Life in Chicago

Speaking of Food

Welcome to My Kitchen

My relationship with food is inextricably linked to my mother. She's the one who taught me to cook and she's the one who taught me to love food. Pretty much every fond memory I have of her takes place in the kitchen. I don't really know who taught her to cook, her mother I guess, but I know that my mother's culinary skills were so far elevated from those of her mother and sisters that I can't help but surmise that she must have done a little self-teaching.

My mother was an artist. She was out-spoken and loud and messy. And she was passionate about food. She came of her cooking age in the wonderful Julia Child era of food. My mother moved to Manhattan after graduating from art school and, as most NY artists did, she worked as a waitress. Eventually, she forayed into a career as a food stylist calling her little freelance business Sal's Eats and using her culinary talents to create appetizing-looking food for commercials and advertisements. I wish I could ask her now how this happened, but I can't. I can only picture my mother, bending over a jello-mold on a commercial set in a Mad Men-ish type setting, tucking a strand of long blond hair behind her ear as she adjusts some parsley.

After she died, cooking became a way for me to connect to her, to keep her in my life. And just as I could never have imagined my life without a mother, I can no longer imagine my life without a kitchen.

So, I'm going to start a new feature here on Life in Chicago, one that I hope you'll like. It involves food, and recipes, and my kitchen, and all the things I think and feel about food. It won't be all the time. At the most, I'll post a recipe or cooking story once a week, but I'm pretty excited about it and hopefully you will be too. At the very least, it will be a break from all things BABY.

Before I start with the recipes and whatnot, I want to tell you a bit more about my relationship with food and I want to introduce you to my kitchen.

I grew up hanging around in my mother's kitchen with her while she worked. When she and my father got married he allowed her to design her dream kitchen. In 1981 it was featured in Better Homes and Gardens. When they met in 1975, my mother was still living paycheck to paycheck in an old walk-up near Murray Hill in Manhattan. He courted her, proposed to her and whisked her away to Atlanta with him. My father was quite wealthy at the time and he lavished gifts upon my mother. He bought her a little cream-colored Alfa Romeo, opened credit cards for her at Saks and Macy's, and he took her to Europe and the Caribbean. But I think that, aside from me, my mother's favorite thing was easily this kitchen. As a surprise my father had the pictured neon sign made up as a last touch.

 

(If you look closely you can see the same pepper mill in both kitchen photos.)

When I was 12 my mother opened a restaurant. Naturally, she named it Sal's Eats, the name becoming a funny throwback to all those old NY delis named after some Sal or another. We were living in Florida at the time, and every day after school I would get off the bus at a stop near the restaurant and spend my afternoons in my father's office that was off the kitchen, working on math problems and slambooks.

At first the restaurant was just a gourmet take-out shop out of which my mother ran a catering business. She made her own pates, flew to New York with my father to buy wines and specialty items like little imported pots of pesto and tubes of garlic paste, and she tried her hardest to make foodies out of the hesitant locals. This was 1990, so you can only imagine what a novelty something like foie gras seemed to the residents of this small Florida town.

Probably because of that, the restaurant only lasted for about 5 years. My parents decided to close up shop, not when they began losing money, but whey they found out they both had cancer, the literal nail in the coffin. We moved back to Atlanta shortly after that and I started high school.

Even though I never really cooked much myself, I spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around in the kitchen with my mother while she did. I was her sous chef, chopping onions, stirring sauces and adjusting oven settings. My mother came alive when she was cooking. I have such vivid memories of her swirling about the kitchen, her hands fluttering over a pot as she scattered pinches of herbs into the bubbling goodness below.

To say that my mother was obsessed with food is putting it mildly. She had every copy, like ever, of Gourmet magazine, archived into hardbound binders in her office off the kitchen. She kept a diary while on the three-week honeymoon she and my father took through Europe, but the only entries she recorded on its pages were descriptions of the meals they ate. She was fearless when it came to food. Not only would she attempt even the most complicated recipe, but she would eat anything. I remember once daring her to eat the eyeball from a whole fish she'd been served at a restaurant in Nice, France. She did so without hesitation, declaring it delightful, and slightly crunchy.

