3-4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
2 cups barbeque sauce, store-bought or homemade
1 cup chicken stock
1 tbsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. red wine vinegar
1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil
Mango Salsa (recipe follows)
Tortillas
Mango Salsa
Can be made ahead of time and will keep for up to four days.
2 mangoes, diced
¼ red onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
½ bunch of cilantro, chopped
Juice and zest of one lime
1-2 tsp. minced ginger (I go heavy on the ginger)
1 tsp. canola oil
coarse grain salt, to taste
Add chicken breasts, barbeque sauce, chicken stock, oregano, and olive oil to slow cooker. Cook on high for 4 hours or low for 8 hours. When chicken is done, shred using two forks. Any remaining cooking liquid can be strained and mixed in with rice or beans.
SLOW COOKED THAI INSPIRED CHICKEN
This dish requires a little more work only if you want to make the fresh sauce for the final dish. If not, buy a good Pad Thai sauce to mix into the rice noodles and slow cooked chicken.
For the marinade and cooking sauce…
3-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
(2) 14 oz. cans coconut milk
Zest and juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp. fish sauce
1/2 tbsp. dark soy sauce
2 tbsp. Hoisin sauce
1 tbsp. Thai seasoning
1/4 cup miso paste
Dash of coarse grain salt
1 package rice noodles (the thick ones) cooked according to package directions
1 cup unsalted peanuts, smashed
1 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
1 cucumber, julienned or grated on cheese grater
3 carrots, shredded or grated on cheese grater
In place of store-bought Pad Thai (or other) sauce…
2 tbsp. fresh ginger, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced
Red pepper flakes to taste (I used about 1 tsp.)
2 tbsp. rice wine vinegar
2 tbsp. Hoisin Sauce
1 tbsp. sweet chili sauce
1 tsp. sesame oil
Juice of 1 lime
Marinate chicken overnight. Add the chicken plus the marinade into the slow cooker. Cook on low setting, 8 hours, or high setting, 4 hours. When done, shred chicken using 2 forks.
When chicken is shredded, place in bowl and mix with store bought sauce, or add: ginger, garlic, red pepper flakes, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, Hoisin sauce, sweet chili sauce, and lime juice. Mix well. Set aside.
Cook rice noodles. When done, drain noodles and place in serving dish. To keep the noodles from sticking, you may want to add a little sesame oil or canola oil to them.
Add chicken mixture over rice noodles. Top with cucumber, carrots, peanuts and cilantro.
“Feed me!” “I’m hungry, Mom!” “What’s for dinner, honey?”
It never ends, I swear. Especially at this time of year, when ball games, extended daylight hours, activities, school projects and summer planning are at their peak, I have to bring my A-game to secure a winning dinnertime.
Dinner, in my home, is the only time the five of us are really all together under the same roof. After school my kids disperse; one child at practice, the other at a friend’s house, the toddler doing something destructive I will later have to clean, my husband working or working out… you get the idea. From about 6:30 p.m. on, I try my best to gather the cubs and Papa Bear back into the den. It’s re-charging time, and if I pull them back from having fun, I better have something good waiting. It starts with a slow cooker.
I have witnessed slow cookers go from crock pots to digital masterpieces. When I was the hungry child, my Mom would make “Malibu Chicken” in the slow cooker. Her slow cooker/crock pot was round, beige and brown, with vegetables painted on the outside. Do you know the one I mean? It had a thick, black cord and a switch that illuminated red, when it was “ON”, it’s only setting. It wasn’t as sophisticated as the slow cookers now - now slow cookers are high tech and have a following of cookbooks devoted to them - back then, I remember crock pot “recipe collections” spirally bound, my Mom borrowing the cookbook from one of her office mates. Who knew we’d be downloading recipes years later, or buying slow cookers that came with a memory of 300+ recipes, multiple settings, and a “Keep Warm” feature, designed for our busy lives?
Me the Mommy now, I am grateful for such advancement. And my own memory full of crock pot dishes, I believe I do have the slow cooking gene. I am so happy after returning from the beach or ball game to have dinner ready for us. Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all…
As busy as life gets, the most joyful days for me are when I relish in the details, when I see them as stones in a path leading me to our family’s evening re-grouping in our castle. Sitting down to dinner, despite the day we have had, is the journey and the destination for me. I feel safe. I feed the ones I love food they enjoy. That slow cooker I romanticize, it’s an enchanted vessel that aids me in my culinary fairy tale.
And it takes me to different lands, too. This past Sunday, escaping a heat wave and heading to the beach, my slow cooker rewarded us with Thai-inspired chicken when we got home, sandy and exhausted. Last week, after my son’s ball game, we came home to shredded barbeque chicken waiting to be wrapped in tortillas and topped with mango salsa. And next week, I’m attempting my Mom’s Malibu Chicken, I don’t know how it got its name, but it is comprised of chicken breasts wrapped around ham and Swiss cheese, slow cooked with Cream of Mushroom soup. I’ll update it by using prosciutto, provolone, and a béchamel infused with dried porcini mushrooms, garnished with some Italian parsley and basil.
