Dear Friends,

I’ll begin my column as if I am writing a letter to you. I am still uncomfortable with this publishing thing and need to somehow make this familiar to me.

My editors tell me to write to you as if we were cyber pen pals. That’s ok with me; I can’t wait to see what you write back to me.

I’ll start by telling you a story of when I grew up, so that you’ll know something about me before I make my points.

Every evening at 6:30, my mother called to gather the family and the most gorgeous of ceremonies would begin.

Before seating ourselves, we would all tour the dining table. Father, both uncles, Grandfather, Grandmother, Brothers, Sister and sometimes the occasional cousin circled the courses. All was laid out, family style, on the eclectic mix of china, crystal, silver, stone, stainless, Lucite and Pyrex.

My mother had her armament of serving platters. Each had its own preordained purpose: the potato platter, the pasta bowl, a bouillabaisse tureen, the fish pot, trifle dish and on and on.

It amazes me to this day how intimately she knew the identity of each piece, so different so numerous, like children adopted from around the globe, a hodge-podge of precious items.

She collected them from her clients. You see, she was quite ahead of her time in some respects. She had her own little catering business, cooking meals for couples on special occasions such as holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, proposals.

Though she cooked for these other people, she never neglected our special days or missed a single one of our daily meals. In fact, her business grew out of her famously prodigious, banquet style holiday celebrations.

“I already cook for you guys, and on normal days, that’s almost eight people, including your grandparents and uncles. What’s two more?” she rationalized.

So, she started by making holiday meals for a few, very grateful, paying couples. “I make back the grocery money, too!” she said with a sly smile.

And, to our family’s benefit, when she began cooking for another party’s special and private days, we would eat gloriously as well.

When I was strong enough to hold platters, I helped her serve at these often extremely intimate and tender functions. I was fascinated by the people’s interaction over the magical food-alchemy of my mother’s cooking.

She could conjure airs of lavish celebration or simplistic appreciation. She was able to assemble joy on her celebratory platters or ladle out nutritious comforts at wakes and bereavement dinners. By the end of the event, all were spell bound by her repasts.

After our clean up, it was time to depart. Our host kitchens were left cleaner than we found them, as if we were never there. To our hosts, the evidence of our labor “magically” disappeared.

As we left, I was often given a serving platter or a dish I had admired in lieu of a tip. My mother said that they did this not because it was inappropriate to give children cash. They gave them to us because I looked so cute while holding the platters, they could not bear to separate us.

I knew even then that she told me such things just to keep me happily working for her, but I greedily devoured each compliment like tea cakes.

My family devoured each meal she laid out every night on the dining table. The crisp green salads or creamy slaws were passed around in its large, Lucite clam’s shell. For the next pass, steaming and buttered potatoes or fluffed pilafs or gooey pearls of risotto were mounded like gold on deep stoneware. Then came plump chickens, standing roasts, bronzed ducks and turkeys laid out on their wooden carvers and their slices were offered up on thin china.

Oftentimes, fishes of all shapes and sizes appeared in their stead arranged on beautiful Japanese lacquer ware or shining silver platters on parsley beds. Accompanying sauces were served in the white boats that constantly ferried across the table.

Usually, no less than two, hot vegetables made their presence known. One was steamed to accentuate its seasonal freshness. The other was usually herbed and buttered, sometimes bread crusted or sauced in cream.

You could say that my mother has produced one of the longest running theatrical productions. All my years at home, she never failed to produce these galas except in times of extreme illness or duress.

And if she had one of these moments, her understudy, that’s me, would take her place. And that’s where I got my first lessons in cooking.

Now, the years have flown by, those lessons have not been forgotten, however, they have seen little practice.

Instead, I’ve chosen to follow another path, one that chases elusive words to pin down wisps of inspiration.

Yet, I find that this path is still paved with food, the wonderful enabler of my life. In the pursuit of this all too humble existence, I’ve turned to the industry of food to (I deeply apologize for the lack of a better phrase) “place food on my table.”

I’ve washed dishes, waited tables, carved at buffet lines, decorated cakes, catered weddings, wrote menus and even a few backs wine bottles. I often thank my mother for this nutritious affinity she’s brewed in me.

However, until recently, I have rarely practiced this birthright for myself. Hard work and scarce play have taken away from any cooking diligence. Sometimes I feel as though I have lost my religion.

It’s the strange curse of those who work for this industry; rarely to do we cook for ourselves. Ironically, those of us who are blessed with the gastronomic talent and the culinary training choose to feed ourselves just like the rest of society. Our palates are dominated by take-out, frozen dinners, and fast food. We too are seduced by the temptations of easy, greasy, processed gratification.

Like many of our contemporary, convenience store compatriots, we’ve developed into microwave gourmets, masters of our reheat buttons. We’ve established rapport with freeze-dried foods that were once relegated to outward bound camping trips and foreign legion desert campaigns. Why select, measure, dice, incorporate and simmer hour after hour when all we need to do is reconstitute by adding water and mixing?

Indeed is that not what is centralized, advertised and merchandised, dominating the middle aisles of our local grocers? Examine the floor plans of every major grocery outlet. The tall, cryogenic metropolis of “fresh frozen” items usually occupy center stage. The delicious pictures on the waxed boxes and plastic baggies convince us to buy even though the real item is actually, frighteningly institutional looking and tastes even more so.

In fact, the taste of frozen food seems to be measured by a different standard than that of restaurant fare or home cooking. Like that other aberration of nutrition, airline food, frozen “cuisines” are judged by how we TOLERATE their bland, inorganic sustenance. As long as we don’t wretch at its sight or smell or lack of taste, we suspend our disbelief and consume away.

