I Think My Grandmother Has Forgotten

Posted on January 18, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged cooking, family, grandchildren, grandparenting, grandparents, multi-generational, parenthood, Patrice Gopo, relationships • Leave a comment

By Patrice Gopo

On the two-hour drive to my sister’s house, I tell my older daughter about the time my grandmother slaughtered my pet chicken. My husband’s hands hold the steering wheel, and my toddler sleeps with her cheek pressed against her car seat. But my six-year-old focuses on the story about the woman we will soon see sitting on the couch in my sister’s home.

“A family friend gave your auntie and me a chicken,” I tell my daughter. I then explain how one day when my sister and I were away at school, my grandmother walked with her machete to the makeshift coop in our backyard. She grabbed the chicken and chopped off its head.

“Then Gong Gong cooked it for dinner,” my daughter adds using the same name my grandmother called her own grandmother long ago in rural Jamaica. My daughter has heard the story before, and she doesn’t flinch at the chicken’s beheading.

“Yes, Gong Gong made a curry out of it.” I chuckle at the thought of my grandmother’s no-nonsense behavior. Her life in rural Jamaica happened decades before I was born, far from the suburban American neighborhood where I grew up. I imagine she struggled to believe that a chicken was supposed to be a pet. I can also imagine that an activity like slaughtering a chicken must be similar to riding a bicycle. Even if decades have passed since one last killed an animal, a person can’t forget the way the hand holds the feathered body. Or the way the opposite hand grasps the smooth, wooden handle of the machete.

Except a person can forget, and I think my grandmother has forgotten.

* * *

When I was about eight and my grandmother a bit past 60, she called her daughter-in-law—my mother—and said she was going to retire and come help my parents care for my sister and me. She left New York City, her home since leaving Jamaica, and came to Anchorage, Alaska, the place my parents settled after my father’s time in the military. With two working parents in our home, my grandmother shouldered many duties, easing the strains of managing life. She walked my sister and me to the bus stop and was there when we came home in the afternoon. What I remember most, though, is the way her hands spent their days in a whirlwind of motion: holding the handle of a hot iron as she pressed my father’s work shirts, twirling a wooden spoon while she stirred substances in great cast iron pots, hovering over a vegetable garden plucking weeds. Even in rest, she sat with word search puzzles in her lap, a pencil in her hand, making quick circles around the found words.

The color of my grandmother’s hands is brown like mine but with a tint of sunlight. These days she sits with those golden hands folded in her lap, no longer twitching or looking for something to make the fingers move. Now she doesn’t long for pulling weeds in a garden. And if my daughter had a chicken, her Gong Gong wouldn’t remember the steps to transform the pet into a fragrant curry dinner.

Why does the brain do this? When the brain decides to forget, to carve out gaps in memory, why does it leave the hands idle?

Once upon a time my grandmother came to help my parents care for their children. Now the years have passed and the roles have changed. My grandmother lives with my sister who helps her get ready in the morning, reminds her to take her medicine, and offers her more water to drink. From time to time, my sister even wipes my grandmother’s tears away when she remembers how much she forgets.

My older daughter was in preschool when my grandmother came to live with my sister. In those early months my sister and I talked about the similarities in our caretaking roles. The overlap as we both cajoled others to eat or go bathe or both.

As time has passed, though, I have watched my daughter develop greater independence and shoulder her own responsibilities. And my sister has watched the eager help my grandmother’s hands once offered diminish. Instead my grandmother sinks into the couch while the sounds of old television shows fill the living room and transport her to the past.

* * *

At the end of our drive, my sister answers my daughters’ pounding fists, and my girls leap through the front door. A dance of hugs ensues, and my grandmother rises from her spot on the couch. Her smile is wide across her face, and I know my sister will tell me later that Grandma had a good day because we came to visit.

“TC,” my grandmother says, standing in front of me with her hands pressed against my shoulders. She stares at me, her eyes a soft sparkle. I smile at her use of my old nickname. She stares a moment longer before adding, “It’s been so long since I last saw you. So long.” Her hands drop from my shoulders, and her arms curl around my waist, bringing me into a hug.

“Yes, Grandma, it’s been so long,” I say to her just like I said last month.

In the kitchen, my oldest daughter says to her aunt, “Gong Gong asks the same questions again and again.” I hear silence and know my sister pauses, taking a moment to gather her words. I’m glad my family lives close enough that we can make this trip often. There is a sweet joy that comes when I watch my grandmother’s face brighten at the appearance of my daughters. Even more I think of the lessons of life, love, and family my daughters discover during these times.

“She asks the same thing over and over,” I hear my daughter say again.

“Yes,” my sister explains. “Gong Gong’s brain is sick. She has a hard time remembering things.”

