pamjsa

What a great thread! What was your family food culture when you were growing up? Both of my parents are/were working class Midwesterners. Lots of meat and potatoes, peas, corn--the basics. (The first time I tried an artichoke was in college--I remember thinking of this as a momentous event.) My father kept a huge garden and my mother froze or canned most of our produce. She also made jam in huge batches--we often hadn't finished off the previous year's freezer jam when she started making the next batch. I gagged the first time I tried store-bought jam. Was meal time important? Dinner was, in that we were all expected to be home and at the table at 6:00. But the dinner table conversation typically consisted of "Hurry up and eat," and we kept the TV on so my dad could watch the news. Was cooking important? My mother has always liked trying new dessert recipes, but she sticks with her standards for entrees. She's an excellent cook, in that bland Midwestern comfort food way, and she takes great pride in being known for her cooking. I was seldom allowed in the kitchen--my mother's domain. I suppose she thought I'd be more work than help (and she might have been right.) What were the penalties for putting elbows on the table? None. As long as you didn't knock anything over, you were fine. But woe be to she (me) who spilled her grape juice. Who cooked in the family? Only my mother. When she was occasionally away from home, my father opened a mean can of soup. (He is quite adept at the barbecue, but I grew up in Idaho, where barbecue season is short.) Were restaurant meals common, or for special occassions? We went out for pizza every two weeks, when my father got paid. Always to Shakey's. Always salami pizza. (I know. Ugh.) Did children have a "kiddy table" when guests were over? Depended on the size of the crowd. If we could all wedge in around the dining room table, we did. I think it made my mother nervous to have all those wild unattended children in another location. When did you get that first sip of wine? Honestly, I can't remember. My parents were beer and cocktail drinkers--it's possible, as I think about this, that a college boyfriend gave me my first bottle of wine, from which I had my first sip. Was there a pre-meal prayer? Usually. "God is great, God is good, and we thank we thank Him for our food." Short and sweet. Was there a rotating menu (e.g., meatloaf every Thursday)? Not formally, but my mom had a pretty standard repertoire: tuna casserole, cube steak, salmon cakes, chicken and biscuits, creamed hamburger on toast, spaghetti (the sauce for which was made with Campbell's tomato soup mixed with a can of tomato paste--to which my father added Tabasco. I didn't know what spaghetti was supposed to taste until I ordered it at a restaurant in high school). How much of your family culture is being replicated in your present-day family life? I try to make mealtimes a family affair. My son always reminds us to say grace. It's easy to get everyone together, for now, because my kids are small and don't know anything different. We all eat together, even if we're just eating pizza. No TV, of course; I use mealtimes to help my kids learn how to make engaging conversation, and to catch up with them at the end of the day. This is very different from my family. I also try to bring something new to the table at least once a week--a fruit or vegetable, usually. The rule in our house is "You have to try it; you can spit it out if you don't like it, but you have to try it." That way, my kids know there's no risk in taking chances with new foods. And they can't use the excuse that they've tried it before, since tastes change (I remind them of the fact that they both *loved* sweet potatoes when they were babies, though neither one will eat them now.) My husband grew up in a family where very little cooking of any kind was done, so he's always grateful to have a meal on the table--whatever it is!

For me, it's Tortilla Soup. I'm not a native Texan, but I've come to appreciate the curative powers of the serrano pepper since moving here. My husband swears by egg drop soup, though hot and sour soup will do in a pinch.

Cold, with dried apricots (chopped into smaller pieces) in place of raisins. Out of this world!

Quiche is one of the few things my whole family will eat. My favorite is spinach and caramelized onions with a bit of baby swiss, but my son isn't a fan of "that green stuff," so I make a salmon version for family meals. Truth be told, quiche is a good cover for many vegetables my kids wouldn't otherwise eat. (So are pancakes . . . but that's another post.)

