“The frying pan’s too wide…’ –Joni Mitchell, “My Old Man”
I have been posting sporadically lately. In April, my marriage came to an abrupt end and I have spent pretty much the entire time since then dealing with the exquisitely painful unpleasantness that a breakup entails while still trying to go through the necessary forward motions of everyday life with small children.
The final decision came at the end of the entire household’s two-week-long bout with the flu (the worst of my adult life). During the time I was sick, I could barely walk to the kitchen, let alone cook anything. We survived for a week on ginger ale and crackers, soup from the freezer and a cardboard box, poached eggs on toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, and later, takeout Vietnamese noodles. Anything in the fridge pre-dating the flu began to quietly turn on us while we all lay there inert–the neglected vegetables in the crisper, the chocolate milk, the leftovers from our final dinner party.
I didn’t really cook for quite some weeks after the morning of Thursday, April the 9th. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot of point, as I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything anyway. The kids were content enough for the time being with their rather monotonous rotation of 5-minute meals punctuated with fruit and cucumber and yoghurt and baby pita breads, while I ate a cracker here and there and rapidly lost the weight put on last autumn while I was sick with a succession of colds and heartaches. Reluctantly, having been anti-vitamin my entire life, I embarked on an annoying new regime of supplements to boost my decrepit immune system. I can’t tell you what a depressing moment it was to learn that my drastically depleted iron stores would simply never recover just with food alone. Even if I wanted food, it couldn’t help me now.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t have an appetite, however. Along with the music I couldn’t listen to anymore, the movies I couldn’t watch, and the photographs I couldn’t look at it, there were suddenly a huge number of meals and foods that were now off-limits because of the memories they stirred. Seventeen years together, just short of 14 years married–well over 3000 meals shared together. No more. I couldn’t yet contemplate a future of special meals cooked alone and eaten alone after the kids were in bed. I took curry off the menu indefinitely, threw the brown sauce into the garbage and shoved the tiger prawns to the back of the freezer.
Even when I managed to start cooking properly again, the reminders continued unabated. The everyday placemats that were a wedding present had to go. I grimly started separating the dishes: the bowl given by my mother-in-law, the tray made by his friend, the birthday wine glasses and carafe from my parents. Cookbooks were pulled from their cosy alphabetical home and piled into two teetering stacks. His, Nigella Lawson, Gary Rhodes. Hers, Nigel Slater, Mark Bittman. I had almost forgotten how cooking used to be a shared pleasure and how many kitchen items we had given to each other over the years–the pots and pans, the pestle and mortar, the new mixer, the beautiful big salad bowls. Who would take what? Who would start new? Could either of us manage to divorce the memory contained in these much-loved familiar objects and happily go on using them like nothing had ever happened?
I rearranged our table seating so that the empty chair wouldn’t be so obvious, but I still couldn’t seem to prise myself away from the square certainty of number four. I had made and eaten plenty of meals on my own with the kids over the years, but soon realised that there must be a deeper psychological reason for why after 20-odd years in the kitchen, I was suddenly incapable of figuring out how much food to cook for three people. The cold unwanted spaghetti pointed its long thin fingers at me accusingly as I tipped it into the compost hours later. Legions of leftovers lingered long past their welcome. I realised anew that the base amount for most recipes seems to be four people and despaired over the questions, “How do you split an egg in half?”* and “What if two is not enough and four is too many?”
Not quite six weeks later, I’m (mostly) eating and cooking again. I’ve even slowly cleaned out the fridge of the rotten two-month-old reminders of meals gone past. I expect that it will be some time yet before I’m fully up to speed with the new status quo in the kitchen and the table. In the meantime, I’m taking an enjoyably selfish pleasure in eating what I want when I want, and am mainly concentrating on making food to keep us well, make us happy, and create new memories (like my mom’s waffles, which we had this weekend). We’re also all eagerly awaiting the warmer weather that will let us finally get out in the garden and start growing something of our own to eat again. Spring is here, even if it doesn’t feel like it quite yet.
My mother’s waffles
- 2 cups flour (I like to use half whole wheat)
- 1Tb baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 Tb sugar
- 2 eggs (separated)
- 1-2/3 cups milk
- 6Tb vegetable oil
Mix egg yolks and milk–add dry ingredients–add vegetable oil–then stiffly beaten egg whites.
Serve with syrup, berries, jam, and vanilla ice cream. Personally, I like a bit of bacon on the side. You may think this is rather weird, but hopefully we can agree to disagree.
Serves 4–or a family of 3 with leftovers. Who doesn’t like leftovers?
* To split an egg in half, whisk it gently together and divide it that way. If the yolks and whites have to stay separate, just try using the smallest egg that you have. It really probably won’t make that much difference to the final recipe.
The Core Neighbourhood Youth Co-op will hold its annual dinner and auction on Thursday, 28 May. The fun starts at 5:30 pm with cocktails and the silent auction, supper is at 6:30 pm, and the live auction will kick off after that at 8:30pm.