My daughter accepts this answer. Later, when we all are leaving a museum and walking down the sidewalk to the parking lot, I hear my daughter call, “Wait, Mommy. Don’t forget Gong Gong.” I turn and see my grandmother lagging behind.

While there are no guarantees about what the mind will do in the future, today I don’t forget. I tell my daughter about my grandmother’s hands that were once in constant motion. I pour over my daughter stories my grandmother no longer remembers. Perhaps one day my grandchild will speak to her daughter the stories I no longer remember.

Now, though, I stare up the sidewalk at the generation ahead of me and the generation behind. “I’m coming, Gong Gong,” my daughter says. She runs back and slides her smooth fingers into her great-grandmother’s wrinkled hand. I watch them, linked together by laced palms, walking toward the rest of their family.

Patrice Gopo‘s recent essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Full Grown People, and online in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She lives in North Carolina with her family.

Photo: gettyimages.com

A Last Meal

Posted on September 9, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged cooking, death, family, grief, Indian cooking, Indian food, loss, Naseem Rakha • Leave a comment

By Naseem Rakha

Two days after Dad died, he made us dinner.

We sat at my table and we ate a feast of Qabooli Biryani and Mirchi Ka Salan, both dishes typical to Hyderabad, India where Dad was born and raised.

Qabooli is a lentil Biriyani made with basmati rice and channa dal. It requires a careful hand washing of the rice, rinsing out all the starch from the grains until the water runs clear. It requires a sorting and picking of the dal (golden lentils), ridding any that may be of poor quality. Then the two, the rice and the lentils, must be drained and let dry. The same must be done with the finely sliced onions, squeezed of excess liquid, they must air dry before they are carefully set in a half inch of sizzling hot oil and stirred to a delicate golden brown. The Qabooli requires garlic and ginger to be peeled and puréed into a fine paste, and then a grinding of spices. It requires a precise measurement of turmeric, cardamon, coriander, cumin, cayenne, mint and fresh squeezed lemon. And then, and this is critical, it requires that both the rice and channa dal be par-boiled to a place that is not quite done, so that once the five elements—the rice, the dal, the golden onion, the garlic/ginger puree, and spices are all layered together, and then drizzled with an infusion of cream and saffron—it can be covered, and sealed and baked to the exact point in which when a spoon breaks into the it‘s golden surface, each hand washed grain emerges tender and whole and separate and distinct.

The second dish, Mirchi Ka Salan or Green Chili Curry, is the equivalent of creating a Mole, it is time consuming and complicated to make. The paste itself has more than 12 ingredients. But the end product is unique and flavorful; it is one of my favorites.

When my sister came home on Monday the 12th of January, Dad was in the kitchen preparing to cook. It was 6:30 in the evening, the College Football National Championships were on the TV, and Dad was at his cutting board preparing the onions, his kitchen towel characteristically tossed over his shoulder. When Shameem asked what he was starting, she felt exasperated that Dad had taken on such a big project so late in the day. She had worked all day, she was tired. But, this was her dad. And we all knew his days were limited. There was the kidney disease, the heart problem, the iron build up from transfusions, the fatigue, the pink hospital form taped boldly to his refrigerator: Do not resuscitate. So Shameem set aside her exhaustion and spent the rest of the night cooking with Dad.

What surprised my sister most about the meal, she told me, was how much food he was preparing. This was not just for the two of them. Dad clearly had something else in mind. Perhaps a party the coming weekend. She didn’t ask. Instead they chopped, and stirred, and fried, and mixed, and boiled, and baked their way through the might. Finally, somewhere around midnight, they finished and put it all in the refrigerator for another day.

That day came the following Friday, 45 hours after Dad died from a tumble on a Portland Streetcar. Earlier in the day my family and I had gone to the funeral home and arranged for his cremation. Then, before heading back to my house, we went to Dad’s place, opened his refrigerator and took out the last meal he had ever prepared.

When my father came to the United States in his early 20’s, he had no idea how to cook. In his home in Hyderabad, India cooking was the work of servants, not the family and definitely not the men. Still he attempted to replicate the food he most missed. But trying to cook Indian food in the 1950’s and 60’s in the US, when Indian spices were not as ubiquitous as they are today, made the process of cooking a challenge. Yet he did not give up—collecting recipes and spices and experimenting at every opportunity.

One of Dad‘s favorite things in his later years was to have friends and family over for large meals, even though those meals, particularly as he got older, would often take him more than a week to fully prepare. It frustrated him that his arthritis made it slower to peel and chop, or that the onions would seem to burn more frequently, or that he‘d forget ingredients, or would sometimes spill an entire meal trying to transfer it from one heavy pot to another. It frustrated him that cooking would make him so tired. Still, just the weekend before he died, Dad told me he wanted to make Shrimp Pulau one last time. It is another time consuming dish, and it is also a dish, due to his very limited diet, he could no longer eat. Yet, that is what he wanted to make, for us, his children, all of us in our forties and fifties now, all watching our father with greater and greater levels of anxiety and sadness and love.

