I haven’t watched Oliver! in years, but I thought of it recently, when I made Richard Nixon’s Chicken Casserole. Good food was not unknown in 1968, the year in which Nixon was elected, and though I can’t attest to this fact from personal knowledge – I was born in 1968, and not yet able to eat even my mother’s notoriously terrible food –  I submit the Food Glorious Food movie sequence as evidence. Good food existed, and was being paraded in front of movie orphans that year.

Why, then, was Nixon eating that casserole?

What is the point of being leader of the free world if you’re stuck eating bad food?

As leader of the free world, wouldn’t Nixon have had both knowledge of what might be considered good food, as well as the ability to arrange some for himself?

It occurred to me that perhaps there was some correlation between the quality of leadership, and the quality of the food they ate – you know, garbage in, garbage out. With this in mind, I sought out a recipe from another notoriously bad president, and U.S. history being what it is, had no difficulty finding one.

Herbert Hoover, to the best of my recollection, was the president who promised voters a chicken in every pot if elected, and delivered instead the Great Depression (oops). The Depression was hardly his fault – he was elected in 1928 and the stock market collapse occurred the following year – but it occurred on his watch, and to describe his handling of the crisis as poor is to be generous. He rejected the idea that government intervention could help, and some of the steps he did take, such as signing the Smoot-Hawley Act, only served to make matters worse.

I thought I knew it all about Hoover, but after a bit more research, I uncovered a far more complex picture. Hoover’s World War One record was probably the most interesting and unexpected reading:  As chairman of the Commission for Relief of Belgium, he obtained and distributed millions of tons of food, negotiating with the Germans to allow food shipments. When the United States entered the war, he became head of the U.S. Food Administration, securing the nation’s food supply, and when the war ended, the USFA became the American Relief Administration, which Hoover continued to head, and which provided food to millions in central and eastern Europe. He headed a similar program after the second World War, providing food to school children in post-war Germany.

It is no small irony that the man who is today remembered for failing to put a chicken in every pot was, in his day, widely known for securing a food supply for millions of people.

My book of historical and presidential recipes – Eating with Uncle Sam – contains a number of chicken recipes, but rather disappointingly, there isn’t a Herbert Hoover chicken recipe among them. Instead, the book contains a cookie recipe from the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library – for the rather unusual-sounding Sour Cream Cookies. So, I gave them a try.

The recipe is a bit oddly written, in that it doesn’t actually tell the cook when the key ingredient, sour cream, should be added. I resolved that by simply adding it in the order listed in the ingredients, which worked out fine. I expected a slight sourness to the cookies, but there was none at all. The cookies turned out soft and moist, almost like little cakes, with a delicate flavor of vanilla and brown sugar. They could be frosted, as the recipe suggests, with a bit of vanilla frosting, or anything, really – but they are lovely on their own, simple and the perfect complement to any beverage they are served with.

It’s a nice recipe, easy to make on a moment’s notice, requiring no unusual ingredients, no significant effort, and no pre-planning from the cook. In that sense, it’s similar to the Nixon recipe, which also relies on ingredients the average cook would have on hand. But the Hoover recipe stands apart, in using fresh ingredients – and the resulting cookie is one that I liked enough to make several times, for different occasions, and for just having around the house when someone wants a cookie.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

As with so many things, it doesn’t work quite like that at my house. It could, of course, but when I started my little garden, I immediately filled the planting beds with every type of herb and four or so zucchini plants; later that year, I had learned the answers to important gardening questions, such as:  What Does Slug Damage Look Like?  How Do You Get Rid of Powdery Mildew? and the all-important, Why Shouldn’t I Grow Four Zucchini Plants?

When the main beds were full, The Child requested a spot to grow strawberries, and located an unused sunny spot right next to the similarly unused shed. The shed once had a function – it stored gardening equipment owned and theoretically used by The Departed, but left behind when he departed and subsequently discovered to be unusable (weed whacker with missing cords, leaky gas can for use with nonexistent lawn mower), expired (10-pound bags of moss-be-gone and fertilizer, each with a few handfulls missing), or simply unrelated to gardening (half-full cans of latex paint, an outgrown bicycle). When the beds were put in, I put a few useful-seeming implements into a small box, which I stored in a convenient location, near the beds. So the large shed sits, mostly empty and completely out of sight. 

