Waking Up

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I am three, and I’m waking up from my afternoon nap in the right way: Slowly. Contentedly. In my own time and space.

I’m in no hurry to open my eyes. The bedroom is dim from the pulled curtains, anyway, and I’ve memorized every sight I would see from my place on the bottom bunk.

6259167128_a64b881939_bAn airplane flies overhead. In our house, below a well-traveled flight path to the airport, it’s a sound as common as a truck roaring by on our busy inner-city street. Whenever the house is quiet and I’m quiet, it seems there’s the sound of a plane somewhere in the sky.

The window is open in the bedroom I share with my brother, who, at almost-six, is too old for naps. I can hear the neighborhood kids playing outside. Laughter and shrieking, then protests, complaints.

Now the sound of a hose as more water is added to the plastic wading pool in the yard next door. I can picture the blue pool, the grass clippings floating on the glistening water.

There’s the voice of the bossiest girl, who is not the oldest but is the most sure of what she wants and how to get it. Just the tone of her voice conjures a snapshot of her hands on her hips, one hip jutted out to the side.  

My eyes are awake now, primed by scenes my ears have fashioned. I get up, my pigtails lopsided from their time on the pillow, and leave my bottom bunk to follow the sound of humming to my mother.

*    *    *    *    *

We lived on the ground floor of the house on Walnut Street until I was five. It was my first home. There are photographs to inform my visual sense of that place, but I can’t really claim them as memories. What I truly remember, from deep in some audio file my mind, are sounds.

Like the sound of my mom humming.

Our living space was small, making it easy for sounds to travel from one room to the next. My mom loves silence, but sometimes I think she loves it because it’s like a blank canvas—an open space for her to hum or whistle into as she folds laundry or chops vegetables. In the house on Walnut Street, her humming was my homing beacon as I navigated the waters between independence and security.

Sometimes upon waking from a nap I could hear my grandmother’s musical voice coming from the kitchen—a one-way, joyful conversation that meant an “audio letter” had arrived in that day’s mail. With my grandparents far away in California and long distance phone rates too costly for either household’s budget, my mom and grandma regularly recorded newsy updates on small, table-top cassette players. The tapes were mailed back and forth in padded manila envelopes.

If Mom was recording a letter to Grandma rather than listening to one, she would announce my appearance into the small microphone, inviting me to talk. “Oh, here’s Krissy! She just woke up from her nap. Krissy, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa! Tell them what kind of cookies we baked this morning.”

My dad’s arrival home each evening was inevitably announced through the stereo speakers: the pop-and-crackle of the needle touching an album. When Dad was home, there was always music playing. Aaron Copeland, Miles Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Bela Bartok, the Beatles, Peter, Paul & Mary—their electrifying, silky, surprising, earthy, and complex notes were the soundtrack of my childhood (the volume always a bit too high for my mom’s taste).

During warmer months, the sounds in our home mingled with the sounds of the world outside. In 1970s Michigan, no one had air conditioning—certainly not those of us renting old houses divided into duplexes in the city’s core. We opened windows, turned on noisy box fans, and spent as much time as possible playing outside with water, or sitting on shady stoops. Private lives were aired to the neighborhood: Everyone’s music and arguments, their clattering pots and pans and crying babies, were heard alongside the passing boom of car stereos, loud mufflers, and barking dogs.

After being tucked into my bottom bunk each night, the sounds of Walnut Street played on, each sound telling me a story. Some were as comforting and present as the hum of my mom’s sewing machine on the kitchen table; others were as mysterious and distant as another plane in the night sky, its seats filled with strangers traveling who knows where. 

*    *    *    *    *

Kristin bio YAH

Safe and Sound

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Packing tape rips, the sound raging through the telephone wire, threatening to undo my best attempts not to yell in order to be heard.

“Will you please stop for a minute?” I whisper in a saccharine tone. (I read somewhere if one lowers her voice during a conflict, the other person will listen better.) Tom keeps on clinking and ripping. I imagine his shoulders hunched over a desk, counting hundreds of buffalo nickels. My heart softens. “Call me tomorrow!” I yell. “I love you!”

I’ve been married to a traveling man for thirty years. Like a peddler whose wares hang on hooks from a wagon, Tom’s road-1208298_1280wares are coins which he buys and sells from his briefcase, filling it during the day. When he is racking up miles on asphalt, his office is a hotel room. Every evening he organizes and boxes the day’s purchases for shipping to customers. When he checks in in the evening, I try not to be annoyed by clinks of silver dollar on silver dollar as they drop into plastic holders. After all, he’s settled in, safe and sound.