I’m saving time. I’m using it wiser. I’m remembering it past. I’m doing something right. And I’m making it taste good…what else can I do?
Store bought pizza dough
1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves crushed, diced garlic
1 14.5 oz. jar pizza sauce, marinara sauce, or tomato sauce
1 8 oz. package Canadian bacon or diced prosciutto
1 14.5 oz. can pineapple rings, drained and chopped
3 cups shredded Mozzarella cheese
Dried oregano
* Special equipment recommended - pizzas stone (cookie sheet will work fine, too)
Preheat oven to 400º.
If using a cookie sheet, spray with non-stick spray.
Roll out pizza dough onto stone or cookie sheet with pizza roller, until it resembles the crust for your pizza.
Drizzle olive oil over crust and dot with garlic.
Cook pizza crust in oven for approximately 6 minutes, until the edges begin to brown.
Remove pizza crust from oven.
Carefully pour pizza or tomato sauce over pizza crust.
Add pineapple, then bacon or prosciutto.
Sprinkle on dried oregano, to taste.
Lastly, add shredded Mozzarella to pizza.
Cook in oven for approximately another 10 minutes, until cheese melts and before crust gets too brown.
FISH TACOS
2 Pounds Wahoo (also called Ono) - Halibut or Tuna will work too
Whole Wheat Tortillas (or white, it’s a matter of preference)
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
½ head of green and ½ head of purple Cabbage, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped
Diced tomatoes optional
Lime wedges
FOR SAUCE
Sour Cream (no more than a cup)
(Best Foods) Mayonnaise (no more than one cup)
Juice of 1 lemon or lime
Lemon Pepper
Pinch of Salt
Make sauce:
Put equal parts sour cream and mayonnaise in bowl. Squeeze juice of one lemon into bowl; add a pinch of coarse grain salt, and about half a tablespoon of lemon pepper. Adjust seasonings to taste.
Season fish with salt and pepper prior to sautéing. Coat pan with olive oil. Add fish, grind some additional pepper to taste. Squeeze lime juice over fish. Cook fish 4-5 minutes on each side (note: if grilling fish, cook 4-5 minutes on each side as well) Next, warm up tortillas.
Serve taco by placing fish on tortilla, adding cabbage, and finally white sauce with lime wedges on side. Tomatoes and cilantro add the perfect touch.
The year was 1984, I was thirteen years old. My best friend Kari and had traveled up Interstate 5 North from San Diego to Laguna Beach, California for a week-long vacation with her family. A thick marine layer had moved in on the coastal city, it was June, and we walked towards the beachfront hotel with alongside Kari’s older sister, Kathy whom I worshipped. Kari were sipping sparkling cider out of glass bottles, our hands strategically wrapped around the labels. We were pretending to be older and glamorous like Kathy, and that our cider was actually beer.
During the day that preceded our adolescent pretending, Kari and I giggled like the little girls we still were as we chased the waves. Nearby, a radio (”blasters”, we called them back then), played The Boys of Summer by Don Henley. We were aware that in the black and white Boys of Summer video shown on MTV, a man and woman chased each other in and out of waves on a beach that remarkably resembled the one in front of our hotel. But we had no boys chasing us, we knew we were just kids, and we spent a good portion of that summer day discussing what we thought our future husbands would be like.
Life seems so simple when you are thirteen. At least, it should.
I had not fallen in love yet. I wasn’t thinking about college. My family was intact, and I didn’t have a job yet. No major rite of passage was on the horizon for me, either - but I did find an integral part of my identity on that trip. I discovered twenty-four years ago, in some fine restaurants and rustic beachside snack shacks in Laguna Beach, California, my inherent sense of culinary adventure.
It went something like this at dinner that night…
“What’s that they put on the peeeht-suh? Pyyyne-apple…and hh-what? Bay-cuhn?” Kari’s father, a Texan, said this in his finest drawl. I had never heard her father surprised about anything, it made me giggle. And I don’t know what possessed Kari and me, maybe we wanted to be rebellious, but we ordered a pizza for just the two of us (we were going through a growth spurt, no doubt) with those unheard of toppings. Everyone else stuck to pepperoni and sausage.
In 1984, the Hawaiian pizza, as we know it now, was not mainstream. It was, as I recall, almost sacrilegious. And our exploratory attitude served us well; we succumbed to the pineapple sweetness and Canadian bacon saltiness married atop a blanket of earthy mozzarella.