Although my mother had some of the most refined food tastes of anyone I've ever met, her favorite foods were liverwurst, bloody-rare steaks, and salty potato chips. The image of my mother tipping a carving board to her lips so that she could drink the blood from a just-carved roast, is one I'll never forget, and one I saw often. Or the sight of her idly snacking on a bag of potato chips after returning home from a 4 star restaurant was not uncommon.

When she died, when I was eighteen, food was the most obvious thing suddenly missing in my life. My father and I were completely remiss as to what to eat for dinner.

And so began my own culinary journey.

In the beginning, I was a terrible cook, but I was determined. After the second week in a row of ordering Chinese food, I decided to take over the duty of providing dinner for myself and my father. I was ambitious in my attempts, but I suppose the complicated recipes I was tackling (think homemade pestos, pommes anna, and carbonara sauces) were just dishes I was familiar with, and meals that I missed. Throughout much of the first year I overcooked, undercooked, over-salted, under-seasoned and generally failed to hit the mark with pretty much everything I attempted.

After the first year following my mother's death, my father and I went our separate ways. He went to California and I went back to Vermont, where I had been attending college. I lived with my roommate Tricia, in a weird townhome a few miles from school. Tricia and I were both depressed and I rarely saw her. I stayed up until 3, 4, sometimes 5am most nights, unable to sleep, unable to figure out how to move forward in the world without my mother.

Finally, I sought refuge in cooking. I had kept only one of my mother's books out of the pile that went into boxes for the storage unit, and it was The Joy of Cooking. Maybe not the most amazing cookbook, but one that was certainly accessible to a novice like myself. After my disastrous first year of cooking, during which I hadn't made a very concerted effort to actually follow recipes, I finally vowed to pay attention to the details.

So, a couple of times a week, on days when I didn't have too much homework, I'd head to the local Price Chopper, armed with a carefully written out list of ingredients, and I would fill my cart, wandering the aisles slowly, savoring the anticipation of the meal I was about to prepare. Because I was determined to follow each recipe verbatim, I bought and cooked meals that served 4-6 on a regular basis. I made bolognese sauces, souffles, breads, quiches, and cakes.

I would destroy the kitchen in each attempt, learning the hard way, as I struggled to quickly stir a scalding sauce while simultaneously attempting to remove something from the oven, that the most challenging part of cooking is getting the timing right. Finally, I would sit down to a meal for six, all by self, the cast of Dawson's Creek on a grainy television set, my only dinner company.

It's funny, those evenings were often such lonely and sad ones for me, but I look back on them and the girl I was then so fondly, that it breaks my heart just a little.

By the end of the six months I spent in Vermont, I had given myself a solid cooking foundation on which to move forward. Moving forward meant New York City and a tiny 5 floor walk-up in the East Village where I truly honed my culinary skills as I learned to maneuver around a kitchen the size of a coat closet.

The four years I spent in New York made up the era in which I learned to cook for two. And the six years I 
spent in Los Angeles, became the era of parties as I tried (and dare I say mastered) my hand at cooking for a crowd. Now, here in Chicago, I focus on small dinner parties, and on cooking for my little family (baby food is next!).

I've now been cooking for 12 years, and I get better all the time. I no longer follow recipes verbatim. I haven't for a long time. I can usually recreate something I ate in a restaurant or at someone else's home with little or no difficulty, and I have a rebellious tendency to tweak every recipe I ever do attempt.

Since I've become a mother a lot of my friends have questioned my ability to continue to put home-cooked meals on the table. I have to explain to them that cooking is a religion for me. It's a way of soothing and calming myself, a way of reconnecting with my absent family, and a way of nurturing my existing family.

I'm excited to share this love of mine with all of you.

Look for my first recipe on Friday: Curried Butternut Squash Soup

What Are You Waiting For?

Veronica is going to be six months old next week and lately I've been thinking a lot about her arrival, and the weeks surrounding it.

Now that I know her, now that she's really here and her little personality is emerging, and now that she has completely and irrevocably taken over my life, I can't help feeling amazed that Greg and I created her in the first place. It's caused me to reminisce a lot about those last weeks, just before she arrived.

