On Friday, I mentioned the fact that I’m very often thinking about food. So, what better way to start the week than by discussing the weekend’s food?

The highlight, of course, were the crepes. I made them in my new Bialetti Aerternum nonstick frying pan of awesomness. (Christmas present from my parents.) Seriously, this pan is amazing. It’s not Teflon, but food literally slides around in it. Cleaning it is a joy. And it’s cute, too. If you’re in the market for a new nonstick pan, may I suggest one of these? And then, may I suggest you make crepes in them?

The Nutella crepes were delicious and were eaten in about thirty seconds flat. (Recipe here, video here.) I could have eaten a dozen. Next time, I’m doubling the recipe.

My Nutella snack was completely justifiable, in my opinion, because this is what I had for lunch that day:

An enormous salad with homemade French vinaigrette with Dijon mustard and shallots (recipe: here). Jesse and I were quite proud of our vegetable intake on Saturday. Now, if we can just keep that up…

On Sunday, we had lunch with good friends, which was wonderful. Once we’re done with some of our leftovers, I’m going to try my hand at homemade tortillas. Exciting!

I’m easily amused, and I must say–I like it that way.

Make crepes

Buy olives

Boil eggs

…Well, I think that about sums up what I’m usually thinking about. (Read: FOOD.)

Which means, I spent an hour running errands and the rest of the day cooking.

I wanted to bake a pie. A chocolate pecan pie. Specifically, this one. This pie is the easiest pie in the world to make. Assuming that you have pre-shelled pecans. Which I didn’t. I had a giant bag of fresh pecans my aunt and uncle had given us from Charlotte. How hard could it be to shell a cup and a half of pecans? That’s nothing! Or, so I thought.

About five hours later (I am only exaggerating slightly), I emerged victorious with my shelled nuts and turned my attention to the pie crust.

(Insert pie-crust-making-and-errand-running here. I really need a food processor. I hate cutting the butter into the flour by hand. Really really really really hate it. I’m bad at it too. Which is part of the reason I hate it.)

For dinner, I made roasted butternut squash soup, pan-fried salmon with spicy honey mustard sauce, and Israeli couscous. I told Jesse this was the most involved meal he’d eat for the next four months. The dinner was really just an excuse to use some toys I got for Christmas, specifically my immersion blender and my new Bialetti pan (love!).

Then Jessica came over to hang out and play music, and she bravely taste-tested the pie with us. The pie crust had kind of fallen over in one spot, so it wasn’t the most attractive pie ever, but…

…

Ohmygoodness.

Let’s just say, if shelling those pecans wasn’t so gosh-darn difficult, I might make this pie on a weekly basis. And then I would weigh 200 pounds. But I wouldn’t care. That’s how good this pie is.

Today being my last day of break and all, I think I’ll celebrate by eating the rest of the pie.

In case you ever wondered how to tell whether I’m on break or not, here are some signs.

1. This weekend, I made bread. The most beautiful, glorious, lovely loaf I’ve ever made.

(Okay, fine. That was the second batch I made that day. The first batch never made it to the rising stage because of its being the most epic failure of bread making in the history of bread making. I won’t go into the story, but suffice it to say, it involves a too-large ball of dough, a mixer that was literally bouncing, and grease. Not the edible kind. Grease from the mixer–in the bread. Yeah.)

But let’s not dwell on failure, shall we? The end result was worth the trouble. The house smelled of freshly baked bread all day, and I couldn’t have been happier.

2. This week, I’ll get both cats to the vet, have a chiropractor appointment, finish my Christmas shopping, and still (in all likelihood) have time to clean house and get some reading done.

3. Speaking of which, I’ve already finished a book I’d been working my way through all semester. Now, onto a book my sister-in-law sent me a couple months ago…

4. Free time? …This feels strange.

5. The house is fairly clean.

6. The laundry’s done.

If you notice any of the signs above, I’m probably on break.

I’ll give you a quiz to make sure you’ve learned the concepts.

(Wow, if that didn’t give away my profession, I’m not sure what would.)

Ahem–ready?

I’ll give you two lunches. You identify the “break” lunch and the “during the semester” lunch.

Lunch A: fresh veggie sandwich with homemade hummus on homemade bread, followed by home-baked cookies and milk.

Lunch B: McDonald’s.

