Food, Family and Memory

On a trip through Oklahoma, I was reminded again how deliciously satisfying homemade food can be in restaurants off the beaten path.

We had traveled north from Tulsa, stopping in Pawhuska to visit Ryan Red Corn whose t-shirt company Demockratees is an internet sensation.

Ryan's politically savvy t-shirt designs speak to his reaction to the Bush administration's policies. With Barack Obama's election, Ryan has the opportunity to use his considerable talent to create more inspirational designs.

For breakfast Ryan and his dad, Raymond, took us to a local institution, Sally's Cafe. With a long counter out front and an over-sized table behind the kitchen, Sally's is an authentic diner from the 1930's.

Every summer when we were kids, my brother and I would visit my grandparents on Lake Minnetonka in Orono, Minnesota. We spent some of our days waterskiing on Mud Lake, seeing plays at the Guthrie, and riding the rollercoaster at Mall of America. But most of our WASPy Midwestern days were spent at the Woodhill Country Club playing tennis or lounging poolside.  Many teenagers were bored by Woodhill’s sea of Lilly Pulitzer sundresses and Brooks Brothers’ monogrammed golf-sweaters, but I was fascinated. I was convinced (since I was a teenage TV junkie) the Woodhill Country Club, built among some the largest estates of suburban Minneapolis, was built on a bedrock of scandal.

I’m changing – slowly, but surely, morphing into some life form I no longer recognize as myself. With this neurotic thought stampeding through my mind, I rise this morning and put up a pot of Rose’s favorite coffee—Peets Major Dickason. Despite her penchant to skip breakfast, I prepare a healthful little dish, hoping my angel will think twice: a dollop of non-fat yogurt sprinkled with Urth Café granola and topped with a red glistening strawberry. Into the kitchen she comes, looking every bit the marketing director of an International law firm that she is and the woman whose bras I’m continually picking up off our bedroom floor. I proudly present her the breakfast plate. “Would you mind getting my dry cleaning today, honey?” she asks, walking by me to the coffee pot, where she fills her cup to the brim. I tell her I’ll think about it. A perfunctory peck to my cheek and she’s gone, off to work.

A few seconds later and a forty-pound school bag strapped to his back, Julian comes clomping down the stairs and into my face, “You’re nuts if you think I’m gonna eat that!” he warns, motioning derisively to the plate I find I’m still holding. In one large spoonful I consume the yogurt and take him to school, stopping along the way at Starbucks for his customary ham and egg sandwich; after numerous attempts at getting Julian to eat real eggs I have given up; begrudgingly conceded that the disgusting pale yellow layer in the sandwich he crams into his mouth each morning, while not the Real McCoy, is, at the very least, some distant relative.

As with so many foods in our lives, dishes served when we are young put strong imprints on our adult palates. Most nights when my father came home from work, he would settle into his leather recliner and watch wrestling on TV. While my sister and I set the table, my mother would serve him an appetizer plate and his cocktail of choice, a 7&7 (Seagrams & 7-Up).

His favorite appetizers reflected his Russian Jewish background. There would be plates of pickled herring with sour cream, chopped chicken liver, pickled beets and onions, anchovy fillets and pumpernickel bread that he ordered from a mail-order outlet in New York.

Wanting a father-son moment with my father, who was decidedly old school and not much into father-son moments, I would sit next to him and share the appetizers (and steal a sip of his 7&7 when he wasn't looking). I definitely developed a taste for the anchovies and chicken livers but not for the pickled herring with sour cream!

One day, with very little in the refrigerator, I wanted a lunch with a lot of flavor that wouldn't take much effort to create. With a box of pasta, a couple of chicken livers, a tin of anchovies, an assortment of aromatics and a few other ingredients, I put two and two together and made a dish that was light and delicious. I wonder if my dad would have liked it?