For a long time I’ve said that cooking is a spiritual practice for me. For a while- before it was cool and a real art form- I had a food blog (www.prayerkitchen.wordpress.com), now inactive. I’ve always loved sharing the different stories from my kitchen. Cooking is an important creative outlet for me. I love flavors from around the world and prefer the taste of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean menus to our typical American fare. Thanks to Buddhist monk Edward Espe Brown from the Tassajara Zen Center in California and his wonderful cookbooks, I have learned how to slow down in the kitchen and to offer thanks for the ingredients before me, as I work to prepare nourishing meals.
There are stories about my father as an adventurous cook. Though he died when I was a toddler and my memories of him are dim, my mother talked about some of his more creative culinary exploits: a whole roasted suckling pig that barely fit in the oven, venison roasts from deer that he had hunted, and Baked Alaska burst into dramatic flame at the tableside. (There are other non-food stories about my father that express his adventurous spirit, like the time he and my mother covered their faces in Vaseline and then gobbed on plaster of Paris to make harlequin masks of themselves which they then swapped and wore to a New Year’s Eve costume ball. I like to think that I got my father’s creative spirit in the kitchen. My mother was a good cook, but she did not enjoy it much, and she had a large family to cook for every night in the kitchen of our 17th c. home; now, we did have a refrigerator and stove, but no lovely granite countertop prep areas like the spacious kitchens of today! Our kitchen was small and dark, with a low, antique pine table next to the stove as the sole space to prepare anything. My mother created menus that allowed her to do the bulk of preparation during the day when we were out from underfoot, and so we ate many casseroles and roasted meats and vegetables. This “make it ahead” style also allowed my mother to have a civilized cocktail and conversation hour with my stepfather when he got home before launching into dinner. Some of my favorite dishes today are things that my mother made- for sentimental reasons, I know: chicken divan, beef stew, and her corned beef hash casserole. My mom always had a salad at her end of the table- as a child I could not stand the bitter greens- kale, chicory and endive- that she favored. Today, I am the Queen of Kale.
When I was growing up we ate in the dining room by candlelight with full table settings of china and sterling flatware. We weren’t trying to be fancy- it was just what we did. For several years, there were 8 of us gathered each evening at the table: my twin stepsisters, my two brothers, my sister, and my parents. (My other siblings were older and making their own households.) My mother sat at the kitchen end of the table (a custom I follow for myself, still today) and my stepfather sat at the opposite end, serving up the evening’s entrée onto a big stack of plates before him. We said grace. My father’s grace: “Bless, O Lord, this food to our use and our lives to your loving service.” My mother’s grace: “We thank thee, O Lord, for these provisions. Bless us, guide us, keep us, save us, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”
We had dessert on the weekends, as I remember. Certainly not every night. On occasion, my mother would try to get away with serving canned peaches for dessert. No thank you.
My mother was tall and slim. Until I was an adult and struggling with some of my own food issues, I didn’t understand that she felt pressure to “maintain her figure.” In those days (the ‘60s and ‘70s) the approach to staying thin was to skip meals, drink lots of black coffee, smoke cigarettes, eschew certain food groups (my mother didn’t eat many potatoes or much bread) and buy chewable meal replacements/appetite suppressants at the drug store. I think that this was typical for the time and place (upper middle class, white suburbia) where we lived.
When I grew up and became a mother myself and sat at the end of my own dining room table- at the kitchen end- I kept a lot of our family traditions: Regular mealtimes. Grace. Candles. Meat, Veg and Starch on most nights, and some more bold flavors at least once or twice a week in the form of “international” cuisines. We expected napkins to be in laps, elbows to be off the table and for the children to ask permission to be excused. We weren’t draconian about table etiquette, but I’m glad that we created some sort of decorum for our children as they grew. Many nights we listened to music as we ate, and on Sunday nights we’d listen to a local Compline service that was broadcast on the radio by two Episcopal priests. I think that I cooked a good variety of food for our family with an emphasis on “whole” and “clean” foods. Our children had adventurous palettes which I credited to feeding them just about any and everything that I could, as soon as they had teeth.
