Headline News: Woman Revitalized after Family Dinner Slump

I’ve been in a dinner slump. No joy in thinking about, preparing and putting dinner on the table. For the past few months dinner has been a job and an ordeal for me. I would have been happy to open a carton of yogurt for myself or have some cheese and crackers.

I’d been trying to figure out what was going on. I had lost my knack, my confidence and my desire. Was I slipping into a mild depression?

Time dragged on, meals were served (at home or in restaurants), and then a convergence of ideas emerged. It was like the clouds that have been coming together lately for our magnificent thunderstorms.

Here’s what happened:

1) Evan read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and became a convert.

2) My girl started Farm Camp for the third year.

3) I read Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish.

4) I went on a quest for a coffee cup, which entailed driving for 5 hours, and we ended up listening to some of the podcasts on my ipod, including a TimesTalk with Alice Waters.

These four events happened within about a week and it suddenly dawned on me that the Family Dinner I was dedicated to putting forth needed to be re-worked. Family dinner had been a big effort on my part to put dinner on the table (set generally by My Girl) and then cleaned up by Evan. It had seemed like a fair distribution of effort, but not any more.

Evan’s interest in eating in a more responsible and healthy way made me realize that he had a bigger stake in the meal than before. He had always been appreciative of the meals I prepared and served. But one night I realized that he makes rice better than I do and that the work is easier when we share it—both preparation and clean up.

My Girl was excited about Farm Camp this year because it involves more cooking. She harvested zucchini yesterday. She prides herself on her ability to clean garlic.

I was drawn to Kalish’s book by the cover and the hope that her voice would be like that of my grandmother, telling stories about how to “make do” with less. She helped me get my shower door clean with baking soda (truly, make a paste and scrub lightly—all of the sick scum comes right off without the fumes or cost of the scrubbing bubbles) and reminded me about the green husk on walnuts and how you have to let them age.

And then My Girl and I listened to Alice Waters (who I both admire and find grating) talk about teaching children to appreciate good food by growing it and preparing it. My girl is already 9, ready and able to learn more about making meal plans and preparing food.

My vision of Family Dinner has shifted. It’s no longer just the three of us sitting down to dinner I prepared. A real family dinner has to involve all of us – in decisions, in preparation, in sharing and cleaning up. So last night we had lamb chops, mashed potatoes and cauliflower (My Girl’s choice of vegetable). We all worked together to get the meal on the table. My Girl picked and washed the rosemary for the rub, prepared the garlic and mashed everything up with the mortar and pestle (then made her lunch for camp when she was done). Evan put water on to boil, cleaned and chopped the cauliflower and made the mashed potatoes. I grilled the chops and prepared the cauliflower. We sat outside in the summer evening enjoying all of it, and I knew that I was on to something and that my delight in dinner was recaptured.

A Day with Frog and Toad

I was feeling a lot like Toad yesterday, Frog’s rather glum and pessimistic friend. An iced coffee at about 4:00 finally shook it out of me, but I promised to have a brighter outlook today. So I started things off with a brisk walk and came home to stare down the three baskets of raspberries in the fridge.


The local A&P has raspberries on sale this week, three baskets for five dollars. It is actually a sweet deal when one considers that a half-gallon of organic milk is almost that. The thing with raspberries though, is you have to use ‘em or lose ‘em. So the pressure was on: what was I going to do with those berries?

I thought of a raspberry mousse, that is until I looked up the recipe and saw how many cups of heavy cream go into it, and it seems a shame to eat all those calories without the chocolate. I riffled through as many cookbooks as I could and came across this from my guru, Laurie Colwin: “God created raspberries in large part so that we would preserve them in glowing jars to stack smugly in our cupboard. Lord knows I love jam making—the ravishing color of the berries as they first combine with the sugar, the moment when the thickness is right, the satisfaction of ladling the wanton jam into the tidy jar.” See! Toad would not make jam; it is such a Frog activity.

I found some old jars and fresh lids and put them on to cook. Measured out equal parts berries to sugar and let my mind drift to other literary inspirations for the process. Suddenly I was Sal’s mom, in their kitchen, making blueberry jam. Yes, I am hopeless.



Feeling even more empowered I sliced up 9 lemons, sprinkled them with sugar, and began to mash them with a potato masher so we can have lemonade later too.

It’s 11:00 am. Maybe it’s time for a nap.

Frog and Toad illustration by Arnold Lobel
Sal and her Mom, inside cover from Blueberries for Sal, Robert McCloskey

Who is This Man and Why Will I Read Anything He Writes?

Adam Gopnik has a piece in this week’s New Yorker about cooking in literature and comes up with four ways that writers use food in their novels.

First, he says, there is the “food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it.” He says that this kind of food is a step out of the action, a little down time in the busy character’s life. What’s key, he says is that there isn’t any appraisal of the food (i.e., was it good, surprising, satisfying, disappointing). I have definitely had meals like that where the point is just to have a break. It doesn’t matter what or where it is, it is so forgettable; I just need to sit down. Gopnik writes that the food, in these instances, is “interchangeable,” and I couldn’t agree more.

The next kind of food in literature is food that the author conjures up and is “served by an author to characters in order to show who they are.” This is my dinner parry food, or why else would I have ever made (or made great effort to learn to pronounce) gougère (cheese puffs), wassail, and so on. Scrooge has his bowl of gruel before the fire, Salinger’s Esmé drinks tea, and once I served up Francis Moore Lappé’s Peanut Butter Balls at an A’s game.

