Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

WHY I COOK

i love to cook. i love to eat. heh. i love to cook for my family mostly. i love it when they love it. much has been written about the connection between food and family history. i won't even try to get that deep into it. in the past couple days, a couple things have happened that have caused me to think a lot about this whole thing.

i wrote yesterday about matty and his weird obsession with healthy cooking. i know i played a very small part in his love of cooking. the boys always helped me cook. i talked about cooking while we were working. we tried anything. we were fearless. but. BUT. i am in no way a healthy cook. no way. we joke -- matt is ming tsai, and i'm paula deen. those are pretty good analogies.

i was so happy when matty first asked me for a recipe when he started cooking in his own kitchen while in college. it was the first time i actually tried to write down my pasta sauce recipe. took me forever. matty has his own sauce recipe now. a lot spicier. good sauce. another rung on the ladder. his own kids will probably add to and change that recipe.

i was just telling jackson the other day about how anything and everything you do can have special, spiritual meaning. washing dishes sometimes does it for me. i look at my hands (kind of small, utilitarian) and wonder whose hands they are. did some great-great-great-great grandmother have these hands? what was she like? what did she do with these hands? will my great-great-great granddaughter have them? will she wonder about me?

back to food.

my mom didn't cook very often. when she DID, however, it was always good. often great. she made chicken soup that was the best. it's the chicken soup i still make today. she made a red clam sauce that my sisters and i would LOVE to replicate. it was like italian fast food. her 5-minute specialty. THE absolute best red clam sauce ever. EVER. she made a veal franchese that rivaled ANYTHING i have ever tasted.

but she never cooked with us. sure, she had us helping. we'd clean up after her. we'd be setting the table. whatever needed to be done. but she cooked alone. it's how she wanted it. i don't know why she didn't want our help. i wish i could ask her.

i've been dying for some of her veal franchese. yesterday, we picked up some chicken breasts so i could make some chicken franchese. i was going to make one more attempt to replicate her specialty.

i called my sister "j" to see if she wanted to come for dinner. she was busy. i asked her if she had any of mom's cookbooks. nope, but i've got some notes she kept. I MUST HAVE THEM. "j" never mentioned this to me. i cannot wait to get my hands (heh) on these notes. i feel like i've found the holy grail. "j" is looking for them -- she'll call me when she finds them.

i just finished up the my chicken franchese. it's as close as i've ever come. i think that i'll have to play a little more with the proportions and the choice of wine to approximate my mom's dish. maybe there's a clue in mom's notes. while i was cooking (alone today), i was wishing that i was cooking with my mom. lately i've been feeling her absence keenly.

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another funny food thing that got me looking at world maps. i was looking at some recipes on recipezaar today and saw a recipe for rice and milk. for a while, we lived in my grandfather's house when i was little. my grandfather, my two aunts, my cousin, my dad, my two sisters, sometimes my uncle, and me. grampa would make this rice and milk a lot for breakfast on a cold day. the notes on the recipe say it's an african recipe. reminded me that i heard somewhere that grampa (a sicilian) was born in tunisia. i mentioned that to bill; and mr. big brain said, "look how close sicily is to tunisia." so i did. cool, huh?

whoops. didn't label it. tunisia on left, sicily on right. duh!

this mom thing and her recipes? this is one of the reasons why i blog. it's like, here i am. you'll NEVER get rid of me!

Posted by Stacey at June 24, 2006 04:20 PM