Unfortunately, Dad never got to make the Shrimp Pulau. Two days after he made the Qabooli and Green Mirchi Ka Salan he had his fall while riding the streetcar. At the hospital he refused treatment. He told us he was going to die that night. We fought him. We wanted him to live. But he knew better. He understood that his fall was a way out from the longer more agonizing death he faced, and then four hours after sunset, with Portland‘s lights glimmering out the hospital window, he died. His breathing became more and more labored. We could not imagine saying goodbye. And then, he was gone.

We brought the meal to my home after the funeral arrangements were made—three tired, distraught children, heads spinning, knees wobbling, all in need of comfort, and not knowing how to find it. And there it was, seeping into the house from the oven, the scent of rice and dal and ginger and onion. Saffron and chile, turmeric and cardamon. The scent of Dad bent over a stove, cooking for us one last time.

Naseem is the daughter of Mohammed Allah Rakha and Beverly Francis Schafer, both of whom are now gone. She raises her 15-year-old son with her husband in Oregon. She is the author of the award-winning novel, The Crying Tree, and is a journalist and geologist and naturalist. And she spends her free time backpacking, gardening, knitting, reading and writing. Dad‘s recipe for Qabooli Biryani and Mirchi Ka Salan, can be found on Shameem Rakha‘s blog Scratch: For the love of all things homemade .

The Kitchen Is Closed

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Lauren Apfel • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged children and childhood, cooking, family meals, Lauren Apfel, meals, motehrhood • Leave a comment

And when all else fails, we hit the drive-through. Because I didn’t know that, on so many days, motherhood would feel tantamount to being a short order cook.

Children, damn them, they need to eat. Every day. Multiple times a day. It sounds simple enough, one of those straightforward facts of life. But there is nothing simple about my children’s relationship with food. They always want more of it, without ever quite wanting what it is that I have available. Their insatiable appetites and focus on certain food groups to the exclusion of all others is nothing less than an albatross around my neck. It is my Sisyphean rock. The meatball I keep pushing up the hill that rolls right back down again…uneaten.

I will never truly understand the plight of the parents of bird-like children. The ones who pick delicately, listlessly at the contents of their plates, before asking to be freed from the prison that is the kitchen table. The ones who skip lunch or “forget” to ask for a snack. In our house, “nack” was among the first words ever uttered and “nack time” has not once passed by unnoticed. Blood sugar levels plummet to precariously low levels if more than a couple of hours go by without a top up. Dinner is getting earlier and earlier. One of my kids asked me to make it at 3:45pm the other day.

My husband and I recently put up double doors between our kitchen and our living room as a way to stuff the dam of our children’s constant demand for food. For in the absence of a physical barrier, they have been known to swirl in and out of the kitchen at will, eddies of unquenchable hunger, no matter what time of day it is, no matter when they have last been fed (No, you can’t have”breakfast dessert”). Out of sight, the theory goes, and therefore out of mind, because if the little buggers so much as see snack-food or sweets, they need to have it. And if they aren’t allowed it, they start to beg. And then they beg and beg and beg some more.

The older ones ask nicely, imploringly, steeling themselves for my wrath, which comes quick and hot if we are in touching distance of a main meal. They even offer to make it themselves. Just a bowl of cereal, Mom, a slice of toast. I’ll do it myself, Mom, and I won’t spill the milk this time! The younger ones alternate tacks. Either they whine until they wear me down into a nub of spinelessness. Or they approach me tentatively and whisper in my ear, as if the softness of their voices and the especially cherubic cast of their eyes will sway me in favor of the need for a third pack of organic cheese puffs in a row.

Set meal times, you say, of course that’s the answer. Clear limits on snacks. Be firm, be consistent. Make them wait, build the appetite. If they are hungry, they will eat anything! Don’t give them choices! Oh I know the litany of rules and oh how I’ve tried. But I have too many children now and there are too many variables and some nights I end up cooking four different versions of dinner, where “cooking,” you would realize rather swiftly if you saw me in action, is a euphemism for “cobbling together.” I like to think of theses disparate dinners as variations on a theme, because then it at least sounds artistic.

My nine year old, who is as thin as a wisp, eats more and more sophisticatedly than the rest of his siblings combined—I want a REAL dinner tonight, Mom, not just baby things smooshed together! My seven year old’s love affair with bread products and peanut butter and jelly (PbJ crumpet, anyone?) is matched only by his aversion to sauces. One four year old used to eat everything, but now relays a laundry list of fastidious requirements, as much as I assure her that, if fruit and vegetables were meant to be skinless, they would grow that way. The other four year old eats more than he used to, but ingests at a snail’s pace. Have you ever seen a child take on a single meal in eleven discrete stages?

