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Old Foods and New Years

Beck — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 11:32:41 -0500

There are some things that my mom made when I was a child that I still remember with a poignant, nostalgic hunger: cinnamon buns at Christmas with white frosting and red maraschino cherries on the top (memorable because my mother, a responsible mother of the 70s and 80s, shunned red food colouring); tea biscuits with winter suppers, to be devoured afterwards with margarine and homemade jam; hot milk sponge cakes on lazy Sunday afternoons; pancakes on Saturday mornings while we watched HOURS of cartoons.

It's funny what we take away from our childhood, this brief, haunting space of time. I have had - and, I will say with no real modesty, made - any number of delicious things in my adult life, but none of them possess the same enchanted glow as a bowl of orange jello brought to me in a silver bowl when I was in the hospital at 8. I can't even remember what my birthday cake tasted like this year, beyond it being delicious, but I could tell you in detail about my childhood birthday cakes, delicate and chocolate and sandwiched together with strawberry preserves.

I read in a cookbook ages before I had kids that it was important to keep in mind what "taste memories" we are building for our children, which I mentally squirreled away, thinking at the time that it sounded like quite sensible advice. Now, though, I'm not so certain - I don't think we get to pick what "taste memories" our children take away from childhood, since my kids have no memories at ALL of me ever making things that I am quite proud of and make WAY too often (brownies, anyone?) but speak yearningly of doughnuts that their grandfather bought them two winters ago.

And then there are the things that I make without even thinking about, like the tray of polenta squares (totally simple and from the cookbook that came with my son's lunchbox) that I pulled out of the oven last night, and which my husband had never even SEEN before, since they're normally packed in school lunches and eaten before he gets home. Yet I make them nearly every week and they're received with a surprisingly rapturous glee by my kids, this food that I rarely even think about and that he'd never even seen.

Most people go into parenthood wanting to give their children a good childhood, to give their children happiness, sweet-tasting and mild. The problem with children, though, is that they're actual people and live in the actual world and we don't actually get to control other people or the world - well, I don't, although that feels unfair. And we also don't get to say what memories they'll keep from their childhood, which is sort of depressing, just like my stupid polenta squares.

A lot of people take stock of their health in January, and make plans to eat healthier in this still-new year. It's certainly not a bad idea - my personal resolutions are to eat more fruit, to have more vegetables with supper and to cut back on how many processed foods we eat, but I have other food resolutions beyond those. I want to make more soul-feeding foods, more foods that will stay (possibly) in their memories long after childhood is over, long after this goes from being their home and just becomes the house they grew up in, long after childhood is over and this all has just become memory, vivid and bittersweet and gone.

New Year, New Promises

Beck — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:00:11 -0500

Everyone is back to school/work today! I spent much of yesterday feeling a bit downcast about this, but now that everyone is out the door and my house is quiet - except for the happy Baby, playing with her Littlest Pet Shop toys from Christmas, and singing Jingle Bells again, God help me - it's quite lovely. And it's probably for the best that we're forced back into our regular routine, since having my husband home for nearly TWO WEEKS caused us to nearly get beri-beri or rickets or some other exotic malnutrition-related disease.

I made some half-hearted Eating Healthier resolutions for this year, but a) we already think we eat quite healthily, with little apparent effect that I can see and b) it's mostly just code for "I want to lose a lot of weight". But the post-Christmas season of lazing around, eating nothing but appetizers and leftover Clementines have made certain glaring deficiencies in our diets a lot more obvious. We are a lazy, lazy people. Apparently, only the structure of the school year and the work week keeps us fed at all - over the break, the kids floated around the house unbreakfasted until midmorning, supper a question mark at 5:30 instead of a certainty, an answer I've known for a week. And so now we all have bad, chesty colds and the relationship between our half-hazard eating patterns and our health seems more obvious.

So yes, this year we've resolved to eat healthier. We've also resolved to stop eating so decadently, to start spending substantially less on groceries and then to pass on the savings to local children's hunger groups. Our part of the world is being hit REALLY hard by the financial crises, and we've decided that it's no longer moral to keep eating like life is one big Greco-Roman feast.

One thing that's always startled me about old photos is how grown-up everyone looks - serious people in suits and proper dresses, serious people for a serious time. Looking at them makes me feel ridiculous in my jeans and hoodies and sneakers, makes me feel like a perpetual toddler, someone who has been protected from serious choices and consequences. And lounging around the house over the past two weeks, with my husband and I barely even changing out of our goofy pajamas and eating snacks instead of dinner and playing Guitar Hero - as fun as it was - really made me feel like we'd backslid on our already tenuous adulthood, that we'd skidded all the way back to our teen years.

This morning my husband got up in the dark and the cold of the morning and put on his workclothes, and I watched out the window while the car lights disappeared off into the distance. Then I sighed and made a big pot of No Fun Oatmeal for the kids' breakfast, got back to the daily work of adulthood, with my secret promise that this year we will be serious people, people who will look like real grown-ups when our pictures are old.

Almost Next Year

Beck — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:02:48 -0500

It's almost impossible for me to believe that it's nearly 2009, which sounds like a freaky-leaky sci-fi year and not a year that we actually will be LIVING in. I think that in my mind, real years start with 19-something, despite the fact that 2/5 of my household were born in the 2000s and another 1/5 was hanging out in diapers in the latter half of 1999. Still, though.

2008 hasn't been - and I'm knocking on wood here - that bad. It was pretty busy, but I managed to not nearly die this year, which is always a plus, and the kids are still pretty cute, and we're keeping our head above water economically, so I'm grateful for all of that. We're going to celebrate in our usual fashion, which means hanging out at homes, playing board games and eating appetizers and nursing whatever dread illnesses we managed to pick up over Christmas. We are warily allowing The Girl to invite her BFF over for the night, but that is only because we are VERY nice and also because she's a pretty good kid. I realize that's pretty low-key, but by December 31st, it's ALL we are up to.

I keep seeing big menu plans for fancy New Year's Eve dinners, which is fine if you can stand it, I guess, but right NOW I never want to eat again, thanks to... let me think... SEVEN family gatherings over the past four days, all of which involved MASSIVE amounts of food. Nothing but dour water and lettuce for me right now, thank you. So we're probably just going to do a cheese fondue and some boxed appetizers - because I REALLY do not want to cook at this moment - and something child-pleasing for dessert and that is IT.

New Year's Eve used to be THE big party night of the year, and now it's turned into a quiet night at home, which is the sort of thing you never suspect that you might eventually want someday - and this is why I'm not a big plan-maker, because who KNOWS what I'll like ten years from now? Right now, though, the idea of a quiet night with all my kids and some easy yummy food and probably a million rounds of Mario Kart sounds just PERFECT, sounds like the ideal end to a year that was certainly not perfect but that was more than good enough.

So what are you doing New Year's Eve? Has it been a good year for you and yours?