Sunday Cooking and Food

Gardening for me has always been about a combination of things: creating beauty for the eye, habitat for pollinators, including birds, and food, especially growing the things I couldn’t find or if found, afford, in markets. I wanted to put beautifully scalloped Costoluto Genovese tomatoes on the cabrese salad, fistfuls of chives and cilantro, parsley, oregano and lime basil in my zucchini latkes — made, of course, from buttery Gadzukes squash. Yes, sometimes having something different from what was on offer at the grocery store was about wowing the neighbors who shared meals with us, but it was mostly about flavor. I don’t care how disease-resistant a tomato is if it doesn’t taste wonderful.

I began cooking on Sundays when my children began school — I was working, they had after-school everything, but I still wanted to feed them healthy, home-cooked meals. So, on Sundays, I would spend several hours in the kitchen making casseroles, bread, soups, maybe roasting a chicken, all of which were easy to pop into the oven throughout the week. Sometimes my children would join me, sometimes not, though they both grew into wonderful cooks in their own right, and know how to feed themselves and others well.

But while my own mother was a good cook and let me work on my own in the kitchen from an early age, Julia Child was my first true encouragement, and taught me the adventure available in flavor. So much has expanded from those first black-and-white French Chef episodes. (I loved it when the shows got closed-caption help and included the ‘Oof’s’ that Julia’d gasp when wrestling with a chicken for coq au vin). Now, there are celebrity chefs and cuisines and cooking methods from around the world offering what seems like an infinite variety and possibility. Enough to manage to come up with a delicious meal with almost anything. But Julia was first, and the big thing she did, at least for me, was legitimize the pleasures of the plate and conversation of the company.

Cooking, gardening, food, nourishment and nurturing are all inextricably connected pieces of a whole life.