 *   *   *   *

When he was away working, in the early years of our marriage, before we had internet, cell phones, or caller ID, but we had two small children, I listened for the phone to ring, carrying his voice to me. Call times varied according to where he was: I’m at the Red Roof Inn in Fargo. Our back and forth:

How was your day?

And how was your day?

What did the kids do today?

Taekwondo, homework, and oh, I put a drop of soap on Kendall’s tongue because he called Barbara a penis. Of course, she probably taunted him.

When Tom heard my laughter on the other end, he relaxed. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention helped keep our marriage together in our early child-rearing days, creating moments of intimacy in the ordinary when we were miles apart.

*   *   *   *

It’s 12;30 a.m. on a Saturday night. Tom is out-of-town. I am wide awake in bed, fanning the bodice of my cotton nightgown, trying to recover from a hot, humid day. Add a layer of anxiety from mothering two teenagers; I begin a conversation with myself.

Did I tell Barbara to call me when she leaves her friend’s house…

Cautious and compliant, Barbara will drive home, glancing through her rear-view window to be sure no stranger is following her, but I still want to hear “I’m on my way home.” Sometimes she positions herself in a taekwondo pose and pops a high kick reminding me that she almost earned a black belt.

The quick chirp of Barbara’s car alarm pierces the night. She closes the side door with a gentle nudge. Floorboards creak. The kitchen water faucet turns on, then off. I know she will open the refrigerator door looking for a snack to satisfy her tummy before a good night’s sleep. Her feet tread quiet and quick up the stairs to her room.

My inner monologue turns to Kendall.

Did I remember to pray: God watch over my boy—as if God would not keep Kendall safe if I forgot? Did I tell him to follow the speed limit?

A train whistles in the distance, and I worry that Kendall will pull too close to the tracks, and the train will derail.

Boom ba Boom ba Boom ba. I hear and almost feel Kendall approaching our driveway, heavy bass blaring—beautiful music to a mother’s ears. I inhale and exhale like an expectant mother in a Lamaze class. He needs to turn that thing down when he enters our neighborhood.

Our side door opens. Hinges squeak. Slam.

My man-child lumbers down the hallway with his size 14 sneakers slapping the floor. A looming presence stops at my bedroom door: “Mama, I’m home. Are you awake?”

“Yes, I’m awake.”

*   *   *   *

“I am 56 years old. I am not an old woman,” I say to Tom. “You bought me a safe car, and I can wield this cane like an old woman fighting off a purse snatcher.”

He worries about me. I have physical challenges, and he likes to be my knight in shining armor, but I insist that I have to do as much as I am able.

“Please text me or call me when you get home,” he says with concern, “and I’ll text you when I get settled at my hotel.”

I meet my sister for dinner, something we rarely do. Our menus remain untouched on the table while we begin chatting, catching up, talking over one another, finally stopping to give the server our orders. Diners at the table next to us smile when I choke on laughter as my sister and I reminisce about old boyfriends: the good, the bald, and the portly. Struggling to recover my manners, I avoid eye contact with my sister lest high-pitched giggles conquer me again.

We are the last to leave the restaurant, carrying our conversation out the door.

“We closed the place down,” I say with a merry grin. “Let’s promise one another to do this more often.”

The evening has flown by. I pull out my phone and text Tom.

Home soon. Love L

Back home, I settle under a quilt, with a full belly and heavy eyes. Grown and gone, my children are never far from my mind, but I don’t worry as much when I’m not expecting them to come home.

Instead of listening for a key in the lock or booming bass paving our driveway, my ears and heart are more open to God’s voice. He and I have a history together, and those nights I waited up, wondering, worrying, God heard, God answered.

My phone on the nightstand vibrates and scoots, awakening me from the edge of sleep. I knock my glasses off the nightstand, grope blindly for the phone, and bring it close to my eyes.

I’m in for the night

Safe and sound  Love T keys-233368_1280

 

 

Lisa bio YAH

 

The Sound of Breath, Hard to Come By

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There is the sound of a child who is not breathing well, the sound of inflamed airways, the sound of air-gulping. She comes into our room in the middle of the night, and my wife and I both sit up in bed.

“Abra, are you okay?” I ask, and she nods, because everything is always okay in Abra-land, even when things are not okay. But her eyes are open too-wide, and there is a little panic there, hidden in the blue.

“My breathing,” she says, opening her mouth and pulling in air, and we scramble for medicine, for the inhaler, and for the calming oils. There is the sound of her coughing, and the sound of her swallowing her medicine. There is the popping sound her inhaler makes, the misting psht, the ten long breaths.

We have been down this road before. There is a new bed on the floor beside ours. There is the sound of quiet breathing, then the sound of sleep.

