A Writer Afoot » the lost recipe for happiness

Honoring those who walked with us….

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:22:42 +0000

One of the most astonishing sights I have ever seen was a graveyard high on a moody mountaintop in Truchas, New Mexico. It was the 5^th of November, and the entire cemetery exploded with marigolds and pinwheels, with fresh toys and garlands made of red tinsel. Clouds hung close over the moutains, intensifying all the colors, and I cried out, “Stop the car! Stop!”

We were alone, with a sullen little village in the distance, and barely one car an hour passing by, so we let ourselves in through the gate and wandered through the carnival of celebration—bits of food still on a plate, pictures, and plastic flowers and everywhere the marigolds, bright orange, and pink tissue paper wrapping posts and tied to flags. All of it flapping in the wind blowing across the mountaintop. READ MORE at the Goddess Blogs….

Who would you honor on a day of the dead altar? Come tell us.

Also, a soup recipe from The Lost Recipe for Happiness that would be appropriate for such a celebration: http://www.barbaraoneal.com/extras/recipes/abuela-maria-elenas-posole/

RITA AWARD FOR THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS!!!

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:14:42 +0000

I thought you might like to see the sisters.

More when I can actually sit up straight. After 6 days of conferencing and three of Walt Disney World, I don’t trust myself to cross the room, much less post about the conference.

The Lost Art of Family Dinners

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:59:49 +0000

Dinner in Suburbia by Make Less Noise

When I was a child, we ate dinner together nearly every night. I did not necessarily love the whole ritual, especially when my mother made hamburger pie, covered with mashed potatoes, or when I was in trouble for one thing or another (which was a lot), but I can see from this angle that it was a good thing.

Our kitchen was large and we ate there, gathered around the white melamine table with its painted edging of lacy gold leaves. We had assigned seats, mainly because my sister Merry is left-handed, but also because there was sometimes a scuffle over who landed the seat next to my dad. My parents pinned the ends, and I sat between my mother and my sister Cathy (who still jockeys to sit next to my father at all functions). My father would ask, “What was the highlight of YOUR day?” and we’d have to answer.

Supper was rarely anything fancy. Tacos and spaghetti and sometimes a Sunday roast beef, most every meal made from ground beef, which was affordable and stretched over six people. We did eat Hamburger Helper, which honestly didn’t seem that terrible to me, and jello with fruit, green beans from a can (I absolutely despised frozen vegetables) and applesauce from a jar, and sliced wheat bread with margarine to fill up whatever didn’t get full from the main meal. (Four growing teenagers can eat a lot!) When my father worked for awhile at a 7-Up bottling plant, he sometimes brought home six packs of Nehi, but we mostly drank Kool-Aid. (Hey, it was the ’70′s. Nobody had discovered cuisine, at least not in the suburbs.)

We talked, made conversation. Sometimes my father would ask us all to tell the highlight of our day, and we’d moan about it, but it was fun. We talked about everything, and if anyone had a problem, they stayed at the table after dinner to sort it out.

So naturally, when my own children came along, I also created a tradition of dinner at the table. American standbys had shifted a bit by then. Chicken and soups and Mexican food were my standbys, things that wouldn’t burn if I became distracted by my work. We drank milk and iced tea. Again, simple food on a simple rotation, the same 30 meals in endless rotation. In our house, we sat in the dining room with blue walls (light blue for a long time, then a bright, bold deep blue I loved madly), around a heavy wooden table someone gave us early in our marriage. The dogs were banished to the line on the other side of the door, and waited politely to finish. We talked about school, and I asked them sometimes to share the highlight of their day. Somebody would tell a joke. Someone would lodge a complaint.

But it was good.

There has been much made about some (flawed) studies of children and family dinners, and I’m not going to bother with statistics here. I’m an observer, not a social scientist; a curious writer, not a statistician. We don’t need statistics. Our gut knows that this is an important ritual. Time Magazine said it best in this article from 2006:

“There is something about a shared meal–not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably–that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760,00.html#ixzz0gEQfFb8l”

Yet, over and over we read that the family dinner is in decline. There are likely hundreds of reasons. Parents who work long hours to keep the mortgage paid, the decline in cooking skills, fast food, irregular schedules. I suspect, however, that we’ve simply fallen out of practice a bit.

In THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS and THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING, family dinners end up playing a small but crucial part of the narrative. And I’m forced to admit that I believe in it, family dinner, believe that it has the power to cure all kinds of ills and problems. Not everything. Heaven knows family dinners didn’t keep me out of trouble as a rebellious (and obnoxious) teen. They did, however, give me a place to retreat, fall apart, even make reparation by showing up and behaving myself. “Pass the potatoes, please,” and “Does anyone want this last tortilla?” can go a long way to healing rifts.

Family dinners don’t have to look like they do on television. Maybe both mom and dad can’t be at the table. Maybe the family is mom and one child, or dad and his visiting children, or stepfamilies assembled in all their glorious and inglorious incarnations. Maybe it’s even grandpa bring home some chicken and biscuits from the local Kentucky Fried.

The important part is the regular-ish timing of it. It’s the setting of the table and the sitting down to a meal on plates, whether it came out of a bucket or an oven or is peanut butter sandwiches and a glass of milk. It’s the dumb requirements of conversation (What was the highlight of your day? What was one thing that happened today?) and the attempts to be present for each other, even if—as in the Time paragraph—everybody would rather be holed up in their rooms in front of the television.

So, those would be my rules for magical family dinners.

Same time every night
(If evenings don’t work, make family time at breakfast.)
Seven days a week.
Every family member is required to sit at the table unless they have to work (and parents should not use this as an excuse very often. Aim for a time that’s realistic.)
Everybody has to participate even if they think it’s silly.

Bonus points:
Prepare meals from scratch together
Offer a blessing from your tradition over the food before you begin
Aim for one really great meal every week, maybe Saturday evening, and follow with family games or movies.

Triple points for teenagers showing up. I shamelessly used bribery with mine, but you may be more squeamish.

Eat. Talk. Prosper.
—————–
Do you find it difficult to arrange family dinners? What gets in your way? What tricks have you found to help? Did your family eat together?

Cooking and books, books and cooking: my Julie/Julia story

Barbara Samuel — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:19:21 +0000

One Christmas season, I was at loose ends. I was finally, officially divorced after a fairly long marriage. My sons were working and traveling, or out with their friends. There was a man I’d been seeing, but he was traveling, too, and anyway, he was never going to be My Guy and I knew it.

I was alone. A lot. And Christmas was bearing down on me with all the traditions I would not be indulging this year. No vats of cookies or Christmas morning bread. Not much shopping. So I wrote journals and surfed the Internet, and focused on mainly just getting through this boring, lonely Christmas.

One night, I stumbled over the Julie/Julia Project. It’s hard to remember now exactly where I entered the whole thing. I opened it at random somewhere around the middle, led by some link from somewhere else. She had already finished it, but being a reader who wants the whole story, undisturbed, I waded my way back to the beginning and started to read from Day One. I read until my eyes gave out that night, in my dead-quiet living room.

And I came back the next night, and the next, and the next and the next, reading and reading and laughing at her misadventures, thinking, “If any editor on the planet has read this, surely she has a book deal by now.” (And of course, by the end of the blog, she did land a book deal. A very good deal. Just as Julia did, with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.)

I didn’t suddenly start cooking as I read. There was a pretty big wound in my kitchen, waiting to devour me. I hadn’t cooked much in a couple of years because cooking was family and my family was all in pieces. Also, my ex had fancied himself to be THE cook in the family, so I was relegated to making great cookies and loaves of bread, and the workaday meals everyone could eat five days a week. These days, there was almost never anyone home at dinner, so I ate Cheerios and Lean Cuisine and sometimes nothing else.

That hushed season, Julie Powell’s bad language and ineptness and moxie and honesty kicked my heart awake, and I told me mother I thought I might buy a copy of Mastering the Art of French cooking. To, you know, just mess around. I don’t know that I really intended to do it. But my mother (who has always seen me much too clearly for my comfort) beat me to it: she gave it to me for Christmas.

