A Very Special Day

Today is my mother’s birthday, though we are not spending it together. My mother is spending her birthday in Seattle with Alice. When Alice was born last year the family pecking order was revised—granddaughter now trumps daughter. I don’t blame her one bit, I’d want to spend my birthday with the sweetness that is Alice too. And in this month of too much work it is almost a relief for me. Her absence this weekend gives me an opportunity for the tiniest amount of perspective on her.



The truth is I have no perspective on my mother; we are far too similar. I have only to glance at my mother to understand the origin of most of my peccadilloes. From the piles of paper littering the floor of my office; to the fact that I stay up too late at night; take on too much work; and am usually sprinting for trains, planes, and buses. And let’s not mention the cynical humor and disturbing tendency to say aloud the thing that everyone in the room is thinking but is too tactful to say. All of this can be traced straight back to Mom.

Even our tastes in food run parallel. I have only to look at a restaurant menu to know what my mother is going to order (though she does sometimes surprise me). If a dish contains a bounty of mushrooms, olives, capers, sun dried tomatoes, or ginger, Mom’s usually in. Anything sour piques her interest—lemons, sorrel, vinegar. We both love pickles, the crispy hard edges of baked things, rye bread, caraway seeds, goat cheese, and things that crunch, like pretzels. For my mom it must be vegetarian, organically grown, local, and sustainable. She admits that one of the reasons she still lives in the Bay Area is that she would be hard-pressed to find the same level of organic and humanely raised food anywhere else.

My mom was organic long before it became cool, and it is something I struggled with growing up. Not only organic, but health foodie and political. With her at the helm of the family we boycotted grapes (pesticides), The Nestle Corporation (baby formula distribution in developing countries), and weren’t allowed to watch TV (cathode ray tube radiation, in addition to general brain drain and sapping of childhood creativity). My brother and I were allowed no mechanized toys, ate no sugar, and we shopped only at health food stores, which were few and far between back then. If it wasn’t organic we couldn’t have it, which made for a lot of “but, Mom!” whininess at the market. I remember a rare moment of leniency when my mother told me I could have a lollypop that someone had given me—but only the part that was white, as the red part probably contained red dye number two (since banned as a carcinogen). She had me stand on the bathroom stool and run the lollypop under the tap until the red part had dissolved.

All this was hard on a kid. I just wanted to fit in, to do and eat as other kids did. Once, in a fit of pique, I complained to my mom. She looked at me and said, “When you’re thirty and your friends start dying of cancer, you’ll thank me.” I looked back at her and said, “But if all my friends are dead, I don’t want to be alive.”

My mother’s values made a heavy yoke to carry and life wasn’t exactly fun. Growing up with the weight of the world’s problems was a challenge, especially as no one else I knew seemed aware these problems existed. There was a picture on the wall of our house of a little boy, age four, forced to carry bricks as his daily work in India, and other photos of children gone blind from weaving carpets for export. Nobody else talked about child labor in Asia, dead baby seals, or infants born without limbs due to pesticide use. And every toy or item of clothing I wanted seemed to be made in China, which we were boycotting because of human rights violations in Tibet.

But the truth is, I am grateful. As I become an adult (an ongoing process), I have a different perspective on my mother’s choices. As I get deeper into this food blog and spend more time thinking about food issues and food politics, I am moved by her prescience and determination. I am especially stunned that she did all this as a single mother, without any outside family or financial support. We never had much money, my mother worked harder than many people ever do (she’s still not sure how she pulled it off, her only explanation: “I didn’t sleep for about a decade”), and was frugal in a way that drove me crazy. We never took vacations, but she sent her kids to private school (Waldorf, naturally), fed us organic foods, and took us to the theater and museums. She was always tired, often yelled at us, and never realized she could have asked for help, but the only time I saw her cry was one day, at about age eight, when I brought in the mail. My mom stopped weeding the garden to open the National Geographic magazine that had arrived. When she saw the images of mothers and children starving in Ethiopia, she sat down by the side of the driveway and wept.



My mother doesn’t know how proud I am of her. She doesn’t know that I talk about her often, that most of my friends know of her even if they have not met her. She thinks I have nothing but complaints about my childhood and, to be fair, I do have some (what was up with that tofu icing on my birthday cake?). Having to be conscious of the impact of every decision, in a culture that is mostly unconscious, was a lot for a kid to take on. It seemed like we were the only ones having to do this and it felt punitive—like I was being punished for my mother’s values. Because she wasn’t raised with much family, it never occurred to her that her kids needed other like-minded people around to provide a sense of support and community in these choices. I sometimes tell her that she should have raised us on a commune. As it was, we were the only ones of our kind in the semi-rural, middleclass suburb I grew up in; the isolation in our alternativeness was particularly hard.

My brother and I joke that all we wanted as children was a house with wall-to-wall carpeting and a mother who attended PTA meetings, baked cookies for bake sales, and had the decency to wear pantyhose. But the truth is I wouldn’t trade my mother for an army of stay-at-home moms and all the bake sale cookies in the world. Today I am endlessly proud of her, grateful for the example she has set me, and I join her in avoiding pantyhose whenever possible.

