ABOUT THE FOOD DUDE - PART 1

Mom was a lousy cook.

I loved my mother, may she rest in peace. A raven-haired beauty in her youth, she was a gentle, sensitive soul who loved her children and taught us all we needed to know about family. Mom lived all of her life within ten miles of her parents, brothers and sisters. She spoke to them every day. She didn’t deserve to lose her husband so young, didn’t deserve the strokes and the cancers and, in the end, the Alzheimer’s disease. But the fact remains, the woman couldn’t cook a lick. Her best shot at a home cooked meal? Open a can of chicken noodle soup, rip up some iceberg lettuce and cover it with bottled dressing, bake a chicken dry and boil canned green beans until they turn soggy. For dessert? Store-bought apple pie with ice cream on top.

Not her fault. Born nine years after the next youngest of her siblings, Mom was raised by her brothers and sisters with one directive from their mother – keep Esther out from under foot. And Grandma Rose was one of those big-chested, broad-shouldered, no-nonsense Russian women who ruled her house as surely as the czars that she’d fled had ruled. Her children, not being Bolsheviks, considered rebellion out of the question. Mom was kept out of the kitchen. Mom never learned to cook.

I have no quarrel with Grandma Rose other than the fact that she failed to teach my mother the arts of housewifery. I was the eldest son of her youngest daughter and she spoiled me rotten. She gave me Cokes when I was already high on sugar. She hugged me close and told me she loved me. Doesn’t change the fact. She should’ve taught Mom to cook.

Fast forward thirty years. (Get used to it. This will not be a chronological narrative.) I have met and married Cathey, the best cook that I know amateur or professional. Cathey reads cookbooks with the same intensity that a teenager plays video games. When it’s just the two of us, we eat at 7:00 PM every night. We take our time. We talk. We dine together. We have dinner parties with friends that start with appetizers at 6:30 and finish with dessert at 9:00.

In other words, I’ve spent three decades learning what it means not just to eat, but to enjoy the food and the rituals that surround food.