It’s a luscious book. It’s impossible for a cook at any level to resist the kitchen once she starts to read, so I found myself cooking again. Not the breads and cookies and meals I made as mother/wife. Now I explored Julia Child–starting with vegetables, mostly, because no one in my family had ever really liked them, and I do; and eggs, and chicken breasts. All through the dark days of winter, while things devolved more and showed me that I wasn’t dating the right person or living in the right place, or maybe even writing the right books, I cooked. I cooked and wrote, wrote and cooked.

It turns out, I am not terribly interested in the French method. There are things I enjoy about it–who doesn’t like mushrooms sauteed in butter, or chicken breasts cooked in wine?–but I began to see that I was already an excellent cook with a clearly defined method of my own. My ingredients are chiles and fresh tomatoes and avocados and spinach. My style is more California than Paris; I’m not a huge meat eater (though I’ve failed at repeated attempts to become vegetarian, too); prefer olive oil to butter and fresh lemons to Hollandaise.

During those long dark days of winter, cooking, I finally heard my own preferences and desires and voice. Cook spinach, it said. Write about tamales. Move to Colorado Springs.

Yesterday, I went to see Julie/Julia and absolutely adored it. It’s a very rich story with brilliant acting and wonderful visuals and a great storyline about how wonderful cooking is, but it’s also the story of two women falling in love with their work, finding themselves in words and cooking, cooking and words.

I had not expected that I would remember that lonely winter, but as I cheered Julia in her pursuit of her cooking and cookbook, and cheered Julie in her pursuit of the year of cooking, I found I was also cheering myself, that woman pursuing herself with bravado and then calm. Because I, too, cooked with Julia and Julie, and cooked up myself and wrote a book which became THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS. That circle, Julia to Julie to me, me to you, each of them to millions of others–seemed so lovely that I came home and cooked. I made sauteed mushrooms in honor of Julia, and I cooked the chicken breasts in wine, but I also added grilled lemons to the mix, because I love them, and served them with steamed yellow squash which is fresh and particularly perfect right now.

I think Julie and Julia would approve.

————————

If you’re interested, the Julie/Julia Project is still online. Here is a link to the first page, which has a lot of comments, but if you go to the next few days, you can see that nobody read her blog for ages. It’s fun to watch the evolution, see the backstory: http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/08/25.html

An excellent review and interview

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:18:11 +0000

The Gazette Telegraph’s book columnist had some lovely things to say about The Lost Recipe For Happiness:

http://anitalaydonmiller.blogspot.com/

I should add that she most graciously interviewed me and read my book open-mindedly even though I accidentally blindsided her in a blog I wrote for RTB. Thanks, Anita. A lady and a scholar.

The Full Catastrophe

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:48:29 +0000

I really really loved this review. From an Adelaide publication. (Newsletter, maybe?)
http://www.galaxyguides.com/newsletters/newsletter8_1.09.html#lostrecipe

My favorite part is that she quoted Zorba. One of my favorite movies of all time. (When I was pregnant, my fabulous sister took me to the play, and Anthony Quinn was playing his signature role. ) Anyway…..

THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS
Barbara O’Neal
Published by Harper Collins Publisher Australia, P/B $32.99

This is shameless ’chick lit ’ and it’s pretty unlikely that any male
chef (or for that matter male) is going to get into it unless they are
a bit pissed (or stoned) and sentimental and/or have been recently
dumped by a tough female chef in love with nothing but her food. Girls
will get it, especially kick arse female chefs who make it to the top
and stay there because they have earned and gained the respect of
their male colleagues by being their better, tougher, stronger and
more talented. The Lost Recipe for Happiness does make the connection
between the kitchen that really works, the one that understands it
takes a team and the better the team, regardless of how competitive it
is, the better it works. Punters will probably not get half of this
book, the sickening opening night that goes completely wrong, a
kitchen half staffed with illegal immigrants, drunks and addicts, the
jealousies the love, the family that is the mystical group of cripples
who share a peculiar love for each other and run the best kitchens;
basically the full catastrophe.