I have ordered only Hawaiian pizzas since summer, 1984. Every time I order or make a pizza pie, I taste the independence first encountered at that pizza snack shack by the water.
The following evening on our vacation, Kari’s parents took us to a Japanese restaurant next to our hotel. I expected white tablecloths, white napkins, and tea steeping from a ceramic pot brought to us, set in the middle of the rectangular table, with tiny white cups dotting the crisp linen setting. I expected chicken with a dark, tangy soy sauce and sticky white rice, steam rising from the plate. Instead, someone put baby octopus and raw fish in front of me.
So I ate it. I simply could not think of a reason not to try it.
I hadn’t taken the SAT test yet, decided what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I felt strongly I should not turn down a culinary dare. I loved the chewy texture of the octopus, the cold wetness still clinging to it from the sea. I loved the pinkness of the raw fish, the thin blackness of seaweed wrapping around the avocado, crab and rice in the California Roll. I ate a lot of sushi and then I ate some more. I felt brave, proud of myself in a silly way, and I hadn’t broken any rules. A win-win for the foodie to be, me.
I was content with the simple contradiction of daring paired with obedience.
***
The year was 2004. An August morning in Laguna Beach, California, I was experimenting with champagne, mango juice, and star fruit. Cinnamon rolls were baking in the oven, and as I poured heavy cream into whisked eggs, my husband Pete sat on the sofa of our vacation rental with our children, watching a baseball game. Watching, as it were, the boys of summer.
Life felt simple. The imaginary husband that I concocted at the same place twenty years ago waited for his breakfast. He was, and is everything and nothing what I expected him to be. Another contradiction that I couldn’t deny enjoying. Beyond the open windows overlooking the beach, I watched young teenage girls in modest bikinis not straying far from their parents, and laughing, laughing with abandon, whispering in each other’s ears, and drawing hearts and initials in the sand. I smiled and remembered Kari, who slipped away from me years ago, and moved to Texas. I wondered if she still ate Hawaiian pizzas. I made myself a note to e-mail her older sister Kathy, whom I was still in contact with.
Pete and I spent our vacation days in Laguna Beach much like other families do, families who traveled to the beach for recreation and escape. We built sand castles, glided on skim boards, and stopped every four to six hours to reapply sunscreen (I got burned enough as a child). But most importantly, we introduced our children to non-traditional cuisine. It’s our job as parents to instill certain risk-taking behaviors in our children, we agreed.
So we geared up and headed out for fish tacos at a roadside place called Wahoo’s. They specialize in the “surfer’s hamburger”; grilled fish wrapped inside a tortilla, with cabbage, tomato salsa, avocado. Squirts of lime as well as Tabasco - total necessities for a fish taco - ran down the back of our anxious hands cupping the seafood treat. Fish tacos were no different than chicken or beef tacos to our kids, and for that, we reigned happy and indulgent. Cultivating palates that were non-conventional in culinary wisdom would serve them well. Risk-taking that didn’t endanger. A win-win for our little foodies.
My introduction to fish tacos - during a baseball game, the third date my husband took me on - was the only time since 1984 that I had taken a culinary dare. I had eaten sushi, broken tradition with pizza, but hadn’t been challenged by anyone since I was thirteen years old. So I ate the fish taco, married the person who wanted to partner with me in calculated, flavorful, and secure adventure, and have eaten a thousand fish tacos shamelessly ever since.
Because I believe that potential favorites come unexpectedly, and almost any food is worth trying once. It’s sanctioned jeopardy. Breaking culinary boundaries can change the way we eat, the way we look at food, the way we see ourselves, and provide hints of kinship within others.
At the table, I never say never. It’s a simple, reliable recipe.
It’s not so much “you are what you eat” as it is, you are what you feel like eating.
If I feel adventurous now (or if I’ve had too many star fruit Mimosas), I may try Menudo. If I covet the feeling of safety, I’ll fall back to cinnamon rolls. If I feel nostalgic, I’ll go out for California Rolls.
Later today my husband, three children and I are driving to Laguna Beach for the holiday weekend. We’ll do Easter Brunch seaside. I foresee Eggs Benedict in my near future, but I could change my mind - about food - at any time. That is so much fun for me.
It might sound simple, but the culinary choices I am free to indulge in provide the fixes I need, that I can take without consequence - whatever age I happen to be.
3 cucumbers, peeled and sliced1 cup rice wine vinegar1 tsp. sesame oil1 tsp. soy sauce
½ tsp. canola oil
Coarse grain salt and pepper, to taste
Dash of red pepper flakes
Toasted sesame seeds, to taste (but no more than 1 tsp.)
Place sliced cucumbers in bowl.
Add vinegar, oils, soy sauce, and salt and pepper.
Mix well.
Top with red pepper flaked and toasted sesame seeds.
Serve.
