Meditating ktichen

“Are you going to cook for the week?” my dad asked.

“Why would I do that?” 

“So you don’t have to be bothered during the week,” my dad’s voice was earnest. So far away, my parents look for ways to be helpful in my everyday life. For my dad, truncating my cooking schedule seemed an easy fix. But cooking for me is as much the point as eating the food I prepare. Anyone who knows me knows how much I adore food and how much gravity equating the two holds.

But I have discovered I enjoy the process.

When I lived in South Africa I cooked out of necessity. Tucked away in a village with no refrigeration (except the frigidness of the tin roofed concrete house in winter) anything that wasn’t bagobe (the staple food akin to grits) and soya mince (soy based MSG filled faux meat) had to be made from scratch. Peace Corps volunteers that preceded me had done the heavy lifting, they had converted recipes from home into ingredients readily available in the local economy. Everything from samosas to beagles, and cinnamon rolls to Kahlua. 

I started out with the bread based foods. Proofing yeast and waiting for dough to rise were mildly time-consuming tasks that gave me something to do when school was out when I arrived in my village. Cinnamon rolls were delicious, but they were also my initial companion, until I made friends. later it was beagles, rise and punch down and rise and punch down. Form a ring, boil and then bake. Again, a methodical all day task. 

I graduated to samosas and enchiladas. I taught my host family how to make mac and cheese and French toast. But back then I didn’t love the process. I appreciated the process, loved the product. But a few months before I departed south Africa when the heat became too much and burst my bag of tomatoes, enticing every fruit fly in the area to descend like a storm cloud on my produce, I gave up. I turned to boiled eggs and peanut butter sandwiches. I didn’t cook anything of substance and food became something to prevent me from starving.

Back in the US food receded again. It was something that I could purchase as easy as I could make it. I was on the road a lot so eating out was my norm. 

In New Zealand, cooking became a tandem sport. Ess and I cooked together most nights. We didn’t have a lot of variety but we had a rhythm that we fell into.

Uganda brought me back to cooking. Less about survival, cooking in Uganda was a mandatory if I wanted any kind of diversity. Three basic ingredients (eggplant, tomatoes, and a kale-like green) forced me to get creative.  But my kitchen was small and shared and so cooking then was about the product, not the process.

About a year ago I fell into cooking again. I can’t pinpoint the moment or the meal, only that now, searching for recipes or finding new ingredients has become as much the point as the Persian rice or moussaka or lemon lava cake. I am soothed by the measuring, by the whisking, the tasting and tweaking of flavors on my spoon. It is what leads me to make fresh baked bread on a Tuesday night, because the vegetable soup I am making would be better with bread. It is what calls me to search out lard, because I want to make tortillas and the ones I made with oil didn’t seem quite right. It is what has me crafting lemon curd on a Friday night, peering into the lightly bubbling pot- the scent of citrus wafting to my nose, so it will be ready for the cake I’m making tomorrow.

Eating isn’t the only point anymore…the process is.

Not every meal is a success. Some days I sweat over a recipe that is less than stellar, or bring some vision in my head to a bear only to discover I should have left it there. But even when it fails, even when I am eating something mediocre or attempting to doctor something bad, the process is soothing. The process extracts my day from the forefront of my brain and lets me be…in my kitchen.

Book Reflections

When president Obama was elected I wrote about this moment with my nieces in mind. Three of them. I was amazed that they would live only in a world where a black president was possible. A world, that until that election, I didn’t think I’d ever see. 

It felt like such a turning point. It felt so hopeful. Never mind the racist posts that greeted Obama after his election. Never mind the bulletproof glass he and Michelle stood behind just in case.

I lived in “just in case” for at least a year. Then I settled into the assumption that although the racism would continue, he was safe. What I didn’t count on was that the rest of us weren’t. 

Truthfully, I never thought wearing black skin was safe. I knew better. I understood what black people have always understood, that things happen to us when there are no prying eyes to observe, and if you survive, no one will believe your version of what happened. 

Such dark thoughts.

I’ll return to thoughts of my nieces now, with something more like the hope I found myself cloaked in in 2008. I want to spin them dizzy in a world where black presidents are possible and black skin a gift. Fiction seems the best respite. Fiction seems the most realistic place for that kind of optimistic landscape. Fiction can weave in the reality of a black man in the White House and make a kinky haired black girl the hero in the story.

Yesterday I began my search…again. It wasn’t the first time I went in search of books for my nieces. Thinking back to my beloved books growing up, I notice now that the books of my youth have one thing in common. Not a single main character looks like me. Not Anastasia Krumpnik, or Harriet the Spy, or Ramona Quimby. Not Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web, not anyone from the Lion the Witch and Wardrobe or from Bridge to Terabithia. As integrated as my parents made my toybox, the bookshelf proved more palely homogenous.

