windwalker farm

I chanced to have a conversation with the manager of our local Whole Foods Market recently and we were comparing notes on our food cravings due to the recent sudden drop in temperature. We both confessed to immediately buying those food items that definitely say “fall”, vegetables like butternut squash and potatoes or the hearty ingredients for a really big pot of chili, while we still had refrigerators full of cucumbers. We laughed and agreed that we must be real “foodies” since our initial impulse wasn’t to go buy a sweater - or to even dig one out - it was just the desire for real food, the soul nourishing kind of food the cooler weather inspires and that our bodies require.

At a recent celebratory birthday lunch with my sister, Judy (her birthday, a biggie!), we recalled a large misconception we formed and nurtured for quite sometime in our childhood, that being that pecan pie was somehow responsible for her father’s (also my step-father) erratic and violent behavior on week end nights.

Behavior that often started with him being fun and very charming, possibly even taking posed beauty shots of us, or perching us ride on the upper part of the back seat of Mom’s pink Cadilliac convertible and letting us ride there as he streaked up and down hills. Behavior that always deteriorated into angry words, aggressive actions, and even threats with a gun. Often at that point my sister, Diane, would climb out of our bedroom window onto the garage roof in order to go next door and ask our neighbors to call the police. With the arrival of flashing lights, Earl, the father/step-father, would sob and cry loudly proclaiming how sorry he was and how it would never happen again. On those nights when the police were not required he would proceed to loud vomiting after the crying jag.

Now we were young, I was the oldest at possibly 10 or 11 when these activities began. Judy would have been 9 or 10, and Diane merely 7 or 8. This was in the early 50’s, we knew nothing of alcoholism, of bi-polar disorder, of possibly even schizophrenia. We were bewildered. Most of the time Earl was a flamboyant and charming man who had divorced Judy’s mother and married my mother. (Her mother married my father at the same time but that’s another story.) Earl was entertaining, he was fun, he loved surprises, he would decide late at night that we all needed to get in the car and drive for miles just to get schnecken, a Jewish doughnut-type pastry covered with caramel frosting and nuts that could only be purchased in downtown Kansas City. (See how my memory is connected to food?)

So we couldn’t figure out this frequent and sudden change of personality. One evening, as we knelt in the front window of our upstairs bedroom watching Earl being escorted to the waiting police car, the solution became obvious. Why hadn’t we realized it before? It was the pecan pie. As far as we could determine, every one of these incidents had been proceeded by Earl’s request that we walk the short block to Joe’s (a barbecue dinner on State Line Road) and buy him a pecan pie. This was it! The pecan pie made him act like this. It was so simple - we would no longer honor his request. We would not go buy the pecan pie and everything would stay calm.

Of course, this wasn’t the case. The periodic displays continued sans pecan pie and we eventually realized it was alcohol and pills that were exacerbating the flawed mind of this man. To this day I find pecan pie too much - too sweet - just something I don’t care to eat and I never remember the connection. But I find it interesting that Judy says its her favorite pie and I know my mother loved it and never failed to make it for the holidays. I don’t think we ever shared our theory with mother.

I love new cookbooks and I admit to buying too many. But that begs the question, can we really have too many cookbooks? My husband, builder of shelves, would say yes. Yet, that same man, eater and enjoyer of meals, would say no. So I stand in the bookstore, just browsing I say to myself, and thinking of all the recipes I’ve left behind in the many cookbooks I already own. Do I really need something new? Probably not!

Periodically I stack the entire collection of Moosewood cookbooks on the dining room table and pour through them with great delight as I discover forgotten or untried recipes. I make lists of recipes I want to remember to make - soon, I say to myself! Or I dig out all of Deborah Madison’s cookbooks, the woman is a master at making me want to try new vegetables or new combinations. There’s the Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon, probably the most fun vegetarian cookbook I have. I can spend whole days just reading her intros plus the recipes are always good and unusual in their choices and combinations (I almost never reveal what the ingredients are until we begin eating the dish). I have a whole row of bread cookbooks that cover a range of recipes from those that require starters that are buried in a bag of flour for a week or two all the way to quick, unkneaded “artisan” breads that fit the schedule somedays.

Then there’s the collection of ethnic cookbooks, Ethopian (our favorite), Indian (our second favorite), Mexican, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, god I love them all! Many of them fall right open to a favorite recipe - or I can find it by looking for the pages with the most stains and wrinkles. Old friends await me on those pages. The recipe I use for polenta is in the Fields of Greens cookbook and on that page one of my granddaughters practiced her newly acquired skill of writing her name complete with a picture of herself. I love to return to that day when she was so proud and so present in the kitchen.

One Saturday last winter, I enjoyed roaming through a new (to me) antique shop in town. My single purchase was a copy of Julia Child’s The Way to Cook. What a wonderful book. I hadn’t owned any of her books because she so focuses on meat which we don’t eat. But this book is a treasure and so full of step by step instruction. The first recipe I had to try was her French baguettes and it rewarded me with a simple technique I now use for many of my yeast breads, mixing in the food processor as opposed to the stand mixer. Its one of the books I can just plain sit down and read, or take in the car on a road trip. And, because it was originally owned by someone else, I think about its other owner and why she or he gave up this book. Did they stop cooking? Did they not appreciate Julia’s firm belief that her way was THE WAY? Maybe the book just outlived its usefulness for them and I’m glad to have discovered it.

I still return to a 1975 release of The Joy Of Cooking when I need specifics on certain questions like substitutions. And a 1950 copy of Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook was my basis for the filling recipes for all the fruit pies I made and sold over the years. My husband, Jim, brought a newer version (vintage 70’s) of that cookbook to our marriage and by then the pie recipes featured canned fruit for the fillings (to fit a time-challenged need, I guess).

So I return to my original question, can we have too many cookbooks, indeed and obviously not. There is always the vision of new ideas, new techniques, and best of all new flavors and tastes awaiting us. I just bought a new cookbook and I’ll be writing about it very soon!