PASTA WITH CILANTRO PESTO, PINE NUTS & GOAT CHEESE
I know Zoë and I made basil pesto, but we made cilantro pesto the following night and we like it more! It’s a brighter green than basil pesto.
1 bunch cilantro (leaves only), washed and roughly chopped
¼ cup toasted pine nuts, plus 2 tbsp. toasted pine nuts reserved
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil (an additional 1 tbsp. if you like)
½ cup grated parmesan cheese (it can’t be powdered or powdery, get the real thing)
Dash coarse grain salt to taste
½ package (8 oz.) pasta of your choice (we used cellentani)
½ cup crumbled goat cheese
Get water for pasta on heat to boil.
To blender, add cilantro, pine nuts, cheese and salt.
Puree/blend until mixture is like a paste.
While blender is doing its thing, pour olive oil through the top spout, in a trickle.
If your blender does not have a top spout, stop the blender and add olive oil a little at a time, pulsing only with the top on.
Let pesto rest.
Finish cooking pasta, and when it’s done, drain and pour into serving dish.
Top pasta with pesto.
Mix well, don’t stop until all pasta has greenage!
Top with remaining 2 tbsp. toasted pine nuts and goat cheese.
I can’t keep my six-year-old daughter, Zoë, out of the kitchen when I’m cooking.Stirring mayonnaise into tuna fish, she’s there. Crushing garlic cloves under a heavy knife, she’s there. Salting water for cooking pasta, she’s there. Standing on a chair from the kitchen table, wearing a little girl apron with pastel stripes, there she is. Wanting to do what I do. Wanting to know why I do what I do. Wanting to feel the joy I feel when I’m in the kitchen.
For years, I have chased everyone out of the kitchen when I am in there cooking. It’s my happy place, my escape. Come 5:00 p.m., I pour myself a glass of wine, light some candles and tune out the noise in the rest of the house. I dismissed all of the “Cook with your kids!” literature because I affirmed the kitchen is where I relieve my stress; why would I want to create more stress by letting my kids practically set themselves on fire in front of my gas stove, or cut themselves on one of my paring knives? We had a nasty incident once when Zoë reached across a frying pan and burned herself when we were starting off with the basics - a sunny side up egg - and her forearm did not heal for weeks. That kept her out of the kitchen for about six months. But now, she’s back. Six months has made a tremendous difference. All of a sudden my baby girl is a sous chef, and when I say to her “Thank you for your help, baby,” I really mean it.
Last week as I slid in between the pantry and the fridge for the ingredients needed in my cucumber salad, Zoë hopped off the couch and ran towards me, stopping at my socked feet. She is much smaller than me, it is so clear when she stands facing me, her toes mirroring mine. “I wanna help you, Momma.” I leaned down to kiss her forehead, knowing, I couldn’t deny her. I had no good reason to. It may take me a little longer to get dinner on the table, to explain my methods as I go along, but I had to foster this yearning of hers. Covering all of the lessons she’d learn while in the kitchen, I made notes in my mind…
Self-sufficiency
Creativity
Stress release
Sense of accomplishment
Avoiding take out food
Tradition
Healthy living
Time well spent between us
That last one really got me. Time well spent between us. All too often I get wrapped up in writing, in chauffeuring, in laundry; mundane tasks of everyday life that keep me darting around the house and neighborhood like a matriarchal automaton. There is heart in everything I do for everyone, and I carry on like that is enough, but it’s not. I have to smile once in a while. I have driven Zoë to me; especially on the days where the kitchen is the only place I can be caught smiling.
I do nurture our mother-daughter relationship, of course. Every Mother’s Day, we plant vegetables in our garden. It’s become a tradition. But that is once a year, it comes and it goes. What is there in between? There is a little girl who needs to learn how to take care of herself, how to receive love, how to show love. I braid her hair, I allow her to choose what to buy for dinner when we are at the market, and help her with her homework daily. But are all of these details adding up to a larger emotional impact inside of her beating little heart?
Last night, Zoë’s homework packet required her to “Compare two foods that have been cut, one into equal parts, one into unequal parts. Talk about their differences and draw a color picture of each.”
We can do that. We do it every night, matter of fact.
On our white cutting board, I placed a basil leaf the size of my palm next to a basil leaf the size of a matchbook. “Take a look at this basil leaf, Zo-zo. How does it compare to the other basil leaf?”
“It’s bigger. And also because it has a longer stem right there,” and she pointed to the bottom of the fragrant leaf.
“What about if I cut the bigger leaf? How is it different now?”
“It’s in two pieces now, but the little piece still looks like the big one it came from.”
“Okay, I’ll finish trimming the basil for the pesto, and until it’s ready for the blender, go draw a color picture like your homework says to do, okay?”
Hopping down from her chair, her smallish hand on the back of the chair, she said “Okay, Momma.”
