Food, Family and Memory

It wasn’t often that my dad was in charge of making supper, but every once in a while my mom would hand preparation of the last meal of the day off to him. His motto in the kitchen was, "the simpler, the better." He’d open a can of Campbell’s bean with bacon soup, mix it in a pot with some water, then slice up a couple of hot dogs and toss them in. He had supper on the table in no time at all. And, I think we liked it. Ugh.

My standards for bean soup have a come a long way since then. No more Campbell’s for me. On a chilly Saturday afternoon, I love having a pot of homemade bean soup simmering on the stove.

I like to use dried beans when I can. They are very inexpensive and I find their taste and texture to be so much better than canned beans. I like to use a quick soak method, boiling the rinsed beans for 2 minutes, then removing the beans from the heat, allowing them to soak for an hour in the hot water.

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.

This wondrous ‘back to the future’ phenomenon has spurred me to forego dinner on many a night for big bowls of sliced peaches lightly dusted with brown sugar and tossed with sour cream, a childhood summer treat I thought I’d never again experience. In my enthusiasm to recapture a fond memory, I have several times purchased many more peaches than one person could possibly consume.

Last night my husband Rob and I attended a meeting of the East Lansing City’s Planning Commission (because we know how to have a good time) which started at 7:00. These meetings, or at least the part with which we are concerned, usually end by 8:30 or 9:00, so we left Sam Home Alone. He is 11, we were literally 3 minutes away, and there were neighbors home.

The meeting lasted until after 10:00, and because we are very bad parents, and really wanted to be there when the vote on our issue was taken (we lost, by the way), we didn’t get home until after 10:30. (Before you call Child Protective Services, I should add that it was not a school night because he is on spring break). in the midst of getting the dogs out, making wild promises of what we “owed” him for abandoning him, and checking phone messages, Rob noticed an empty Angel Food Cake box in the kitchen,  and a sink full of dirty dishes. The kitchen table was also suspiciously sticky.

From the time I was in nursery school until I graduated from high school, I never spent a summer in my home state of Michigan. Most summers we went to Maine, but for three summers, we headed not to the rocky, Atlantic coast, but across that ocean to Europe. The middle summer when I was fifteen, we explored England, Italy and France deeply and passionately. My mother, possibly the best trip planner ever to draw breath, spent nearly a year before the trip selecting the perfect bed & breakfasts,  auberges and pensiones for us.

The things we wanted to see were an odd mixture of The Things One Sees in Europe (The Coliseum, The Louvre) and things my father wanted to see (the famous “Black Madonna” of Urbino). A consummate networker long before the days of the internet, my mother communicated her charm and enthusiasm via weightless, pale blue aerogrammes that appeared in the mailbox all year, one memorably addressed to “La Famiglia Graham;” by the time we boarded the plane for Frankfort in June, deposits were made, and an assortment of feather beds, duvets and hand-embroidered pillow cases awaited our travel weary bodies.

We fell hard for Florence, so hard that my mother cancelled our reservations in Venice and booked an extra week. Our “insider” guide was a colleague of my father’s, an Italian professor named Bob (and a “real” Italian), the leader of a group of Michigan State University students studying  in Florence for the summer session. Bob had rented a villa at the top of an impossibly steep hill lined with Cypress trees to which we ascended one afternoon for bread, cheese, olives, and a plate of salami, soppressata, and prosciutto.