I’ve always made pizza sauce based on my mother’s recipe, starting with a can of tomato sauce. This year, I started with paste tomatoes from my garden with great success. You’ll notice that the amounts in the ingredient table below are rough; please add veggies and herbs according to your taste.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Place quartered tomatoes in large saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring frequently. The tomatoes will let go of a surprising amount of juice.
2. Remove from heat and strain off solids. Set solids aside and return juice to the stove.
3. Simmer juices, uncovered, until reduced.
4. Add tomato solids back into the saucepan and stir in all remaining ingredients except sugar.
5. Bring sauce back to a simmer and cook, stirring regularly, until the onions are translucent and the sauce has reduced to the desired consistency.
6. Taste.
7. Add a small amount of sugar, mix thoroughly, and taste again. Repeat until you achieve an acidity that tastes good to you.
8. Sauce should keep in the refrigerator for about a week, in the freezer for a few months, or may be canned.

It’s funny what can happen to a recipe over time. This dish is something that my family makes, except they call it “chile verde.” The truth, I’m afraid, is that real Mexican chile verde is a pork dish, with an insanely delicious sauce made out of tomatillos and green chiles. The recipe that follows probably started off with pork and tomatillos, but then somewhere along the line someone substituted chicken for pork, tomatoes for tomatillos, left out the onions… It’s total gringa food, but nonetheless very tasty, calls for ingredients that are usually on hand, and is delicious any time of the year. You may download the recipe from the sidebar to the left.

First published in a 1950s Good Housekeeping Magazine, these candy cane cookies are tender and have a surprisingly complex and subtle flavor. I’ve made a small change with the fat, but otherwise these cookies are the same that my mother and grandmother have been making every winter for as long as I can remember.

     In an undergraduate class at Portland State, straightforwardly titled Persuasion, I formally learned that scarcity makes things more desirable: eclipses of the sun and moon, real Love, Mason Jennings’ acoustic album, Simple Life. For me, more pressing than astronomical events eternally playing hard-to-get, however, are the Fruits of Summer: the berries, the stone fruits, the figs (oh, Lord, the figs). Remember how all of this wonderful produce we love to munch year-round actually has growing seasons? Maybe you can get overpriced, under-ripe strawberries in May, but they’re not worth it. They are only placeholders for summer strawberries. Those out-of-season imposters are white in the middle, unripe, and juiceless. They have no scent and do not yield to the teeth. They look enough like a strawberry to jog something in your brain, maybe fooling your palate into thinking that you’re ingesting the real thing, but you’re not. They are a sad waste of resources. Therefore, in my life as a cook and eater I have resolved to eat what’s in season – as best as I am able (I am powerless for the rest of the day without my apple in the morning, I’m afraid) – and then move on as the weeks roll by. Accordingly, lately I have been gorging myself on summer berries.
     I’ve made two trips to Sauvie Island, where the nearest U-Pick farms are around here, and come home with around fifty-five pounds of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, marionberries and cherries. The night I brought my first batch home (which was followed by a flurry of processing, though I did not get through the whole lot right away) I had nightmares – proper nightmares with screaming and everything – about not getting to my loot fast enough and letting some of them go moldy. My concern in the dream wasn’t so much that I had lost money or missed out on eating those delicious gems, but more so that I had allowed something intrinsically valuable go to waste, that I was responsible for the mishandling of an important gift. In my dream I heard myself say, Oh, I was such a fool to have taken so many when there are others who would have used them up. This is really how I talk in my dreams sometimes.
     I did not, in reality, lose a single berry to the Musty Fuzz. Rather, I have taken my treasure, washed and dried, chopped and mashed, boiled, dehydrated, canned, and bagged and turned my sixty-plus dollar investment into small jars and bottles of priceless, distilled Summer.
     Project, First: Jam. I have some very strong feelings about jam, and these I shall presently share.

