And all those reasons I hadn’t wanted to come to lunch disappeared completely. Everything got done: I went to the airport, I cooked for my friends and ate dinner with them. I may have been too full but, decades later, I still recall Ernie’s lunch with pleasure.
A HOPI HAMBURGER
Sometimes disappointment and confusion arise over food and people. When living in Flagstaff I had time to do things spontaneously, like drive an astrophysicist to a conference in Chaco Canyon. At the end of the conference, the governor of one of the Hopi villages asked if I might drive him home, which I did, through snow and over muddy roads. We pulled up to his little house, and out front were heaps of corn—blue corn, white, red, yellow, each in its own pile. He invited me to lunch. My hopes soared—perhaps I was finally going to experience some “real” Native American food!
We went inside and he quickly pulled together a meal of thin hamburgers, liters of Pepsi, and chips. It was so disappointing. No posole? No beans? What about those piles of corn outside? Maybe they were ceremonial. But I was hungry and had hours of hard driving ahead of me, so I appreciated the sustenance of the hamburger and I was grateful to be in the warm house having lunch. My host, in turn, was grateful for the ride and he made sure that I went home with a handsome pot, made by one of the women in the village, who, it turned out, is an aunt of a man who lives in the village where I live today in New Mexico.
I was glad that I hadn’t refused his hospitality, not because of the pot but because it was, after all, genuine hospitality, something possibly more rare than whatever else might have been served. I still have that pot, and it brings the whole meal back to life when I look at it.
MEALS WITH ANN AND ARNOLD
Frequently in Flagstaff I enjoyed meals with two friends I had made there, Ann and Arnold Johnson. Ann was a potter; Arnold taught at the university and was also a Zen practitioner. Both are now retired. They lived in a tract home and had for many years. Ann and Arnold actually succeeded in growing an abundance of food in that difficult climate and in not much space. They put food up, Arnold made wines, and I was impressed that so much goodness came out of a place as ordinary as a ranch home in a development in Flagstaff.
I ate there often. Maybe there was a stew for dinner, a salad from the garden, thick slices of bread made by Ann and served with good, soft butter. Coffee was carefully ground and brewed. There might be a cookie for dessert, or a rhubarb pie come summer, or a fruit crisp. It was simple food, but cooked and served so deliberately and calmly that I always came away from their table with a sense of having been truly nourished. I still see Ann and Arnold when I drive to California, and when I can, I stop and have a meal with them before heading onward to the Central Valley and the long fast drive up Highway 99 to Davis. The feeling of nourishment is still there.
Where did it come from, this feeling of being well fed? Nourished? I suspect from calmness, intention, maybe not having tons of foodstuffs in the house given the limits of Flagstaff. Instead there was the bounty from the garden. Ann and Arnold were not foodies, but simply people who cooked their meals whether busy or stressed, sad or happy. In no way was this modern food, or stylish food, and it completely didn’t matter. What did matter was the feeling of calmness that imbued their kitchen.
When I look for a standard to hold myself to, theirs are the meals I think of. Not that I make the same food—I don’t. What speaks to me is a more elusive quality—of attention to detail, and of quiet intention—that made these meals so deeply nourishing. That’s what I strive for.
A MEAL AT THE GOVERNOR’S HOUSE
One cold, clear day shortly before Christmas I was invited to a meal held in the house of the governor of Pojoaque Pueblo, after the December dances. My friend Kate and I went together. First we attended the dances, which unfolded over many bone-chilling hours and were mesmerizing enough to cancel the cold, at least temporarily. Then we were invited to walk up to the governor’s house. The sister of a farmer friend of ours was married to the governor and she had described the feast day meal to me in detail beforehand. There would be bison from a nearby pueblo. There would be chile and posole and enchiladas, all made with foods my farmer friend had grown. It was a New Mexican menu, for sure, and that we were now numb made it sound especially appealing.
When we arrived people were already eating. We were beckoned to a nearby room to wait our turn and thaw out by a fire. We spoke quietly with those we met there until, after a half hour or so, the governor held up two fingers and pointed to us, thus calling us to the table. The food was steaming in pots in the kitchen, where dishes were also being washed, dried, filled with food, scraped clean after eating, then washed again. The kitchen space was large enough that a number of round tables had been set up for the guests. We were seated at a table with the assistants of one of our state’s senators. They were well into their meals when we joined them.
Soon, small pottery bowls of red chile stew with bison were brought to us. After that we were served, one dish at a time, green chile enchiladas, red chile enchiladas, bowls of chili, posole, beans. All the portions were small, just a bite or two. The bowls were also small and handmade. We talked quietly with the others at the table while we ate. Eventually a beverage was served and an enormous buffet of desserts was pointed out. The women who were bringing us food were gracious, but we sensed that we shouldn’t linger too long, for others were waiting to eat. So we got up, thanked the cooks in the kitchen and the governor, then walked out into the afternoon.
The air was clear, the sky that full New Mexican blue, and our eyes watered in the wind and cold. We didn’t speak until we reached the car. For me, time slowed down so much that it seemed to be nearly stopped. The taillights on the cars crawling along the highway in the distance below formed a beautiful red ribbon of light.
