Mother's Day

My mother was not Donna Reed or Jane Wyatt.  What’s worse, in an era when father knew best, she was a single mother.  To support us, she trained race horses.  Since none of them ever won, we moved a lot. The two constants through all of this shifting and moving were my mother’s stews and spice cakes.  In both cases, she was proud of never having used a recipe.  In the case of the stews, memory tells me she could have used a cookbook.  The cakes were a different story.

Although they looked like no other cake I’ve ever seen – for some unknown reason, she baked them in metal ice cube trays rather then cake pans – their taste haunts me to this day. They were a wonderful mixture of exotic spices, sugar, and ordinary flour cooked into light golden brown loafs. I enjoyed these odd concoctions in private, but was not happy with them in public, whenever they showed up in my school lunch.  Luckily, I was never at any school long enough to really be embarrassed by them.

Mother's Day is in one week. Are you prepared? Skip the flowers and the gift certificates, and make Mom a beautiful breakfast that she won't forget.

I'm starting with an easy frittata inspired by my mom. Nutmeg has an affinity for spinach. I learned that from her.

OK, so she didn't say "affinity," but she loves them together.

So will you.

Spinach and Ricotta Frittata
Makes 8 servings

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups white mushrooms, thinly sliced
2 cups baby spinach, thinly sliced
8 large eggs
4 ounces (1/4 cup) whole milk ricotta cheese, drained
4 ounces (1/4 cup) grated Grana Padano cheese, divided
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg or fresh grated nutmeg
a liberal helping of salt and freshly ground black pepper

Melt butter in an 8-inch non-stick skillet over medium-low heat. Add mushrooms; saute 5 minutes, or until lightly browned. Add spinach and cook just until wilted. Season with salt and black pepper.

I had a completely fabulous mother.  She was a pretty good cook, except that she was always so busy with her politics, and with being consigliere to her large family, and with talking  to my dad while he was on his second job shift, that she almost never cooked dinner without a phone lodged between her shoulder and her ear.  This resulted in many culinary tragedies, and seasoning mistakes.  Here are two examples.

One day she was making her amazing chicken soup, loaded with carrots, and turnips, and leeks, and dill, not to mention the largest soup chicken she could find.  When it came time to add salt, she grabbed what she thought was the large red box of kosher salt, but it was the similar-sized box of Tide.

After a week in Dublin, the mother and child reunion tour moves to a town in Sicily, Taormina –built on a cliff above the aqua sea with a snow-capped volcano behind it. After settling into our room, Rachel says she wants to make no plans and have no agenda.

There are hundreds of sites to explore in Sicily: more Greek temples than in Greece; Roman ruins; Arabian ports, and chains of volcanic islands with black sand beaches. But for the next week, we'll see almost none of them.

We give ourselves over to il bel far niente, the beautiful doing nothing. Italians have raised this to an art form, but I get nervous when Rachel suggests I take off my watch.