* * * * *

We decide to flee the city for a few days, and we pack up the truck with food and a tent and sleeping bags. We drive south and get to the cabin that used to be our house, and we remember those quiet days in the forest. We take trip after trip into the woods, carrying our things like mountain climbers attending to base camp. Lucy helps me set up the tent while the boys make a few more treks and Maile and Abra collect firewood.

IMG_1414It is cold and the wind rushes through the trees like a giant shushing us, reminding us this is holy ground. It was the house where we found our footing again after a long trip, the house where Maile miscarried a baby. It is the place where we were snowed in for three days, where Maile and I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck to keep it from collapsing.

We sit around the fire and my parents and two of my sisters surprise us by showing up and we laugh and eat s’mores and shift around the fire like the hands on a clock, avoiding the smoke. I remember the sounds of this place: dogs barking; a four-wheeler racing through the woods; a chainsaw starting up. But all of these sounds are muffled by distance, and if you’re not careful, you’ll miss them. They are, each of them, little messages from a different isolation.

My parents and sisters leave us as the sun is setting, as the cold rushes in over the hills. We quickly clean up the campsite and retreat to our warm sleeping bags in the tent, hoods up, eyes peeking out. Our son Leo crawls all over us, and our daughter Lucy reads Harry Potter to us. Her voice is like the voice of the last storyteller, clear and clean. When she reads, the faraway voices fade to almost nothing.

When we turn off the light, we can hear the wind, always the wind, rustling the soft spring leaves.

* * * * *

The sound of a cough wakes me up, and I hear labored breathing in the tent.

“Abra,” I hiss. “Abra.”

She rolls over and looks at me, and in the dim lantern light I can see her eyes are watery and tired.

“My breathing,” she says in a quiet, sleepy voice. I exit my sleeping bag, enter the cold air of the tent. I search through the bag, throwing out clothes, flashlights, a box of matches. I find the plastic bag that holds her medicine, her inhaler.

She holds the mask up to her face and !pop! goes the inhaler and then she takes in a deep breath, two deep breaths, three deep breaths, all the way up to ten, and (she knows the rhythm now, knows it without being reminded) !Pop! again, and again breathing up to ten. She takes a small dose of medicine. She crawls back into her sleeping bag, and I do the same.

I lie there for quite some time, staring up at the silhouette of leaves on the tent roof, placed there by the moon. Everything is still and Abra’s breathing calms and then the wind rushes through the trees again, thrashing the leaves around, reminding me to be still again, to listen.

The Epitome of Cakedom

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

The public library was a weekly haunt for me growing up. My mom and I would part ways at the door, she heading for the fiction section and me to the children’s room.

During one trip in my pre-teen years, I found the “Beany Malone” series by Lenora Mattingly Weber, and found another family to belong to—mine was actually quite wonderful, but these characters somehow connected with another part of me in the ways good characters do. I wanted to live next door to the Malones—and at the same time, I did. I spent so much of my free time at their home in Denver I could tell you just how old Beany was when she finally got her room painted “a shade halfway between robin’s egg blue and the sky in August.” Though they lived thirty years in the past, for me they were contemporaries. They lived knowing they were a family. I loved that about them. And when I emerged from my room to join my own family, the air of their camaraderie followed me down the stairs, and helped me see and name the good things my family brought to me.

Most of all, I loved their family meals. I loved watching how Beany, still a teenager, planned out the meals, using her ingenuity and thrift to keep the Malone table filled with good food, prettily presented.

But when it came time for extravagance and celebration, her older brother Johnny Malone was the one I wanted to see in the kitchen. I grew up believing his Lady Eleanor Cake was the epitome of cake-dom, with its fifteen egg whites and “feather light, velvety texture.” When the Lady Eleanor Cake was in the oven at the Malone house, it was my best indication the event was special. This extravagant cake—fifteen egg whites in wartime!—conferred value on people and events, and reminded me that the best creations are the ones we share with others.

I wondered about the cake, possibly obsessed about it. I wondered enough to purchase the Beany Malone Cookbook not once, but twice—each time amazed it didn’t include this essential Malone family recipe. I’m not sure why now, in adulthood, I decided to stop wondering and get busy in the kitchen, but I did, determined to create my own recipe for the Lady Eleanor Cake. Virtual meals, in fictitious places, can only sustain you so much. And it was time to move from Denver, in the 1940s, into the new century.

