Food, Family, and Memory

noodle_kugel.jpgEven in turbulent time like these there are certain constants in life – like noodles. Noodles have played a very important role in my life. Whenever I got sick my mother would cook luchen (‘luxshun’ for those jews and non-jews unfamiliar with yiddish pronunciation) and cheese. I have vivid recollections of her bringing me a steaming bowl (not just a bowl but a BOWL) of wide egg noodles (like pappardelle but eggier and chewier) bathed in butter, cottage cheese, cream cheese, cinnamon and a touch of sugar and salt. It was the only thing I had to look forward to when I got sick. If the noodles were hot enough, the sugar and butter would melt into a glaze over the whole dish. And in college when I got sick I would routinely make myself a bastardized version of the dish usually with just spaghetti, salt, butter and cottage cheese. As I got older and began moving around the country for different jobs the luchen and cheese unfortunately receded into my history.   

Luckily noodles crept back into my life. It was the first date I had with my wife Niki. We had just seen a late movie in Santa Monica and were starved but nothing was open that appealed to us so I said something like, ‘let’s go back to my place and I’ll cook us up something.’ When I said that I really didn’t know what I had in my refrigerator, however I was out to impress her with my cooking skills. Upon getting back and examining the provisions all I had was Hebrew national hot dogs, spaghettini and celery. So I thinly shredded the dogs and celery, boiled and drained the noodles and fired up my ancient wok. A few drizzles of soy sauce, pinch of black pepper and a little maple syrup and voila! A first date meal that won her heart. 

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nkcNat King Cole holds some magical power over me. I was shopping the week before Thanksgiving when I heard it--

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack Frost nipping on your nose,

Yuletide carols being sung by a choir,

And folks dressed up like Eskimos.


That most mellow of voices (along with Frank and Bing) transfixes me. I hear it, and I'm instantly struck with holiday cheer, which for me, means shopping for foods such as cranberries, pomegranates, and, of course, chestnuts.

Here's the thing with roasting chestnuts. The actual roasting and removing of the nut from its shell is a lot less romantic than it sounds. Every year growing up it was the same thing: We would enthusiastically purchase a big bag of fresh chestnuts, roast them, and then puncture our fingers in a desperate attempt to eke out the tiniest piece of chestnut we could find that wasn't studded with sharp shards of shell or tinged with mold.

Thank goodness someone came up with bottled chestnuts. My mom first bought them a few years ago and sent me some. I removed the bottle top and, in 5 seconds flat, was eating a chewy, moist, chestnut devoid of shell and mold. Bottled chestnuts can be found at most organic markets and Italian specialty markets. I also like Trader Joe's vacuumed-packed chestnuts.

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lobsters_sm.jpgMy father was a dyed-in-the-shorts Bermudian who loved to feast on all things from under the sea. Shrimp, crab, oysters, mussels, fish of all kinds, and lobsters. Five years of serving in the Canadian Army overseas in Holland and France during World War ll chewing on K rations in a trench didn’t diminish his early island jones for a crustacean or almost anything seaworthy and edible.

Relocating to the Toronto suburbs in Canada in the late Forties where seafood restaurants were almost as scarce as mermaid sightings still didn’t discourage his quest for a taste of the ocean. He did his best to pass his glorious seafood cravings on to his children, but as a toddler, I balked at the thought of sliding one of those grey slimy, pulsating mollusks down my tender young throat no matter how much tangy cocktail sauce was dumped on it.  I cringed at the thought of cracking open a giant scarlet claw to scoop the steaming white meat dripping with warm clarified butter and lemon.

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melomakarona.jpgAs 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...

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shippingnews.jpgMy dad lived part-time in Sag Harbor and made the drive from the city every weekend in every type of weather. I would visit him and my stepmother every summer, and we’d stay put for the weekend, usually poolside. My dad and I would swim back and forth and read books and nap. He would do his Sunday puzzle and I would nudge him for clues; I would read books he gave me and he would nudge me about which part I was up to. Because to me, my dad was part Phillip Roth and part John Updike, I read Phillip Roth and John Updike. Because we both loved to punctuate the headier reading with murder mysteries, he would toss me his copies of Lee Child or Lawrence Block, and I would gobble them up like candy. I still have the water swollen copy of Annie Proulx’s Shipping News that he accidentally tossed into the water in order to save me from a hovering bee, and I remember how he had said he envied my getting to read it for the first time.

But what would any return home to the family be without the requisite favorite foods? Besides the inevitable Saturday night Maine lobster dinner, the most memorable part of the summer food wise, in addition to the musk melons and the corn and potatoes and other fresh fare at the roadside markets, were the little blue and white checkered bags of chocolate chip cookies that one could find only at Kathleen’s Bakeshop.

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