Well, were you able to correctly identify the home lunch and the school lunch? Need a hint?

I didn’t think so.

Now, I’m off to clean something or take a bath or read a book or all of the above. Ahhhh.

We spent this Thanksgiving with Jesse’s family in Florida. We’d originally planned to be in Charlotte with my family but after getting Jesse’s dad’s diagnosis, we quickly changed our plans. But even though we wished we were there under different circumstances, we did enjoy ourselves quite a bit. Thanksgiving day was spent at Jesse’s aunt’s house–a lovely country place with a barn and an orange grove and a couple horses and a veritable flock of chickens. The dinner was almost derailed by a local fire that took out the power in the area–with the turkey half-done in the oven–but fortunately the power came back on just in time to finish everything. The meal was wonderful.

Throughout the day, the family played cornhole, watched football, watched the sun set over the orchard, fed the horses. We ate pie and drank coffee. A few folks played guitar and sang everything from Jimmy Buffet to Oasis. The kids played hide and seek outside. We thumbed through Black Friday ads.

We also took our family Christmas photo. Here we are on our best behavior:

But if you know us, you know we’re rarely this well behaved. Here’s a slightly more realistic/silly portrayal of Jesse and his family:

And here’s the real story:

The definition of family: people you can be yourself around without worrying about it. And people who forgive you when you post embarrassing photos of them online.

1. Stuffing our faces with pizza. (Yum. Also, my first full meal since being sick. Thanks, Jessica!)

2. Talking about the music video Joey is directing for Jessica.

3. Pondering the possibility that Jessica’s house is haunted. (Mystery music every night at 10:00 p.m.! It’s not the neighbors!)

4. Dreaming big dreams.

5. Thinking about stories and art and music.

6. Howling–howling–at a kitten video.

Jessica had hooked up her computer to the TV and I can’t remember why we ran across the video, but as soon as it started, Jessica, Jesse, and I immediately started to shriek.

It went something like this:

“IT’S SO CUTE! AHH! CUTE!”

“OH MY GOSH–OH MY GAWWWW–SO CUTE!”

“MAKE IT STOP! TOO CUTE!”

Joey watched us with an expression somewhere in the middle of amusement, curiosity, and mild horror. Tears streamed down my cheeks. We slapped our thighs and pounded our fists on the floor. We continued shrieking.

We made so much noise the first time we watched it that we didn’t realize it had sound.

“It has sound?!”

So, of course, we watched it again. This time, we kept the shrieking to a minimum, so we could hear the kitten. I cried some more.

Friday night, Jesse had to work late (with Joey–they work together), so Jessica came over for dinner. We made a tasty veggie soup and from-scratch buttermilk biscuits. We talked for hours and hours, until we were practically falling asleep. Then she went home and I went to bed and Jesse came home after 4:00 a.m.

The weekend was lovely–I got caught up on laundry, cleaned house, and cooked a lot. Tostadas, which were delightfully messy. Beans and more biscuits. Pumpkin pie with homemade pie crust. Some kind of cheesy-creamy cabbage thing.

I’ll end this with the kitten video. I must say, though, that–as with most things–it’s better with friends:

While I was fighting with the dumpling dough, I thought, this is something I should inherently know how to do. Both of my grandmothers cooked all the time, it seemed, and neither of them used a lot of recipes. They cooked by instinct and habit. This much flour for biscuits, this much water in the pie crust. They knew exactly what things should look like, and they knew how to adjust if something was going wrong.

I cook at home a lot, mostly for budget reasons, but also because I enjoy it, and I feel better physically when I don’t eat out a lot. But I am mostly dependent on recipes, and there aren’t a lot of dishes that I cook over and over (enough to memorize). I’m much better now at improvising or adjusting recipes, but I don’t have a repertoire, if you will, as my grandmothers did.

Perhaps that happens when you reach your thirties. I have, with much practice and determination, gotten fairly good at biscuits. Maybe the rest will follow.

But the problem, really, is that I don’t want to learn to cook from recipes. I want to learn to cook from my grandmother. I don’t want to learn recipes. I want to learn her cooking.

Making chicken and dumplings last night made me nostalgic, made me wonder if my grandchildren will have any memories of my food one day, made me wonder if all this can be blamed on the fact that no one lives near anyone else anymore. I hate living in a different state from my parents and my grandmother. But, what can you do? You’ve got to stay where you have a job, especially now.