O’Neal even gets most of the kitchen bits right apart from the notion
of dying the tamale husks with food colouring ddd…! It just wouldn’t
happen in a good kitchen. There is a lot in this book for Anthony
Bourdain’s ’kitchen bitches’ to relate to, right to the crippling
agonising pain of a broken back, the exhausted limping which was a bit
too close to home.

This could have been yet another dreary hash of sickeningly sweet
books like Mostly Martha, but somehow manages to scrape in with just
enough toughness to have some sense of truth. At least there is a lot
of hot and steamy sex, just like every normal kitchen, that ends up
condoning complicated incestuous trysts because no has the time or
energy to go looking for a relationship after a 16 hour a day. These
cynical personalities are mainly driven by their love of food and
cooking, but deep down most long for someone to love who will love
them back without asking them to give up their passions.

If you’re into kitchen reality you should probably tear out the last
20 pages before you start reading and throw them in the bin, but if
you feel like a lot of unbelievable happiness and in need of a good
weep the end will kill you. After all the title says it all! If they
make this book into a movie, which is more than likely, there are
bound to be girls in cloggs attending the mid afternoon sessions,
weeping noisily and wishing their love affairs had half such happy
endings. It’s a soft, mushie, tragic, sad, a story of ghosts and
kitchens, love and redemption and for some inexplicable reason
impossible to put down.

Roasting chiles

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:22:10 +0000

photo of chiles by Sarah Serendipity

A reader of The Lost Recipe for Happiness wrote to me and said, “Those of us without knowledge of the southwest US and its foods might have liked a little more instruction on how to roast chiles.” A good point.

It’s a cloudy day here in Colorado, a very good kind of day for a green chile stew to burn off the viruses hanging around the house and our bodies. (Click here for Michelle’s Green Chile Stew recipe, the best, simplest recipe I know for this hearty, wholesome dish.)

To roast chiles is very simple. Look for mild green chile peppers, about three or four inches long. They might be called Anaheim or Pueblo or Hatch or mild green chile peppers. Most grocery stores seem to carry them year-round these days. I buy them in bushels from the farmers market or the roadside stands that bloom in August and September around here. Often, they will do the roasting for you in giant revolving roasters, and you can then bring them home and divide them into smaller batches for freezing. This would be for the serious chile consumer, however, not the casual user.

For the more casual user, buy mild green chiles, choosing peppers that are firm to the touch, much as you would choose sweet peppers. The smell will often hint at the heat–try to smell a few to see if you can tell what a hotter pepper might smell like, just for fun. For an average stew, bring home 10 or 12 chiles (plus a few jalapenos or serranos (careful–super hot!) to roast as well. You might also want some thin latex gloves, thin enough you can still work with the chiles.

At home, wash the peppers and put them on a cookie sheet under the broiler for a few minutes to blacken the tough outer skin of the pepper. Keep an eye on them. It doesn’t take long! (One of the most fun parts is watching the chiles “breathe” in the oven.) When one side is seared, turn them over and sear the other side. Remove from the oven.

When they are cool enough to handle, strip off the blackened skin and strip out the seeds from the middle of the pepper. This is best done by using the stem as a little handle for each pepper, and you’ll quickly get a feeling for the rhythm. DO NOT TOUCH YOUR FACE OR EYES WHILE DOING THIS! For a small batch of chiles, you will probably not need the gloves, but if you do a big batch, you absolutely need the protection, because your skin can blister. Handle the jalapenos and serranos with particular care. They can be roasted just like bigger chiles, but they are smaller, and you need just a little.

When you’ve stripped off the skins and seeds, chop off the stems and the chiles are ready to be chopped and used in whatever recipe you like.

Anyone else up for green chile this afternoon? I think I might even make tortillas from scratch. mmmmm…

http://www.barbarasamuel.com/blog/2008/09/21/if-there-are-c…t-be-septemberif-there-are-chiles-it-must-be-september/

photo of chiles by Sarah Serendipity

Time for a new giveaway: What would be your last supper?

Barbara Samuel — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:01:15 +0000

Week before last, TOP CHEF had a challenge that involved cooking the “last supper” of a group of individual famous chefs. Fascinating idea. Someone then asked me on Twitter what my last supper would be and I popped off with “a southern breakfast.”

