My son and daughter-in-law, Andy and Katie, and their sweet baby Claire were here for a few days. Andy and Katie enjoy being in the kitchen and appreciate good food. It seems nine-month-old Claire will soon be joining in on kitchen fun. There's no doubt she is turning into a little foodie. She sits in the Tripp Trapp chair (we've had it since our boys were little) at the table with us, gumming small chunks of cooked potatoes, avocadoes, sweet potatoes and peaches. Before long, she'll be wanting garlic mashed potatoes, fresh guacamole, sweet potato pie and peach salsa. And probably some of her mom's Frozen Lime Pie.
I've never been a big fan of frozen desserts that do not include ice cream or gelato. I call Katie the queen of homemade ice cream. She makes the best and often stirs it up and treats us to her homemade frozen cream when she is here. So, when Katie said she would make the Frozen Key Lime Pie from Ina Garten's "Barefoot Contessa Family Style"
Growing up there were just some things
that this little pudgy boy would not eat. High on the short list of
food items, along with sour cream and avocados, was this recipe called
Capirotada. No matter how hard they tried I just wouldn’t move past the
strange blend of ingredients that went into this Mexican bread pudding.
In the chill air at 7:30 in the morning, I would head out. Heavy books that I never opened were piled high in my arms. They weighed me down, but I was used to it. These were pre-backpack years. Teachers required you to cover books then, and mine wore clumsy jackets of recycled brown Safeway grocery store bags. The covers barely hung on, despite the many pieces of Scotch tape randomly applied in all directions.
My mother prepared us breakfast every day of the week because she was
not about to send us off to school on an empty stomach. Yet the only
day I really remember eating breakfast was on Saturday. Not because she
cooked an elaborate spread, but because we were left to fend for
ourselves. It was the one morning my parents slept in – probably only
to about 8 or 9, but it seemed like all morning and it was a thrill to be without parental supervision in the dining room. My siblings and I weren’t what
you’d call “skilled” in the culinary arts, but we were quite capable of
pouring a bowl cereal…and that’s where the trouble started.
In our house, the first smell of Thanksgiving was not turkey roasting or pumpkin pie but the bleach-sweet steam of my mother ironing the good tablecloth. I remember it from a time when I was small enough to creep unnoticed beneath the ironing board while she painstakingly transformed an undistinguished hump of wrinkled linen into a curtain of shimmering white. With a curt flick of her wrist, my mother sprinkled each length with water from a yellow, plastic bottle designed for this purpose, and then the iron would sizzle a path just above my head. Soon I was surrounded by a linen tent. The smell sparkled like hot stars.