though we take turns with the existential questions of life, he is the one who asks most of the ones – aloud – that are -sometimes annoyingly – foggy. the kinds of questions that require lengthy, long-winded, circular, pondering dissertations, steeped-in-wisdom-devoid-of-wisdom yada-yada, first-person-experience tales, prolonged dialogue, yin-yanging polar opinions, all the reddiwip of solid answers.
i find myself – in these moments – thinking of the practical, the reassuringly tactile, the basic. the homemade chicken soup.
“…all mixed together for a mirepoix of a day,” jonathan-the-wise-one wrote.
what a delicious word. meer-pwah.
i did exactly this a few days ago. made a mirepoix – a sautéed combination of carrots and celery and herbs – in preparation for our homemade chicken soup. chicken soup is “good for what ails you,” according to my sweet momma. really, good for anything that ails you. we had spent time writing ahead – like this post – for there will be a few days we are away. and we had had a glorious fresh air walk – our faces were still flush from the cold wind.
i thought about a dear friend as i added fresh baby spinach leaves and ladled hot soup over them, wilting them. i thought about loida as we ate out of beautiful williams and sonoma bowls. we sipped red wine and talked about our families. we watched videos of jaxon. i thought about jen – who always has fun napkins – as i pulled out our 2023 napkins, willing 2023 to be a good year. we talked to 20 on the phone and sat up late-late-late to watch our son mix music on a livestream youtube. 2am is later than it used to be.
a mirepoix – the base – for flavorful soups and stews, that which is nourishing, life-giving, warming.
in my wild-harebrained-dream we own a food truck called “and sauce.” and we drive around the country in big red pulling our food truck and selling sauce on pretty-much-anything.
i blame the whole30. or credit the whole30. i suppose there’s a difference between blaming and crediting.
the whole30 is a diet for 30 days (clever, eh?) during which you only eat whole foods and do not eat any: grains, legumes, dairy, added sugars, alcohol. you pare down your menus to fresh vegetables and meats and seafood and, after 30 days, deliberately add things back in to see how your body and digestive system react to various ingredients. it was back in early 2018 and it truly helped me get a tummy that was having a rebellion under control.
in many ways, it kind of stuck.
one of our staples was my homemade tomato meat sauce. but, at the time, we could not have it over pasta – regular or gluten-free. so we had it over spaghetti squash, which was, surprisingly, amazing. then we had it over oven-roasted chopped sweet potatoes. then we had it over roasted brussels sprouts. and over a hamburger. and over a baked potato. when we could add gluten-free products back in, we had sauce over penne, over rotini, wrapped in corn tortillas. sauce, we had discovered, is good on pretty much anything.
and the ideas were born. “and sauce”, the cafe, the food truck, the home delivery service. with the entrance of the pandemic, the food truck seemed like an apt adventure. i mean, who needs to even think about pianos and stages when you can travel around with stock pots and a food truck?
perhaps i am romanticizing this a tad bit, but, since this is my dream and not my reality, i am giving myself grace to daydream.
in those moments where comfort is sought and food that soothes the soul is paramount, we turn to the stock pot, to sauce or soup. the biggest pot comes out, the apron goes on (i adore over-the-head aprons), the cutting boards sit on the counter and life instantly slows down.
chopping and measuring (sort of) and sauteing and stirring with the giant wooden spoon from finland and sampling…it’s all heaven. there is not much that smells better than onions and garlic being sauted in olive oil. (though i recently read how you could re-create the williams sonoma store scent, which is very popular, by simply simmering vanilla extract, rosemary, lemon and peppercorns.)
just walking into the kitchen and seeing the stock pot on the stove is a reassurance. whether there is sauce in that stock pot or veggie soup or – drumroll – my sweet momma’s chicken soup (with the addition of spinach leaves and shredded parmesan, of course), it brings everything back into focus.
and as we ladle out sauce or soup into bowls or onto baked potatoes or penne, we, in turn, put worries and concerns and out-of-sorts-ness into the big pot. cause that’s actually the job of big stock pots. balancing out life.
a couple suggestions and, now, i owe her. they make all the difference. she, in some amazingly intuitive way, knows how to lift dinners, no matter the plate, to splendid.
leaves of spinach quietly waiting in a bowl for ladles of homemade chicken soup. and then, shredded – not grated – parmesan dresses it off. if soup can be called glorious, this fits the adjective.
in this time of pandemic – this never-ending-we’ve-never-done-this-before-therefore-we-all-need-some-grace-two-years – we are cooking to maintain sanity. and i have to agree with elsa (whose auto-biography “shocking life” i now want to read) that “eating well gives a spectacular joy to life.” though these two years have not been lavish in expensive foods for us, they have been rich in the experience of cooking and dining together on meals we have mutually prepared.
we love to cook together. and, lucky for me, david loves to chop. i can line up a festival of ingredients to be prepped and he, the mighty sous chef, takes them on willingly and, really, with a little bit of glee. that makes my cooking a wee bit like one of those shows where all the ingredients are in tiny and big bowls, measured and ready. we don’t have swanky pots and pans, but we have an abundance of zeal and, let me tell you, when we are hungry we are daaang focused.
if we feel we can do nothing else – no indoor restaurants, no pubs, no gatherings, no potlucks – then we can invest in cooking for each other or for ourselves. we can honor good food, plain or fancy-schmancy, placed in bowls or on plates, plain or fancy-schmancy, and time taken to savor and be grateful for being fortunate enough to sit at a table and eat.