It’s not an easy challenge. I’m still running through the possibilities. I don’t think it would be something rich and gourmet (neither were most of the chef’s choices–they tended to want their childhood favorites). I might want macaroni and cheese and whole grain rolls. Or chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and banana pudding. (Hmm. I think that might be it).

What would you choose? I’ll draw a name from the replies and send you a copy of the Australian edition of THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS, just because it’s a little different. Autographed, of course.

Did Joan wash her hands at the same sink?

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:30:37 +0000

Joan Didion, the celebrated writer, went to Columbia Elementary School for awhile. The old building, made of red sandstone (as well as I can recollect), not the modern version that occupies the lot these days. I have been drunkenly reading her work, admiring the western cleanness, the spare and unsentimental way she captures the world, my world, the west. I was electrified to read her casual mention of the school, a brief sojurn while her father worked at Petersen Field, and even though I now wish to find the exact reference, I can’t. It was small and not very important.

Is is important to me, however, because I went to Columbia Elementary School, too, back when it was a tall, graceful building with long double hung windows. I, too, am a writer. I remember my classroom on the first floor, the western side of the building, where the teacher had hung squares of construction paper with the names of colors written on them. Orange. Brown. Red. Yellow. It seemed I could own those colors by knowing their names, leash them with letters. Mine!

Did Joan Didion sit in the same chair ….Read the rest of this post

http://coloradosprings.yourhub.com/Briargate/Blogs/Life/Work-Career/Blog~572937.aspx

Life With (Bad) Dogs

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:42:42 +0000

I have two rescue dogs. You’ve met Jack, my neurotic and stunningly gorgeous Chow mix, who prances more than walks and has been known to do things like bolt through my front window in terror over fireworks (a double-paned mullioned picture window on a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve). Jack is six, and stars as Alvin in The Lost Recipe for Happiness.

Today, Sasha takes center stage. Sasha, also known as the pirate dog, was baking in the white hot summer sun in front of Safeway almost fifteen years ago. Some kind of midsize terrier mutt, a three ring circus of a dog from that day to this. These days, she’s stone deaf and half blind and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. She walks a mile and a half on hills every day, and hourly makes her tour of interior perimeter of the house to be sure that no food has fallen on the floor since her last trip, and while Jack snuffles along animal trails in the parks, Sasha’s great joy is finding mouldering pototo chips or maybe a half-eaten candy bar caked with dirt! She’s the greatest scavenger known to canines.

Lately, I’ve been trying to remind myself that dogs don’t live as long as humans, and a dog this size aged 15 is probably about 85 in dog years. She has lumps and bumps all over, and the last time I took her to the vet they said not to bother with one of the vaccines. You brace yourself as well as possible, but is any of us ever really ready? I thought she was done for last winter, when she and Jack had a fight over cat food (from which she emerged bloodied but victorious) and they had to put her under to check her eye. She was fine.

But there it is, her ancientness, looming.

Just before Christmas, I was making cookies. I put a tray in the oven, then went around the corner, maybe 15 feet away, to hang a few more ornaments on the tree. I heard a funny noise and ran back into the kitchen, and there was Sasha, sprawled flat on her belly, limbs sprawled wide. She was having a seizure, her whole body twitching and convulsing, and I fell on the floor next to her. Unsure of what I should do, I just put my hands on her, talking soothingly, telling her I loved her, and I put my hands on her sides to see if that would make her stop twitching, or at least make her feel less afraid. “I’m here, baby,” I said, “I’m here.”

When I lifted her slightly, it must have given her body a little help, because she suddenly heaved and coughed, and out of her mouth flew out a perfectly round ball of butter. She’d stolen a whole stick off the counter and tried to get outside with it, but before she could make her getaway, the stick melted in her mouth, and settled in her throat, quite efficiently choking her. When it landed on the floor, she scrambled as fast as she could to grab it again, but I was faster and nabbed it out of reach.

She leapt up after it, and when she saw she had lost, her only expression was, “Curses! I almost made it.”

Nothing in life makes me laugh harder than dogs. Do you have a pirate dog? A scavenger? A neurotic beauty? Tell me a dog story!