7024892047_89e44031cb_oSomething with fifteen egg whites most likely would be in the angel cake category, so I started there. But “velvety” is not how I would describe the spongy texture of angel cake. It needed a bit more depth. It needed more vanilla, a just a bit of the richness of egg yolk, along with the egg whites. I went through five variations, with my family gamely trying every version.  We had an ever-changing mixture based on angel cakes, chiffon cakes, and a lemon cake, striving to get something worthy of the hours of daydreaming I’ve done about this cake over my lifetime. But it eluded me. Egg whites became a staple on my grocery list. By the end, my daughter knew when she heard the mixer going for ten minutes or so, she would be called upon about an hour later to judge if this version was both “feather light” and a “velvety texture.”  It had to be both!

I considered it a significant moment when, on my birthday, I finally got the right proportion of ingredients. And a fictitious family from the 1940s, who had invited me to their home on a quiet street in Denver, Colorado, reached through the pages and joined my family in New York, helping us celebrate in style.

* * * * *

Andrea%2BDoering%2BPhotoAndrea Doering is an editor, freelance writer, author of three books for children, and most recently The Children’s Table: Recipes and Meals Inspired by Favorite Children’s Stories. She lives in New York, just one block away from the children’s library.

Mixing bowl photo by Barb Hoyer, on Creative Commons

Chips in a Foreign Land

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The first time I had salt and vinegar potato chips was in London, and I couldn’t wait to trade them away.  I was 20 and a student in a four-week study abroad program. The chips came in a sack dinner I picked up every afternoon, and my friends and I would eat them along with our sandwiches, sitting on the curb in Leicester Square. For the first two weeks, if I found the salt and vinegar chips in my sack, I tried to trade them away for regular chips. The vinegar was too strong, too sour and tangy. But Londoners seemed obsessed with them: I saw them all over the city.

I wanted to be like the sophisticated Londoners I saw every day, walking purposefully in the busy streets, standing confidently on the Tube, and going to the theater. I began venturing off by myself more, without friends to trade chips with. By the end of the four weeks, I could hardly believe that I had once disliked salt and vinegar chips. What a perfect combination of flavors! What a brilliant country!

8865057426_6be830e5a2_oWhen I came back to school in the U.S., I frequently kept a bag of salt and vinegar chips in my dorm room, a late afternoon snack in the midst of writing papers, reading, and dinner dates with friends.

After college, I found myself living overseas again, but on the other side of the world. Instead of one strange food to adapt to, it was all unfamiliar. For the first two months overseas, I had to have every meal (that I didn’t eat at McDonalds) ordered for me. My coworkers and I soon had our preferred dishes, bowls of noodle soup, spicy cabbage, steamed rolls with sugar. I grew to appreciate the unfamiliar flavors, the crowds we ate them in, and the the anticipation of wondering what I would receive. But I longed for home. I would have been willing to run a marathon for something familiar.

Even after I began ordering my own food, I had to point to someone else’s dish to let the server know what I wanted. Sometimes this was done with lots of smiling, the server happily relieved when I decided on something and we seemed to be in agreement. Other times I smiled and pointed to a stone-faced waiter who seemed to dismiss me out the door and out of the country with his eyes.

Then one day, while exploring the foreign city by myself, I went up a new staircase in a long city block and found myself in a shopping mall. There, in a small store, on a display in the center of the room, were three cans of salt and vinegar Pringles. It was as if a spotlight was shining down on the blue and yellow canisters.

I grabbed them immediately, looking around furtively to see if I had any competition. I couldn’t believe they were just sitting there, available. I hadn’t seen any other Pringles in the whole country, and they were even my favorite flavor.

I kept the chips in a hidden corner of my apartment and didn’t tell anyone about them. For several months, when I was too tired to go outside for another minute in a place with constant reminders that I didn’t belong, I knew it was time for the chips.

Eating those chips took me back to London, to the carefree days with college friends. As I slowly savored them, I found myself wondering if I would one day be as confident and assured as those Londoners.

Now, ten years later, I remember the confidence of the young woman who lived alone and braved crowded, unfamiliar streets, eating countless bowls of noodle soup and savoring three cans of salt and vinegar Pringles. Now, back at home, I await the next adventure.

* * * * *

MiahOren portraitMiah is the author of The Reluctant Missionary, a memoir about the two years she spent overseas teaching English. She writes about learning to let go of perfectionism and embracing God’s plan for her life. She lives in Dallas where she dreams of someday having another cat. Connect with Miah online at www.miahoren.com.

Chip photo by RosieT on Creative Commons

The Rice Between Us

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My mom’s dad was stationed in Okinawa during the Korean War in the 1950s. Although he never saw combat, he did see rice. When he returned from Japan after the war, he swore it off completely, exercising his power of choice as a civilian. As far as I know, he went to his death without eating another grain.

