Taste the Love

My mother says that my dad had heartburn every night for a year when they were first married. Now, my mother is a good cook, don’t get me wrong. But her kitchen-related training came from my grandmother and great-grandmother (who lived across the yard) who were, of course, Mexican. My great-grandmother could make a green chili so hot that it would burn the lining of your nose from across the house, in the refrigerator, in it’s sealed Tupperware container that had in turn been put into a sealed plastic Ziploc bag. That woman had a stomach made of steel. She lived to be 103.

When you go out on your own, you cook for your family all the dishes that you’ve eaten as a child. I think it nearly killed my father that first year. At some point, though, my mother’s love for my father (well, pity anyway) ruled the day and she got some recipes from his mother. I loved my grandma Lela and I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, I mean I have fond fond memories of the afternoons spent playing dominoes and checkers and don’t get me started on all the cookies that were provided to me over the years, but…she cooked the most boring food that ever was on the face of the planet. She in turn, passed this on to my mother for the sake of my father’s stomach.

The effect that this had on my siblings and I was tragic. This was particularly true because my mother never mastered the shift in cooking style from her family to my father's. Until I was in my twenties I thought steak was SUPPOSED to be black. I thought that tacos were supposed to be made with flour tortillas and ketchup. I was a lost child, completely displaced. I’ve learned over the years that the two ways that culture is transmitted to us is 1. The food and 2. the language. I had neither. My cousins used to make fun of me at family gatherings and offer me cabesa burritos. Oh, the love of family. I was too ‘white’ to be a real Mexican.

One good thing that came out of my years with my mother’s cooking (hey, it was a precursor to all my years of bad cooking) is that I learned to appreciate the simple. Truthfully, I LOVE my mother’s cooking. Going back generations, food was love. My mother always tried her very best for us. And she gave up a lot of what she liked out of love for my father. (except perhaps for the occasional burning of things when she was pissed off). When I go to her house I still expect her to feed me. So, to me, I always thought the food was just fine.

That is…until my fiancé came along.

Jodie is a complete FOODIE, a connoisseur of food. He can make cardboard taste good. It has been completely detrimental to my self-image as a woman (no matter how much I think I’m a feminist I still come from people who measure the self-worth of a woman on whether she can flip tortillas with her fingers and not get burned and who can satisfy the appetites of the man she’s chosen to be with). There is no way on this earth that I would ever be able to adequately satisfy the appetite of a man who is a genius in the kitchen, who understands the science of proper herb and spice choice, and who creates the most elaborate visual/olfactory/gustatory presentations that I’ve ever experienced. After being with him for awhile my own expectations of a meal were getting so high that I had to stop eating his cooking as a means of self-preservation. I was starting to gain weight, and I no longer appreciated the things I was able to burn on my own.

Now, mostly I cook. The presentation of the food goes something like this:

“Okay, dinner is ready. You are going to like it. You are not going to complain about it. Even if you don’t like, you are still going to like it because it’s good for your soul to learn to appreciate things that aren’t so pretentious. Think of this burnt casserole as training for the soul!”

Yeah, I’m not defensive or anything…