When the bananas sitting on the kitchen counter start to turn brown, Husband and I have slightly different reactions. Husband dreams about the warm fragrance of banana bread filling the air and I look over at the trash pail wondering if I toss the dead banana just right, will it come back like a boomerang? Obviously, Husband is domestic and I’m imported.
In the home of my childhood, and all the surrounding homes in my childhood, meals were one-choice affairs; if you didn’t like the meatloaf you just ate more of the potatoes. If you didn’t like any of it, there was always chocolate pudding for dessert. But what there wasn’t was saying you wanted something else prepared for you. Just as salmon swim upstream and sharks litigate, so did I know as a child that dissing what my mother put on the table was not on the menu. Liver night was liver night. You just thanked God there wasn’t a pancreas night.
And yet somehow I raised a family that mistakenly believed they lived in a diner. To eat with my grown children today you would never suspect they each ate a total of five specific foods for the first 12 years of their lives. Grown up Son eats pasta fra diavolo, pesto, marinara and pommodoro. If I call up memories of cooking for Young Son, I think of washing sauce off overcooked spaghetti. Only after Son’s elbow macaroni was portioned out could I add the Velveeta cheese sauce for Daughter. But not too much or it grossed her out. Grown Daughter today would call the child abuse hotline if she even remembered the word Velveeta. Nowadays, she stands on line at the Union Square Farmer’s Market on weekends to pay $2.50 for an organic tomato. As kids, I couldn’t have paid either of them $10 to sit at the same table with a slimy, squirty tomato.
I could tell myself that the thrill of cooking was extinguished by a lifetime of preparing menus for picky eaters but that’s not true. I could also blame my lack of desire to express myself through food on genetics. I have two longtime friends who are sisters and they’re both amazing in the kitchen. My pal in Brooklyn, the betty from Before The House Comes Down, can whip up a buffet for 50 on a moment’s notice. Her sister is a world-class pastry chef in California who made the gorgeous and delicious wedding cake when Husband and I married. I tell them it must be a family gene, but that’s not true either because my mom was a good cook, even with the liver night. She wasn’t culinarily inspired like betty and her sister but she kept her family alive just fine and I’m proud to say I did the same.
Back to Husband and the banana bread, I decided to thrill him and bake one this past weekend. Twenty minutes into the cooking time, our neighborhood had a 2-hour power outage. When the juice started flowing again the oven wouldn’t heat up to 350 degrees. I pulled the loaf out and slid it into the toaster oven where the par-cooked bread promptly began to burn. Husband came home to acrid banana smoke filling the air. He took a deep breath and if love is blind it must extend to the nose because he threw his arms around me and gushed, “Thank you!”
Organic or not, Daughter’s Featured Foto of street art cherries looks good enough to eat.