Gopnik goes on to say that an author “cooks for characters in order to eat with them.” That sounds so hospitable to me. These writers are à table. We get to do everything but taste it. I feel like this when I wander through Whole Foods and they have all of those prepared meals on display. I never buy the Nut-Crusted Trout, the Roast Beef with Grilled Red Onions and Bleu Cheese or the Chili Lime Basil Tofu Salad, but it’s entertaining to glide past the perfect-looking dishes with their rosemary spear garnishes.

Last is the author that cooks something up and “actually serves the reader.” These writers, according to Gopnik, invite us into the kitchen and make us feel as if we’re with the characters in real time. Think of Ma Ingalls cooking with her spider on the prairie. My mind goes to film with Stanley Tucci whipping up some eggs in Big Night. Gopnik looks at Ian McEwan’s Saturday, where the protagonist cooks up a Bouillabaisse. That’s a memorable scene for me because I love to sit around in a kitchen and watch people cook. More than that, I love to actually cook with other people. Even though I write about my attempts at getting the dinner on the table, my joy in cooking comes from the joint effort. I like chopping while my father-in-law sautés. I like to grill while someone else makes the salad. I love being in the kitchen with The Husband as we pull a meal together. And one of my biggest thrills is cooking with The Girl, who cannot only crack an egg, but knows how to measure and sift.

I "heart" gingerbread

In all modesty there are a couple things I'm good at: 1) I make The Girl call me Mrs. Parker when we're out in the car because I am so darn good at finding great parking spots. Even in Manhattan. I don't have to worry about alternate side of the street parking, but I know where the goods spaces are and when they're likely to be available. 2) I know how to use the web generally (and Google, specifically)really well. I do all kinds of crazy searches to satisfy my quest for mostly useless information.

It's the latter skill that has failed me today.

Once I had little heart-shaped baking dish: glazed inside, unglazed outside. It was just the right size for MFK Fisher's wonderful gingerbread recipe in How to Cook a Wolf. My memory is that it was made by a Marin County company called Amnion Ware, but when I google that I get all kinds of hits about amniotic fluid or pet medication.

I've looked at all kinds of heart-shaped baking dishes and none are the right size (about 6 inches tall and 2 1/2 inches deep). I'm beginning to think I made the whole thing up.

Still, it's a snow day, and what would be better after dinner than some spicy gingerbread?

Here's the recipe:

Edith's Gingerbread

1/4 C shortening
1/4 C sugar
1/2 C molasses
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. salt
3/4 C boiling water
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 1/4 C flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 beaten egg

Cream shortening and sugar. Sift in the spices and flour and baking powder together. Beat the 1/2 tsp. soda into the molasses until it is light and fluffy, and add to the shortening and sugar.

Add the 1/4 tsp soda to the boiling water, and then add it alternately with the sifted dry ingredients. Fold in the beaten egg when all is mixed well, pour into a greased and floured pan [preferably a heart-shaped pan bought in Berkeley over 20 years ago], and bake about 20 minutes at 325F. This mixture will seem much to thin to make a cake [she's absolutely right!], but do not increase the quantity of flour, as many doubting cooks have tried to do [Not I Mary Frances. I always take you at your word!]

Pasta and Prose

Here's a book recommendation for young readers and people who just like good books: Granny Torrelli Makes Soup, by Sharon Creech. It's a charming story about friendship, love, family, and food. I read it aloud to my 6th grade classes, and they were enthralled the by story and the complicated emotions. Our family listened to it on tape over a long car ride this summer, and there were parts that were so beautiful they made me cry. Granted, I cry easily, and no, I wasn't driving.

Most of the story takes place in the kitchen, and Creech lovingly describes Granny Torrelli making a chicken and pasta soup, homemade cavatelli, meatballs, and spareribs. I've never made homemade pasta, but this book got me as far as buying the semolina flour. It's still in my cupboard, but hey, that's the closest I've ever been to making homemade pasta. Pretty inspiring, hmmm? There's also a simple salad of oranges, olive oil, salt and pepper, and parsley. Doesn't that sound refreshing and easy?

Poetry Month

I work in schools, and for some reason April is poetry month. I'm glad schools don't wait for February to teach African-American history or March to teach about women in history, but many of the English classes I know save poetry for April.

I have many, many favorite poems, but there is one that has a long history with me. I found it in the 70's in a free paper called The Berkeley Monthly. I loved this poem so much that I asked a friend who did calligraphy (he also made his own chain-mail from wire, could quote endless Monty Python bits, and became a firefighter) to write it out for me on parchment. It hung in my kitchen for years, and then in preparing for one cross-country move or another I took it off the matting, glass, and clips and rolled it up.

I still have it, though the paper is cracking in parts. Some might say that it's treacley, but I like that sometimes. I think it says less about what my life was like in the 70's, but more about one slice of the life I wanted to create for myself. I had some Julia Child on my shelf, but its pages weren't as worn as Laurel's Kitchen or Diet for a Small Planet. At the same time, I kept a little card in my purse that held the complete text of the ERA. It was a confusing time, maybe more so because I was so young and trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.

Biscuits Made-From-Scratch

I had forgotten how good it feels
To cook slowly and with patience,
To chop things fine and sauté, to bake and boil
To mix with care, to keep the oven warm all day
Through breakfast, lunch and dinner,
To clear and clean continually
Each meal's debris, to wipe
The tables and mop the floors
To fold the laundry, to set
The accounts in order
And color with the kids
To act as Solomon for all disputes
And nurse to every hurt,
To take the time to make things
More than tidy,
With flowers arranged just so.

The separate lives come and go
In the house, and I am
That day's center, the base
Each one touches.

I had forgotton nurturing
And in this slow, summer rain,
The soft gray sky, found again
What pleasure there is to start
The day with biscuits made-from-scratch
And end it with a bedtime story,
To narrow my world view
To those things I can touch
Only with my hands.

—Dian Hanley