We put a small bed next to the shed, and the cleaning lady gifted several strawberry plants, and since there was a little space left, I added a rhubarb plant. I made muffins the first year, and posted the recipe here.  Each year since, I notice one day that my blog suddenly has a lot of traffic, most of it coming from pinterest and all of it going to that one recipe.

When this happens, I go outside and discover I have rhubarb, and lots of it. Then I make muffins, too. And jam. And cookies. And a pie, if I feel like pie, or a cake, if I feel like cake. If my neighbor has brought apples from her tree, I make rhubarb applesauce and share it with her.

I give rhubarb away to neighbors, and when they’ve had enough, too, I freeze some. Sometimes I use it during the winter, and even then, I often still have some when winter becomes spring and rhubarb muffin bakers re-appear on this blog, and my rhubarb re-appears outside.

Blackberries are a somewhat similar story, or at least, they were until this year. They grow wild in the area, by which I mean, untended spaces are quickly overrun with masses of thorny bushes. They crowd out everything else, and make nice homes for bunnies and rodents. There are service companies that have entire businesses based on removing blackberry bushes, some of which employ herds of goats to deal with the problem.

We live next door to a community college with a large property, some of it undeveloped, and while this means that there are an assortment of critters that live there and pay us occasional visits – a regrettable assortment of moles, rats, raccoons, as well as, more pleasantly, rabbits and the occasional deer – it also means that every year, in August, I can walk the college grounds on my lunch hour and pick blackberries for baking, for eating, and of course, for freezing.

That is, until last year. The the bulldozers appeared; the blackberries disappeared. Bunnies appear in my back yard, to the delight of my cats; rats appear in my neighbors’ garage, to the dismay of everyone on our block.

I could have found another blackberry-picking spot last year, but there was no urgency about it, since I was still working through the numerous bags in my freezer, not to mention an ample supply of blackberry jam, so I didn’t. This year, I made muffins, and upon discovering the muffins were quite delicious, decided to make a second batch, only to find I had finally exhausted the seemingly inexhaustible supply of frozen wild blackberries.

Finding the recipe – like having endless, free wild blackberries – was a bit of good fortune; I received a review copy of The Harvest Baker, by Ken Haedrich. I had previously enjoyed a book he co-authored with the late, great Marion Cunningham, the Maple Syrup Cookbook, so I was pleased to receive another of his books and give it a try.

As baking books go, it’s pretty straightforward, which is one of the things I enjoy about Haedrich’s books: They are meant to be cooked from. Yes, there are a couple of recipes that veer off into Look At Me Being Unique territory, notably a recipe for Whole Wheat Blueberry Beet Muffins, which are certainly colorful, if not enticing.

I showed the photo of those to The Child, who remarked, You know, we can all learn something from Jurassic Park: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Still, that was just one recipe, and there are numerous others that we found incredibly enticing. As it happens, The Child’s favorite cookies – which I have, oddly, never shared on this site – are Lemon Ricotta cookies, soft, tender, and tart, so I was delighted to find a similar offering, in muffin form: Ricotta, Lemon, and Blackberry Muffins.

They were everything I hoped they would be: Tender and light muffins, brightly flavored with lemon and studded with sweet-tart blackberries. They don’t require any special equipment, just a mixing bowl, and if you happen to have blackberries in your freezer, you can toss them into the batter still frozen.

The Child adored them, and they were gone in just a couple of days, leaving me with the problem I never expected to have: I had no more blackberries with which to make another batch. There were other recipes of interest, so I did make more muffins, notably a batch of strawberry rhubarb muffins that were made special by the addition of some cardamom to the batter – rhubarb and cardamom, like rhubarb and strawberries, are made for each other.

But what The Child wanted most was more of these lovely muffins, so we’ve already begun to keep an eye out for the white blackberry flowers that, in August, will replenish our stock, even if we have to venture a bit further away to pick them.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

I asked what I could contribute to the meal and was told: anything, as long as it’s either gluten-free or vegan, ideally both, but that’s not always possible, and really, anything is lovely.

