By
Expat Chef
Every Saturday, I take my daughter to the Farmer’s market. She loves riding in the backpack, watching the people, looking at the fruits and vegetables. I hear her gleeful shout for “More!” as soon as she sees the blackberries and blueberries. We fill our basket, talk to the farmers. One family waits for us each week, saving my little girl a slice of fresh cantaloupe and cherry tomatoes. And while I know we are shopping to feed ourselves in the week ahead, I am also coming to feed my soul.
In 1975, I arrived here in the Midwest, along with my sister, our two flea-ridden cats and a couple suitcases. Everything we had in the world. I was scrawny and disheveled, and old beyond my ten years. It was my seventh move, fourth family situation, and the culmination of a four-year custody battle. The battle involved accusations of neglect and malnutrition, use of child support funds as income. It wasn’t pretty.
But you don’t realize all that when you are a kid. You walk yourself home from school at age 6, let yourself in the door, and find whatever food there is in the house to eat. It wasn’t much. Frozen McDonald’s hamburgers, corn flakes, peanut butter, powdered milk. A real treat was a can of ravioli. A rare sit-down meal was minute rice and boil-in-the-bag Salisbury steak. Which was far better than the chipped beef variety.
By eight, I took to trying to “create” my own treats. This usually involved bisquick “pie crusts” and jello pudding. Yes, I used the oven. Alone. But, that was pretty much how I did everything.
And then life changed.
We went home with my father and stepmother to a house on forty acres. My sister and I were reunited with my brother after three years apart. I had a family.
When I look back on those few years, I see them all wrapped in a golden light. I hear laughter, and I remember, most of all, doing everything together. There was dinner on the table as a family every night. Nothing was boiled in a bag. If it was frozen, it was once fresh and we had prepared it and stored it. There was whole milk in the refrigerator. As much as you could drink. If food is love, then I was surely worshipped.
A farm is a wonderful place for a child with a hungry body and soul. Looking back, I now realize I was “eating local” before it became a movement. It was just how we had to live. The nearest grocery store was 30 miles away. The closest restaurant was a truck stop 20 miles away. We had a one-acre garden that produced so many tomatoes, my stepmom resorted to making her own ketchup. Our eggs were a quarter-mile walk away. We took them out from under the chickens, no styrofoam container. We went to a nearby u-pick strawberry patch in June. Visited the orchard for peaches in late summer, and again for apples in fall. We canned, made jam, pies, preserves, sauces, pickles. We had a freezer full of beef, inch-thick steaks, from my great-uncle’s cattle farm. My stepmom made bread. And she did this despite an hour commute to a full time job in the city.
I had forty acres with woods, and four dogs and a cat to explore them with. It was there, in the fresh air, open land, and the fertile ground of a real family, I finally put down my first tentative roots. The roots grew strong. And fortunately quickly, as life changed again and again.
My father is gone now. My siblings scattered as adults. I’ve moved at least ten more times. My stepmom now distant and altered by past events. Yet it is those few tentative roots that I cling to, what I hold dear as my role model for how a family should be.
And food is love. Fresh, beautiful produce. Healthy food that sustains you. The food I find at the market, from the farm community that I grew up in, the only place I ever called home as a child.
I try to share this with my daughter, my new family. To give her something of the richness that helped me grow my few strong roots. And, just as a starving plant sends forth new roots in search of water, I too have sent forth new roots. Drawing to me friends as my family of choice. I like to bring them into my home. To hear our children playing together, filling the house with laughter and the richness of togetherness. I bring them to my table. I feed them with the fresh foods from the market, the best way I can prepare them. It is love.
You can find the Expatriate Chef in
her kitchen, facing a 40th birthday and, I hope, a huge carrot cake.
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