She came back with a picture of her and I. She didn’t draw two basil leaves and use a green crayon, she drew the two of us in the kitchen, using sienna brown, goldenrod, aquamarine.
Evidently, she and I are basil leaves.
Come Mother’s Day, I imagine Zoë and me planting a basil variety in the garden. For the rest of my life, I imagine us cooking together in the kitchen. In between all of the particulars of our busy lives, you know the ones I mean, the kitchen will remain the place that centers me and brings me back to my mental happy place. But from here on out, I’ll have nightly company. I’ve started culinary rituals with my daughter and that is one of the cornerstones of our relationship now; there is no turning back. I always knew she’d catch up to me in the kitchen, get the cooking bug, it just seems like it got here a lot quicker than I expected. She is growing up, but she is my little basil leaf, from a larger plant, and she will never outgrow the need for her colorful surroundings.
That is just fine with me. The possibility that my legacy could be the establishment of a happy place and its eight life lessons takes me to a place where “happy” is merely a simmer. I’m bubbling over being friends with my six-year-old daughter. I can only imagine the impact our time well spent together has on her.
One slice of bread, with a square or round piece cut from the middle of the bread and set aside
1 pat of butter
1 egg
Salt and pepper to taste
Place a frying pan over medium-high heat, add butter.
Over the melting butter, add bread slice to the pan, alongside it, add the piece cut from the middle.
Crack the egg and add it into the hole in the bread.
Sprinkle salt, grind pepper over egg and bread.
After about thirty seconds, turn egg and bread, and separate slice of bread alongside, over with spatula.
When egg is done, slide onto plate, and use the separate slice of cut out bread to dip into the yolk.
RIGHTEOUS CORNBREAD
Goes with everything, especially chili on Super Bowl Sunday.
2 cups buttermilk baking mix
5 tablespoons cornmeal
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
½ cup milk
½ cup sour cream
½ cup melted butter
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
Preheat oven to 350º.
Mix all ingredients in bowl.
Place in a baking pan (such as an 8×8 bake ware dish) and bake for 35-40 minutes, until the edges of the cornbread are browning and the bread pulls away from the sides of the pan.
Menus, like the corners of my mind
Salty, butter-flavored memories
Of the way we ate
Scattered placemats…
…oops, seems I got a bit carried away there.
This happens to me sometimes, I will start to tear over a menu or cookbook.
Tonight at dinner, I really, really missed my stepson, Dillon. He hasn’t lived in the same city as the rest of our family for four years now, but sometimes it hits me - at the dinner table, for instance - he really should be here with us.
This past weekend, my husband and I took our three other children for dinner at a local diner following an afternoon of biking along the water. I was so excited to eat a patty melt and slurp down a chocolate malt within the kitschy, aluminum walls of a classic American diner (this is usually the case, my appetite overshadows my awareness of things) that I wasn’t thinking about being a party of five instead of a party of six. You see, I am accustomed to my husband visiting my stepson in the state where he lives now rather than my stepson making brief, infrequent visits to see the rest of us. Being a married couple with three children instead of four is our accepted state of family affairs. With text messaging, e-mails, speed dial and low internet airfares, it doesn’t seem so lonely or isolated. It needn’t be this way forever.
Only food can illustrate to me how badly I miss him. Like when I look at a menu and see one of his favorites - something obscure or that I used to make for him - and with a paper menu trembling in my hands, it’s all I can do to keep from asking the waitress, “Can we get another chair for someone who will be joining us at a later time?”
We all miss Dillon, for obvious reasons; he’s an absent son and big brother, he’s that fourth person you need for a pick-up game. Because it’s nice to have an older brother to protect you or show you how to spike your hair. I am the only one who sees our life passing us by when I look at a menu, recipe card or empty frying pan.
My husband picked this up right away, my change in verbal demeanor, like I had seen a ghost walk by our table.”What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.”Nothing.” I have never been a good liar.
“No, really. What?” He wouldn’t stop until he cracks me.
“They have Egg in a Hole on the menu,” which is all I needed to say.
He registered my emotions and let me alone. He knew I was taking a second here at the diner to remember when I used to cut holes into slices of bread and slide them into a frying pan with pats of pale butter, cracking brown eggs into the middle of the bread slices…and how the egg, butter and bread together emitted a milky scent and crackling sound before 7:00 a.m. on the weekdays or before ball games on weekends, for a hungry kid waiting for his favorite breakfast. For my stepson, Dillon.
“Oh, gotcha. Want to order it?” Careful consideration.
“No, I’m good. Maybe next time.”
I don’t cry by nature; I eat, act nonsensical, and write. This is why my husband asked me if I wanted to order Egg in a Hole; because I have been known to order something for Dillon, my stepson, and have it packaged to go, or take a few bites and set it aside. Why would I do that? Order food for someone hundreds of miles away?