i wish i could sit with my mom right now. i wish i could be at her kitchen table with a giant bowl of her homemade chicken soup and a big glass of red wine. i wish i could be talking with her, really talking, not merely chit-chatting, but sharing all the stuff that we – very-human human-beings – go through. i wish i could feel that kind of comfort, that kind of never-ending fierce support, that kind of unconditional love, that kind of mothering right now. i wish she were here.
making my own homemade chicken soup will have to suffice. pouring a glass of wine and turning on the happy lights in the sunroom will have to do. sitting with david and pouring out my heart, tears and laughter intermingling, will have to satiate me. looking out over the backyard, staring at the lights strewn up between the trees, will have to be enough.
adulthood has its challenges. we race through our younger years at seemingly warp speed, our ever-widening circles further and further away from home. so much presses us. too much sentimentality is rejected; this world does not run on threadiness and success is not deemed reached with a collection of rocks, feathers, branches collected to remember times with beloveds. we are encouraged to push back against emotions that are confusing, that are overwhelming; this world does not reward our angst, our fear, our grief. instead it suggests that teflon hearts, insular, tough, impervious to the outside, will forward us down the road. we give less and less time to nurturing relationships; we are immersed in making a living, in getting by, in our own self-actualization.
and then suddenly, we screech to a stop. and we are there. we are adults. and, despite all the trappings, we are a little bit lost. we look around, we look back, down the disjointed path, and we realize it’s all fleeting and we, struggling, our hearts quivering, the gift of retrospect bright and shining, pine for simple. we wish we could sit and have chicken soup with our mom, or with our children, and listen and share. we wish we could say that we have learned, in all our human-imperfection, that most important of all, just as we might have suspected, are those rocks and feathers and branches. most important of all are those moments spent with beloveds. most important of all is the honest exchange of ideas and thoughts, choices good and bad, learnings and re-learnings. most important of all is the sharing of our emotions, the visceral, the belly laughs, the sobs, the mistakes and the forgiveness of our flawedness, our common denominator. and hopefully, if the world is as full of grace as we are told, most important of all is the giving and receiving of unconditional love.
i wish i could sit with my sweet momma right now and ask her…how did she make it to almost-94 without a broken-heart-from-life-stuff time and again. i wish she could, once again, reassure me that “this too shall pass” and remind me that moments in time are just that – moments in time. i wish she could tell me her coping strategies, the way she found her zen in this big old damaged perfect world.
the cold air was stinging my face. i pulled my scarf up further, to block the wind a bit more. as we rounded a curve in the trail, the breeze was biting. it seems early for this kind of cold. but it’s not.
it’s december and the official start of winter is right up around that bend in the trail. the cold is predictable. this is wisconsin.
i walked away from the stockpot of chicken soup i was stirring, waiting for a warming dinner. i sat on the steps in the hall, overwhelmed. i keep hearing and picturing the words of my firing, the non-explanation-explanation given to others. it may seem like it’s time to be over it. but it’s not.
it’s only been three weeks and even sitting on the steps doesn’t yield an explanation or comfort. it just creates more questions, more astonishment, more hurt. the distress is predictable. this is shock.
i look, again, at the christmas list in my hand, trying to summon up the energy to shop and wrap and ship. it seems like the time is going slowly. but it’s not.
the holiday is rapidly approaching and, like many of you, we face it alone, wondering how to celebrate without our loved ones. we grieve traditions set aside, normal ways we honor these holidays. we ponder what we might do anew. the sadness is predictable. this is loneliness.
the night sky is filled with stars, the cold air beckoning them. the moon out the window is steadfast. the vast universe is vast. our tiny world inside, away from the biting wind, down the hall from the steps, at a table with a steaming bowl of chicken soup and a tiny christmas tree, is tiny. it seems that real peace is somewhat elusive. but it’s not.
the first snowstorm took us by surprise. heavy snow fell on southeastern wisconsin at a time when we were just back from being on island and struggling to figure out where we were in what felt like a time warp. it was, indeed, the end of october, but it just didn’t feel like it.
the snow was beautiful and heavy and, in our neighborhood of old houses and in-the-trees power lines, it bowed branches and pulled down those lines. we lost power early in the day.
having no power these days doesn’t just mean you can’t warm up your chicken soup for lunch or (perish the thought) make a much-needed afternoon nespresso. it means no wifi, no technology, no dropbox. i couldn’t do the laundry for a trip the next day. it put us on pause.
we wondered how the people of california were functioning with millions of them power-less in a vague effort to avoid more fires. i wondered how many people were still struggling without power in puerto rico, for what is an interminable amount of time. i was reminded of the big flat-line-windstorm that happened in our ‘hood back in 2011, hundreds of trees uprooted and no power for days. pause is acceptable for a few hours, but after that….
as it got darker we pulled out candles and a battery-operated-lantern that my big-ikea-fan-poppo purchased. we put our chicken soup in a picnic basket and went out seeking a microwave in which to warm it up.
we got a text from john when he got home, “do you guys have power?” later, we could see an impressive glow of candles in his living room windows.
my favorite moment in a day of challenges that included having no electricity, came when he followed up on the power company update we texted him. with john oz wit and his you-do-what-you-have-to-do outlook he wrote back, “the dachshunds ate by candlelight.”
reverse threading 