My mom’s mom honored his aversion. Recently she told me that she’d made him dinner when they were first dating: a dish that included rice. He hemmed and hawed and ultimately didn’t eat it. Only later, he told her the backstory. During their marriage, she never served rice when he was home. Sometimes, however, she would prepare it when he wasn’t. My mom doesn’t remember eating rice as a special occasion or a treat, but she remembers liking it.

My earliest memories are of eating white rice, my favorite–a foreshadowing of a palate that leans hard toward taste over health. It was only later that my mom switched to brown rice, for the higher fiber content (although she sometimes added Benefiber to white rice, which never bothered me). I knew the brown rice was supposed to be healthier, but to me it wasn’t really rice. I can’t help thinking that if my Poppa hadn’t been completely against rice, he would have agreed with me. He was never one to choose a healthy option over a more delicious one. That may have been part of what killed him at 56, before any of us were ready to say goodbye.

***

At nineteen, I signed up to take a trip to South Korea with my Tae Kwon Do school. I was months away from testing for my black belt, and I was eager to see the birthplace of my beloved martial art.

Almost immediately, I fell in love with the country. Although with my blonde hair and fair skin I looked like exactly no one who lived there, I felt completely at home. Every new experience filled me with delight. One of the first things we did when we arrived was eat. We really never stopped for long.

3161831426_780182ca28_zI had grown up eating three distinct meals every day, with breakfast containing different foods than lunch or dinner. This wasn’t always true in Korea.

My body plunged headfirst into culture shock, as I sunk my teeth into bulgogi (the most delicious Korean barbecue). At bulgogi restaurants, we would sit in groups at long tables with small domed metal grills in their centers, spaced every few feet from each other. Our server would bring us containers of marinated meats and vegetables, and we would cook them ourselves on the nearest grills. When we got close to meal times, my ears would prick up, hoping that someone would say that we were going for bulgogi again.

Another favorite for me was the classic meal-in-a-bowl, bibimbap. At one of the restaurants, our host told us that the concept is credited to members of the Mongolian army, who would put all of their leftover food into their helmets to eat like liquidless soup. Later, I discovered that this is only one of the many legends that surround this chameleon of a food. It looks different depending on where you are in the country, the time of year, the whim of the chef. If you’re making it at home, it’s a kitchen sink meal, lending itself easily to using up whatever you might have on hand. In a restaurant, it’s a little more uniform: a bowl of rice topped with veggies and (sometimes) cooked meat, with a variety of ingredients which were deliciously mysterious to me. It’s served very hot, sometimes in a heated stone bowl called a dolsot, which continues to cook the contents throughout the meal. At the last moment before serving, an egg is usually cracked over the top, the heat of the other ingredients quickly cooking it. I would mix the egg into my bowl with delight and then squeeze large dollops of spicy red pepper paste in, swirling my chopsticks to get a consistent flavor.

And at every meal, without fail, we ate rice. I loved it.

I wonder, now, if I was trying to memorize the taste of Korea. I knew I couldn’t stay, that I would need to return to a land where rice was a side dish, not the undergirding of everything I ate. I could make rice at home. I could use my tongue to transport me back to Korea.

***

It no longer surprises me when I discover that my Poppa and I share similar tastes. It’s hard to know if it is because my mother missed him and cooked his favorites for me as a child. The ways of food and family are mysterious. I’m sure that there are other ways that we differ, but I know this one well, and I think about it every time I turn on my rice maker, or order a risotto, or take a virtual journey back to Korea, where I was overwhelmed with a sense of belonging.

For my Poppa, rice was also a portal to another place, but it was one that he wanted to remain closed forever. For me, the idea of Mongolian soldiers eating out of their helmets adds color and context to a delicious dish. But I have never been a soldier. I have never worn a helmet for long hours in the heat, knowing that I would have no control over how I broke my fast at each meal, far away from home. For a long while, I wondered if my love for rice was disloyal to him. Even though he never held others to his standard, now I think he might like the fact that I think of him as I reach for a piece of sushi or add coconut to my rice. Our connection continues to be strong, our opposite tastes providing an ironic but significant bond.

cara YAH bio

(photo credit)

Comfort Food

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“We thought maybe you ate too much and couldn’t fit through the door.”

My face blushed red and I turned away from my 5th grade classmates in shame. After being out sick for a couple of days, I had returned to school. A friend walking beside me turned around and yelled with fiery authority, “Shut up!” at the giggly boys who scampered away.

*************

I’d worked all day at a job that was a daily test in humility as I earned a paycheck far below my skill, experience, and Master’s Degree education level. Many of my coworkers at the big-box retailer were in the same situation. I was at the end of a seven day stretch of work days, three of them starting at 4 a.m. My sleep schedule was irregular, I was fighting off a scratchy throat that usually signals that I’m about to be knocked out for 24 hours, and my feet were killing me. The day had been typical – it was spent climbing tall ladders, lifting heavy boxes, and having people 10 years my junior instruct me on how to properly put products on a shelf.  