• 1. Jam should taste like the fruit from which it is made.
• 2. Jam should be strong enough to hang together on a piece of toast, but should not at all remind one of gelatinous substances such as flan or Jell-O.
• 3. The purists use all sugar and no pectin when making jam, which requires a whole heck of a lot of sugar and a great deal of heat. Made this way, the jam’s more sugar than it is fruit. I prefer a little bit of pectin and a whole lot less sugar.
• 4. Jam should not have too much junk in it. It is tempting, I know, to want to add ginger and vanilla and raisins and walnuts and wine and SweetTarts to give your jam a signature flair. Of course, there are exceptions to this persnickitiness (red wine with strawberries, for example; and toasted, ground walnuts with figs), but generally I very firmly believe the simple and plain is best. Go figure.

     I have thus far made two batches of raspberry jam, blueberry, strawberry, drunken strawberry, blueberry, marionberry and a rasp-marion mix. The recipe, included in the Pomona’s Pectin box, is roughly four cups of mashed berries, between two and four teaspoons of pectin, some calcium water (to activate the pectin) and between three-quarters and two cups of white sugar. The pectin makes it easy to gel, and home canning isn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
     Project, Second: after the jam came a cobbler or two. I’m not sure what’s tastier than baked fruit topped with a sweet biscuit. As far as I can tell, the cobbler camp divides into those who would cook the biscuits separately, and those who would cook the biscuits with the fruit. I grew up in a house that believed in baking the biscuits with the fruit, spreading the eventual topping on the bottom of the baking dish, pouring the fruit mixture over, and letting the cakey biscuits rise to the top in the oven. The other method, with which I have only recently begun experimenting, is to par-cook the two components separately – fruit on the stove and biscuits in the oven – and unite them only in the dish’s final minutes in the oven.

Berry Cobbler, two ways
Upside-down Method

ingredients:
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (2 ounces) salted butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 cups stewed berries with juice*

procedure:

• 1. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
• 2. Cream 1/2 cup sugar and butter until smooth and fluffy.
• 3. Stir in sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk.
• 4. Pour batter into prepared pie tin or casserole dish.
• 5. Put drained berries over batter.
• 6. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup sugar over.
• 7. Pour 1 cup berry juice over all.
• 8. Bake 45 minutes @ 375ºF, until topping is golden and edges are browned.

Serves six.

**Stewed berries = fresh or frozen berries + desired amount of sugar + flavorings (also as desired: vanilla, wine, ginger…). Heat until berries are just cooked. Simple as that.

Separate Biscuit Method
Biscuit recipe borrowed from The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into half-inch cubes
1 cup buttermilk

Stewed berries, as in above recipe. Cook longer for this recipe, allowing the liquid to thicken a bit. You may choose to add some cornstarch.

procedure:

• 1. Preheat oven to 425ºF.
• 2. Prepare baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat mat.
• 3. In the workbowl of a food processor, fitted with the metal blade, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Pulse to combine.
• 4. Sprinkle butter cubes over and process until the mixture resembles a coarse meal.
• 5. Transfer to a medium-sized bowl, add buttermilk, and toss (with your fingers or a rubber spatula) to combine.
• 6. Scoop batter (with a measuring cup, ice cream scoop, large spoon) onto baking sheet. The original recipe says 1 1/2″ ice cream scoop will yield 12 biscuits.
• 7. Bake until lightly browned on tops and bottoms, about fifteen minutes. Do not turn the oven off.
• 8. Put filling into your pie tin or casserole and arrange par-baked biscuits over.
• 9. Bake the whole lot for about ten minutes, until the biscuits are a deep golden brown.

     While I am not a convert over to the separate biscuit camp, I think my loyalty comes from time and conditioning rather than thinking that one method is intrinsically superior to the other. I have been an upside-downer all my life and to make such a drastic change in my cobbler consumption twenty-something years in might just be too big a shift for this old gal. Try both – goodness knows there’s enough fruit around – and tell me what you think.

     Hang around for Red, part two, in which I shall discuss freezing, drying, snacking, and winemaking.

I have been to a river.

