The Long and Winding Road

Janet here:

I had meant to write something about cooking for my youngest on the night before he heads back to college, but the reality is I got home late and didn't really make that interesting a meal. Besides, it's not what grabbing me. Instead, I find myself thinking of road trips.

If you read this on Friday, I will be wending my way slowly southward to drop off S for his sophomore year in college. We'll be taking our time on the drive down, making our way first to Pennsylvania and then into West Virginia before eventually, after a few days landing in North Carolina where we will drop him off and begin the loooonnnnggg, definitely not leisurely, drive back to work and our emptying nest.

The trip reminds me a little of the trip S and I took alone the summer he was 14. He was supposed to accompany his father driving his older brother G back to Indiana for college. At the last minute, plans changed, G flew and S, whose family nickname is Rand McNally, was more than a little disappointed. "But now I don't get my road trip!" he complained.

I told him I'd take him on a road trip for a week but I had one criteria: We had to do more than just drive, i.e. we needed some destinations, and we had to make a part of the trip be in Amish country in Pennsylvania. By the time I came home from work that day, S had a 60-page triptik outlining our trip day by day. We would start with lunch in Scranton (We are both The Office fans), spend the night and part of the day in Lancaster, and head to Baltimore where he wanted to see the aquarium. From there, we went to Virginia to Mount Vernon and Monticello and the Blue Ridge Highway, and we ended in Norfolk, VA for a little beach time after an unexpected but fabulous side trip to Antietam because we were both enthralled after visiting a teeny Civil War museum in Baltimore about Maryland's role in the war.

We ate some kind of crab every day and kept a journal where we each wrote something about the day every night. Throughout, I drove and S navigated. I literally did not look at a map once (This was before smart phones and we didn't have a GPS). S just told me where and when to turn.

It was the beginning of the switching of our roles, although I didn't realize it then. I rarely get a chance to tell him where to turn and when I do, he often turns the opposite way. At the time, I just reveled in the fact that this new teenager was willing and indeed interested in spending time with me on the road. He didn't put on his headphones once. It was a trip that absolutely changed our relationship.

This time around, the car will likely be quieter and S will be looking forward to leaving us at the end. The summer was good but now he's eager to get back to his friends and to be the captain of his own destiny and days.

It is the right way to go — we are both more than ready on so many levels — and so I will enjoy this short road trip, knowing that the days of traveling together are coming to a close.

Food for Thought Thursdays: And Then There Were Two

Janet here: After 13 years straight of parenting teenagers fulltime and nearly 26 years of being (mostly) first in our children's lives, Peter and I have officially moved to back-seat status. S, the last child, has left the nest for college and the middle son, G, left yesterday on a jet plane for the next life adventure on the West Coast.

It's a strange feeling, this empty nest. On the one hand, Peter and I are more than ready. One teenager would be exhausting; having multiples for years on end has left us feeling at times as if we were on the 14th round in a boxing match. There were certainly days when I wondered how I would make it until they actually left.

But now the house is empty and of course it is a lot quieter than I imagined it would be. When I walked into G's room to strip his bed, it looked and felt different than S's room, which is still filled with S's essence in a way that G's is not. S's room is a movie on pause; G's room belongs to a show that is over, its main character gone forever.

It is the way it is supposed to be, of course. I wanted to raise strong-hearted and strong-minded children who would feel the world is their oyster. I didn't want to be a parent who stood in the way or who made her children feel as if they couldn't leave. I know, too, that they will be back and that, of course, we will have more family adventures and times together. But the path of the orbit has shifted; where we were once the sun, now we are the moon, still providing light of course but without the same strength.

I know in coming days, I will begin to feel happier about this new change. I am excited to see what it means for Peter and me individually and as a couple. If nothing else, I am no longer going to have to worry about whether a new dish will be well-received; the last fussy eater just left the building and our palate just expanded immeasurably.

Most of all, I am excited to see where our children will go next. This time of their lives is so open with opportunity; it is the decade of complete possibility in so many ways. I can't wait to see where the ride takes them — and us.

Food for Thought Thursdays: Cookie Comfort

Janet here: While therapists and studies regularly point out how emotional eating is bad for you, it seems pretty clear to me that eating and emotions are inextricably and impossibly intermixed. Starting with a mother breastfeeding her baby, whose only needs initially are to be fed and held and protected — all of which are satisfied with the food she is sucking down — food not only nourishes us physically but emotionally as well.

