Steak and Macaroni and Cheese (March 2007)

It's been a few dinners since I've written to you. The first one was on a Thursday night. We had steak, winter squash, potatoes and salad. For dessert we had thumbprint cookies and tea. I had neglected to tell you that I was cutting out red meat from my diet (I've been thinking of becoming a vegetarian). When I saw the steaks sitting in the foam tray, ready to be slapped onto your little Hamilton Beach grill, I figured it was now or never, and so I told you, not wanting to hurt your feelings at all. You were okay with it. There were always foods that Grandpa couldn't or wouldn't eat, such as cucumbers in a salad. And your oldest daughter who eats with you a few nights a week is on a Weight Watchers diet. So you are used to accomodating the preferences of others. Now you have a granddaughter who won't eat red meat.

I had worked that day, and rushed to make a dessert when I got home. Flipping through my Betty Crocker recipe book, I found one for jam thumbprint cookies and decided to make those. Now usually cooking and baking is a relaxing pastime for me. I enjoy creating delicious meals and desserts for people to eat. My mother says that this love of cooking and ability in the kitchen came directly from you. She doesn't like to cook and rarely will try a new recipe. She avoids the kitchen if she can; her favorite dinner is a bowl of popcorn and a Diet Pepsi.

It was partly through books, partly through movies and television, and partly though people that I discovered that there were those who loved food and loved to cook; the secret that those who eat well, live well, and that cooking can become ingrained in a family's traditions and celebrations. Two books that come to mind are Like Water for Chocolate and Under the Tuscan Sun. Two women, one in Mexico and one in Italy, pour their passions into their cooking and it yields magnificent results. I remember staying at a friend's house in college and her making fun of me for even mentioning the word "recipe". In her family, you learned to cook through oral tradition, one generation passing down their secrets to the next. And then there was the Food Channel on t.v. It dawned on me that cooking didn't have to be a chore, one more thing you needed to do after a long day of work. Cooking is play; cooking is a way to unwind and relax and feed your creativity.

As I learned to cook, I branched out and began creating. Farfalle pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts; Big John's Texas Chicken Pie; New York Cheesecake; Chicken Tortilla Soup. I began to enjoy food more. I asked for a bread machine for my 25th birthday and began making my own pizzas from scratch. My family teased me, calling me "Martha Stewart" and a tension grew between my mother and I for a while as it turned out that I felt quite differently about cooking than she did.

As I cooked, I discovered something about my mother that I had never noticed when she was cooking: that she was almost as picky as a child. She will scrape the red and green bell peppers off her pizza, push the onions to the far side of her plate. She doesn't like peas, which I always knew, but since having dinners with you, Grandma, I realized there's a whole gardenful of vegetables that she doesn't cook or eat. Beets, winter squash, brussel sprouts, asparagus and spinach, to name a few. I love her very much, just as she is. But there is a part of me that wishes I had grown up in a family where getting to help the women in the kitchen was a treat as a girl, and where cooking skills and a love of good food had been passed down from generation to generation.

As I was making these thumbprint cookies, I was not enjoying myself. I kept spilling things, banging into things and knocking about clumsily. I didn't have any shortening and so I doubled the margarine, which was a mistake. The cookies took extra long to bake, and didn't look too impressive when they came out of the oven. I made indents in them and spooned raspberry jam into them, loaded them into a Tupperware container while they were still warm and dashed out of the house, leaving a sink full of dirty dishes.

The next week, you had prepared macaroni and cheese. And wouldn't you know it, the oral tradition began. Always remember that this is a good way to use up all of the old, hard cheeses in your refrigerator, you said. Any old cheeses will do. You were right; it was delicious. We also had banana bread, beets, homemade applesauce, and country apple tart and tea for dessert. I was making up for the thumbprint cookies of the previous week by bringing the country apple tart.

The applesauce, you told me, comes from apples that grow on a tree in your backyard. It was a volunteer tree, and produces little, white-skinned apples that you discovered make a good applesauce. Not too tart and not too sweet, just spicy enough.

You had gone to the shed in the backyard this week to get some of your caning supplies and take inventory, and you discovered little pine cones in the bottom of your basket. A squirrel's winter stash! He probably thought he had found the best hiding place ever.

You surprised me by talking of selling your house. You had decided that if you were to have only a year or two of life left, you wouldn't want to spend it uprooting and moving into a strange place. So you will keep the house on Cherry Street and finish out your time there. I think that is a good idea. You said that you would like to sell the house to a family member, but all of your children have homes of their own and wouldn't want it.

"I'll buy it!" I said laughingly. "Ryan and I might need a place to live after we get married."
You took me seriously. "Well, we'll see - I'll remember that," you said. "But hopefully you're not hoping for this to happen soon."
"Oh goodness, no," I said to you. "I want you around for a long time. I think that's why I would buy your house; I want to keep you and my memories of you."
"Maybe you will; I don't know what will happen," you said, meaning life after death, ghosts, and spirits haunting houses.

I told you that if I bought it I would want to make it the way you've always wanted it, and playfully "took orders" from you. Put siding on the exterior - a pretty, Colonial mustard-yellow color that you saw on a house once. Hang charcoal-gray shutters on the windows. Put oak floors throughout the kitchen and dining room, and use the long wooden planks from the attic as flooring for the Keeping Room. Put French doors leading out to the back patio, and a large triangular window on the south wall to let the sunlight spill in. Take the light fixture hanging in the Keeping Room, which was a gift from your friend Charlotte, and hang it on the front porch. Put tile ceiling in the downstairs bedroom and dining room.

I would want to do all of that, plus replanting your gardens out back, remodeling the kitchen and putting in a skylight, and maybe building a small barn-like garage at the end of the driveway. Your house would be truly lovely if all these changes took place. But I hope that it will be many years before anyone else begins making your house their home.

You had a hobbyhorse in your tea leaves. You didn't reach for the book; you knew that hobbyhorse wasn't an entry in there; you've gotten one before. You thanked me for having dinner with you. I don't like eating alone, you said. I am glad to be providing you with company for dinner, one night a week.