Simple. I have to see if the chef makes it better than I do. And because that all-of-a-sudden, wish-you-were-here energy derived from food can reach my stepson faster than an egg fries in butter and is more tangible than a formulaic text message.
So I got past that culinary memory, the way people put a scrapbook or photo albums back on a shelf. Then I spotted cornbread on the menu, offered with the chili.
“Think they use sour cream in the cornbread like I do?” I asked my husband. He placed his menu down and looked at me, saying with raised eyebrows, yes, I remember when Dillon specifically requested your cornbread with meatloaf, steak and chicken. Enough already, eat something and you’ll feel better.
Rather, my husband said “You want to call and see if he’s eaten well today?” I shake my head from side to side, silently, like a kid about to cry. But I don’t call, and I don’t cry, because I know Dillon is probably working the second shift at the restaurant where he is employed, where his lunch is comped. “Just order the chili and cornbread. Okay?”
I visit this place through menus and cookbooks. For me, the food tells the story. The familiar scent, the coveted flavors, the setting full of colors, and the coincidence that really isn’t (how many places serve Egg in a Hole anymore, anyway?).
Sometimes when I think Dillon is slipping away to his teenage commitment to be as cool as possible, that he’s forgotten just how much he’s loved from a different geographical location, he’ll call our home and ask how I used to cook something. He’ll request “that thing you made us all the time,” or “the side dish I used to scarf down.”
I pull out the sixth chair from our kitchen table with the phone in my hand, sit down, and say, coolly, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I’ve got to make sure he still comes back to have it the way I made it.
“Come on. Tell me how to make the cucumber salad. Please?”
“Alright, get a pen.” I say to Dillon as I look at my husband, who registers this, and listens as I dictate the list of ingredients and share instructions, with that wishful energy traveling great distances, rooted in hunger and in memory.
For me, the food tells the story, and the menus, all of the menus I am lucky to have, could fill a book.
This recipe for spaghetti with meat sauce is prepared Greek style, my mother-in-law’s way. My Sicilian girlfriends, their mothers and grandmothers also use cloves and cinnamon.
Ingredients:
1 lb. or 16 oz. package spaghetti
1 lb. lean ground meat (such as sirloin)
4 oz. canned tomato sauce
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. ground cloves
Dash cinnamon
Coarse grain salt and pepper to taste
Grated mizithra or parmesan cheese
Mix beef with sauce, then add ground cloves and cinnamon, salt and pepper, stir.
Cook over medium heat until beef is done, stirring occasionally.
The meat sauce, when done, should be somewhat thick - add some pasta water if you like the sauce loose.
Drain cooked pasta and add to the pan with the meat sauce, or plate the pasta and add spoonfuls of meat sauce over the plated pasta (my mother-in-law serves it the latter way).
Top with the grated cheese.
Recipe Courtesy of Harriet Gianulis
After a long day skating on ice, one needs marinara to replenish the soul.
“Meet us at 5:30, it’s the Italian restaurant in the strip mall by your house,” said my Mom. Mom and Dad occasionally (well, often times) treat my husband, kids and I to dinner on the weekends. Sometimes you just want someone else to cook Sunday dinner for you.
Aside from my craving for Marinara, the restaurant choice seemed meant to be - the name of the place is Pietro’s, what our many Italian friends call my husband, Pete.
When we got to the restaurant where my parents waited, I saw seats filled, smelled garlic immediately, and was tempted to swipe a few ornamental jars of bucatini, which sat next to the pictures of the 2006 Italian soccer team (the team that won the World Cup). Chianti bottles waited in wine racks and posted Italian proverbs had me trying to remember the romance languages I knew. But sometimes you have to hear a proverb to get its full effect, like this one…
Unna fazza, una razza. One face, one race. Greeks and Italians - who share culinary traditions, history, architecture, political models and a love for soccer say this catchy phrase to each other, as I learned at dinner that evening, to establish a short cut to brotherhood based on said similarities.
Dinner started with bruschetta - fresh torn basil, mozzarella, tomato and bread over garlic and olive oil. We were happily devouring these antipasti when a man approached our table, pointed to my husband and said, “I think I know this guy.” It was Pietro, the chef. The owner of the neighborhood restaurant that has been serving authentic Italian cuisine for thirty-one years. That’s a long time to be competing with corporate restaurant chains. How does he do it? Well, with an Old World charm, congenial nature and heavy-on-the-last-syllable accent, he walks the house and says to his new customers as well as his regulars, “I know you, don’t I?”
I know you, you want your kids to have fresh food and scratch sauces. I know you; your Mama probably uses cinnamon or cloves in her tomato sauce, too. I know you; I overheard your son talking about soccer. I know you, you like extra red pepper flakes and I make sure you get them.