Books for children seem to have gotten more diverse since I’ve gotten old; there are folks of all kinds of backgrounds in books these days. But I am difficult, and diversity isn’t enough, I have a few other requirements for what I’d most like to present my nieces with:

1.       Person of color protagonist 

2.       No historical stories 

3.       Female protagonist 

4.       No love interest to live “happily ever after with."

 

What I’ve found is that two out of the four requirements is highly probable in a book, three out of four possible, and four out of four I am having difficulty in finding. I can’t claim to have exhausted the children’s book section of any bookstore or library but oh how frustrating my internet searches have been as I find books with great stories no doubt, but ones that don’t reflect my nieces or the values I want them to have. 

My 11 year-old-niece adores dystopian novels. Hunger Games, Divergent…I went in search of something in that genre for her. I found Tankborn. Tankborn met three of the four (1,2, and 4) but romance snuck its way in. 

The things is, my requirements aren’t arbitrary. I want protagonists of color because I don’t want my nieces to believe that the default or norm, is whiteness. I want them to understand that the world, and the people in it, is a varied place. I want them to see themselves and others reflected in that world not during black history month or for special messages, but just because it is a Tuesday and someone is walking to the store. 

I also don’t want the brownness of characters to relegate them to some historical context of suffering and overcoming. I don’t want stories that have characters that reflect my brown and fuzzy haired nieces to have to relate to the civil rights movement or slavery. I want it to be in the here and now or in the dystopian future where historical context doesn’t limit the types of stories or triumphs they can have.

I want them to see girls and women as the protagonists because the Bechdel test is a low bar and yet so many movies and books fail it. Having a female protagonist isn’t a guarantee that the threshold is met but it goes a long way in showing that girls don’t have to be helpless and boring…girls can be smart and funny and kickass or make mistakes and learn from them. All traits I hope my nieces possess.

Finally, point four is about NOT having a romantic interest. I’m not anti-love. One day I hope my nieces are cloaked in the love of a partner. But at the tender ages of 7,9, and 11 I don’t want them focused on that. I don’t want them to fall into the trap of believing that happily ever after is the result of someone “completing them” or some such nonsense. I want them to understand that people can be friends – deeply and meaningfully- and not have to be more than that. A person can be special and not be a boy/girlfriend. 

While Hunger Games doesn’t fixate on the romance angle (although the movies elevate it in importance to some degree) it is still a component of the books. Still a component of Katniss’ world. Divergent does the same. Fairy tales are based on the premise of one true love. It is all so cloying and transparent. Not yet teens, I want my nieces to explore a world where they and their friends are enough to tackle any new adventures.

Finding books that meet my threshold has proven difficult. I’ve gone back to the classics…maybe classics is a stretch…I’ve gone back to my childhood, back to my love of Judy Blume and Madeline L’engle who meet some of the rules and fall short in others. I’ve researched The Lost Girl and will check it out to see if it is any good (even as I already know it fails rule 4). More than anything I realize that rather than complain I need to do pull a J.K. Rowling and write what I want to see in the world…I hope inspiration hits me soon because my nieces aren’t getting any younger and their minds are being filled…and not according to my preferred rules.

A

Does anyone have a good idea for a children’s book?

Tomatoes-a-Plenty

Flush with tomatoes. So flush with tomatoes I had them withering in the fridge. And, no surprise, Wednesday’s CSA box had more of the same. I’ve had cherry tomatoes and plum tomatoes, and heirloom ones. SO many that making tabbouleh and other salads just isn’t enough to stem the tide.

Last night, nestled over kisir (turkish tabbouleh), haloumi, and sautéed mushrooms I contemplated my fate. I had to figure out some way to consume 7,000 pounds of tomatoes (only a slight exaggeration) or resign myself to being part of the American masses that throws away a quarter of my food. It was well past 7pm but I had it in my mind to do something.

Call it impulse. Call it meditation. Call it a need to rest my mind in light of all the things that are happening in the world right now that cause me to rage out. Whatever you call it, it involved me humming to myself while I peeled tomatoes and one and a half heads of garlic simmered at low heat in a ½ cup of olive oil 

I peeled, and peeled. No blanching because it was hot and I’m impatient. Instead, I quartered each tomato and with a thin blade started at a corner and pulled down. 45 minutes later I had a full pot. I adapted this recipe from one that a friend sent me a while ago called the four hour tomato sauce. That one calls for half a cup of oil (which I find excessively oily), canned tomatoes instead of fresh, and the water from boiled mushrooms for an extra layer of flavor (I was out of mushrooms).

I made do. 

After simmering the garlic until it was brown and tender (like me!) i poured it into the boiling and dissolving tomatoes with a few pinches of my homemade rosemary salt, and a dollop of tomato paste (maybe a teaspoon). And then I just let it simmer. 

Initially the sauce was watery and I wondered if it would ever reduce. I put it on low heat and went about my evening (namely, baking brownies) and almost forget it was there until I washed my dishes and looked over. The sauce was thicker. More of a pinkish red than the vibrant crimson the canned tomatoes produce (my tomatoes varied in color form yellow to green to red) but it tasted divine.

Into the freezer it went, ready and waiting for me to make lasagna. Maybe next week.