Last week, in my Call for Writers, I invited you to join me on Sundays to do some creative writing. People from all over the country responded- Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Texas, and Turkey. Thank you for joining me in making a little time each week to write, to exercise our imaginations.
Each Sunday, I will post some inspiration for a stanza or short story, but, of course, you can write about anything you wish. Post it in the comment section below.
This week’s inspiration comes from Denise Woltering-Vargas of Tulane University. She writes, “This summer I have recently been enjoying telling stories through food. I have learned a great deal about my husband’s family through some impromptu Peruvian cooking lessons with his grandmother. Each of her dishes is a story in itself. Perhaps a prompt to write on cooking or food would be fun.”
Thanks, Denise. Here are a few suggestions to get us started:
- Write down a list of some of the favorite foods or meals in your life. Include the people who prepared this food, the rooms where you remember tasting, smelling, sharing. Can you use this language for a stanza? A Story
- Think of food you enjoyed (or hated) as a child. Tell the story of how you hid food or bribed a sibling to eat it for you. Write a poem that is a snapshot of eating your favorite food with all the senses.
- Look at these pictures (the two above). Imagine the story behind one of the images. Try first person or third person.
- Maybe you have a beautiful memory of cooking with someone. Can you recount that in story form, maybe third person?
Write. Write. Thank you.
As a caveat before beginning, I am a math and technology teacher who has never written for pleasure. Be kind!
My most fervent wish…food that just appears! I like to eat but the planning is just too hard. How many kids are going to be there? What time will Bill get home? How long will it take to cook? Oh crap! I didn’t defrost! Do I have all of the ingredients? Can I substitute almonds for pine nuts? Set the table, light the candles. Does Anne like cauliflower? Should I slice bread or will that put me over on MyFitnessPal for the day? Screw it! I’m opening a bottle of Pinot Noir. That goes with everything, right? Everyone’s coming home. “Go wash your hands with soap!” The flurry of activity to get everything to the table while it is still hot. Everyone sitting and talking and laughing is wonderful. And I have to do it again tomorrow.
Alison– You made me smile
This is my wish too! Also, I have asked myself almost all these questions while cooking. I even have to look at the recipe for dishes that I have prepared over and over for years.
I started out writing about how what we “ingest” defines who we are regardless if we are referring to food, or the people we surround ourselves with. As my brain typically does, I started to scatter in order to try to make some correlation between what we choose to eat, and those we choose to spend our time with. Epic fail. Let me use my wife for example. She is a vegetarian. My wife chooses not to eat meat. Not because of the taste, but because of what it represents. In the same sense, I’m assuming she has chosen me not because of the “taste” which in this case be described as my appearance or the description one might provide to a stranger that did not know me. Tall. Blue eyes. Big guy. But because of what I represent. What I believe in. She is both selective with her food choices and the people she spends time with. While she is a bit more adventurous than I when it comes to meeting new people, she’s an introvert at heart and thus fairly selective. Just using her as an example, one might conclude that we choose our foods and our companions similarly.
On other hand, I am not at all picky with what food I ingest. Growing up in a household where you cleaned your plate or you didn’t leave the dinner table, I tend to eat what is in front to me. That is not to say that I don’t have favorites. I’m a sucker for a good slice of pizza, or a really good burger. But if I’m not being served what I enjoy, I will grin and bear it out of respect to those who prepared the meal. I’m just happy to eat. With relationships however, I’m about as picky as they come. It is almost painful to begin new relationships which makes me almost super loyal to those that I love. I make choices carefully and I’m careful about what I ingest, similar to the way my wife picks her food.
These two examples then show that there is no exact coloration regarding how we choose food and how we choose people. Then one wonders, how do we begin to make these choices and how are our habits determined? My wife made a choice to become a vegetarian and she has maintained this habit for over 5 years. I’ll have whatever she is having, however I want more friends, but it is extremely hard for me to open up and not be weird around new people. Why can’t I just choose to be closer with more people? I’ll tell you why. Food can often be used for comfort. It doesn’t judge. It is often warm, sweet, satisfying. It’s there when you need it and there are so many choices. People however can be uncomfortable. We judge all the time and often don’t have control over this function. While we can be warm, sweet and satisfying, we are often cold, tart, and disappointing. In order to like a pizza, I don’t need it to like me back. In order to marry my wife, or have the same best friend that I’ve had since junior high, I needed them to enjoy my sense of humor. To genuinely like who I am as a person. Maybe this is why I enjoy pizza as much as I do. Maybe I’m trying to fill the void of needing more friends in my life with the warm cheese and sauce in my belly. I’m going to go ahead and call that a coloration. We choose what we can, and fill in the rest with pizza. While I may not make any new friends this week, you can bet that I’ll be having pizza again this Wednesday night. Don’t Judge.
jack
Mom stands over the kitchen sink-
her bracelets
clanking against the stainless steel
making music with the glassses and plates,
as she hums a church tune.
She stands at the sink because
there is no place at the table for her.
Every inch of the benches are filled,
little bottoms side-by-side,
elbows out just enough to eat.
I wonder if she does not want to eat with us.
I wonder if she prefers her elbow room at the sink.
I want to stand at the sink alone.
Mom, you can have my seat.
Sushi.
