by Adrienne Ehlert Bashista
My mother became a vegetarian at
age fifty. Her own mother died of colon cancer a few years earlier,
so a good part of why she quit eating meat was for health reasons. Another
reason was also that finally, after twenty-five years, her children
had all left the house. My four siblings and I had all hit or surpassed
the magic age of twenty. For the first time in practically all of her
adult life she had no one to cook for except herself and my stepfather.
Despite working full time as an
engineer when we were growing up, my mother almost always made our meals
from scratch. I have fond memories of her baked chicken with mushrooms
and pot roast with juice-soaked potatoes and stewed onions. She made
a mean pork chop and the crispiest, tastiest fried chicken north of
the Mason-Dixon line. Thanksgiving turkey was always fantastic. Much
to my pickiest sister's disgust, my mom would cook the giblets and chop
them up into her homemade gravy. I loved the tiny chunks of heart and
liver floating in the flour-thickened pan drippings. She even made her
own deep-fried eggrolls, twenty-five at a time. Everything was in massive
quantities; it had to be, to feed five teenagers and a husband. Everything
was comforting. Everything was good.
My mother is still an excellent
cook, but the food she serves doesn't give me quite the same level of
pleasure as it did when I was a kid. She didn't just replace the meat-based
meals with non-meat alternatives, but she's revamped her menu so everything
is super healthy. No more grease, no more fatty pork chops with the
bones still in. No more crispy, well-basted turkey skin. No more giblet-filled
gravy. Now, all her meals feature five different vegetables, quinoa,
brown rice, and beans. Chewing, and lots of it, is required. She's discovered
a meat substitute made out of corn fungus that bears some resemblance
to chicken, if cooked the right way, and has flirted with becoming vegan.
I've asked her not to. I worry that if she gives up eggs and dairy,
too, she'll lose her last two percent body fat.
I see her often as she and my step-dad
'retired' to North Carolina a year or so before my son was born. I say
'retired' because she and my step-dad both started new careers once
they'd given up their old ones. He has become a high school math teacher
for behaviorally challenged kids, and she bought and refurbished a giant
old house into a bed and breakfast. Why, you ask, did she want to return
to cooking and cleaning for masses of people, just as she'd gotten out
from under it? It's a mystery to me. My only theory is that maybe she
enjoys getting paid for something she once did for free.
In any case, the guests at her B&B
get the comfort cooking I am denied. She makes breakfast bread pudding,
smothered in stewed apples and sweetened ricotta cheese, and breakfast
burritos with cheddar and fresh salsa. They get tiny sweet potato pancakes
with fresh fruit and real whipped cream. They get homemade blueberry
waffles. Need I say more?
Last year, when central North Carolina
was hit by an ice storm and our house didn't have power for a week,
she gave us a room at the B&B and we ate her breakfasts every day.
We were in heaven. Then the ice melted, our electricity returned, and
we were back to being family. Recipients of the healthiest, most nutrient-filled
meals you can imagine, with desserts of fat-free soymilk frozen yogurt
topped with a few organic berries, if they're in season. It's food made
with love, to be sure, just not the food that I crave.
Nor does my husband. Here's a secret
about my mother's cooking: my husband doesn't like it. He is picky:
he doesn't like onions or garlic or cooked tomatoes or big chunks of
vegetables. He is always asking my mother, 'What's in this?" before
he puts a bite in his mouth. He eats her cooking because he's polite
and she's his Mother-in-Law, but almost every time we eat dinner at
her house he comes home and eats a sandwich or some leftovers, 'just
to tide him over.'
So last September, when we returned
from the trip to adopt our second son, Jamie, from Russia and my mother
called us to say a casserole was waiting for us at home, you can imagine
my husband's reaction. We'd just flown for eleven hours with a good-natured
but brand-new-to-us toddler in tow, and we were exhausted, dirty, and
hungry.
"A casserole?" he groaned.
"How about a pizza?î
But I turned him down. All I wanted
to do was get home and sleep. I didn't care what I ate, as long as it
was something.
"Let's just eat what she made,"
I said. "You can pick out the vegetables."
"Nothing will be left if I
do that," he grumbled, but he drove past the pizza place.
When we got home, I went directly
to the refrigerator. "Let's see what she made for us," I said,
pulling out a casserole dish. "looks pretty basic," I called
to my husband, who was busy bringing our bags in from the car. I stuck
it in the oven to warm up.
"You hungry?" I asked
Jamie, who only understood about four words of English at that point.
"Do you want to eat?"
He started to scream. 'Eat' was
a one of his words, and because food had been in short supply at his
orphanage his response to food was an anxious one: a frightening, high-pitched
vocalization, clenched fists, and a purple face.
"Guess so," I said, and
I sat him at the table. I gave him a couple of crackers. He crammed
them whole into his mouth, making the sign we'd taught him for 'more.'
While the casserole heated I sat down next to him, handing him crackers
one at a time, making exaggerated motions with my mouth, trying to get
him to chew.
The buzzer went off on the stove.
"Food's ready,î I called out to Mark.
The casserole was simple: whole
wheat noodles, kidney beans, sautéed onions, garlic, broccoli,
mushrooms, and diced tomatoes. "Do we have any cheese?" my
husband asked, jumping up to see what was in our refrigerator. "I
wonder if barbecue sauce would taste okay on this?"
"Wait. Look," I said,
pointing to Jamie. My husband turned around to see.
As quickly as he could, Jamie was
shoving pieces of the casserole into his mouth. A noodle, a chunk of
onion, a stewed tomato, a kidney bean disappeared. In minutes his serving
disappeared and he was asking for more. It was astonishing.
We'd spent the past five days with
this child and had been impressed by his appetite in that time, but
it was as if now that he was at home - a place five thousand miles from
where he'd been born - his hunger let loose with true abandon. It was
almost as if he knew that now was the time to relax.
At one point he paused to take a
breath, picked up a cooked mushroom and held it out to me. I expected
him to throw it down in rejection, like any American toddler would do
when faced with that bit of cooked vegetable. Instead, he showed it
to me, smiled, and opened his mouth wide. He put the mushroom inside.
"Mmmm," he said. Yummy, in any language.
This basic, vegetarian food, so
bland and unexciting to my husband's and my spoiled palates, was exactly
what our little boy needed. My mother knew what she was doing. Her super-healthy,
low-fat, whole grain vegetarian casserole was truly comforting: food
made with love.
About Adrienne:
Adrienne Ehlert Bashista is a writer, librarian, and mother of two boys
who lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Her picture book about Russian
adoption: When I Met You, will be out in May, 2005 through DRT Press.
Click here: www.drtpress.com
©