I spent many hours searching my cookbooks and the internet, and arrived at a disheartening conclusion: There is very little food that is both vegan and gluten-free that I personally want to eat, much less make and serve to others. I consider bringing a platter of decoratively arranged vegetables – an actual recipe from a cookbook I bought on a layover in Iceland – but eventually settled on some simple baked apples, which turned out okay, which is about the most I can say for them.

I’ve made baked apples before, many times, with quite some success, so I pondered my failure at some length the next day. The problem, as I see it, is this: It is easy to find a good recipe when you are searching for something you want to enjoy. Oh! you think, This should be good, and you go off and make it and maybe make little adjustments to suit your taste or align with the contents of your pantry.

The process of choosing a recipe because it isn’t something is a different one. It begins with a firm statement: No. I looked at and rejected dozens of recipes because of some butter or some eggs or, god forbid, a pastry crust.  I know that some baked goods can be modified to be gluten free, but I’ve learned from the hard experience of heart-rendingly bad banana bread that the process is not simply a one-to-one substitution of gluten-free flour for plain. Rather more frustratingly, at the end of the process, an imperfect effort to be inclusive of someone else’s dietary choices will be greeted not with thanks, but with a large serving of disappointment followed by a chaser of regret.

Such was the fate of my baked apples, eaten without the enthusiasm that greets my usual dessert offerings (Oatmeal Pie, Sugar Cream Pie). To be fair, it was also the fate of this year’s mince pies, or more specifically, the subgroup of mince pies made with store-bought gluten-free crusts.

The mince pie baker and I were on the same team on the annual trivia contest, and we didn’t fare very well there, either. When we said goodbye, we vowed: Next year, we’ll do better.

With twelve months to plan, I began, but decided that rather than researching recipes that are primarily defined by what they lack, I would simply try to notice recipes that happen to be vegan or gluten-free in the usual course of looking at cookbooks for recipes that I might want to try, if the mood takes me. I theorized that, as with a Google search, phrasing a query slightly differently might produce very different results.

This is a long-winded way of explaining why I was excited to learn that vegetarian food writer Deborah Madison had published a new cookbook, In My Kitchen.  Even without an actual need for vegetarian recipes, I would have been excited, because I’ve appreciated Madison since the day I tried out her Smoky Brussels Sprouts on Toast, a dish that quickly found its way into the regular dinner rotation at my house, either with the cheese toasts when I wanted something substantial, or without them, when a diet banished carbohydrates from my menu. The cookbook from which I sourced that recipe – The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone – is, unfortunately, massive, in a way that doesn’t really lend itself to perusing before bed.

As luck would have it, I received a digital preview copy of In My Kitchen, which readily lends itself to reading whenever I have a few minutes and my iPad handy. The book offers a nice assortment of recipes that are all clearly marked vegan, or gluten free, or if they happen to be neither, suggest modifications that can be made to accommodate dietary restrictions. Perhaps as important – or perhaps more important – it includes quite a few recipes that sound delicious and don’t require any unusual ingredients. So one day, when I felt inspired to try something new, I chose her recipe for a vegetarian stew.

It was easy to make, and easy to modify, which I needed to do, since I didn’t have exactly the number of bell peppers called for, and apparently should have given my supply of saffron a decent burial several years ago. Although these are things that seem like they should be problems, they weren’t; it’s a forgiving recipe if you follow the broad outlines and taste as you go.

The real test of any recipe, of course, is whether it meets the approval of my toughest critic, The Child. She pronounced it a keeper, but rather more reassuringly, helped herself to seconds that evening, and took leftovers to school for her lunch the following day.

Not long after, I was delighted to discover Madison was giving an author talk and signing cookbooks at an event at the local cookbook store. I went with another vegan friend, and made a surprise discovery: Deborah Madison, foremost vegetarian cookbook writer, is not a vegetarian. She signed my cookbook and we chatted about the fact that it’s possible for steak-lovers to appreciate a good vegetable dish, too.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

I have only the vaguest recollection of the major news events of my early childhood. There were angry protests against Vietnam on college campuses, but I was barely out of diapers when most of them occurred, and only two years old when the National Guard fired on students at Kent State. Nixon resigned when I was five, but the things I remember seeing on TV that year have nothing to do with him: I watched Hee-Haw and Lawrence Welk with my grandfather, and the Wonderful World of Disney with the whole family – whoever happened to be around.