That meal was not a dinner party. It wasn’t a restaurant meal either, although we didn’t cook. Nor was it like a zendo meal, where one can’t talk. We did talk, albeit quietly. There was a randomness about the whole thing—the order, the mix of people at the table—but the kindness with which we were served transformed cold into warmth, the mundane into the beautiful. Body and soul were deeply nourished.
We were grateful.
A FAMILY BIRTHDAY
During the years I was at Zen Center, then in Flagstaff and Santa Fe, I didn’t see my family much. My father had left my mother and moved to the coast; my mother was still in Davis as were my siblings, who were busy raising their kids. There wasn’t a lot of room for me in their lives, and besides, I was busy with my own life. But I always made a point of visiting my mother and drove out to California at least once a year to do that. Patrick and I attended a few Thanksgiving dinners as well, which was generous of him as he was not so interested in families, either his or mine.
It was after my siblings’ kids grew up that I became much closer to the family. I visited my brother Roger in Costa Rica and attended a family wedding in Turkey, and Jamie and I speak frequently and visit with each other. Mike I’ve always been close to even though he can be a bit prickly. From a distance, I always imagined that Mike, Jamie, and Roger were all close to one another since they were close physically. Apparently they weren’t until I came home for a visit. I was the border collie who brought everyone together.
Recently Jamie and I gave the best party ever. Ostensibly it was a family event to celebrate Mike’s seventieth birthday, but we knew that it would be a lot more fun if some other people came. So we invited another Mike, who was having his sixtieth birthday, and our now mutual friend Michele from Ten Speed and her partner, Cris. We made an enormous table out of a number of smaller ones, covered it with red and gold tablecloths, flowers, and candles, and cooked a big Moroccan dinner. For dessert we had a birthday cake that was inscribed with the words “130 Years of Mikes.” The bakery actually called to make sure we meant to say “130 Years.”
The three guests, because
they were not Madisons, had a way of breaking up our habitual family responses to things. For the first time we could all just be people together instead of older brother or sister or such. Family. The conversation was good. New friendships were made. The feeling was warm. There were presents for the two Mikes. And no one got up and left just after eating because they had to be somewhere else. It was an entirely new experience of family.
MY FATHER’S LAST MEAL
It wasn’t really his last meal, but it was one of the last times my father tasted real food. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I might cook a meal for my father, his caretakers, and their fifteen-year-old son until I found myself in an Iowa woodland hunting for morels the day before flying on to upstate New York. I had gone to Des Moines to give a talk to the garden club on farmers’ markets, and part of the lure of leaving my own spring garden was the promise of morel hunting. Our luck was good and we found many.
Standing in those beautiful glades with my hosts, I thought of my father not as an old man at the end of his life, but as a young boy. He was from Iowa, from nearby, actually, and he might have looked for morels on a hillside like this one. Even this one.
The earth was soft, spongy, and damp, and it smelled of both decay and new growth. Overhead the trees—shagbark hickories, black locusts, and others whose identities I learned that day from my friends—were just leafing out. Occasionally we came across a circle of mayapples, their broad leaves hiding their single, waxy blooms, which resembled apple blossoms. Woodland violets poked up through the leaves of the past winter, and there were, albeit more rarely, the exotic jack-in-the-pulpits, their stately, modest, upright flowers sheltered by their curved leaves. Of course, there were the morels, which were at first so hard to see, but which gradually revealed their odd shapes.
The goat cheese and leek tarts I brought for dinner were left over from the brunch that followed my Saturday morning talk in Iowa. At a fledgling public market, also in Iowa, a woman stood behind a table covered with asparagus from her garden. Each stalk was a different length and thickness. Curving this way and that, they looked like a handsome bunch of green snakes. I bought what she had. And of course, we had lots of morels. A menu was starting to take shape. Wine would be part of dinner, too. My father loved wine. I thought a Viognier would be floral and sweet enough for my hosts, who I knew hadn’t much, if any, experience with wine. Or with asparagus, as it turned out.
“Are these artichokes?” they asked, while fondling the asparagus snakes.
The tarts in their box needed to be reheated and crisped, so I set them aside on the dining room table. Then I showed my father the morels. He looked in the bag; his thick, white eyebrows shot up, but his face was blank. He sat back. His eyes moved away from the bag. It wasn’t quite the reaction I had hoped for; it was a little tepid. But several minutes later he returned to the bag and peered intently into it. Then he picked up a morel, held it to his nose, and his face opened into a smile. “Oh my, oh my!” he exclaimed. His voice quavered with excitement. He sputtered something unintelligible and went back to fetch another mushroom to look at. Then suddenly he was done with the morels.
His watery gaze shifted and his hand crept toward the box of tarts. He started fingering them. “Would you like one of these?” his caretaker Penny asked. She put one in his hand. He nibbled at it, savored it, and then the hand crept out for another, which he also savored.
