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I learned to love food in the mid 1970s, on a ridge top 10 minutes from town. We were pretty poor -- when my mom made orange juice from concentrate, she poured four cans of water into the pitcher, instead of three, to make it last longer.
We ate locally and organically long before it was trendy, but we did it out of necessity. Since we had more time than money, my mom planted a garden half the size of a basketball court, which doesn't sound all that big unless you're an eight-year-old boy and have to weed it.
The results, though, were fantastic. We'd get strawberries early in summer. Then there was asparagus. Later, tomatoes, and peppers, and eggplants, sweet corn and watermelons. Pumpkins in the fall.
When something was in season, we ate a lot of it and froze more for later. I liked green beans. But I liked them a little less after my mom opened the 8th frozen bag of beans in late January.
We would go out to eat every once in a while. I loved the hot dogs and root beer floats, and would have eaten out more often, given the chance. Fast food was gratifying. At home, meals took time. My mom baked bread every week. She proofed the yeast, and mixed the dough, kneaded it, let it rise, shaped it, and let it rise again. She took hours to make our bread. I would come inside from a morning in the garden, tired and dirty. She would hand me the first slice, still warm, butter melting.
My parents' marriage was rocky, at times, and we weren't always together. The best dinners I remember were when all four of us sat at our round wooden table, talking and eating. The tensions of the day would fade; over plates of lasagna, we would for a while be at ease with one another.
Before we left home, my mom made sure that my brother and I could cook for ourselves. We knew to snap off the wooden ends of asparagus by hand, and how to bake a loaf of bread. Later, I started offering "helpful" tips when cooking with someone else. Over the years, several girlfriends would just call it "being annoying."
I learned more about cooking when I worked in a restaurant. I saw food move from the fiery chaos of a production kitchen to the cool linen quiet of the dining room. Couples came together for their anniversaries, graduating seniors brought their families to celebrate. All of them came to share a meal made from roughly the same ingredients I had grown up with. At the restaurant, we simply combined them in different ways. As with my mother's cooking, I saw that with careful preparation, food means more than just what's on the plate: we were giving people a chance to linger and reconnect.
Here in New York, going out to eat is the norm and apartment kitchens are usually tacked-on afterthoughts. Very few of my friends cook. For me, it's still a necessity.
I'm a graduate student now; the other night I left school late, at 9:30, and on my way to the subway, I passed a number of restaurants where I could have gotten takeout. But I knew my wife would be coming home from work at ten, and I knew that in the fridge I had a bunch of kale from the farmers' market, and a block of tofu, and some angel hair pasta. So I went home. The apartment was empty. I knew my wife would soon arrive, exhausted, in her blue hospital scrubs. I washed my hands and boiled some water. I picked up my knife, took a slow breath, and filled the apartment with what I think love smells like in its purest form: onions, garlic, oil, flame.
Ambi: [pan sizzling 3 secs]
We have takeout sometimes, of course. But this night, as tired as I was, I set to work. My wife came in the door, and we sat down at our little wooden table, the food still steaming on our plates, just the two of us.