Annually, my family meets somewhere between Eugene and Portland – my folks take a few days to drive and my brother tucks away his projects in Brooklyn and arrives by plane. We end up in two suites at a certain bed and breakfast on the McKenzie River in Vida, Oregon. This particular B&B – one of a handful we have stayed at over the years – is preferred because there is a place along the bank in front of our rooms where trout can be caught conveniently. The other places we have stayed have sub-par fishing holes.

My father is a fisherman. He can tell stories about specific casts when he was twelve with an enthusiasm that still carries an twinge of giddy urgency. You can close your eyes and almost see him, two and a half feet shorter and all those years peeled off his face, standing in a kitchen telling his mother about that one huge bass in the lake. Or I can, anyway. I remember family road trips, having to stop at roadside ditches for just a couple of casts because he was convinced that fish were hiding in the rushes. I have heard the story about my mother’s 1997 Steelhead more often and in greater detail than the story of my birth. It’s nice to see him giddy. It’s like the way I feel about jam or figs or lobster tacos. So we go every year because he loves it and the rest of the family enjoys it well enough. Fly fishing really is pretty fun when the fish are biting, when the day is warm but not hot, when there is just enough of a breeze running up the river to cool your face in between casts. It’s downright enjoyable when you are landing more strikes than you miss, when you don’t snag the trees, when you see the osprey and the ducklings and the beavers on the river too.

The first fishing trip I can mostly clearly recall is our Epic Journey to Idaho in 1992 or ’93. We drove two eight-hour days. I remember thinking that the exotic land of Stanley, Idaho – our rendezvous point – was almost certainly a lifetime away. My brother and I made up a song about a town called Winnemucca that began Oh, I’m going to Winnemucca with two cows and a ducka. I remember a new kind of sticky heat and staying in a motel with the kidney-shaped pool and eating at a Basque restaurant where they sat us with strangers: there was no menu and we all ate family-style together and long tables with benches for seats.

The Idaho trip was run by the same company that we meet up with every year on the McKenzie. In my memory, it was some kind of magical, traveling show – 18 guides, a cook, a swamper, 9 boats, a barge and one big blue raft with enormous yellow oars. Our gear went ahead of us on the barge. Tents were pitched by the time we arrived at camp from our daily float. Our meals were prepared for us thrice daily. I remember bacon for breakfast – the only bacon I have ever happily eaten. I remember bread in dutch ovens and pork chops in massive fry pans and impossibly fresh salads. The wives and mothers and kids rode in the raft that almost never tipped over while husbands and brothers and sons wet- and dry-fly fished out of driftboats adroitly piloted by sinewy cowboy-types who knew the river like a hometown. The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, of which we floated about a hundred miles – is wilderness. We released every fish we caught with specially-designed unhooking tools that allowed us to keep with fish in the river during their entire ordeal. For dinner one night they flew in flash-frozen trout. We took nothing, and theoretically left nothing. That week was pure fish fever though, and – I think – some of the prettiest wilderness I have ever seen.

As a young person, I was not expected to fish, only float. One afternoon on our seven-day trip I rode in one of the drift boats instead of the raft. That was the day the raft tipped over in the rapids and we all had a nice reminder to wear our lifejackets . That was also the day we came upon The Flying Bee – a house in the middle of all of that wilderness with a huge blue trampoline underneath the rotating sprinkler in the fenced-in front yard. We went ashore and bought fudgsicles, as evidently the house doubled as a store – - or, at least, a place to get a a girl a chocolatey frozen treat. That could have been the the day I got heatstroke. I’ll ask my dad, but I am almost positive that the Flying Bee is real.

Every time we meet on the McKenzie to fish, we talk about Idaho. Our favorite guide runs eight trips each year up there and Dad likes to hear about which guides from the company – many of whom we’ve fished with over the years – are going. I am interested in the ever-tightening regulations on the outfit going into the Wilderness. I learned a few days ago, for example, that they can no longer use nine volt batteries – and not because they might leave them there as trash, but because, it was explained to me, nine volts make it too easy and it is not supposed to be easy in the country.

