cook pot stories

It's been a long time since I wrote here. My life crumbled this year and I'm learning how to rebuild. If you want to read about 2014, check out my other blog . The very short story is that my husband has died. It is as hard as you imagine and often moreso. One of the challenges grief has brought me hovers around food. I loved cooking for Kevin. As his illness progressed it became more and more difficult for him to eat until finally he no longer could. So cooking lost its joy. Once he died I had no interest in cooking for myself since I associate it so strongly with Kevin. It's been hard. Most of my meals since his death have been eaten out, cooked by friends, or simple to the point of idiocy. Over the last few weeks I have started cooking again. Not with the complexity and passion I once had, but it's something. A roasted chicken. A salad. A grilled steak. Tonight was the most complex meal I've made since mid-January when he was diagnosed: salmon with mango sals...

"Mosquitoes remind us that we are not as high up on the food chain as we think." - Tom Wilson

When I was a little girl we would go for long drives in our VW van around Pennsylvania and New Jersey (NJ is more than the Sopranos, you know). Sometimes we would go for camping trips with our old canvas tent, look at the stars and stop off at farm stands. Sometimes we'd go to some farmland we owned in rural Pennsylvania.  At the farm stands we would get tomatoes. Real tomatoes. Red and heavy and tangy and god! were they good. I still have not recovered from my love of Jersey tomatoes bought at farm stands. And peaches. A bushel at a time. We just couldn't resist them. They were so lovely and coy and cheap. The car would be redolent with that scent, warm and sweet.  As soon as we piled back into the van we would start to ask each other, "What are we going to with all those peaches?" But we knew. We would go back to our campsite or home and eat. I would press the fuzzy flesh to my lips, letting it tickle just a little bit and smell the dusty summer scent. My teeth woul...

This is what made me decide to start this blog. In my other blog I was writing about the afterlife and declared that I hoped there would be tomato-cucumber salad there. I included the recipe, though it wasn't quite relevant for the conversation. Here it is again, just for fun. Tomato-cucumber salad Inspired by various Mediterranean chopped salads, made up by me. Perfect for a summer day. Or when you want to be reminded of summer. Take a couple of lovely, heavy, ripe tomatoes. Cut them in half and scoop out the seeds. This will sting if you have any scrapes or cracks in your hands. Chop the tomatoes into small pieces. Put it in a good sized bowl. A pretty one. Take a cucumber. I usually peel it some, but not entirely. Slice it in half the long way and run your thumb down the inside, scraping the seeds out. You can use a spoon, but this is more fun. Chop up the cucumber and add it to the tomato. Find an onion that seems non-threatening. Peel it, dice it and add it to the bowl of vegg...