Comfort

The mushrooms at the grocer's are big this year, perfect for stuffing if you are so inclined, but the stems are too thick and tough for the delicate risottos and duxelles I have been leaning to these dark, cold evenings. Taking the knife to the fungi takes me back to when I first brought my first knife home and spent hours patiently practicing slicing and dicing. Snapping the stems from the cups, a blade to halve the circle, turning the cut edge down. It is all familiar and comforting.

The same knife and nimble fingers make short order of the crimini this evening, destined for a humble pizza. But just as the tops of onions and odd bits cut off carrots and parsley find their way into the stockpot, so these stems sit by my cutting board awaiting a similar fate. They go into their own dedicated pot, a bit of salted water and today's onion discards, to make mushroom stock, for I am reminded of the need for comfort, and not just in our home.

Little One's class is having a hard week, it seems, with book-ended traffic accidents leaving two parents laid up with fractures and bruises, and their families asking for help in the form of dinners and carpools. We are grateful we are not polishing shoes for a funeral, but it is hard to see the silver lining when the sun is so dim.

And so the simmering stock will be thickened, and cream added. Noodles will be boiled--a few more than usual. I will open two jars of tuna this evening, and fill twin casserole dishes with food designed to be reheated and to comfort the soul. 

Stepping back

When I was in sixth grade, oh-so-many years ago, our Teutonic red-haired teacher transfixed us with a cautionary tale: it seems a man had a magic machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. He carried it everywhere with him, and any time he needed to do any arithmetic, his magic machine did it for him. One night, as he slept, machine on his nightstand, a fire broke out in his house. He escaped just in time to save his life--but not his precious machine. He found himself bereft of the ability to perform even the most basic mathematical functions that we need in everyday life. Obviously, we were the last generation to not have calculators in the classroom, but I doubt we were the last to question why we had to learn this stuff.

So here we are a generation later, where art classes give way to "calculator skills" and our Swiss-army cell phones take the care of any mental math (calculate the tip? There's an app for that!) that we may encounter. But we know computers aren't perfect--they are programmed by people, after all. If your phone-cum-adding machine told you 2+2=5, only a person with some real math under their belt would know something was wrong.

But what of other "old-fashioned" skills? Europeans are finding it increasing challenging to find stonemasons capable of restoring Gothic cathedrals, and even here in the New World, it can be difficult to find someone to float plaster over cracked walls, or make pendulum clocks tick again, or handily use a light meter and a film cameras (to say nothing of finding someone to develop said film). The basics of washing dishes by hand seem lost past my generation (am I really that old?). A year without a dryer--unthinkable in this country--forced everyone in our family to learn how to hang (and how not to hang) laundry. Thank heavens we old folks were around to help out the young'uns learn that clothespins have a use other than craft projects.

But the biggie these days is the age-old craft of cooking. As the machines and services have made our lives "easier," we have become more and more removed from our physical world. We all should know by now that the supermarkets have erased all semblance of seasonality from our food supply, but it is truly appalling to see how many people simply don't use their kitchens for more than microwaving and refrigeration, taking their Styrofoam clamshells into the living room to watch the Iron Chef.

I put to you that reheating a burrito is not the same as making one. Takeout teriyaki is cheating. Delivered pizza pales in comparison to the real thing. Rolling a feast of sushi takes less time--and is certainly cheaper--than driving to get it. Even confirmed bachelors and Cosmo girls deserve a home-cooked meal, and deserve the satisfaction of knowing they can care well for themselves. Like basic arithmetic, it is not rocket science. You get better at it the more you do it. And the veil of the commercialized, commoditized substitute is brushed aside, revealing that the emporer is in fact, naked.

Let us relegate convenience food, drive-ins, and restaurants to the celebratory, the exception. Let us return to our kitchens and entrust paring knives to our children's hands, model good habits for their lives, and put good food in their bellies. For our future.