made it, mine has never tasted like hers.
Because I watched my grandma make bread and cinnamon rolls often when I was a child, I wanted to learn how to make yeast breads as well, and 4-H gave me the opportunity to hone that skill as a teenager. I still enjoy the process of making bread; it’s tasty but not the same using a bread machine. Baking bread involves paying attention and cultivating patience since the baker has to wait for the dough to rise and watch to make sure it rises enough but not too much. In our instant society, baking bread is a way to drop out for awhile and return to a slower pace of life, and I have recommended it to parents who’ve asked my input on activities for teens. They have the opportunity to contribute to family meals, experience the joy of accomplishing something that not everybody else they know can do, and think deliberately about a food they will consume.
In the fall of 2003, I took a class at the University of New Mexico called “Food, Festivals and Ethnicity in the U. S.” Part of our grade was for each student to prepare and serve the class a food or foods to which he/she had an emotional attachment. We ate typical New Mexican green chile with pork, Utz potato chips and Japanese obento dishes. I took pound cake and peanut brittle and shared the recipes my mother used for both. When I got home, Mom wanted to know if my classmates had enjoyed their treats, and I was glad to report that they had. Two days later, my mother died. I spent almost six weeks here in Bayfield after her funeral, resting after the five months of caring for her, and I baked lots of bread and cookies as “therapy.”
We are told that we should eat to live and not live to eat, but our food memories are incredibly strong. It’s rare for a person not to remember at least one thing that he/she has eaten in the last 24 hours, and people always answer quickly when asked about foods they dislike. Food is central to our lives, and preparing the foods that nourish us is an intimate connection to life itself. It is a creative as well as a scientific process, and the process itself is comforting. Sharing the process and its results with those we hold dear is a way to literally “share the love.” Cooking isn’t difficult and can be lots of fun, and usually even a novice cook’s mistakes are edible. So here’s to good cooking and the sons whose moms who have welcomed me in their kitchens--thanks for the memories, guys!