I once hated it. I always tried avoiding it at birthday parties. Until one day my dad and I visited a friend in Miami; they made home-made sushi for us. I was afraid of trying it; afraid that I would get the same feeling I last ate it; a bunch of gooey food in my mouth. But I still tried it; many years since my last. But this time it was different. It felt x10 better than it ever could. It felt like it magically changed it’s taste over the past few years. Ever since then; sushi’s been my favorite food. And I have learned that we ourselves can change the way we feel and think about things.
My grandmother is cheese on toast. My mother is stir fry.
My grandmother was jam tarts. My mother is dark chocolate.
My grandmother was pink wine.
My mother is Merlot.
My grandfater was… I don’t remember any food connected with him. Just a cigar and jug wine. He was a peaceful man.
My grandmother was Marmite on toast.
My mother is Marmite on toast.
I am Marmite on toast.
On Marmite, we all agree.
Love was “Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper under an umbrella in London with your boyfriend in the rain…” for my grandmother
Love is not food-related for my mother. She doesn’t eat her emotions the way I do.
Love was sharing his loves with me for my grandfather- fishing, painting, golf, reading, laying by the pool, reminiscing about the past, and writing.
Love is looking beyond what the person comes to you with, for me and making time to grow. sharing meals definitely helps!
My grandmother was distant. She never really unfolded in this new country. She loved me dearly, but she was distant.
My mother is modern and strong. She built her world around me and continues to do so to this day. She is my rock.
My grandfather was like an old soul in an old body who was at peace, always. He loved me dearly and because of his peace it doesn’t hurt to know he’s moved on.
I…well, I am still writing my story and tweaking the recipe. Sometimes, when it’s most confusing, I eat Marmite on toast to feel like I am “at home”.
Baking homemade bread is the one thing I am proud to have picked up from my grandma. Every summer my sister, mom and I would visit my grandparents in Portland, Oregon for a short two weeks. Each time, my grandma tried her best to cook meals we liked. I decided by the time I turned 12 that I would be vegetarian. Gram was confused and offended by the change in my diet. I was adamant that this was part of my identity. I was offended when she thought I was just being picky. Meals would include hamburgers for everyone and a hot dog for me!? It was so hard for us to connect because of this. When we would return home after the summers, I started to look for homemade bread recipes. By this point, my grandmother had passed away. I felt that I never really knew her. My mom pulled out my grandma’s list of favorite bread recipes. That was it! I was hooked! Fresh, homemade bread became my thing. It became my connection to my grandma. Now a mom of a picky eater and watching my mom be a grandma to my daughter, I understand my grandma. Food is an important way to express love and share tradition. I’m so proud to have finally learned who my grandma was and how much she loved us.
Favorite Meal Ever
Somewhere in the middle of Mexico, there’s a restaurant painted olive green, with a mural in the very back of a joyful devil surrounded by flames and black clouds. El Diablo de Paradiso.
I had one of the best meals of my life there–better than any upscale restaurant or dinner with a variety of wines.
Just chicken–oh, but the kind of roast chicken that comes to the table smoking with juices flowing inside, as if it had been prepared by that devil himself. Cut in quarters, skin sinfully crisped.
Served on a slab of wood, surrounded by lime wedges, crisp ridged french fries, fresh tomatoes and onions. With plastic containers of corn tortillas, spotted around the table, each of us had our schemes for the first taco.
A leg quarter tempted me, and greasy pieces of it quickly found themselves in a homemade corn tortilla. A squirt from the lime and an dash of salt barely made it in before I bit into one of the best bites of food ever. Coronas washed it all down for us, and we all tries several versions of the tortillas and chicken, adding pico de gall for some, maybe a slice of avocado.
The Devil and Chicken–gluttony in El Diablo de Paradiso.
My Aunt Florence Pekelder was born on February 14, Valentine’s Day, 1900. She told me she had been married there times, once to a man named Fred Valentine because she thought it made sense to marry a man named Valentine if you are born on Valentine’s Day (though my brother Jim told me recently that she probably never did marry the guy, just moved in with him). Made thrilling and crazy and romantic sense to me, raised as we both were in the Dutch Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan, surrounded by a family and community of conservative religious Calvinists.
Something in my spirit resisted that conservative upbringing and saw that resistance modeled in her life; she was an artist–a painter–and a dancer–a stealthy twenties jitterbugger, whom I also imagined sipping bathtub gin–in spite of our church’s injunction against sinful dancing. She once told me she believed in Heaven, but not in Hell. She told me she had for years been a secret nudist, who (and this is one of my favorite family stories) once, in a nudist colony somewhere hidden between Grand Rapids and Grand Haven, turned down an offer of marriage from then itinerant guitar playing nudist Burl Ives, fearing this drifter would never come to make anything of his life. 🙂
Flo, or Flossie as many affectionately called her, became a second grade teacher for a time, as I became a teacher and writer. In baking, she was known in my family on holidays for the artistry of her pies, and especially her Dutch apple pie, with that extra layer of butter and sugar crusted on the criss-crossed top. Dutch in its typically buttery fashion, it was her proudest baking accomplishment. She was also known for being the first to say, at every eating of it, “Isn’t that just the BEST pie you ever tasted in you whole life??!” Every year, I make this pie for my family, in honor of her spirit (and because it is the BEST pie you ever tasted in your whole life, as I am quick to also say).