Homemade Life

"When I walk into my kitchen today, I am not alone. Whether we know it or not, none of us is. We bring fathers and mothers and kitchen tables, and ever meal we have ever eaten. Food is never just food. It's also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be."--Molly Wizenberg, from A Homemade Life

Molly is right. Food never is just food. I think about this a lot now that the braces have completely changed my relationship to what I eat. I have to be more more thoughtful in my choices, more leisurely in my pace. It seems the act of being mindful should be meditative (and help with weight loss according to the NY Times). However, it is in fact more stress inducing. I want to sink my teeth into carrots and crusty french bread. I want a handful of honey roasted cocktail nuts. I want to eat popcorn on Oscar night. I want to take a slice of pizza to my lips and, like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, chomp it with my front teeth as I walk down Brooklyn streets. These simple desires feel large and luxurious.

I have settled into patterns of eggs and soft potatoes, oatmeal, soups and stews. Things that offer warmth and comfort, even if they sometimes feel strange and tentative in my mouth.

I like the quote above (and can't wait to read the book) and I wonder how the food that I am eating now is changing me. Am I growing soft? Will I have the urge to simplify my life as the food I take in is in its simplest, most boiled down form? Nothing can escape the natural cycle: what I take into my body to nourish me, will feed my cells, inform my choices and affect my actions. If I'm eating things that offer warmth and comfort, am I increasing my ability to be warm and comfortable for those around me? Or am I offering a more ascetic version of myself to the world, unable to take in the great variety that surrounds me and therefore, reflecting back a less juicy, meaty, crispy, spicy form of me?

I will harken back to the Alexander Graham Bell quote from a few posts back--I have been looking regretfully upon the closed door, and I am not seeing what I am bringing to my kitchen table now, at this moment in time. I have new stories that go along with the foods in my kitchen. I have learned to make egg drop soup, my mother's recipe, remembered from a Chinese cooking class she took when she was in her 20s. I bring the knowledge and memory of how much my father loved her Chicken and Hoisin Sauce (and I did too!) when she would make it on special occasions all those years ago. I have tea given to me by my sister-in-law's mother from Paris, carried lovingly across the ocean in her suitcase. I drink in these tisanes to invoke Danielle's sweetness to warm my frozen winter days. I bring the stories of my great grandmother's mamaliga (Romanian for polenta) which I never tasted, but have tried to recreate in my own pot. (So braces friendly!) I make sherried broccoli soup, a recipe I've made up. This is my story in my kitchen. This has become my homemade life.