Our McKenzie trips are not wild. We haul out or burn our trash, yes, and only take our limit of fish per the Oregon State Fish and Wildlife authority, but it is impossible to pretend that we are “roughing it” (even Idaho didn’t feel like roughing it, though – there was a cook, for heaven’s sake!) with multi-million dollar homes lining the banks of the lovely river. It is impossible to pretend that we are having an authentically rustic experience after having a three course breakfast at the B&B before meeting our guide at the turnout next to Ike’s Pizza. It is impossible to think you are communing with nature while carrying a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer in your pocket in case your hands start to feel icky.

But we do not go to the McKenzie River to commune with Nature, or to demonstrate our survival skills. We go to the McKenzie to kill trout.

In recent years I have, predictably, begun to feel very uncomfortable with fishing for its own sake. It is fun, yes, and satisfying and exciting (especially while sporting polarized sunglasses, with which you can see the fish come up to the fly while they are still under the water) – but I think it is also a kind of cruelty if all one is after is hooking, hauling, and release. Luckily, the McKenzie River is stocked with “planter” trout – a scheme to protect the native species by giving we anglers something to pull out of the river – and the planters are just as tasty as the natives.

As a Lover of Food and an aspiring Back-To-Basics-ist, I rather enjoy the experience of catching and killing my own food. First revision: I rather enjoy the experience of catching my own food, then forcing myself to look on as someone else whacks it over the head and puts it in an icebox. Second revision: I rather enjoy catching my own fish… Fish are so unrelatable. So long as we are catching for lunch or for takin’ home, I am all about throwing my hook in the water and waiting for those poor suckers to take a nibble. As soon as we catch our limits, however, the activity loses all appeal.

Our lunch on the McKenzie is the same every year. We work for it. Sometimes we have a slow morning, and worry loudly if we will catch lunch at all (there must be sandwiches in that cooler – how could there not be a contingency plan?). Then, at some predetermined spot that is not someone’s front yard, the guides pull the boats onto shore. Folding chairs are produced. A camp table happens, usually while I am catching poison oak in the bushes. Grapes, chips, and salsa are often offered while lunch is prepared. A long mornin’ of fish-killing makes a girl hungry, but the grapes, salsa and chips must be resisted.

A fire is lit with wood and charcoal. While the guides dress the trout in the river, leaving the heads, skins and entrails for the birds who will come to clean our lunch site, the woodfire lights the charcoal until sets it all glowy-gray. The charcoal is transfered to the dutch oven in which our buttermilk biscuits are baked. The ridiculously fresh fish are dredged in flour or cornmeal and then pan-fried in butter over the open fire. Someone’s wife always sends along homemade jam. A simple salad – lettuce, cucumber, tomato, mushroom – rounds out our meal.

This is, I am afraid to admit, what keeps me happily returning each year. I might advocate for another activity – one that does not involve itchy rashes or animal cruelty – were it not for the good eatin’ that follows our day on the McKenzie.

A couple of days ago I came back to the city in a rush. I had to be at work; I missed the cats, the Squeeze. I had my day of catered ease and fresh air and wild birds and I was ready to get back to real life that, lately, has been moving too fast. Relaxation was not easy to come by. A couple of days ago when I returned to the city I brought the River with me. It came in my camera and in my icebox. At work on Saturday, my boss was generous enough to let me brine and smoke what remained of our catch in the bakery’s kitchen. I’ve sampled smoked trout a handful of times but was never impressed by it. My family, colleagues, and fishing guide were all more excited at the prospect than I, but smoking seemed more sensible than freezing, so smoking is what I did. (Actually, I merely brined the fish – a pre-smoking treatment. The chef at work smoked them, for which I am grateful.) This smoked trout is notably tastier than any other. It is better because my skill- or dumb luck – landed those poor things in the boat in the first place, because it is fresher than anything you can find in the grocery store, because people I know helped me prepare it.

I think I will always prefer the garden and the U-pick farms for “getting in touch” with my food. I think if I had to kill all of the meat I consume that I would eat far less meat, if any. Maybe it is all of that fresh air they have up down there on the McKenzie in Vida, even if it is wedged in between those big houses. Maybe it is the adventure of it all, making like I am a fisherwoman and not some mostly-helpless little girl who could never hook a critter without assistance from her daddy or the guide. Maybe it is seeing my food from start to finish – river to pan to plate and back again to the river.