“Let me heat those up,” I offered. “They’ll be much better.” But it was too late. Everyone was sampling the tarts. Not even a plate was put out to set them on. Goat cheese was a new food for this household, but they liked it. I cooked the asparagus—another new food—and the morels, yet another. I opened the wine. It was new, too. They cooked a steak, which was practically new to me. For dessert there were handfuls of M&M’s because one of their kids had access to them. It was all a bit helter-skelter but we did share this meal together and my father was visibly delighted. I think we all were.
LUNCH IN THE MARBLE MINES
When I was living in Rome, some friends and I drove up to Carrara to see the marble mines. It was a cold day in early winter. The air was foggy and white, the marble was pale, we were cold and, eventually, famished. There was a restaurant in the village, but no lights were on. We pressed our faces to the window and saw that people were eating, so we went in. There was a sudden flurry of welcomes, and the lights were turned on. We were seated and soon eating bowls of hearty bean soup. Its warmth relaxed us, made us smile and look around at our setting. We thought that the other diners were probably men who work in the mines. We saw the green olive oil that was brought to the table; we noticed the blue scarf on the head of the woman who was serving us. We didn’t need the lights, but we did need that soup. It brought us back to life. We were so happy and so grateful.
DINNER IN THE MOTEL 6
In the first few years of the new century, Alice Waters sent me off from a Berkeley visit with a lunch to eat on my drive back to New Mexico. I finally ate it at the end of the day, in Needles, in a Motel 6, on a little wooden table set in front of the air conditioner. It was about 106 degrees outside and nearly sunset. The salad leaves were flat and limp by this time, but the Bandol rosé was still cool from the ice it was packed in. I don’t remember the rest of the food she had packed, really, but I loved that meal. I felt so well taken care of and it made me happy and content. My little table held just what was needed: the dinner, the wine, a linen napkin, a nestled bamboo knife, fork, and spoon. Now I always stay at that motel and come prepared to set my dinner on the little wooden table.
A POTLUCK I DIDN’T ATTEND BUT WOULD HAVE LIKED TO
A woman wrote to me to find out if she could freeze the lasagna she was planning to make for her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. The party following the ceremony was not going to be catered, she explained. It was to be a potluck. She sounded nearly breathless, even in print, and determined. This was not the way things usually were done in her Los Angeles temple and there had been some pressure to have the event catered. She was not going for it.
Yes, she could freeze the lasagna. She was going to be busy. She mentioned that she had also been planning to make her own pasta but added, “That’s all well and good, but there’s a certain point where you have a little sense, please!” I couldn’t have agreed more. But I was wondering: How had this woman come up with the idea of doing a potluck for an occasion that is so commonly and predictably catered?
“I had a friend in an underground band and when she got married she had a potluck wedding. It was one of the best weddings I’ve been to. She rented a room at a beach club and everyone brought food. It was so much fun. Of course, given that it was a rock ’n’ roll wedding, it had a fun feeling to it anyway, but it was special because it was a tattooed crowd of potlucked people. Everyone came knowing that there wasn’t any judging going on about the food, or talk about how good the caterer was or wasn’t and that sort of thing. And everyone knew that they were all part of it. Everyone was bringing a piece of themselves to this wedding.”
This woman told me that she couldn’t afford to go the catered route for her daughter, but that she was determined for her to have her Bat Mitzvah party and have it be special. Even if, as her own mother warned her, people would judge her for not using a caterer. She had decided that she didn’t care.
“I thought it was impossible at first, but then I remembered my friend’s wedding and thought a potluck was the way to go. I mentioned the idea to another friend and she said, Why not?” The woman who oversaw the temple kitchen was doubtful, though, and she shook her head, saying this had never been done before.
She sent invitations and in some of them was a slip of paper saying, “If you want to help, call us!” In the end there were more than thirty dishes at the party for ninety people.
One friend who was Indian made rice and lentils. Another poached a salmon, and a third made an egg dish. A fourth frie
nd offered tuna fish because there were kids coming and kids eat a lot of tuna fish. The daughter’s swim coach brought fried rice balls because she liked making them. People just cooked what they wanted to cook. And as for friends who didn’t cook, they brought crudités, cheese, bread, and crackers. The party was a huge success and no one missed the catered food.
“People have been very positive about the potluck idea,” my correspondent said when I called her to find out how it went. “One of my friends said that this was the way a Bat Mitzvah should be because it’s about community and she appreciated that she was included. Even my daughter’s friends were saying, ‘Why didn’t my mom think of that?’ ”
I loved hearing this story, and the notion of the potluck as a community event. But I especially appreciated the conclusion that my acquaintance offered at the end of our conversation.
“What was interesting about a potluck,” she said, “was that I had to give up control and stop thinking that everything had to go perfectly. I had to tell myself to shut up and say thank you. Now I tell myself to shut up and say ‘Great!’ ”
I recently heard from this woman, who caught me up on that thirteen-year-old daughter. She is now in medical school at Harvard and the second generation of her family to cook from The Savory Way and now, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
DYING AND LIVING AND EATING
My first mother-in-law, Mary Welch, was a deeply generous soul, a kind person, a woman who was helpful and loving to all who crossed her path. Her family of friends was wide and warm. At the end of her long life Mary decided to stop eating and drinking. Her exit from this world was to be quiet, intentional, and dignified.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 25
