Food, Family, and Memory

Citrus is California

Or maybe I should say citrus was California? But no, despite the Southern California citrus industry going the way of the subsequent aerospace industry, I still think citrus is California. I was inspired to write about California citrus by an article that recently ran in the Sunday Los Angeles Times’ L.A. Then and Now column: “Southern California’s Great Citrus Had It’s Crate Advertising.” The article is about the colorful labels slapped onto the wooden crates the fruit was packed in, and how they were considered cutting-edge marketing at the time. Big, bold, multi-color images of the fruit and the growers logos let the consumer know that the oranges, lemons and grapefruit of that specific grower were special, above average.

Cooking With My Sister: Studio Apartment Pesto

The first time my sister cooked for me, we were both in our 20s and living together in my 500 square foot studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was the day I had quit my job working in book publicity and had decided to go back to freelance film production work. My sister, Alexandra, having just finished up her first transfer semester at the Fashion Institute of Technology, wanted to make us a home-cooked meal to celebrate our big life changes. She was already cooking by the time I arrived at our apartment that evening. I smelled pasta boiling and lots of lemon and basil. I started over towards the blender to take a sniff, but she shooed me away. “It’s almost done. Go and sit down.”

The River Cafe

The good thing about having a sister who owns a restaurant – and The River Café is a great one in my opinion – is that when she’s cooking my son is allowed to order ‘off the menu’. In his case it’s a plate of the most wonderful creamy pasta carbonara. Made special for him with egg yolks the color of oranges, peppered pancetta and the parmesan cheese hand carried from Parma, I suppose. The bad thing is that my sister won’t let me have any. “You don’t need it”, she says looking at my waist. So it’s the regular menu for me.

Sisters

For the last year my sister and I have thought what a neat thing it would be to go back to the exact places that we visited on our first trip to Europe with our mother 50 years ago. I am not exactly certain how this trip idea started but the one thing that I am certain of is that it centered around a lively food discussion. Somehow all of life's most interesting memories seem always to involve food. So the idea of retracing our first trip sounded like a interesting idea.

My sister and I take an annual trip to France together and we have done that forever but this trip was going to start in Madrid and then would end in Paris which always feels as comfortable to us as an broken in old pair of shoes. We planned on two things happening: first, that it would jar both our memories on long forgotten details that some how through the planning stage seemed important and second, returning to somewhere that you are not totally familiar with is a good thing to do when you are over fifty.

We vowed that we will now travel each year to an unknown place together as a healthy thing to keep mentally nimble (and it sure beats learning Chinese or doing crossword puzzles.) The unknown, the piecing together and non-predictable is a healthy silent partner as we all age.

The Melomakarona My Mother Used to Make

As my daughters will attest, I am not a cook.

Indeed, the only thing I have ever cooked is brown rice and boiled eggs (you notice I said boiled and not scrambled or poached or anything remotely requiring any cooking skills) so it was a testament to my attempts to be fearless, that the first time I cooked anything more complicated than brown rice or a boiled egg, was on national television on Martha Stewart’s show...

Food, Family and Memory