Food Memories: Food is more than an essential of life

This is the first in a series of blogs on food and memories from friends, members and guests of the Community Day Center that we will be posting over the coming month.  We want to encourage readers to comment and share their food memories with us. – Marilyn and Catherine

 

Food Is More Than An Essential of Life

Our garden has provided us this spring and early summer with many wonderful and nutritious meals.  The red lettuce, peas, radishes, herbs, pansies, and nasturtium and arugula flowers have provided us with six meals of fresh crispy side salads for over 30 guests. Now these vegetables and flowers are looking tired so I have cleaned them out of the beds.  Due to the intense summer sun, the broccoli, spinach and arugula have flowered early and have been removed as well.  In their places, we have a row of robust kale with its beautiful spear shaped leaves.  In the next row, we have the Swiss chard with its attractive shiny green ribbed leaves and bright red stalks; and not to be outshone, the ornamental loose leaf collard greens. Peering out of the squash plants we can see the trumpet shaped flowers and the young yellow squash and bright green zucchinis.  In the next bed, the tomatoes are bearing fruit that are slowly turning from green to juicy red.

kale

Swiss chard

collards, tomatoes and squashes

 

Food is more than just essential to life.  It is also about our relationship with nature, about the economy, about border policies, about race, culture and religious struggles, and about memories and traditions to name a few.  Probably the centerpieces of our early memories for those who live in the United States and Canada are the large festive (and sometimes stressful) meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

My most vivid childhood memories are also associated with food.  My family and I immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong when I was five years old.  My mother scrimped and saved on all things, but food. She would walk a mile to Chinatown to purchase chicken from a live poultry store because she felt “freshly killed” was more nutritious than “packaged chilled chicken”. We had chicken a lot because in Chinese, the word for “chicken” is pronounce the same way as “luck.”  As we sat down for dinner, my mother would pick all the choice pieces of food to give to each of her three children.  When we were full, my mother would then finish eating. On my birthday, I knew my mother would give me the drumstick, my favorite piece!  Even though we never got birthday presents, I always felt special and loved by this act. 

Mom also regulated our health by giving us “cool” foods like watercress soup when we ate too many “hot” foods like potato chips.  (In Chinese food therapy, the belief is that some foods have hot or heat properties and others have cold or cooling effect on the body.  The imbalance of these properties would cause illness).  All year round she would make medicinal soups.  It would take hours to boil down a pot of herbs, meats and liquid down to five cups of broth. She would always know what we need to eat and drink to stay healthy.

It has been over 23 years since my Mom passed and I still miss the foods she made especially for me.  I guess it is true what the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote,

It seems to me our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. (Fischer, M.F.K. The Gastronomical Me. New York: North Point, 1989, p. ix.)

Many of our guests are excellent cooks, but do not have the money nor the kitchen facility to cook. Using the vegetables that have been flourishing in our garden, like, kale, Swiss chard and collard greens they have been able to give back and show their talents to everyone.  Craig Claireborne, the restaurant critic, food writer and former food editor of the New York Times was right on the mark when he said, “Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love. 

Here are some of the foods we have made.  They are kale crisps, bacon with Swiss chard and kale, and stir-fry collard greens.  You can get recipes from the popular cooking sites like:  www.foodnetwork.com/.

 Kale Chips

Cut kale in small pieces

 

Add olive oil and salt

Bake at 275 for 20 min.

 Bacon with Swiss chard and kale

Crispen bacon

Stir fry some Swiss chard and kale, add broth

Good to eat

 Stir-fried Collards

Brown some onions

Stir fry some collards

Delicious meal in minutes

 Balsamic Vegetables Over Pasta

Jim sliced and fried squashes from the garden, added balsamic vinegar

Eric added tomatoes, basil with salt and pepper

Fresh vegetables from the garden!

 We invite you to add your favorite memories of food!!!