Of course, we all get off the path of that original purity pretty quickly. Our parents withhold dessert for "bad" behavior, we give ourselves a "treat" to make us feel better when something bad (or good) happens — the list is endless and makes our relationships with food almost universally complicated, and that's without adding social stuff like stick-thin models and movies extolling only young thin bodies, etc.

But it was interesting to me and Rachel that two weeks ago we both literally woke up and said, "Today I want to make cookies." I know that baking cookies is something I regularly turn to when I need a little comfort. The kitchen immediately becomes a cozy haven from life's nuttiness as I blend the batter, methodically line up the dough, and pull the pans in and out of the oven. I love the smell in the house as cookies bake. And of course, I love how happy everyone is when they discover cookies are in the works and/or that a batch has just come out of the oven. Oh, yes, and I also like to eat them. One of the few (and I mean few) things I don't like about summer is that it's usually too warm to bake cookies so I'm usually on hiatus until the fall. But come that first cool day, there's nothing better than baking up a new batch. Everything feels good.

Rachel here: I love that my mom and I both woke up with cookies on the brain on the same morning 3000 miles apart from each other. I wonder how much of my love of baking cookies is tied to the feelings I associated with baking with my mom when I was growing up. I remember feeling special when we baked together, like I had been invited into this cozy little kitchen bubble and been made privy to an arena that I otherwise viewed as hers (since she did all of the cooking). My brother G helped sometimes (S was too little or not even born during this era), but mostly I recall getting to spend time with my mom that felt like it was ours. Plus, there were the cookies and the sitting at the kitchen table together to nibble from the first batch just as soon as they were cool enough while the second batch baked. My mother seemed so competent to me, absent measuring accoutrements for the most part and with the strength to cream butter and sugar that far surpassed my childish arms'. I figured I would never know how much salt was called for, or vanilla, the way my mom just knew. I would dutifully read from the recipe while she dutifully ignored it, a feat which always felt a little dangerous to me and which left me feeling a little bit like I was scrambling to keep up. I loved everything about those weekend afternoons baking cookies with my mom, though. I loved the mess inevitably made with the pouring of flour and sugar; I loved the wooden mixing bowl the dough would come together in; I loved the nearly sick feeling in my stomach when we were done from having tasted the batter, the chocolate chips AND the cookies. When I bake cookies now, these feelings and sensations are conjured vividly for me and, without fail, I am left feeling a whole lot of love for my mom, even if its from 3000 miles away.

The Beginning

After months (okay maybe years) of talking about starting a blog on food and cooking, we are finally doing it. We both love cooking and sharing recipes we've discovered and fallen in love with (and every so often hate). Beyond that, though, we both see food as a point of togetherness and sharing, with coming together for a meal as a time not only for nurturing ourselves and our families literally, but also as a time in which we pause and mark our lives.

Janet here: We got the name for the blog from an essay I wrote about my mother's cookbooks. When my mother died a decade ago, I discovered that she had written commentary in her cookbooks. "Bob [my father] really loved this," read the one next to the recipe for horseradish meatballs in her coverless, stained McCall's Cookbook. "Janet and Kellee [my sister] did NOT like this," read the comment by tomato aspic. I realized as I leafed through them that these were more than simply recipes; these were my mother's journals, her way of recording our lives together.
So Rachel and I started talking about this idea and realized that sharing recipes was one of the ways that we've remained connected even though we're now living 3,000 miles apart. It made our lives still seem somehow connected, and we thought if this is happening to us, it's probably happening to other people too.

Rachel here: When I first moved across the country from my family at the age of 19, one of the ways in which I navigated my homesickness was by making food that my mom made for my brothers and me when we were growing up. Now that I have a partner and we are growing a family of our own, one of the ways I bridge the two parts of my family is through food. As my mom and I have discovered our shared love of cooking (alright, let's be real here--we're pretty fond of the eating component, too), though our kitchens are thousands of miles apart, our exploits in them have become a shared space space of sorts.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy our blog and would love to hear your own tales of culinary trials and errors, as well as about the ways in which food functions in your life.