Once, in the face of dinners left barely eaten and mitigating pleas of I’m not hungry, I had two of my kids sign a contract that they would not, under any circumstances, ask for more food for the rest of the night. If they truly weren’t hungry, I reasoned, this was a legitimate approach. And if I could get it on paper, surely it would stick. It goes without saying that I underestimated the three year old. 45 minutes later, with the foolproof logic only a toddler can muster, he was begging for chocolate, because he “really, really likes chocolate.”

Reader, I gave him the chocolate, and all was quiet.

Don’t judge me, this is what I live for. The calm born of full bellies that descends upon our house like a warm blanket, once dinner has been served. The high I experience when the grocery shopping is done for the week. The promise of a refrigerator stuffed with a sufficient variety of food to ensure that nobody will be bursting into tears at the mere sight of their plate.

And when all else fails, we hit the drive-through. Because I didn’t know that, on so many days, motherhood would feel tantamount to being a short order cook. Because I didn’t know that my favorite four words, both literally and metaphorically, would become: The kitchen is closed.

Gathering Around the Table with Bread & Wine – A Book Review

Posted on November 28, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged book review, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes, Christina Krost, cooking, motherhood, Shauna Niequist • Leave a comment

By Christina Krost

I’m balancing my lunch plate on my lap, trying to enjoy a sandwich slapped together after feeding my one-year-old. She toddles up to me, eyes focused on my plate. Her gaze meets mine as if to say, “Some for me?” I tear apart some bread crust and hold it out for her pudgy fingers to grab. She mashes it into her tiny, drooly mouth. Sometimes the youngest among us understand best how to be nourished.

Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes by Shauna Niequist is about the sometimes complicated desire to nourish ourselves and the ones we love. Niequist writes from her experiences as a pastor’s kid, musician’s wife, and mother of two boys. And she knows how to feed her people well.

But it wasn’t always that way. Like many girls growing up in the 1970s and 80s, Niequist’s own mother shooed her out of their kitchen, seen as a place of oppression for many women of her generation. Instead Niequist’s cooking chops were earned piecemeal, by devouring cookbooks like trashy romance novels in her college and newlywed years, throwing elaborate dinner parties, and learning (often humorously) by trial-and error.

Niequist saw her cooking forays as exotic, intense, and satisfying. She tried new-to-her combinations—savory bacon-wrapped dates, simple-yet-impressive mango chicken curry, and rich dark chocolate sea salted toffee—which she shares here. The collected recipes remind her of her travels to Spain, Paris, and Italy alongside memories of home in western Michigan, San Francisco, and Chicago. The variety of tastes and favors she cultivates in her cooking helps her articulate her desires for her family. She writes, “I want my kids to taste and experience the biggest possible world, because every bite of it, every taste and texture and flavor, is delicious.”

For those that don’t find cooking thrilling or easy, Niequist offers some advice: “I believe every person should be able to make the simple foods that nourish them, that feel familiar and comforting, that tell the story of who they are…to nourish ourselves in the most basic way and to create meals and traditions around the table and tell the story of who we are….And the only way to get there is to start where you are.” Though this book highlights spiritual nourishment, readers need not be practicing Christians to appreciate her message.

Through different vignettes that jump around her timeline of early marriage and motherhood, Niequist tackles infertility and pregnancy, grief and loss, body image and acceptance, multitasking and being present, fasting and feast. She introduces you to her varied circles of friends: church friends, musicians, family, neighbors, and her cooking club. By the end of the book, you feel as if you know them, and you’ll want to be part of their club. You can imagine yourself, and them, around her table. Though I myself can’t imagine planning and preparing all of her exotic recipes for my own friends and family due to the lack of “fancy” ingredients in my small central Illinois town [population 1600], I’ve learned that what one makes is less important than how and why it is made.

Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes is a must-read for those who love to entertain or those who want to learn. Definitely not a Martha Stewart kind of how-to book, Bread & Wine presents tried and true recipes with helpful guidance from the author. As we grow closer to holiday celebrations that gather our own loved ones around our tables, Niequist helps remind us that the stress that comes with the holidays is often self-imposed. If you’ve ever invited over friends or cooked for any number of people, you understand how much thought and preparation goes into every bite. Niequist gently guides us to the idea that if you are going to feed the people you love, it’s best to try to do so equitably and safely (whether that means gluten free, nut free, meat free, etc.).

Perhaps the most resonant of Bread & Wine’s lessons is that “What people are craving isn’t perfection. People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home. If you create a space full of love…they’ll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd.”

Take a lesson from my daughter: turn to the ones you love, ask for what you need, and eat.

Christina Krost is an elementary teacher turned full-time mom turned United Methodist pastor’s wife. She lives with her husband and three daughters in rural central Illinois and blogs at thekrostfamily.blogspot.com.