As I got older, more of the world seeped into my consciousness. I remember images of long lines waiting to fill their cars during the oil shock and boats overloaded with people fleeing someplace in Asia, and not understanding why either was happening or even important. Other things made far more of an impression on me: The filth and graffiti of New York City, full of garbage-strewn lots, smoke-scorched abandoned buildings, and a constant fear of random, violent crime.

Every year at school, I would make a new best friend to replace the one from the previous year, whose parents had fled the city for the safety of the suburbs. My mom taught me how to stay safe from muggers (be aware of your surroundings); at school, I learned history and math from worn-out textbooks, and how to stay safe during a Soviet nuclear attack from regular safety drills (duck and cover, kids!).

Sometimes suddenly, but mostly gradually, things changed. Glamour replaced hippies. The abandoned buildings gentrified in spite of slogans spray-painted on them (Die Yuppie Scum), and New York City stopped being unlivable and became, instead, unaffordable.

The Child did not live any of this, and does not understand that her life will follow the same arc. I remember the defining event of her early childhood, 9/11, but she was mercifully unaware of the horror of that day. She did not spend it making frantic phone calls and gasping for air. She watched Teletubbies and fell asleep as I cried about the world ending.

On Election Day, I asked her to sit with me, watching the returns, fully expecting to spend an evening sharing a historic moment: Mother and daughter, independent women, witnessing the election of our first female president.

I changed the channel repeatedly as a rather different story unfolded, then went to bed late and with a sense of unease.

Neither of us slept that night.

The Child went to school the next day, to a cocoon of sheltered, privileged children who suddenly experienced the shock of learning that the world that cannot always be predicted or controlled. The teachers, she told me, did not even bother trying to teach. Nobody cares about chemistry when the world is ending, and her history teacher couldn’t stop crying long enough to give her prepared lesson.

I would have thought a history teacher would have some perspective, but then, she is also young – too young to remember the Berlin Wall coming down, and thus, too young to remember the constant state of fear we lived in before that event. Too young to know that we roller-skated and played with Rubik’s cubes and marveled at a gadget called a Walkman in spite of it all.

The next night, I sat up with The Child until the small hours of morning, listening to her fears, offering her perspective, and knowing as I did that it is something that cannot be taught; it can only be learned through a lifetime of experiences.

The world did not end with Nixon, I explained, and by the time he died, he was sufficiently redeemed that I got a day off work.

This is different, she tells me, and I know that for her, it is.

I don’t often spend time thinking about Nixon, but he has been on my mind since that night in November. I watched All The President’s Men, a couple of times. And then, just before Inauguration Day, the LA Times ran an article about presidential recipes, including this one: Richard Nixon’s Chicken Casserole.

The recipe is variously credited to Nixon’s wife or one of his daughters, but the article’s author doesn’t quite know who or attempt to resolve the issue. I would hazard a guess that it’s a Nixon family recipe culled from the Nixon Presidential Library, but don’t quote me on that. I have a book of presidential recipes that includes other Nixon family recipes – Tricia’s wedding cake and Pat’s meat loaf, among others – but no casserole. That particular book also contains an entry from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library for a dish called Liver Deluxe, a recipe that probably explains why he was voted out after one term.

The Nixon casserole certainly is in the tradition of late-60s/early 70s food; with the exception of the onion and eggs, everything it contains has been processed and packaged. I’ll give credit where it is due, though – it is very easy to throw together on a weeknight, and doesn’t require any difficult to find ingredients, exotic cookware, or challenging techniques. If you can open a can, stir, and turn on an oven, you can cook a meal fit for a president.

If you’re looking askance at the ingredient list, well, you should be. The mayo plus cheese plus eggs make this possibly the fattiest thing I’ve ever eaten. One of the ways you will know it’s done is when an oil slick forms on a nicely browned surface. In spite of this, though, it is easy to make and – if your arteries are up to it – oddly delicious.

