This is the 33rd year that I have been cooking with my spouse. It all started in a gorgeous 1871 Victorian mansion in Providence when I was in college. The most beautiful house I have had the privledge to live in and the inspiration for the purchase of my current home. The kitchen was literally a closet, and the cookbook selection was meager, but that is where I really learned the joy of cooking. I cooked with the same two people every Friday night, and it was such fun. We were on the brink of the weekend. No one ever complained about the food--even though we really didn't know much about what we were doing. Generations of friends in the future owe their meal quality to those brave souls who ate those early meals. We were better than most, and that was enough. I loved those days--even then, I knew it was a gift. At that point I didn't understand how people could spend $20,000 a year (I have since discovered that it is not much of a challenge), but I did understand that afternoons where my only obligation was to put a meal on the table for 20+ people were days that were numbered. I still cook out of three of those cookbooks from those days--it is nostalgia, pure and simple.
Today, six abodes and four boys raised to men later, we occasionally get a glimpse of the joy of cooking. Last weekend was one of those times. My spouse was his usual exuberant self at the Farmer's Market--I asked for tomatoes, and got do much more in return. Not to mention what we had leftover from the week before! But it became a day of "making space in the fridge" that was perfectly orquestrated. While he made a delicious broth for pho (he spoke to the Asian greens growers at the market and got lots of sage advice that he wanted to put to work immediately) and a shrimp gumbo, and a Vietnamese Caramel chicken dish that is just as delicious as it sounds, I made a mixed greens gumbo, a butternut squash and penne pasta dish, and we collaborated on a ratatouille. We ended up with a little bit of summer for the freezer and food for the rest of the week.
We have always cooked big. It goes back to those early days of cooking for 20. We just never really grew out of it, and cooking for four boys, that seemed like a strategy bound for success. We had a milk refrigerator and a beer refrigerator at one point. We went through serious food. Now we need some finesse, and we have more or less managed to get a better hold on it, if not be wholly successful. For example, we emptied one of our three freestanding freezers into a friends, and we have yet to get every last thing back, due to lack of space. We could probably eat for the better part of a year should the apocolypse commence. Be that as it may, it is still really nice to have a joyous day of cooking.
My cooking habits also were highly impacted by those formative days of cooking for 20+ in the Carberry kitchen. For decades I only knew how to cook vegetarian, for one thing. Even after I started eating meat during my first pregnancy, there was a serious lag time of years before I figured out how to cook meat. I also continued the habit of making a grocery list once a week that included the ingredients of all the upcoming dinners plus breakfast and lunch staples. I love sitting down on the weekend and planning a set of dinners for the week that I am excited to eat and that go together well. And I still have some recipes handwritten in the back blank pages of my now very well loved Enchanted Broccoli Forest that bear the names of my fellow cooks at Carberry!
ReplyDeleteI still don't cook meat--Joel does all that. Funny how that is, those habits born early and become long lasting.
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