I was physically exhausted. I was mentally exhausted.

SaladOnce home, I pulled a metal pan out from the cabinet, filled it with water, added quinoa, and set it to boil. From the fridge I pulled an assortment of leafy greens, strawberries, feta, lemon juice and the jar of minced garlic. I grabbed a grapefruit from the counter; walnuts, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and spices from the pantry. From the cabinets I grabbed mixing bowls and cutting boards. I did not really know what I was making, but I needed to chop and simmer and stir. I needed fresh flavors to mix together to enliven my senses.

The lemon juice and vinegar and oil were whisked together with honey and seasonings. I tossed kale and arugula with feta and walnuts and sliced strawberries.  Small segments of juicy pink grapefruit plopped atop the mix of greens.  When the quinoa was done, I spooned in the filling grain and then tossed it all in my home made dressing.

Here was my comfort food. I relaxed into the smooth wooden dining chair I had picked up at a yard sale a few months ago. It’s an old office or library chair – with an extra wide seat and a sturdy frame.  The meal was delicious and full of just what I needed to feel calm and at rest after a crazy, exhausting week.

*************

I’ve always loved cooking and food. As a child I poured over the American Girl cookbook for Kirsten Larson and made a Swedish feast for my family. I remember many mornings with my elbows propped on the table in my grandmother’s farm kitchen watching her cook for hours. I have read cookbooks cover to cover as if they were a novel.

There were many years where I was ashamed to admit my love for those things. I was afraid that it would surely lead into a fat joke of the “of course she does!” variety.

Here’s the thing when you’re fat: you’re not sure if you’re supposed to love food, or hate it. There are the caricatures of fat people and food.  One is the abundantly joyful fatty who drools over the mere description of food. The other is the sad fatty who forces herself to eat salad in public but must certainly binges in private. Most of us are given only these two pictures of what it looks like to be fat in relation to food.

For the longest time, I didn’t know I liked food. I just thought I needed it, the way an addict needs a fix.

I was in college when I realized that I really didn’t like chocolate that much.  I wasn’t just pretending not to like it to try to somehow make myself appear thinner by declining sugar-heavy sweets, I really didn’t like chocolate that much. (Then later I discovered dark chocolate, and yes I like that chocolate!) But, if I am hungry and tired and want something that is going to give me energy and make me feel satiated – I will most likely crave something like my kale, quinoa, and grapefruit creation.  

Yet, there are times when the sweet warmth of an apple crisp is what is desired. And sometimes the celebration of cake and ice cream with the smell of blown-out-candles wafting through the air is just what the occasion ordered. And those are things that fat people can enjoy without shame as well. 

*************

One of my grad-school roommates peeked around the corner into my door and asked with a expectant smile, “I heard tomorrow is Lent. Is there anything that you are giving up that you’d like to pass on? Get out of your cabinet? Sweets? Are you fasting sweets?”

Another roommate called out with a laugh, “I don’t think you will get anything from Nicole. She doesn’t do sweets.  Next time ask her for veggies.”

 

*************

Nicole bio YAH

Find more of Nicole’s thoughts about life in a fat body at Fat Faith

 

We Could Do Anything For Indian Food

Posted on by under Food & Place

During those four years that we lived in England, we specialized in the overnight flight from Newark to London, the flight I slept on but never really slept on. The flight attendants moved silently up and down the aisles while passengers murmured to themselves in their sleep and children cried out randomly. A cup of tea. An extra blanket. The person in front shifts in their seat and jams my knees. For 6 hours, 200 of us soared through the sky, racing through the night.

When we finally caught the sunlight, it slanted in through the oval windows, crept in under the small cracks where people had not pulled their blind down all the way. Our eyes were not ready for morning. Our brains told us we should still be sleeping. More tea. Hastily filled out customs forms. Stretching limbs. Out into the jet-fueled air of Heathrow Airport.

b3ed8fdfOn our first return to England from the U.S., we made the mistake of giving in to jetlag. On that particular trip, we arrived at our Wendover home and slept all day, a gorgeous, indulgent, heavy sleep that felt more like drowning. We slept from 10am until 4pm in the afternoon.

But that day of sleep had disastrous consequences. For the next three weeks, we could not turn the clock around. We were awake all night, groggy all day. I almost fell asleep in meetings. I watched 2am turn to 3am turn to 4am. We vowed to never do it again. We could be disciplined. We could stay awake until bedtime.