My journey to hooch-in-the-linen closet began many months ago, when a good friend discovered – by what means I can’t recall – The Joy of Home Winemaking. Being the type of woman inclined to make her own wine (just as she cooks, bakes, gardens, and makes her own jams), she set to work at all kinds of home brews – dandelion, grapefruit, berry – which, reportedly, not only did not kill anyone, but were also very tasty.

On August 18th of last year, I publicly vowed that I, too, would make my own wine someday. I promptly ordered the book. I even read most of it. And then I put the winemaking project aside in favor of other things. Finishing my Bachelor’s degree, for instance. I imagined that home winemaking could rapidly become an expensive and time-consuming hobby. My kitchen and craft room already spilling over with baking bread, sewing projects, knitting lopsided baby blankets, jam-making, card-designing, writing (in theory anyway) and more, I told myself that I would have to get one or two other projects well in hand (like the degree, see?) before I could embark on another pastime that would only make me giggly and my kitchen sticky.

Last March I could wait no longer. I consulted my guidebook once again, visited my local home brewing supply store and plunged forward.

I made the Easy Apple Wine from Garey’s book. It’s what she recommends for beginners. I also picked up a book at Steinbart’s that had a very similar recipe for apple wine – similar in that both called for apple juice and only one fermentation, instead of “fermenting on the fruit” and then straining out solids, which seemed overwhelming at the time. I made that one too, so that in a few more months when I work up the courage to taste the stuff I can do some scientific-like comparisons. Or something.

When I racked my wine three weeks ago – that’s siphoning off the liquid from the yeastysediment or “must” that falls to the bottom once the initial fermentation takes place – I splashed a bit into my mouth, just to confirm or deny the presence of alcohol where once there had been none. When I splashed the wine into my mouth I also splashed it all over the kitchen.

It smelled a bit like a recycling center in here for a few days. Alcohol? Check.

The book said that it should, at the racking stage, taste a “little raw,” and that the longer I wait before bottling and/or consumption, the more the flavor will balance and smooth, so I’m not worrying yet. For now, I am actually rather enjoying the waiting. I did not, in fact, ever experience the urge to barrel ahead as I was worried I might. Perhaps this apple wine is teaching me patience. Or perhaps I am afraid that it’s been bungled somehow and I’ll be disappointed after all of this blasted patience and restraint.

I just uploaded the images that you see here on my post. I hadn’t looked at them side by side before. See in my closet, the one on the right? That’s the very same that’s above, being prepared back in April. The color difference is really quite striking. Maybe there is some hope yet.

Falafel – the Middle East’s brilliant veggie burger equivalent (roughly) – is the latest rediscovery among the lost and forgotten dishes of my past. A few months ago the Netflix geniuses recommended the cult-fave, He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. I dutifully added it to my queue, then promptly forgot about it. It’s a fun, entertaining flick even without the food reference, but when I saw that corpse clutching his pita-swathed falafel, that little light bulb went -ping!- and it all came flooding back… I now recall that less than a year ago, I was making the stuff at home on a regular basis. I think I had falafel parties, giddily setting out plates of tomato slices, sprouts, and cucumber; testing recipes for tahini and yogurt sauces, warming pita over the open flame of a gas burner… that was me, right? I had my first falafel at Petra’s Café in Monterey. The stuff they serve at the Basha’s cart at PSU is almost acceptable, but the Fantastic mix is even better (just add fresh basil).

Today, in an effort to create a memorable experience, and therefore a lasting relationship with my favorite incarnation of the mighty garbanzo bean, I made the stuff from scratch.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Mash the garbanzos. Set aside.
2. Process onion, garlic, and herbs.
3. Add spices, egg white, olive oil, lemon juice and baking powder to onion mixture. Blend thoroughly.
4. Stir together onion, etc. and mashed beans.
5. Add bread crumbs gradually, until desired consistency is achieved. The mixture should hang together as a patty, approx 1/2″ thick and maybe 2″ in diameter.
6. Pan-fry over medium heat in vegetable oil and/or olive oil, until crisp and golden on both sides.
7. Drain excess oil over paper towels.
8. Serve with your favorite goodies: flat bread, red onion, cucumber, tomato, alfalfa sprouts, tahini, tabouleh, etc.

