(I haven’t had any Internet connection for the past few
days, so I’m filing F, G, H, I, J, and whatever we’re up to, as fast as I can.
Gotta keep up.)
I love
food. Jack, my late husband, loved food. I love to eat. Jack loved to eat. I
love to cook. Jack liked to cook—I don’t know if he loved to cook. I love to
try new dishes; last week I made a vegetarian chili verde for my writers’ group
and had no idea how it would turn out until it was almost done and I tasted it.
Jack had his specialties—broiled chicken, black bean soup, tuna casserole,
spaghetti sauce, brownies—which were always very good. I often thought of
writing down his marinade for the broiled chicken, but never did—and now it’s
too late. But it wasn’t really a recipe anyway: juice, olive oil, wine, dried
herbs or spices, whatever was handy or he felt like.
I’m a
recipe person myself, wrote about this years ago for a tiny magazine, And/Then. Called “Recipes for Life,” it
contrasted two ways of approaching cooking: following a recipe, or sensing what
went well together and winging it. At that time in my life I followed recipes.
I needed to know quantities: how much juice, how much wine, how much oregano
and what if I’d run out of oregano? Then, I was hoping to be more adventurous
in cooking, and in life as well. Now I use recipes as guidelines, looking at 1,
2, 3, what ingredients do I know I like, what combos taste interesting in my
mind.
That
vegetarian chili verde? I had a chili verde a friend had made, but it was full
of pork. One of the writers in my group is vegetarian, so I had to improvise.
(I used the basic pork version but substituted beans for meat and added bell
peppers and about half as much green chilis.)
I love to
cook, but not every day. Even the few years I was a full-time parent, I didn’t
cook every day. We ate out a fair amount, and our school-age daughter had her
favorite restaurants: Symposium (Greek), 107 West (new American), Japonica (she
liked sushi at age 8). When Jack was the full-time parent, he’d go to the
farmers market late in the day and buy a quantity of tomatoes and sale price.
Then he’d make a quantity of tomato sauce and freeze most of it. We even had a
free-standing freezer, which felt very suburban in our New York apartment.
My mother
didn’t teach me to cook, though she was a pretty good cook. She didn’t have
enough patience, she said. She’d been a home-ec major in college (a compromise
with her immigrant parents; she wanted to major in biology) and relished modern
technology: frozen vegetables, TV dinners. We did have a garden for a few years
when I was a child, and I learned the luscious taste of sun-warmed tomatoes and
crisp peas right out of the pod. I also read my mother’s cookbooks from college
and started clipping my own recipes as a teenager. Perhaps the first one was a
tuna melt from Seventeen.
And I
wanted my daughter to learn the fun of mixing ingredients into some new
concoction that tasted good. So when she was 4, 5, 6 and had to stand on a
stool to reach the counter, I’d have her take a turn mixing the cake batter and
frosting, rolling out the pizza dough, filling the dumplings. When she was a teenager,
she wanted to make her own meals and start experimenting. I suggested she
master some recipes first and improvise once she’d learned the basics. Now in
her 40s, she still cooks, makes leftovers to take for lunch, and has found a
partner who likes to cook as much as she does.
Third,
spending an hour helping one of the editors on this project get up to speed on
the technology we will be using. But there’s a hitch, and I had to e-mail
people at the magazine for help.
