My sister and I were raised in a house with two working parents. When we were younger, our father worked nights while our mother worked days. This schedule left our dad on dinner duty. Luckily, having been raised by a working mother himself, our father already had cooking skills in place. My mother, who didn’t know the difference between olive oil and Karo syrup, wrote a note to my dad’s mom thanking her for teaching him how to cook. My mother claims it was Gloria Steinem’s influence that led her to delegate my dad to kitchen duty, but really it was because he was the only one who knew how to “wear the apron” in the house.
Despite our mother’s feminist take on women in the kitchen, my sister and I happily cook at our stoves, bare-feet and all. I’ll whip up lunches and dinners for friends and family, but Alexandra goes beyond, preparing dinner for her new husband nearly every night. I recently had the opportunity to witness this firsthand when I invited myself (last minute) to their Upper West Side apartment for dinner. When I entered, Alexandra called out from her galley kitchen, “I’m making fish tacos. Go sit down at the table.” I went into the dining room and saw their new table was set with their brand new “everyday” dishware I had purchased for them off their wedding registry. My brother-in-law entered a few moments later and, in between work calls, began to pour a buttery, slightly sweet white wine to accompany the spicy fish tacos.
It took me half my life to realize that when Guadalupe Contreras
says “Gadaymee”, she means to say, “Goddamn it”. I thought for years
that she had been referring to my sister, whose name is Amy, with a
level of stifled frustration that I found hard to account for. I told a
Spanish-speaking friend about this misunderstanding a while back, and
he in turn informed me that my Spanish pronunciation of “I’m scared”
(tengo miedo) sounds a lot like “I have shit” (tengo mierda). I relayed
this conversation to Lupe. She claimed to disagree.
I went to cooking school at the advanced age of 17 in 1973 in the bustling town of Newton Centre, Massachusetts. There wasn’t any question in my mind what my future held for me, I simply had to find the perfect place that would form it exactly as I had dreamt it would.
After decades of biting into and spitting out mouthfuls of mealy mushy
flavorless fuzzy fruit sold as ‘prime peaches’, suddenly this year the
peach crop is reminding me of the juicy beauties I enjoyed 40 years
ago. Almost certainly it’s because I’ve been getting my peaches at
local farmer’s markets from growers who actually let the fruit ripen on
the tree before hauling them off for sale. 
In the thirty years I lived in Los Angeles, I experienced a wide
array of social gatherings including a séance, a cocktail party in a
cancer ward and an evening of Pictionary at the home of the late Don
Knotts. But, I never went to a pot-luck dinner.
