My mother is a romantic.
She loves to make things beautiful. She loves gardening. She loves holidays.
She is also a very adventurous person who will head into a challenge
with reckless abandon.
This combination
has given us memorable meals, oh, things like risotto
made with champagne.
One Thanksgiving, the gathering was small, so she bought a turkey breast
and cooked it en croute. It was the most beautiful turkey we
ever saw. If Christmas was at our house, she'd start the day after Thanksgiving
making homemade Christmas
pudding. We loved it. She
said that in England children make Christmas wishes when they stir the
pudding, so we got to make wishes very early. She made so much that
when Christmas came she was giving it out to everyone she knew. My mother
is a generous person.
Mom is a gardener,
and the garden determined some of her best meals. One year the mint
was overgrown, so she made pesto with both basil and mint. The cherry
tomatoes were pouring in, so she picked them and made cherry
tomatoes stuffed with pesto. She planted a lot of kale because
it's nutritious and then she'd make kale
and potato gratin. One year she planted corn all over the
back yard. We had corn every day. When it got to the end of the season,
we were sick of it, so she made a black
bean, corn and pumpkin soup. It was my favorite.
Her greatest romance
was her pot bellied stove. She and Dad installed one to live more naturally.
Oh, we were natural. She cooked on the stove and made the best
winter vegetable soup I ever tasted by simmering the soup
for a full day on the low heat of the stove. The way it happened is
a family legend that makes us all laugh. While it simmered, she had
bread dough next to the stove to rise. It became her habit and we had
her stoveside bread
instead of store bread. We were lucky.
Read about
Debbie's discovery.
ABOUT ALISON: Alison is a freshman at the University of Massachusetts. She has inherited
her mother's sense of life and is preparing to go into medicine.
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