Boil this up...

I used to cook for this one friend of mine named Eric. I was never a very good cook, and I am sure he clued in to that. But the point was that I would fry for him potatoes, and they were food. And we would eat the potatoes with my special ingredient, turmeric, and share catching up stories. Actually I used to cook for another friend of mine named Joy Anna. She went through a long gluten free phase, and though I loved wheat, I would make her rice flour waffles in the mornings she stayed over. Rice is stickier than other flours and when I made that, it always seemed to stick to the waffle iron, and I would dig it off with a knife or a fork. I am a pretty unsanitary cook, and Joy Anna pays attention to things like that. But she always was grateful because I'd cook it with love.

Crack these eggs for me...

Now my mind opens up to cooking with friends and loved ones, eating at the Trivet Marion house in an unstable time for me emotionally. My digestive juices gnawing on the inside of my stomach while I waited for their fish which they whipped out of the oven at nine or ten PM. What about eating regularly at 5PM? And Janese carrying on about Turkey, and in Turkey how she and Ken would eat long meals that lasted three or four hours. And the foods were light, but just what they needed. And me sitting there peeved or faint. "Crack these eggs for me." Janese always cooked like a choir director or a conductor, designating tasks all of us. This is my body for you. There is ritual here. There is sacrifice.

Snap these beans...

Mom had just picked the green beans ten minutes ago. Anna's blog informed me that every minute from the vine, the beans loose vital nutrients. Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal Vegetable Miracle" contributed that every product of food travels 1,500 miles to get to our plates. So sitting here in Mom's front porch, where the concrete grounds me and I can watch the sun rise and set, soaking in D vitamins, I believe it is true what Melanie told me, that looking at the sun a bit every day is actually something dieters can do to eventually not eat at all. And Melanie has a sense of humor. And I take it seriously. Mom made so many green beans growing up and potatoes. We might have well have been Irish. Potatoes and beans. Really? Potatoes and beans, again?

The bread is leavening...

It is winter and I am still in high school. Daddy taught me to make bread a while back, over time actually. I miss him now. He is in Washington DC where he has moved. I guess you'd say they separated though not legally yet. But I miss his air roles that he made like clockwork on Sunday before moving away. I like the tick of the clock: faint, sturdy, true. Mom is substitute teaching. I am going to make some bread. I open up a Fanny Farmer Cookbook to bread, but nothing is just right. So I locate "the Joy" (of Cooking - what else?) and paw through the pages to French Bread. As I kneed the dough it starts snowing, which felt rare then. In the late nineties in Tennessee, in that whimsical place and time, it was. Mom walks in the door, "WHAT are you doing?" I misread her, feeling defensive. "I am just making bread." "You're making bread." She almost is crying. Maybe she was. So proud of me.