“He’s Greek, not Italian,” I said, I don’t know why. I love my husband’s Greek-ness, and think I was Italian in many former lives. “Ah, una fazza, una razza!” said Pietro. That didn’t take long to decipher. Even without any linguistic reference, it was clear they just established unity over culture, a culture I could never get enough of.
All of a sudden, I loved this guy, Pietro. He talked about a Greek Opera singer he loves, he asked if we like our food, but was careful not to disrupt our family meal which was silly. I wanted to ask him to pull up a chair and tell me about the little boy in the pictures on the wall making pizza dough with him. I wanted to hear him go on and on about his family and secret ingredients. Pietro is the type of guy one can learn from.
He represents everything I love about Europeans (I have never traveled to Europe, but I know many Europeans; it’s the next best thing). Passionate for cooking food, for pleasing people with food, for communicating with food - and Pietro radiated warmth that comes only from people with good will and no pretensions. It was in his smile and the marinara stains on his chef’s coat.
I imagine that he could chat about the history of his country as he made that marinara, both being second nature. Because with that fazza exclamation, it’s clear he knows the history of his country. He knows how the Greeks colonized much of Italy, and left culinary traces that bring them all together. Not just culinary, either, as Pietro is quick to point out. “The Greeks and Italians, we both like soccer, and we both like the girls.” My Welsh-English father pats my son on the back as only guys do with each other. My husband smirks as he finishes cleaning the olive oil, minced garlic and oregano off his salad plate with a piece of bread from the large basket brought to us. My youngest daughter eats the pitted Kalamata olives plucked onto her fingertips without a clue as to the language they are speaking, thankfully.
So the una razza at the table began their dialogue when our Chicken Marsala, cheese ravioli, eggplant parmesan, pepperoni pizza, spaghetti with sausage and lasagna arrived. I have seen how these expressive Europeans get started with a little bit of wine and a lot of food, then a lot of wine and talk of Mussolini and democracy, then on to women and soccer. It’s very entertaining and I actually sit and listen every time. But that night, I was hungry and chilly and I just wanted my marinara.
When we left, Pietro stood by the door to wish us buona notte, and my son told him “The Marsala was my favorite, I am going to order that next time I come here to eat.” Pietro seemed pleased with this. Pietro then said to my husband, Pete, “Next time you come in to eat, we’ll talk about soccer and food and other things we know.” Because they already know each other, the una razza. And what do I know? I know, because of my acquaintance with the una razza (as well as the human razza) that it will start with a food and end with a bottle, or the other way around depending on the day, and continue at a later time with a [soccer] ball.
This could go on for centuries. I certainly hope it does.
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons peanut butter (I prefer smooth!)
½ cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt (I prefer iodized sea salt)
3 cups oatmeal
1 cup raisins (dried cranberries or chocolate chips if you like)
Preheat oven to 350º.
Melt butter and peanut butter together in microwave. Stir in sugars (white and brown), eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, salt and baking soda. Add flour and mix well - then stir in oatmeal and raisins.
Scoop cookies onto lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake approximately 9 minutes at 350º. All ovens are different, so they may take a little longer than 9 minutes.
Have you ever smelled baby’s breath? It smells like cookies made with heavy amounts of butter and sugar.I have three birth children - Alexander, seven years old, Zoë, four years old, and Melia, one year old. I have nursed all of them. Before my first was born, as I sat in the expecting parents classes, I believed nursing would be the easiest, most natural thing in the world. You pop them on, they attach. Alexander took to it with no problem. My second child Zoë was a different story.
When Zoë came home from the hospital, she had a hard time latching. It took eight weeks to get the whole breastfeeding thing down right with her. In the middle of the night, when I had to take her out of the comfortable bedroom to the kitchen to supplement with a bottle or try to endure the screaming with attempts at nursing, I turned to food to be my motivation.Zoë was born right before Christmas. As a gift from someone at work, my mother received a mason jar filled with dry ingredients and a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies: first a layer of oats, then a layer of flour, then a layer of sugar, you get the idea. Our first venture out of the house with our second baby, we went to dinner at my parents’ house.
My mom had made the oatmeal raisin cookies, they sat on the countertop in a little wicker basket inside a holiday patterned tea towel. They cookies just spoke to me, the scent of cinnamon, the heathery color, the soft texture. They almost broke apart when you looked at them, and they were fresh from the oven. You know how you can tell a soft cookie from a hard one? Look at the edges, and underneath the cookie. There should not be too much browning on either area of the cookie.
That evening at my parents, I skipped dinner and just ate cookies with milk. I found it very nutritious, the cookies have peanut butter, so I had protein, oatmeal is just fabulous for you, raisins have iron which unfortunately, I lack. And I drank soy milk so as not to make Zoë gassy (that was all I needed - a gassy baby who couldn’t latch).