In a perfect world, then, I would drive over to my grandmother’s house and have her show me how to make chicken and dumplings. I would take notes. I would take pictures. Then, the next week, I’d go back and have her teach me pie crusts. I’d cook with her and have her correct my mistakes.

In the absence of a perfect world, however, I will call her and write down instructions and then I’ll make my own batch of chicken and dumplings, which will not be half bad, though I will not capture whatever it is that makes her version taste so good. Perhaps with practice, I tell myself. Perhaps with time. And so I will keep trying.

(Suffice it to say, as soon as we got married Jesse gleefully handed over all the filing and bill paying to yours truly, and this arrangement has worked impeccably well for both of us.)

I also found some receipts from my own college days. You can learn a lot about your former self, and the time period you once inhabited, from receipts. The early 2000s don’t seem that long ago, but here’s a receipt for Hollywood Video–an actual store where I rented movies. And I’m pretty sure I rented them on VHS. On October 3rd, 2001, I rented A Knight’s Tale for $4.02 (it was due back by Monday 10/08/01). Another Wal-Mart receipt listed “developing” as an item, and it took me a moment to remember that I used to pay money to have film developed. Remember that? When you didn’t even know what the pictures looked like? And you couldn’t wait to see them?

I learned to cook in college, but I was working my way up to it and didn’t attempt much from-scratch cooking until my second and third year. Here’s a Publix receipt from June 9, 2002: Toilet paper, turkey hotdogs, hotdog buns, two Boston Market frozen meals, milk, Gatorade citrus cooler (the best flavor ever), a Velveeta mac and cheese with broccoli, and Prego mushroom sauce. I remember that summer. I was working at the Writing Center a lot for the first summer session, and all my friends had left after the spring semester ended. Jesse was back in Merritt Island, working a summer job at Lockheed Martin. We only saw one another a couple times a week. One night, he drove over to Orlando after work and we bought Publix subs for a picnic by Lake Eola. Only it started pouring rain, so we had the picnic on my apartment floor instead.

After the first summer session, I flew out to Oregon and joined my Aunt Nicki and my cousin Katie on my dad’s side for a cross-country trip back to West Virginia. That trip was a month long–a week in Oregon, two weeks across country with stops at Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, and other scenic spots along the way, and then another week in West Virginia with family.

On June 14th of that year, I went to Wal-Mart and bought supplies for that trip, including the Dramamine that didn’t work at all when I went whale watching.

The day before that, I filled up my gas tank for $18.31. I paid $1.33 a gallon, and I remember thinking that was expensive.

So, the times have changed. I pay $3.50 a gallon for gas and think that’s expensive. I rent movies from Redbox or Netflix, I shop at Harris Teeter and miss Publix, I have long given up on Dramamine, I no longer buy frozen dinners if I can help it. But some things haven’t changed. I still like citrus cooler Gatorade, though I can’t remember the last time I drank it, or if they even still make that flavor. Jesse and I are still together, though now there are no summers apart (except when I’m traipsing off to California).

I think I might save some receipts this year in a box somewhere, to discover in another decade. I wonder what I will think then of myself now, what judgments I will pass on my food choices, or what I will remember fondly, or what I’ll be paying for gas then (or will we all be driving electric cars by then?). Will I look back on now and think my life much simpler, as I do when I look back at what I had to worry about in college? Will I mentally gloss over the difficulties of today, knowing exactly how things turned out?

What is a baked pork bun, you ask?

A baked pork bun is heaven in bun form. The bread is soft and sweat. (Tastes somewhat reminiscent of Quincy’s yeast rolls–remember those?) It fits perfectly in your hand, so you can cradle it with one hand and still have the other hand free for driving or holding onto a cable car or gesturing in great joy and excitement. Or, better yet, for holding another pork bun.

Inside that beautiful, perfectly baked roll is a gloriously tasty meaty filling.

(Now, it’s important that you don’t look at the meat very closely and that you don’t think very much about what it is or where it came from. Just enjoy the glory of the pork bun and don’t be a diva about it.)

If you are Jesse, this is how you eat a pork bun:

Look at that face! Look at the joy! Now, don’t you want to try one too? (Don’t answer that unless the answer is “Yes,” which is the only correct answer to that question.)