We hold the same curious respect for other processed and instant foods. Apparently as long as we don’t die immediately from food poisoning, we tolerate a slow decline into malnutrition.

In the meantime, we continue to marginalize our “whole” foods to the edges of the supermarket or to the granola and soy laced health food store. We push fresh produce into the corners, storing them improperly, leaching away their organic flavor.

Perhaps we abuse these victims to justify and rationalize our strange allegiance to our manufactured, pre-fabricated, replicant foodstuffs.

And here I thought I left behind Tang and Spam as early childhood traumas. Now, I discover that they have evolved into new heights (or depths) of still vulgarly commercialized incarnations.

Now, I attempt to reject this homogenized, pre-packaged lifestyle.

“Why leave behind this convenience?” you may still be asking.

Because, my mother didn’t raise that kind of girl.

However, did everybody notice that I stated that I ATTEMPTED to reject these quasi-foods?

Have I succeeded?

Hell, no.

As in all gloriously failed attempts, my efforts were flawed from its very inception. For the beginning, my ambition overreaches my ability and my experience, which left critical gaps in the development of my goal…or so my therapist told me.

She was right, but how could the proverbial “bar” not be set so high?

My mother’s example is set, inscrutable and monolithic, stuck in my childhood perceptions.

The celebrities of the profession cooking industries and their legions of followers, familiars and minions have used the potential of multiculturalism to further rarify their position from the masses. With all their talk of “fusion” and “pan” whatever techniques and ingredients, the commercial food supply remains robustly resistant to these sweeping trends; thus setting up restrictive and discriminatory markets that seem to be strongholds of blue-blooded caste mentalities.

Nevertheless, because of the media’s attention on these exotic foods, public interest had raised and begins to weave into our collective consciousness. On my end, while I duly recognize that the broadening of my perspective is eventually a positive phenomenon, the restriction of resources to realize these new “pan” international dreams seems to evoke a new evolution of contemporary discrimination!

Whew! Glad to get THAT out of my system.

So within the cloak of these exotic, lofty ambitions, these “good things” harbor questionable motives that are often delivered with a condescending air. Of course, I’m about to mention that woman, who has transformed domestic labor into a multi-media industry-Ms. Martha!

Now, please. Before my jealousy and bitterness sweep my away. Let me say that MS has made incredible strides in industrializing, commercializing and merchandizing home-making skills. She has deftly merge conspicuous consumption with basic home economics and turned our kitchens and laundry rooms into lucrative social parlors and new centers of high-grade soap and candle making industry! I would gladly untuck my shirt hems and back my parchment paper lined SUV into my petulant gardeners, to achieve her maniacal level of success.

Seriously, though. Martha represents a tremendous revolution and evolution of my mother’s pocket change efforts, however singular that effort may be. She’s brought Home Economics onto the global financial center stage and unfortunately, she puts the rest of us to shame with her creations, because try as we might, by ourselves, we couldn’t accomplish even one of her projects with her level of polish.

Of course, the advantage of being your own corporation is that you have a staff of hundreds that you may take the burden of credit away from. She possesses an armada of stylists, builders, chefs, researchers, accountants, investors, editors, writers, web designers agents…

Discrete stylists, builders, chefs…you get the point.

She has her enablers who build and endow and enrich her corporation.

Now that I think about it, so did my mother. We called him, “Daddy.”

Indeed, her being “free” to be a housewife allowed my mother the times and the resources to refine her skills.

Of course, I understand the tenuousness of that word, “Free.” In fact, I do not know if she did have the choices that I have today. She probably didn’t, but I never thought to ask. I really should, because it seemed as though she loved it…

Or maybe that she loved us through it…

In any case, I’m too “independent” and not Republican enough, for better or worse, to marry for resource.

Therefor, being this supposedly independent, Modern woman, how do I achieve my dreams?

Within me, I still burn with the ambition to have it all. I want to possess my mother’s abilities and enable them with my father’s means. I want the time to construct and live with my creations.

However, with all the strides we, as a society have made, nothing seems to have softened the harsh duality of my choices. Though we have improved the means to access our dreams, our very humanity limits the scope of our reach.

The battle of “have” and “have not”-“to be or not to be” that is my great question…

Painfully, I have realized that the more capable, self-sufficient and independent I become, the more I yearn for the co-dependence of the past. More and more, I appreciate the relationships of those stifling times. I find myself reminiscing over the 50’s nuclear interactivity.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I haven’t completely lost my mind. I also remember then denial, the foiled desire, the severe roles and the harsh judgement the marred the contents of that age.

Yet, are we really that far away, now? Without the specifics over this or that time, can I not cut and paste my last comments over any period of time?

If this is true; then, in whatever undertaking we commit ourselves to, is it all about the physical, spiritual and social economy of it all? Can my life be reduced to that one rationalization, “A girl’s gotta eat?”

Ick, how ruthlessly Marxian…

Am I forced to admit and submit that we can’t have it all? Must I make the best of it?

I know that I must create new priorities: refocus my goals and make the best of it. “Enjoy the process” as my therapist says, not realizing that the awareness of the damned process comes as a fleeting afterthought swamped in its own regrets.

Maybe the Paxil he prescribed and I resist taking will make life more palatable?

Hmph, I’ll just have to live with this a while longer. I’m determined not to abandon my will and my soul, though.

For now, I’ll push myself away from the table, ponder and digest these things I’ve uncovered.

As I’ve said before, “Oh well, a girl’s gotta eat?”