The Child enjoyed hers, though she picked out the broccoli – not because she dislikes broccoli, but because she dislikes overprocessed vegetables. When she returned her plate to the kitchen, she peeled herself a carrot, then sat on the couch, munching it and watching South Park.

I have never seen her do this, so I ask. A carrot?

I needed something to cancel out all that unhealthiness. How did you survive all that 1970s food?

I’m not really sure, I tell her. But just like the 1970s, somehow, we survived.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

I wander outside, deciding to take some photos of the hotel for the online review I will eventually write. I start with the pool.

One of the two boys I met at breakfast sees me, the younger one, and comes over to talk. He asks me if I can unlock the pool, but since he’s a bit young to be swimming alone, and I am reluctant to supervise, I try to explain that he needs to get an adult, maybe his mother, to open the gate with her room key.

He tells me again, the pool is locked, and I tell him, I can’t open it, and finally he manages to get across to me that it isn’t just locked to him, it’s locked to everyone. They are doing maintenance. Maybe someone will open it later.

He’s waiting for that someone, in the parking lot, wearing his swim trunks, hotel towel slung over his shoulder.

When The Child was little, she loved the hotel pools too, and waited eagerly for us to take her there, but she hasn’t used this one since the night we arrived.

Do you live here? the boy wants to know.

My family lives here, I tell him. I’m visiting them for a week.

What room are they in? he asks.

Oh, they live in the town, I say, pointing past the pool. Over that way.

Where do you live then?

I live in Seattle, I tell him, but I can tell by the look on his face that he doesn’t understand what that means. It’s near the Pacific Ocean, do you know where that is?

He still doesn’t understand, and as I’m trying to think of a good way to explain it to him, he demands:  Do you have a house or not?

Yes, I reply.

He sits on the asphalt, towel on his lap, and begins picking at a piece of tar. It comes loose, and he peels it up.

Whose house is it? He wants to know.

My house, I explain.

He furrows his brow, regarding me carefully. Are you a landlord?

No, it’s my house and I own it and live in it.

He is perplexed. I ask where he lives.

We used to live with my mom’s friend but she kicked us out. So now we’re staying here.

His older brother approaches: Do you want to walk the cat?

I head back to my hotel room, but the card key doesn’t work, so I get a replacement at the front desk, and as I walk back to my room I see the boy, walking a large orange cat around a barren parking lot, toward the pool he can’t swim in right now, but maybe later.

The official breakfast hours end, but nobody asks me to leave or begins clearing the room. A woman comes in, talking on her phone, followed by two boys; they sit at the table farthest from me. The woman continues her conversation, but the boys get up to get breakfast, passing my table on their way to the waffle maker. The younger boy doesn’t notice me, but the older boy stops at my table.

He looks at me intently, then asks, as politely as anyone has ever addressed me, Are you having a good day so far?

I tell him I am, and ask how his day is, and he tells me: Just fine, ma’am.

I take my coffee and leave the breakfast room to the brothers, who play games on their cell phones as they eat.

It turns out that we’re at the right place. Our hotel was a different hotel until recently, and is now being renovated. We wait patiently in the crowded temporary reception area, as the line of people ahead of me complain about their rooms, or request extra towels for the pool, which isn’t indoors as I had thought. It is outside, sandwiched between an asphalt parking lot and an empty field, behind a chain link fence.

My cousin says he’ll wait, just in case.

By the time I get to the front of the line, The Child has decided we aren’t staying there, and I have realized we are; everything is prepaid, and I cannot afford a second hotel bill. I ask the desk clerk what we should do about that if our plans change – you know, family – and she nods and smiles and says we can arrange a refund for nights we don’t use. The Child wants to go elsewhere now, but I am too tired, and point toward the pool.

If we don’t like it, we’ll go elsewhere tomorrow. Or maybe the next day, since tomorrow is July 4.

Our room is serviceable, at best, but it’s fine by me, so my cousin takes off in his vintage Trans Am, leaving me a serviceable Saturn, in case I want to go somewhere.

I don’t.