Today, as a household of “empty nesters,” not much has changed. I still love to cook. I don’t get paid for it anymore (I spent about 10 years in college and post-college working as a chef,) and these days we eat dinner on our laps while watching Jeopardy! – but the basics are the same: I love to play with recipes from other cuisines- Thai, Mexican, Asian, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern foods to name a few- and I find it to be a primary source of connection for me to God’s creation and the good stewardship of our health and bodies. There is no small amount of irony, of course, how this great joy has also been at the center of my own quest to achieve self-worth and a positive body image. I’m about 50/50 over the course of my lifetime, I think, in achieving a healthy attitude about it all. Beginning with some painful episodes from a chubby childhood that I won’t recount here but will save for another time, I have had a lifetime of a dysfunctional and disordered relationship with food. Interesting, isn’t it, that the thing that brings me so much joy has also been, in different seasons of my life, also my greatest nemesis? These days, as I am learning to live with a body that is mid-way into its seventh decade, I’m discovering new things about how a body “settles,” what its limits are, and how it is important to press at those limits gently in order to stay well (a summer experience of persistent tendinitis is teaching me that lesson).
And so.
I’ve done a bit of an exercise this week examining some menus from the past year or two. It’s been my custom for at least two decades, now, to create a weekly menu on my day off- Monday- and to shop and cook for the week ahead, all on one day. I have stuck the menu portion of my shopping list into the kitchen bookcase at week’s end, and this week, as I’ve been sorting through my bookcase, I discovered these many slips of paper- culinary artifacts, of a sort. I decided to do an inventory of our recent menus to see what kind of trends, if any, I could discover. Now, the whole thing is skewed for a few reasons that would toss this “experiment” out the window of any statistics class: 1) There are only 41 weeks’ worth of menus for a period that I know to be more than a year. 2) Most menus only feature 4 or 5 days of food (I plan on leftover nights) and 3) this doesn’t account for “pizza nights,” “Chinese and/or Indian takeout nights,” or dinners out with friends or for work, or for vacations. But this sampling- random, I guess, would be the best statistical assignation- will still give a look at what’s on our table, night by night.
Some of the old favorites are there: Chicken pot pie, Falafel in pita pockets, Lasagna, Fish Chowder, Mujadara and Dal… and there are some things that only appear once: Pho, tuna casserole, steak with chimichurri sauce. Now, this isn’t to say that we don’t like Pho, tuna casserole or steak enough to have it more often, but it is interesting that in this “random sampling” of a couple of years’ menus, that there isn’t more repetition…. Except for… beans. Wow. We eat a lot of beans. White beans, baked beans, bean salads, beans in casseroles and tacos and a million different ways. Having been vegan for a year, I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
The data showed that in 41 weeks of menus, I planned for 196 meals. That’s somewhere between 4-5 meals per week which makes sense for my pattern: plan for the weekdays, eat leftovers on Saturday (or get takeout) and shop separately for Sunday. Sunday dinner has always been a bigger, or nicer meal for us- with dessert!- and I just can’t think that far ahead on Monday to plan six days out…
Of those 196 meals, it turns out that the greatest number of them (83%) were Vegan, 16% of them featured chicken as a main ingredient, 10% beef, 10% pork, 8% fish, and a smattering of lamb and turkey. Broccoli seems to be my “go to” veg. What this tells me (and as I look at the menus) is that more often than not- even when it wasn’t our dedicated (2002) “Vegan Year,” we prefer plant-based meals. Over the course of our culinary lifetimes? No, but in the recent past, yes.
When I broke the menus down by nationalities or ethnicities, only 28% of the food was “American” (ie: chicken pot pie, fish chowder, meatloaf made with beef and pork), 14% was Mediterranean, 9% Indian, 8% Asian, 8% Mexican, and a smattering of Middle Eastern, French, African, Thai, and Vietnamese. There is another category that came in second, actually, at 16%: it’s a category that I’ve made up: “Hippie.” You know: brown rice, veggies, tempeh… or Buddha bowls, or other non-specific ethnic, whole grain, crunchy, granola-seeds-nuts-berries kind of food. I guess other than American, that’s my next-best-favorite.
These results surprise me a little bit because, for someone who loves Middle Eastern food (give me a pita with feta cheese and ground lamb, black olives and currants, please!)… there was precious little of it. Again, random sampling.
If you are still hanging in there with this post, I’d love to know what your favorites are. What do you love to cook? What do you love to eat? What are your family food traditions?
As for me, it’s lunchtime. Cheers.
Our selves, our souls and bodies 