I do believe I said once that Thanksgiving is all about family and food for me – the whole pilgrims-and-indians jig is up, right? I mean, the third thursday in November doesn’t have much to do anymore with pioneers, hardship, or cultural synergy, does it? In my mind, anyway, it’s about gathering, neuroses, making a mess of the kitchen, sparkling apple juice, being with family, gluttony, praise. It’s not Thanksgiving unless someone’s flight is delayed, unless Mom or I cry over the pie crust, unless there’s at least a chance the turkey will hit the floor. We all have those special family traditions to hang on to, to keep us aglow with the holiday spirit through the darkness and the damp of fall and winter.

Two years ago I had my first Thanksgiving away from my own nuclear unit – different faces, traditions. Different food. It never occurred to me until then that other people would have ham, say, instead of crab; or that a table could be set sans blanched almonds. The tofurkey was a big surprise, too. But that meal was delicious, and the family was warm. Just like my immediate clan, there were certain dishes they had to have, traditions they wanted to follow, neuroses they had to appease. I called my parents when the meal was over to make sure they had saved a slice of Grandma Alice’s pumpkin chiffon pie for me. It wasn’t until the next day when I ate it that the holiday felt complete.

Last year the holiday transformed again. Up here in ol’ PDX we have a bit of a Central Cali enclave. Half a dozen of us knew each other from working at or patronizing a certain Monterey coffee shop – family in a different sense, though nonetheless important or dear. We set on having a meal of our own – a potluck Thanksgiving for friends new and old, anyone who didn’t want to trek back home or had no home to trek back to. A year ago, we were potluck rockstars. Invitations issued at one in the afternoon saying only, “Come over tonight” often produced impromptu bar-be-cues of the finest caliber. Being a bunch of foodies, it was hard to have a flop.

And so it was last Thanksgiving. Eight arrived in time for a sit-down meal in the front room of the dangerously-leaning downtown Victorian my then-partner and I shared. Others trickled in throughout the evening for drinks and nibbles. It was a magnificent feast of mismatched essentials, food-memories from a dozen households. I had spent all day in the kitchen producing my favorites: the almonds, cranberry and orange salsa, wild rice with onions. We had a traditional bird and a tofurkey; at least two kinds of pie, and candied green beans that put me over the moon. I felt last year that I had inducted myself into a special circle of women, cooks, hearth-tenders. I was hostess to a Thanksgiving meal; my local beloved in my house, laughing. Happy.

Yesterday the holiday turned over again. I had debated for weeks whether or not to host a meal in my new home. I have this dining room, see – an actual whole room just for eating – and it seemed quite obvious and appropriate that I would break it in with a homeful of friends and food. But the troops were not rallied in time, and my beloved scattered about the city to other homes and other traditions. It was one part disappointment and five million parts relief. These papers, I thought. I can just hole-up while the rest of the world parties and I can write these darned papers and have a long weekend of peace – without delayed flights or polishing silver or crying with Mom in the kitchen over pie crusts. And there would be no huge pile of dishes on Friday morning, and no stains to scrub out of the table cloth. This year it felt OK to plan a quiet night. I would be thankful for peace and productivity. But no one likes to think of an “orphan” on Thanksgiving, and so the invitations dribbled in.

Lady J spent $90 on specially ordered organic, free-range, and emotionally stable turkey. D has a standing annual date with his out-of-state friends at the Marrakesh. K called a few weeks ago and asked if we could just go out somewhere, anything so that we could call it a holiday. I am no fan of double-booking an evening, but I thought I could make it to two events provided, of course, that one were amply late in the day. And I would have passed the afternoon in J’s kitchen, chatting and laughing as we always do (and of course ogling and nibbling at the WonderTurkey), had it not been for a small, white, innocuous-looking muscle relaxer that put me out for the better part of Wednesday and turned my legs (and my head) to Jell-O until well into Thursday afternoon. I’ll just say, though this has nothing to do with food or my feelings about Thanksgiving, that expiration dates of prescription drugs should maybe be taken seriously.