There are other things I would love to tell you about my mother. How even though her own mother died when she was three and she was raised by an abusive stepmother and an absentee father, she gave her children oceans of love she had never experienced. How she started supporting herself at age fourteen, and at seventeen moved to New York to become a dancer. How in 1965, at the age of twenty-six, she bought an around-the-world plane ticket and when she got to Asia she cashed the rest of it in and stayed for three years. How she studied Japanese dance and later lived in a Zen monastery.



I would tell you that when my father left her, pregnant and with me a two-year-old, she somehow managed to keep it together and get a PhD at the same time. How she raised two children on nothing but determination and gave us, not only a world of love, but a real world to explore and experience—art, theater, foreign countries and cultures, and injustices she worked hard to address. How I didn’t understand the sullen teenager who came to live with us when I was eleven—I didn’t know what a Cambodian war refugee really was, or why we had to have one—but I do now. How one of her favorite things when I was young was feeding us food she had raised in her large organic garden, and one of her favorite things now is the end of the year when she writes checks to nonprofit organizations doing work she believes in and makes them as generous as she possibly can. How she is not only vegetarian, but refuses to use or wear animal products (which makes for some rather unfashionable footwear choices, it must be said). How she has a knack for finding houses with amazing ocean views, always perched on rapidly eroding cliffs. How she does work she believes in and refuses to water it down to make it more marketable. How in the rare moments when she really gets excited about something, I get a glimpse of the little girl she was never allowed to be. How she co-founded a graduate school, travels yearly to do volunteer work in areas that need it, and still is taking classes and continuing her own studies, well into her sixties. How even today, on her birthday, she is making time to treat a woman who has both two young children and advanced leukemia.

I would tell you that my mother has supported me in everything I have ever felt moved to pursue, from buying me cookbooks and books on writing, to helping me fund travel, grad school, and the first, scary phases of a freelance business. How whenever I have a problem, she leaves no stone unturned trying to find a solution (she is nothing if not determined). How I know that whatever I manage to accomplish in my life, I do so standing on her shoulders (and sometimes on her head). That she makes me feel like I can take risks because I know she would be there to pick up the pieces. How whenever anyone meets me and thinks that I’m at all adventurous, intelligent, or the least bit brave, I want to tell them that they should meet my mom. She is the source of nearly everything good about me, and not a few of the faults as well (those dang piles of papers!). I know for a fact that I will never be as strong, as disciplined, or as ethical as my mother; she's left some mighty large shoes to fill. And even though she’s busy trying to save the world, she still lets me put my head in her lap when I need to and she strokes my hair.

I could tell you all those things, but then you might think I’m a little too proud of my mom, that I love and admire her, perhaps, a little too much. And anyway, this is a food blog.

So I will just say this—Happy Birthday to the most amazing, inspiring, fiercely principled, and stubborn woman I know. I love you more than I can say, and I am so very grateful that you are my mother. If I had to do it over I’d still pick you—tofu icing and all.



And because this is a food blog I will give you a recipe, one of my mom’s favorites. It pulls together a lot of her favorite nibbles. The original recipe came from a Vogue magazine, I believe, circa mid-1980s. I have only a patchy handwritten copy that showcases my loopy teenage penmanship.

Tomorrow night I’m picking up my mom at the airport. I’ll be waiting with a big hug, lots of love and appreciation, and a container of her favorite pasta salad in the car. Because trying to save the world does make a woman hungry.

BIRTHDAY SPRING SALAD

I first made this salad as part of a birthday party I threw for my mom when she turned fifty. There were about seventy-five people invited, but I made enough food for over a hundred. I remember mixing vats of this pasta salad—in large plastic bags—and there was a ton left over. Good thing mom liked it, we were eating it for days afterwards, even tried freezing containers of it. I was eighteen at the time and entertaining thoughts of being a caterer, though I would have been hopeless— completely over budget and over quantity. But from time to time my mother still requests this recipe, and then can't stop eating it ("I try to hide it from myself in the back of the fridge," she tells me). It's a strongly flavored salad, for a strongly willed woman.

Dressing:
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/3 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 tsp pepper
3 tbs vinegar
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard

Salad:
1 lb fusilli noodles
3/4 lb feta cheese, roughly chopped or crumbled
1/2 cup red onion, cut in half and thinly sliced
3/4 cup sun dried tomatoes in oil, drained and cut into a rough julienne
1 cup Nicoise or Kalmata olives, pitted and halved
1 1/2 cup fresh fava beans (that's about 2 1/2 lbs of the beans in their pods—use edamame soybeans if you can't find fava)
3 cups fresh sorrel, cut into a rough julienne (you could use baby spinach, but you'll be losing the lemony tartness of the sorrel)
1 tbs Meyer lemon peel, fresh or preserved, finely minced

Mix all the dressing ingredients together and blend well. Set aside for a few hours.

Remove the fava beans from their padded pods, blanch them for 3-4 minutes in boiling salted water, drain and plunge immediately into cold water. Peel each bean, squeezing out the bright innards from the soft peel and set aside (after marveling at just how green they are). For more about fava beans, see here.

Boil the pasta noodles, drain, and place in a large mixing bowl. Pour the dressing over and mix. Add sorrel immediately and mix, the sorrel will wilt slightly. Add the remaining ingredients, one by one, mixing throughly after each addition. Makes about six servings.