Then we arrived home from the US on the next trip, exhausted and blurry-eyed.

“Just a little nap,” I begged Maile.

“No, don’t do it,” she said, her head drifting back on to the couch cushions, some invisible weight pulling down on her eyelids. “Remember what happened last time?”

But by then her voice had a smoky quality, ephemeral and fading. It was like we had taken some enchanted potion. I could picture the witch waiting just outside our window, rubbing her hands together and cackling.

“We can’t do this,” I said. “C’mon. Get up. We have to stay awake.”

“What are we going to do?” Maile mumbled from some far off dream world.

“First, we’re taking a walk. And if we can stay awake until The New Akash opens, then we’ll reward ourselves with Indian food.”

She sat straight up, shaking her head to clear the haze.

“Indian food,” she said. “Deal.”

We managed to put on our hiking boots and wander up the hill from our small cottage to where a main footpath went from west to east. It was part of the old Canterbury Trail, and so many people had walked it that the path itself was pressed three feet deep into the ground. You had to climb down into that path. You almost needed help getting out.

We walked to Wendover, the closest village. The mist clung to the trees and the fields. Lonely cars traveled slowly down the narrow roads, off in the distance from where we walked. We could have been the only two people in the world. This is how the afternoon passed.

Finally, early evening. We showered. We drove to town. We walked into the garish gold and red decorations of The New Akash, smothered ourselves in the irregular Indian music, and smiled through our delirious exhaustion as the waiter brought us lamb tikka bhuna and shrimp vindaloo, so spicy it made my eyes water before I even tasted it.

It became our new tradition, our new reward. Stay awake for the Indian food.

Dublin Lamb Stew

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

Nine months after my college graduation, I find myself living with my parents, looking for work, trying to write more frequently, de-cluttering my room, and generally freaking out about life. It is a time of uncertainty, a time that requires more patience than I have.

The lamb stew I am cooking for St. Patrick’s Day takes patience, too. Lamb—trimmed of excess fat and cut into 2-inch cubes—simmers with beer, some spices, and broth for at least an hour before I can add the cubed potatoes and sliced carrots. I start early in the afternoon so that the stew will be ready for my family’s 6 o’clock dinner hour. As it cooks, the stew fills the kitchen with a meaty smell. Its taste, when we finally sit down to dinner, is rich, with a hint of thyme and a ghost of wheat from the beer. My family’s silence indicates their approval.

Deciding to make lamb stew was not so much a whim as a nostalgic gesture to the weekend I spent in Ireland three years ago. It was the end of my semester studying abroad. Four girlfriends and I had arranged our flights to stay over in Ireland for the weekend. After a jaunt to Galway, the Cliffs of Moher, and the shrine at Knock, we returned to Dublin for a farewell dinner to Europe. We chose what the hostel employee told us was the oldest pub in Ireland—The Brazen Head—partly for its history and partly because it was only a short walk away. A waitress seated us at a battered wood table in the pub’s squashed and dimly lit interior.

IMG_2325Four months abroad had felt like a lifetime; we were ready to return to American soil and our families. Yet, at the same time, we were overflowing with the exhilaration of seeing the world, of being young, of having friends, and of being more or less carefree. We ordered Guinness and raised a glass: to friendship, to Ireland, to life.

When the time came to order our food, I knew I had to try a truly Irish dish. I chose the lamb stew. Ladled into a wide-rimmed, white bowl, it came with a scoop of mashed potatoes floating on top. Crusty brown bread was served on the side, slathered in butter, which of course I dipped in the stew, soaking up all of its delicious gravy. My friend, Allison, also ordered the lamb stew and together we reveled in its heartiness, while the other girls enjoyed beef and Guinness stew, another Irish favorite.

Stew, in all its forms, although hearty and flavorful, is a rather unremarkable dish. What was it about the Dublin lamb stew that captured my attention so that it stands forth in my mind as a dish worth recreating?

I felt whole during that weekend in Ireland. Now that I had seen places that before I had only read about, the world seemed smaller. Anything was possible. I could go anywhere. I could meet anyone. I could do anything.

Perhaps, subconsciously, it is that feeling of potentiality I am seeking to recapture as I cook lamb stew for my family this St. Patrick’s Day. A bubble of hope rises in my heart like those that rise to the top of my stew as it breaks into a gentle, rolling boil. Anything is possible.

*   *   *   *   *

IMG_6527 vig“Dublin Lamb Stew” is by Stasia Phillips, a writer and amateur cook who loves a delicious bowl of stew once in a while. Studying abroad in Austria for a semester opened her eyes to a whole world of flavors that she is slowly incorporating into her cooking repertoire. Stasia draws inspiration for her writing from nature, good books, her faith, and hazelnut coffee. You can find her blogging at “Cold Hands, Warm Heart.”