Yesterday I woke early and puttered on my computer, read the news, brewed many pots of coffee. I edited the grant I’ve been working on; I shuffled and unshuffled class notes. I made turkey tacos for myself for lunch (an unplanned irony), and ate them standing in my quiet, clean kitchen. My mom emailed me a photo of her centerpiece, titled “Minus 7 and counting.” When I called and they passed the phone around, I missed them. Of course I did. I sure am getting a lot of attention, my brother said. E came over midday for breakfast and recipe hunting and was soon off to a meal at someone else’s house, where he intended to douse the candied yams in flaming rum. My family loves you, he told me on his way to my kitchen. And then I started to miss them, too.

By seven the rain stopped and I was out the door to finally have my celebratory meal – Jake’s Grill with Lady K. Jake’s, if you have not been, feels substantial. It’s in downtown Portland, on 10th, in Governor Hotel. Marketed as a steaks’n'chops “comfort food” spot, it is, as far as I am concerned, over-priced and under-inspired. And I hate, hate, having to pay extra for a side of veggies. However, Jake’s is gorgeous. The servers are in white jackets and black ties. The floor is hex tile. Dark wood carved pillars (or columns – what’s the difference, anyway?) stretch up to the super-tall ceiling. And the food is gorgeous, too – it all looks and tastes just like you’re expecting it to: nothing to worry about. First on their Thanksgiving menu was roasted turkey, etc., which K ordered. I had a a piece of salmon, beurre rouge, spuds. The food was fine; the Syrah was great, and I got to sit and talk with my good friend who I don’t see nearly enough.

I left the restaurant feeling empowered, free. This could be my new tradition, I thought. To hell with the stress and the anxiety and the mess and trying to please everyone. My high didn´t last long, though. Maybe I need a few more years of experiment: more friends, different restaurants, no deadlines looming, but I don´t think I am ready to give up the mess, the neuroses, the warmth, my traditions. I never for a moment thought that the bird might slip from greasy potholders and bounce on the tile – and it just didn’t feel the same. And I can make Alice’s pumpkin chiffon pie any day of the year if I want to, but it won’t taste the same without staring at Mom’s centerpiece or drinking coffee with ground cinnamon or – or the kind of warmth you can’t create in a restaurant. Family meals are intimate, aren’t they? – not meant to be delivered by harried servers who are too busy to make eye contact.

In writing this, I keep changing my mind. It’s all about the food, I want to say. I am attached to these cultural markers inherited from my family of origin. They signify decades of predictable celebration. They mean we are all here together, that we have taken the time out of our lives apart from one another to be together. And it could be May or October or the third Thursday in November. Like a seder, we eat this meal for its symbolism – because it helps us focus on these valuable intangibles.

But then I begin to argue with myself. Are you mad? I begin. Like any object, food only has the power and the meaning that you give it. Eat pickles and calzone on Thanksgiving. Eat them in a box with a fox; or on a train in the rain – just don’t forget that feeling.

These are in-between years, I think. I haven’t lived with my parents for ages, but I don’t fully reside in my own home either. I may inhabit these rooms, even one designated just for eating, but my heart, especially in the winter, is running up and down the West Coast. These are in-between years of deciding how my life will be, I think; and this includes tradtitions and values. In defining and re-defining these preferences it’s not surprsing that I seem a bit adrift. Maybe Food v. Feelling is a false dichotomy; maybe they cannot be separated, especially in one so dedicated to both food and warm fuzzy feelings as I am.

I can say one thing for sure: I do miss the leftovers.

Yeah, back when I was a kid, we did it on the stove. On. The. Stove.

Just a thin coating of veg. oil on the bottom of the pan. Medium-low heat. Test with a single kernel: if little bubbles form all around it, the oil is ready. Add corn to cover bottom of the pan in a single layer. Cover. Shake. Listen.