Food, Family and Memory

My sister and I have a pretty terrific food store called The Green Spot we have owned or more accurately been the worker bees at for many years., It has an energy all it's own. It’s a gathering place for people to come to when they are happy and it is a place people run to when they need good solid honest advice of the non-food type, if you know what I mean.

Each day we never know what will unfold when it is time to open the doors at nine o'clock. One thing, or well maybe two things, that we do know is that it is sure to be interesting without question and second what every figurative ‘fire’ needs is dousing. And we surely know how to do that with grace.

A few years ago Lucy Dahl who summered on a lake not too far from our store said that her Mother was coming to visit for a long weekend and she was excited to introduce us. Like anyone expecting company we wanted our store to be perfect because Patricia Neal was coming to visit. Oh my, Patricia! How proud our mother would have been because she admired her tenacity and talent so much. Patricia Neal was coming to our food store in a little town in central Maine. I was humbled and speechless!

I blame my mom. Growing up eating her hearty Italian pasta dinners has made nearly all other grains seem insubstantial. Rice is good, but you have to eat more of it to get full. Wheatberries are filling, but they take too long to cook. Couscous is, well, wimpy. That's right, couscous is wimpy. How can anyone get full on a dinner of delicate, fluffy couscous? I can't. That's why I have relegated it to breakfast.

For breakfast, couscous works. It's a welcome change from oatmeal and is just as versatile. It can be made with water or milk and tastes great with add-ins like nuts, dried fruits, or fresh berries. Of course, a drizzle of melted butter, maple syrup, or honey only makes it better.

This Warm and Nutty Breakfast Couscous is packed with belly-filling good carbs and lean protein. It's crunchy, chewy, sweet, and filling. It's definitely not wimpy.

Once upon a time in a kitchen far, far away, I was often babysat by my grandma in our fairy tale of a family deli in downtown New Haven, Ct. I could have done worse. She, a sorceress of superb taste, made ruggelach fresh daily, with me assisting, eating fistfuls of walnuts that 'just happened' to fall from the dough, licking the battered bowl of elixir from the cake preparations, eating crumbs that magically broke off the babka. My mouth was as busy as my hands as I ingested the mysteries of grandma’s cuisine.

We were major meat eaters in those innocent days, breakfast, lunch, noshes, suppers and snacks. How could we not be, with kosher creatures sticking out their tongues or lolling seductively about in grandpa's display cases? Lunches of exotic fare like liverwurst, baloney, pastrami, corned beef and melt-in-your-mouth scoops of the Chartoff chopped liver filled my plate. Pieces of the ubiquitous Hebrew National salamis were served in challah sandwiches, on toothpicks, fried up with eggs or put on my grandpa's homemade pizzas. Grandma's brisket was to die for, and she and grandpa left the earth from heart disease far too soon to prove it.

My introduction to oysters came when I lived in Boston in college, and had a roommate (let’s call her “Ellen”) who was one of the most unattractive specimens of humanity I have encountered in my years on earth. I am not referring to her physical appearance; I’m not that shallow.

Her significant deficits had mostly to do with manners, and with the fact that she kept a small refrigerator in our extremely small dorm room, from which she regularly withdrew and inhaled various edibles ranging from liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches to ice cream. She often consumed these items in her bed, never offered to share, and frankly made such a display of dripping, chomping barbarousness that any appetite I might have had was crushed.