Visit me…as often as possible..at my blog, Babette Feasts. Here’s a sampling, an essay I wrote.
Food Memories
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My wordle from the end of May 2011, the month David died… |
I had just written a short online piece about where to find great chocolate recipes and one website had stuck with me, a site with a lot of savory dishes. After we traded a few ideas talking about possibilities, he tweaked a recipe, making corn cakes topped with his own version of Mexican mole-style chicken and some cheese.
His report back captures David’s personality for those of us who knew him and still makes us chuckle, especially reading of his scorn for American cheese “food”:
Topped a tablespoon of cornbread batter with a bigger spoon of the chicken mix. Topped that with a modest amount of mozzarella cheese since I had some handy already shredded — bad move; should have used the local Monterey jack I bought for the purpose, which is very tasty, or had I thought of it, better still would be supermarket-humble Havarti (which is a great American cheese, IMO, if inexpensive and widely available…at least it’s cheese compared to prevalent and therefore so-called American “pasteurized-process cheese food”). 15 minutes in the oven and they were done.
He signed off “mangia, mangia.”
Three months after those emails, I found myself in his house, my first time in Redlands, but he wasn’t there. His death was heartbreakingly sudden and being there was unspeakably sad and difficult.
We spent a week at his house, cleaning it out, preparing details of the memorial we would hold, sometimes finding laughter in our memories, admiring his garden full of wildflowers, touching pots and pans he touched, always aching for his presence.
One day I peered into the freezer and found a batch of little corn cakes, wrapped in foil and plastic, perhaps a little freezer burned. I knew exactly what they were. I pulled them out, heated them up and had a couple for lunch one day, remembering the process, remembering David, and happy to taste, one last time, one of his creations.