Ukrainian Soul Food

Posted on by under Food & Place

“Mine look like bananas!” I apologized.

I was assured that, first of all, they did not look like bananas. And even if they did, who would care? Once they’d been boiled, smothered in sautéed onions, and served with a giant dollop of sour cream, they would taste amazing.

“It’s more important that they’re sealed tightly so they won’t break apart when we boil them,” my mother assured me. “The shape doesn’t matter at all!”

It was late December, and Mom, my younger brothers, Aunt Mary, Uncle George, and I were gathered around our newspaper-covered kitchen table. Hands dusted with flour, we had each set up our individual work stations with the proper tools: a square of waxed paper, a communal canister of flour, and a narrow-mouthed cocktail olive jar, which would serve as a mini-rolling pin. When we finished our project, the olive jars would be returned to a corner of the pantry to await next year’s pierogi-making party.

In the center of the table was a wet loaf of sticky sour-creamy dough, from which Mom cut small chunks to distribute to each of our work stations. We sprinkled flour onto our waxed paper and coated our olive jars with the same, and then we rolled the dough into something approximating a circle the size of a flattened tennis ball. We dropped a spoonful of filling—either the mashed potato and cheese concoction or my favorite, the sauerkraut, onion, and cottage cheese mixture—onto one side of the circle. Then we folded the dough over and sealed the filling inside by pressing our thumbs along the edges.

Voila! A perfect pierogi.

Which may or may not resemble a banana.

***

homemade-pierogi_kz6bdbGrowing up, the pierogi-making party was an annual ritual, an Advent tradition as familiar as candles and wreaths and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” Our Christmas Eve dinner, or “Holy Supper,” followed the tradition of my father’s family, imported from his parents’ native Ukraine. It was a completely meatless meal, to follow the tradition of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I think its original form involved multiple courses and a lot of symbolism—including straw under the tablecloth, to represent the baby Jesus’ manger birthplace. And raw garlic cloves served up like pickles or olives.

The version of Holy Supper with which I grew up was significantly abridged. We skipped the straw and the raw garlic and served only two courses: kapusta (a sauerkraut and split pea soup, which looked and smelled as appetizing as it probably sounds) and pierogies. Both of these were topped with onions sautéed in a pound or more of butter and were accompanied by unleavened bread, stuck with cloves of garlic before it was baked, and served with generous drizzles of honey. The strong flavor of the garlicky honey bread is the only thing that made the kapusta even remotely appetizing to me.

But I loved the pierogies. We would boil them on Christmas Eve, and for Christmas morning breakfast, we would fry up the leftovers in a skillet, along with the buttery onions.

***

My mother grew up a decidedly White Anglo Saxon Protestant dairy farmer’s daughter, and she used to tell me that she never tasted garlic before she started dating my father. She was raised with a predictably bland meat and potatoes diet, but she grew to love the food of her eastern European in-laws.

To my father’s delight, after a couple of false starts, she mastered how to prepare most of his childhood favorites. They often laughed about her first attempt at making halupki—or stuffed cabbage, or pigs-in-a-blanket, depending on your vernacular. She didn’t realize she had to steam the cabbage before rolling it around the ground beef and rice concoction, so she fastened the rolls together by securing them with toothpicks.

pierogiesWe ate pierogies and kapusta on Christmas Eve, and on Easter, cold kielbasa and potato salad and hard boiled eggs dipped in a shredded beets and horseradish mixture. The one delicacy of my father’s childhood that my mother never attempted to prepare is studenina: jellied pigs’ feet. My Uncle Paul likes to joke that, “You can spend an hour convincing someone that you can make jello out of pigs’ feet, and then you blow it when you tell them that you pour vinegar over it and eat it for breakfast.” My dad loved it. I’ve never been able to bring myself to taste the stuff.

***

When Mom first asked my grandmother for her pierogi recipe, Grandma shrugged. After decades of making pierogies every Friday, she cooked by instinct, not by measurement.

So Mom followed her around the kitchen, writing down everything she did to prepare the dough and mix the fillings. A pinch of this, a handful of that—with the end result enough pierogies for us to eat well that evening and for many meals to come. Our freezer would be well stocked for the twelve months that tended to lapse between pierogi-making parties. And we were following the steps my grandmother had followed week after week, when the “recipe” yielded only enough to feed my dad and his many brothers and sisters for a single meal.

The irony is not lost on me that what we have come to regard as an exotic, once-a-year treat is really eastern European peasant food—or what my dad affectionately used to call “Ukrainian soul food.”

It continues to feed our souls.

***

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