So here I am, today. I haven't blogged in a while (while not due to lack of interesting musings, more to misplacement of time into a box of good intentions). Perhaps we shouldn't dwell on it. The point is, today I have most of the day off, a rarity, and while I was at work this morning, I received a text from my beautiful, lovely mother with the following question: "Do you have a favorite from me...the recipe I make...?" I saw the text as I was leaving and smiled. I mean, recipes are attached to memories, no? She may as well have asked if I have a favorite movie (all my number 1 choices are equal, and there are legion). So in order to answer her question, you all have to deal with me processing the information here (sorry not sorry).So it's been like a few years, but here's a song for you. And here is the same artist, performing one of my mom's favorite songs. I put it up top, in case you want to hear it as you read (both instrumentals).
The first recipe that popped into my head was my mother's taco salad; a dish almost exclusively served in a crystal starburst bowl, and one of the earliest I remember. But I don't really LIKE taco salad. It was brought to many a potluck or Sunday dinner in between church services, and at different ages, I had different problems with it. When I was 4, I didn't like the kidney beans. When I was 10, I wanted Ranch dressing on it. When I was 15 I hated the phase she was in that I lovingly call "the black-eyed pea rebellion," but at least I ate the kidney beans. Looking back on it, she started using more black eyed peas after my southern great grandmother passed away, solidifying my belief that recipes are no more than train physical mementos of transient memories, bringing back a moment with a lost loved one. Perhaps this is why I have always been enchanted with hand written recipe cards and church cookbooks.
In the end, this is why I want my mother's ever changing recipe for taco salad; so that I can live those moments as a child, sitting on a piano bench on Sunday afternoons, stuck between the kids' and adult's tables, seeing people at the age I remember them best. The smile of my piano teacher, who was nearly another mother to me, full of encouragement and discipline. The way her long, slender fingers gracefully passed the bowl to my mother while she inhaled and made a nearly imperceptible click in the back of her throat that I heard a million times as she sat next to me, fumbling over the piano keys as I did. The pastor's daughter, who thought I was such a cool older kid and wanted to be like me, her fiery hair alight in the sun as we crunched on the chips together, me feeling somewhat superior because I had a fan. Captain Awesome, enjoying the very same taco salad on my mother's patio just last summer, raving over the flavors, bringing him into my taco salad memory bank. The point is, you don't always ask for recipes because they taste good; you ask because it was a staple of your life that turns into a deposit in a memory bank.
Secondly, I thought about her Chicken Spaghetti recipe that she discovered the year she home-schooled my brother and me, I think from his home economics textbook. It was wildly expensive to make, and the only time I remember Velveeta being used in our home, but for that year, it was THE DISH. It was also very flavorful, and reminded me of how I didn't love red sauce on my spaghetti, and my mother would saute noodles in butter for me...I was a difficult child, who didn't like my food touching and I wish I could say I grew out of it. I would love that recipe, but would I ever make it? Did we eat too much of it and burn out?
Thirdly, I favor her pumpkin cookies, for which I have a recipe already, tucked away in my handwritten book of favorite recipes. Same with the Dilly Bread and her wedding cake recipe, which I will NEVER endeavor to make, but I think about the edges she cut off the cake to decorate it, and how we were allowed to eat those (the BEST strawberry shortcake ever in the history of the world), and how she always kept things in the oven for storage, forcing us to check before turning it on after we moved into town (and how the oven in the house until I was 13 was finicky but she knew how to time it right). And how transporting wedding cake was always a family affair, each kid holding a layer, lifting it off our laps as we ran over bumps when we knew they were coming up in the road. See? Recipes were never about food.
And then, Last summer she revisited egg rolls, which I remember helping with before I was 10, then don't remember for a long time after. I was visiting her in Michigan, and she needed toasted sesame oil. I had gone to Trader Joe's on my way out of town to bring her delicacies, and had on impulse bought a bottle of toasted sesame oil for myself. It was (literally) the only thing I left at home, because I didn't see myself dragging it all over the Midwest for no reason. She and I must have gone to 6 different stores looking for it, and couldn't find it. We made do, but all I could think about was that stupid bottle of sesame oil, sitting in Minnesota being useless. But man those egg rolls were good; I made a sweet chili sauce to go with them, which turned out not too bad.
I don't know how to answer this question from my mother. I remember her shepherd's pie, with mashed potatoes piped on top. I remember bags of hush puppy mix we had to keep in the freezer, in order to make the delicacy in our Michigan home. I'm drooling right now thinking of her decadent Texas Sheet cake, with crunchy peanut butter and fudge frosting. She taught me to make cinnamon rolls on the kitchen table which I always imagined my grandfather made, but probably didn't. I remember her teaching me to make sloppy joes; how I left the ice cream bucket filled with flour sitting on the adjacent burner, her face in slow motion, silently begging me not to pick it up, even as I lifted it off the element and watched the bottom stay on the coils as pounds of flour escaped onto the floor and into the air. Hours and hours of peeling potatoes for one reason or another, and how only philistines use peelers. How could I possibly answer this question? I know it's crazy that all these memories came from one text, but these and dozens other flashed through my brain in less than a second, one leading to the next, on and on, standing at the cash register as I checked out. So, in answer to this question, I'm going to go completely tangent and say I think...enchiladas. Is that weird? I started out talking about taco salad. Anyway, if the question is a favorite dish, I can't even. :) Hope that helps!