We sit in the hotel room for a while, and I send a message to my one local friend, who I’ve known since second grade in New York City, and who somehow landed here as a college professor. He drives over, and gamely sits with me at the hotel pool, chatting and swatting mosquitos and watching The Child do handstands in the pool, until finally we are all exhausted and call it a night.

We sleep well, and the next night watch fireworks over the lake with my cousin, singing patriotic songs with people we’ve never met, making room on the grass so that everyone has a place to sit, just as they made room for us when we arrived, without so much as a blanket to sit on.

I relate. I spent New Year’s Day canceling email subscriptions and unliking Facebook pages of food magazines and newsletters I once enjoyed. Goodbye Bon Appetit, goodbye Tasting Table. I think they’ll miss me about as much as I’ll miss them, which is to say, not at all. It’s been quite a long time since I read any of their posts, mostly because what I want is dinner, while what they are trying to do is entice me to try something trendy and inedible.

Please click, they beg repeatedly, but I don’t want to and eventually I get tired of being asked. Unlike, unfollow, breathe deeply and exhale.

Toby’s approach is less passive than mine; he’s threatening to write a book called Quinoa, Kale, and 50 Other Foods that Taste Like Ass. He wants to know if I’d buy a copy, and the answer is, of course I would, and not just because he’s a friend. I refuse to eat things just Because They’re Healthy. I like to eat healthy things that taste good.

The food faddists are rapidly ruining those, too. I like cauliflower; in fact, I love the stuff, as does The Child. But somewhere along the line, cauliflower became a substitute for carbohydrates (cauliflower rice, anyone?), and somewhere after that, someone decided it was also a good substitute for lime sherbet. I’m joking, but only a little. The PBS blogger who wrote that article, oddly, appears to be serious.

Also being serious is the blogger who gave us Frambled Eggs, a post that Epicurious, in a cruel jab at people with some knowledge of basic culinary skills – not to mention, good food – filed under “Expert Advice.” If rubbery eggs are your thing, then by all means, use his technique. Bon appetit!

I feel like I’m in a small minority that is getting smaller every day. I went to an actual bookstore not long ago (remember those?), and spent some time checking out the cookbooks. Pioneer Woman? Check.  The Minimalist Baker? Check. In fact, there were lots of pretty cookbooks by familiar food blogger names, while actual cookbooks by trained chefs (Dorie Greenspan, Mario Batali) were in somewhat short supply. No, the cookbook section in question was not a small one.

Turmeric may well have healthy properties, but that doesn’t mean anyone can or should eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, even if one truly believes it is sourced from the Fountain of Youth. Given its increasingly frequent appearance in recipes and food blogs, it must be.  But if I die an early death, will it be because the only bottle of turmeric I’ve ever owned has never been opened and dates to the pre-barcode era?

I’m willing to take that risk, and opt for a bit of cumin, or oregano, or some variety. Variety, I hear, is the spice of life. Not turmeric.

Another minority I belong to: American Citizens Against Zoodles. I’ve never used a spiralizer, and I’ve never eaten a zoodle. As much as I like zucchini, it isn’t a substitute for spaghetti, and at my house, never will be. If I want to be hungry an hour after I eat dinner, I’ll order Chinese food. It’s much less work.

I love to see classic recipes improved upon, and there are many good reasons to do this, such as simplifying a technique or using ingredients for that can be found easily by a home cook. This is not the same thing as throwing a new ingredient into an old classic and pretending it’s a wonderful, modern update. The world needs both dill pickles and chicken piccata, but it most assuredly does not need a recipe for Dill Pickle Chicken Piccata (something Toby swears he saw the other day but which Google, in its merciful and infinite wisdom, refuses to find for me).

My cookbooks aren’t full of pretty pictures of recipes that don’t work, so they don’t live on the coffee table next to a stack of pristine copies of Architectural Digest. Instead, my cookbooks live in the kitchen and sometimes find their way back to the shelves, usually when I run out of counter space, or back to the library, usually when one been overdue for so long that the library stops sending email notices (which I never see in all the email I receive) and starts sending actual letters (which I always see and am still kind of thrilled to get).