I took home all of the remaining cookies and ate them when I woke up with Zoë that night. It made it so much nicer to feed her, lie on the couch snuggled in a blanket with her, eating cookies, listening to CNN and watching the blinking Christmas lights on the tree. Zoë and I had our first niche. We were both happy.Oatmeal raisin cookies also happen to be my husband’s favorite cookie. Opting for oatmeal raisin over chocolate chip, growing up on olive oil instead of butter is probably why my husband still has only nine percent body fat. It’s just not fair.I made these cookies about twice a week while Zoë was a newborn. When I knew these cookies were waiting for me, it was easier to get out of bed at 2 a.m., 4 a.m., and 6 a.m. However, my weight started going in the other direction - up, that is, and I desperately wanted that baby weight off so I could get into my jeans I hadn’t worn in months.
About the time I cut down my oatmeal raisin cookie habit, Zoë got the hang of nursing quite well which meant I could just pick her up and nurse her in my room where she slept. No more trips out to the living room, no need to make bottles three times a night, and my waistline went down.
And one year later, it came time to wean her. At eight months old she started reaching for her big brother’s sippy cup, and she could handle one pretty well, so I gave her one of her own, filled with either soy milk or regular milk. She didn’t want it, she wanted the comfort of nursing, not a cold, hard plastic cup. She screamed so loud when I denied her nursing that in the middle of the night, to keep everyone from waking up, I walked paces across the living room floor until she stopped, once again looking at the twinkling lights on the tree. To calm her down, I wound up the Snow White snow globe on the mantel which played “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, and sang it over and over.
Weaning didn’t just take two or three nights. Like learning to latch, Zoë did it on her own good time, and I missed the deep, uninterrupted sleep I got for a few hours at a time. I was losing my resolve to wean her, more than once in the middle of the night I considered putting off weaning another month or so just so I could continue getting sleep to restore my energy. “I’ll wean her after the holidays are over”, “I’ll wean her when Alex starts pre-school”, “I’ll let her wean herself”. Excuses, excuses, and withering motivation. What to do?
Make oatmeal raisin cookies, said the voice inside my sleep-deprived conscience. The next day, or shall I say, when the sun came up, I reached into my memory and the pantry to make the coveted oatmeal raisin cookies. But this time, there was another hungry little mouth to feed. Another little hand reaching into the cookie jar. Yes, as soon as my little girl was old enough, I packed her screaming, eight-toothed mouth with a cookie and followed it up with milk, and just like her mother, she would calm down almost immediately. The scent of cinnamon lingered in her mouth when she said “Momma”. The cookies actually made Zoë’s breath sweeter than it was before. It certainly made her midnight disposition more pleasant when we snacked in the wee hours.
I dreaded those nights of lost sleep, of listening to screaming, of praying my son would not wake up and hoping my husband would not fall asleep in the car on his way to work after listening to snow globe music all night. But I looked forward to the cookies, and to a time when my daughter would just sleep through the night, which I now believe is something neither they nor I will ever do. Maybe not for thirty years or so. Life just has a way of carrying on into the late night hours, no matter what kind of day we have had…very soon I will be weaning my third child, the older kids inevitably wake and wander into our room in the middle of the night, and one day they will become teenagers who come home late and we, as parents, won’t sleep until they return. Sleep is somewhere in the distance, waiting for me until I get there.
But those nights singing to Zoë, swaying to fairy tale songs on piano keys resonating from the snow globe, under the moonlight that came through the windows - those are gone forever. If only I had not been in such a rush.
When I am feeling particularly sentimental and sense that this is happening way too fast, I find myself dragging the oats, raisins, peanut butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, butter and cinnamon out from the pantry. I am honestly being moved by some force of nature that longs for pudgy cheeks, curly soft baby hair, sprouting teeth under gums but most of all…cookie breath. Cinnamony, sweet cookie breath.
“Feed me!” “I’m hungry, Mom!” “What’s for dinner, honey?”
The year was 1984, I was thirteen years old. My best friend Kari and had traveled up Interstate 5 North from San Diego to Laguna Beach, California for a week-long vacation with her family. A thick marine layer had moved in on the coastal city, it was June, and we walked towards the beachfront hotel with alongside Kari’s older sister, Kathy whom I worshipped. Kari were sipping sparkling cider out of glass bottles, our hands strategically wrapped around the labels. We were pretending to be older and glamorous like Kathy, and that our cider was actually beer.
Stirring mayonnaise into tuna fish, she’s there. Crushing garlic cloves under a heavy knife, she’s there. Salting water for cooking pasta, she’s there. Standing on a chair from the kitchen table, wearing a little girl apron with pastel stripes, there she is. Wanting to do what I do. Wanting to know why I do what I do. Wanting to feel the joy I feel when I’m in the kitchen.