 I was so full of anticipation and impatience. I had been so sure that she would arrive early, but as the weeks and days dwindled and her due date grew closer, I finally resigned myself to the idea that she would be on time, if not late.

(OMG, I was HUGE.)

I had spent weeks getting things ready. I didn't really feel like the typical mom, the one who stands in the nursery, blissfully awaiting her baby. Instead I was nervous and filled with doubt. I was afraid that I wouldn't love her right away. I was afraid that she would be a boy and that I wouldn't know how to be the mother of a boy. I was afraid that I wouldn't know how to be a good mother to a girl OR a boy.

Day after day I dutifully readied the nursery. I washed and folded dozens of tiny onesies, I mulled over the perfect crib bedding, and I stacked diapers in the caddy. I packed the diaper bag, an orange one that my friend Abby got me, carefully tucking diapers and wipes into its pockets and then I set it down, scanning the nursery, trying to figure out what else to add. It's funny to think that there was a day when I didn't know what to put in a diaper bag. Now that the same bag hangs on a rack in the kitchen by the door, its contents spilling out from every pocket. 

Those weeks leading up to Veronica's arrival were like being in a little boat, heading for a waterfall (look Greg, I used a metaphor!). I knew the drop was coming but I just couldn't anticipate how far it would be or where I would end up once I went over.

It's hard to even think about those last days, listing about the house with my huge swelling belly. It was early summer and the world had finally burst forth into green after a long winter. At night the baby kicked and rocked around inside me and together, Greg and I waited and waited.

And now she's here. And she's my daughter, our daughter. And I just can't imagine it any other way. I think about the moments in which her warm, slick body emerged from mine, the very instant in which Greg and I went over that waterfall together, into our lives as parents. Even now, as I type this, I look across the room to where she lays sprawled across Greg's lap, reaching for his magazine, kicking and churning her limbs in happy anticipation of it, and I just feel dumb with love for it all.

Read the rest of this entry and enter the diaper bag give-away here.

Weekly Wednesday Photo

Veronica, 25 weeks

A tiny, teething monster has replaced my sweet baby. NOT evidenced by these photos, in which she was happy to smile for Greg, who was standing behind me. 

To view all the weekly photos, click here.

It's All Happening at Once

Three new developments occurred while we were in Ohio.

For those of you who don't have kids, these might seem impossibly boring, but to me (and Greg) , they're just unbelievable. I can't even tell you how wild it is to watch this little creature go from being an unresponsive, little bug to moving around on her own and expressing her innate personality. I'm so proud of her.

Here's the first development:

The second development happened on one of our last days there.

Veronica ate her first real food, a banana.

I'd been dreading this moment for months now. I was even going to post about my feeding anxiety, in the hopes of working through it before I actually had to deal with it. I just couldn't help feeling as though it would just truly be the end of an era, the end of Veronica's babyhood. Not to mention that it's going to be the beginning of an incredibly messy-Cheerios-ALL-over-the-house-carrying-around-annoying-little-tupperware-containers of cheese-and-apple-bits-era. Ugh, shoot me now.

But there I was on Friday morning, eating a banana for breakfast, while V looked hungrily on. Finally I held it out to her and she went to town, mawing on it. I sighed, resigned myself to going over the edge into a new period of babydom, and I got up and got a bowl and a spoon. The result? I think we all kind of enjoyed it.

Finally, on the 5-hour drive home to Chicago, I was sitting in the backseat with V, trying desperately to distract her from the fact that we still had 2 hours to go, when I noticed that her first tooth is coming in! Greg was convinced of this days ago, but it took some seeing-to-believing for me. Look closely (click to enlarge).

I just can't believe how fast this is all going. Those early days, when it felt like my life was resolutely over because I had this crying, fussy, little bundle that I just didn't know what to do with, seemed like they were going to stretch on forever. But those days already feel like a hundred years ago and her sweet sixteen seems like it's tomorrow.

Oh, and that tooth, by the way, that one little tooth, has been causing HOURS of angst and drool and snot and crying and eye-watering and, on my part, a litlle of the same. One little tooth? And there's how many more to go??

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Check back later in the week for a fun diaper bag give-away!