Yes, there is a point to all this, and I hope you will appreciate the irony.

One of the last Facebook posts I saw from Tasting Table was a banana bread recipe by Dominique Ansel, a name you might recognize as the man who gave us one of the largest food fads of recent memory, the Cronut. The banana bread recipe was accompanied by Tasting Table’s standard, overly effusive praise – Ansel took something that, when made by mere mortals, is “pretty good,” and turned it into an “insanely good … delectable treat,” rescuing overripe bananas from a terrible fate at the same time.

I’m always skeptical when someone is presented as a culinary Superman, but as it happens, I had four embarrassingly overripe bananas (I wish the grocery store would send me mail about that, just once), and as luck would have it, when I looked up the recipe, it called for … four overripe bananas. I haven’t had a good kitchen disaster in a while, so I gave it a try, fully expecting my beloved Fannie Farmer standby to win the day.

She didn’t.

I’d like to say I’m sad about that, and of course part of me is, but the other part of me was too happy about eating a joyfully moist cake with a rich banana flavor and a heady dose of nutmeg, and did I mention the butter? Yes, it was there, and lots of it. And while these things are all wonderful, they are not the most wonderful thing about this banana bread. That honor goes to the thick, sweet, caramelized, crunchy top crust that forms as this giant loaf bakes.

It is, in a word, magical.

Here, dear reader, is my point: Life is complicated, but good food is really quite simple.

Go enjoy some.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

He remembers the van and the theater but not the movies, but remembers another movie we saw, when I was 11, the last summer I spent there. He stopped by the house to give me a break from grandma, but she decided she needed a break from the house, and on his arrival, announced  that she was coming along too.

The movie we saw that day was Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke. My grandmother sat between the two of us, and each time either of us looked at her, or attempted to look at each other, she whispered an indignant remark about how offensive it was, but when she thought we weren’t looking, we could both see her giggling quietly, too.

We laugh at the memory, as we have every time we’ve see each other, which we haven’t done for ten years. We continue driving toward our hotel, taking local roads, driving along the lake, remembering the time it froze over and we drove out, in a tiny car that was either beige or yellow and which nobody cared much about, an important feature if it turned out the ice wasn’t as solid as we thought. It was, and so we did donuts on the frozen lake, and visited with the ice fishermen, and took photos in front of the car, photos I still have but which don’t resolve the issue of what color the car actually was.

My cousin remembers fishing on the lake in summers, when he was little. He would go with my grandfather, learning fishing and patience. I am mesmerized by the story, a tiny picture I’ve never seen of a past I was not part of. I was too young to go fishing with my grandfather, and even if I had been older, he probably would not have taken me, a girl, with him. I remember the boat, though, leaning up against to side of the garage each winter, providing a shelter against the snow for a family of bunnies that were the subject of much breakfast conversation for my grandfather and me. I remember the fish he caught, too, sitting on the porch step, staring with dead eyes, something to be feared and jumped over until someone finally brought them inside.

We are fairly close to our hotel now, but take one last detour, by the former home of my youngest aunt. It was a tiny house perched between a busy county road and a lake. I lived there for a few weeks, when I was about 18 months old, and my mother left me in the care of her sister while she returned to New York City to find work, to escape  working class Wisconsin life. My aunt would recount the story of how a thunderstorm woke me up, and I cried all night, and she could not console me: You wanted your momma so bad, she would tell me. All I could do was hold you while you cried and cried.

That aunt is lost now, consumed by schizophrenia, and the house was lost to unpaid taxes.

My cousin has to point it out to me as we pass by, and I can just barely make out the weeping willow my mother planted so long ago, solid but unrecognizable at the center of the gravel driveway where I once tried, and failed, to learn how to ride a bike.

I was not the first temporary resident: my mother’s older sister returned with her son and daughter, both toddlers, when her marriage to her high school sweetheart failed not long after it began. She is staying there again, with the current owner of the house, her younger sister, who looks after her and takes her to an endless stream of doctor appointments.

It is easier for my younger aunt if we we stay elsewhere: She can only handle one family member at a time.

It is easier for me if we stay elsewhere: My mother cannot drop by unexpectedly and discover we are there.