Thoughts On Cooking

I’m flipping through a magazine as my mother gets her hair cut. As the beautician is clipping away, blonde snippets of hair dusting the tiled floor, she tells my mom about how she hosts a lot of estate sales. “I’m okay with sorting through people’s things, but I absolutely can’t go through someone’s dead mom’s kitchen,” she says. She tells a little story about an old man’s wife suddenly passing away, leaving a kitchen full work behind. “It was so sad,” the beautician says, “There was still food in the fridge and cupboards full of chocolate chips and baking supplies. It was almost like she just ran to Fred Meyers to get a gallon of milk and never came home.”

The beautician keeps working on my mom’s hair, angling the bangs and explaining how kitchens just seem so personal and sentimental to her, like they are the places where a mother makes memories. My mom nods like she can understand all this.

I think about how I hate baking and sifting flour and standing in the kitchen, peering into a recipe book, trying not to get chocolate on the slick pages.

*

When I was younger, I used to try to go to bed as early as possible so I could switch off my bedroom lights, open the door, and listen to my mom making artisan bread in the kitchen. She would spend hours there, measuring ingredients and rolling the dough into perfect loaves. Sometimes, if I didn’t fall asleep before she put the bread in the oven, I scurried out of bed and sat beside her by the fireplace and waited for the dough to rise. I usually put my head in her lap as she read a book, falling asleep to the feel of her hands running through my hair. Later, I would wake up to the sounds of her pulling the fresh bread from the oven. She always dabbed a little honey on a warm scrap before handing it to me. As we bit into the bread, she would ask me what I thought about it. “This is seriously some of the best you’ve ever made,” I always told her. Sometimes she would say, “Mhh…I think I should have used a little more salt…” or “This could have been better if I would have used cooler water in the recipe.” But other times, she would make a certain face- a face that I think I am only capable of identifying- and say that it was wonderful. I felt safe and comforted during those times- as if I had the most successful and knowledgeable mother in the world.

*

It is one of the first nights since I have moved back to my parents’ house for the summer.  My mom shows me this recipe for guacamole and I put on a vintage-looking apron (even though I knew I wouldn’t get my shirt dirty without it) and turn on an acoustic guitar song about summer evenings and crooked teeth before starting to make the dish. As I pull the avocados apart, it feels natural to enjoy the smears of soft, cool green on my hands. I glance at the recipe, but I don’t measure the salt and pepper and I don’t feel guilty about just haphazardly squeezing lime over the avocados instead of making sure I add exactly two tablespoons. Other things I dice up and throw into the bowl: juicy tomatoes (with the seeds still clinging to them), garlic, peppers and some cilantro from my mother’s garden. As I mash it all together, it feels a little bit like I am creating a June evening- the kind of night that I think of when I think of summer and family meals at dusk.

My mom asks me if I want her to fry some pork to add to the meal. “The boys might like it,” she says.

“NO,” I say. “Not when I’m cooking. Not in my meal.” I say this even though I know the kind of food I eat- rice, beans, vegetables, daps of hummus on crackers- aren’t what my brothers and dad love most. But it feels good to distinguish my food from the food that they are accustomed to.  Like if I don’t make what they want, then I won’t be trying to fill the role of the housewife or the mom. Like I’ll still just be me at age 19.

When the meal is over- just scraps of flour tortillas and rice scattered across the oak table- there is an easy feeling in the room. Like those freeing moments when the ropes on the swing go slack for a bit before lurching you back.

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