Before and After This was before I met my husband. I fell in love with a man who was five feet, four inches tall—just an inch or so shorter than me, not a difference you'd have noticed, necessarily, if you'd seen us standing beside one another. Some years before I met him, this man told me, he'd spent all his free afternoons at a gym downtown and worked as a bouncer in various bars. In the photographs he showed me, the muscles of his shoulders bloomed beneath the fabric of his shirts like bread dough rising under a kitchen towel. "I like you this way," I said, touching his now slender arm, meaning his arms and other things. Those muscles had required a certain quality of attention he now gave to other endeavors. Sometimes I stopped by his house in the late afternoons and he made me dinner—Rock Cornish game hens rubbed with lemon and flecked with rosemary, spinach salad, chocolate mousse in a rosy puddle of raspberry sauce. I sat in a chair at his kitchen table, drinking tea from a china cup that had once belonged to his grandmother; I watched his fingers slip a clove of garlic under the skin of a bird no larger than my clasped hands, or pry apart the two halves of a blood orange. A fine, sour mist settled over the backs of his hands, sparkled briefly in the dim kitchen light and evaporated on his skin. It was our habit to sit on the living room floor after these dinners and read aloud to each other, but one night he proposed that we go for a drive instead. We drove with the windows down, and we followed the highway for some distance before he turned off on a gravel road. We stopped when we came to a chain stretched across it, anchored to poles on either side. He got out of the truck, and I followed him. "This is my favorite place," he said, stepping over the chain before he offered his hand to help me across, though of course that chain posed no greater problem for either of us. He didn't let go of my hand as we walked to where the road finally ended, near the west shore of a lake outside of town. We picked our way through long grass and marshy land until we had come to the water's edge. "I come here whenever I need to think," he said. "What do you think about?" I asked, knowing he wouldn't say what I hoped. He shrugged. "I think about all the people I used to know, where they are, what they're doing. I think about all the people I know right now, and I think about how I'm going to wind up losing touch with all of them, too." We sat near the water until the falling darkness made it impossible to distinguish the lake from its opposite bank. We made a careful trip back to the gravel road and his truck. Closer to town, cresting the final rise that would drop us back into the valley where we lived, the full moon appeared directly in front of us: if the road had continued its upward climb, we would have had to wait until it rose higher and left a space for our safe passage underneath. Or so it seemed. “There should be a word for this,” he said, taking his foot off the gas, slowing down. “A French word, I think.” In French, the word for love can be used to signify passion as well as affection. One word embodies the uncertainty that is, I understand now, unavoidable in even the most sincere of human interactions. One week later I went to visit friends in a nearby city. When I got home Sunday night, the man I loved baked a bread pudding in a blue bowl he meant for me to keep. He brought it to my house, still warm, along with a small jar of whiskey sauce. This was, at the time, my favorite dessert. We sat at my dining room table, and he told me about a woman he’d met at a party the night before. What he said was this: "She's very pretty. And incredibly smart. And really funny. She reminds me a lot of you, actually." When I saw them on the street together, some months after this, I noticed the top of her head at a level with his chin. I ducked into a store and watched from behind a sale rack of winter coats as he helped her climb into his truck. Both hands around her waist, even his slender arms were enough to keep her from falling. I don't think of him often now, but recently it happened that my husband and I were driving together at night and I noticed the moon, rising just at the end of the road we were traveling. Our daughter is four years old; that night, she'd fallen asleep in the back seat and the moon looked like nothing more than a circle of yellow construction paper she would have cut out and pasted against an expanse of dark paper meant to represent the sky. It seemed entirely possible that I could just roll down my window and, with one finger, nudge the moon before the glue behind it dried—position it somewhere other than where it was now, precisely in our way. But of course, that wasn't necessary. In the morning, the three of us stopped at a diner and ate a ridiculous breakfast. The waitress filled our thermos with fresh coffee. Before noon, we were home.

My favorite restaurant downtown, on the Riverwalk (and within walking distance of the convention center), is the Zuni Grill--moderately priced, and a very inventive menu. Be aware that if you order the veggie burger, what you'll get is an assortment of grilled veggies on a bun. It's quite tasty, but not what most people are expecting.