Dinner with friends.

I should rename this blog "lamentations about my dead mother" to more accurately reflect the things I write about here. I would, but "Brambles" seems much more vague. Keeping my options open.

It's another post about mom. Or maybe it's just a post about me. Let's find out together, shall we?

Tonight I hosted a potluck dinner for a small, well loved group of folks. The official theme was "home cooking" - interpretation left to each individual. When I hear that phrase, my mind goes to the food I ate as a child; the smells, textures, flavors of a daily life where I still rode a bicycle almost every day in summer and didn't mind the sticky residue from watermelon. I go back to being a kid and the magic of dinnertime. In my head, it is magical. I'm sure I've painted over it and gifted a romance to the picture that doesn't really exist. I understand the truth of this but it has become my reality - I don't remember anything else.

Part of the magic is that many of the foods I associate with my childhood are not foods I eat now with any regularity - or at all. A common meal would be pan fried breaded pork chops with mashed potatoes, canned vegetable, and (for my mother) a few fresh green onions on the side. We didn't eat much fruit but we ate a lot of canned veggies and fried food. Mom wasn't trying to set bad examples or give our adult selves something to be horrified about - this was the food she ate as a child, that she had learned to prepare, that she knew and was comfortable with. This was Home Cooking at it's slightly southern best. As an adult, I realize the nutritional pitfalls of my childhood. As a mom, I work really hard to avoid serving those pitfalls up to my kids. We eat fresh or frozen veggies, a lot of fresh fruit in all varieties, not so much fried food. I'm not trying to pull a superiority thing - the bare fact is that I work hard to compose meals for my family that are substantially better nutritionally than the meals I ate as a child.

But (in my head, or more importantly, to my palette) meatloaf should still have mashed potatoes, spaghetti begs for hash browns, and eggs are best fried over easy in bacon grease. I digress.

"Home cooking" was tonight's theme, and it got me thinking about the flavors of my childhood. I wasn't thrilled to bring those out tonight (see paragraph above about change). So I started thinking about my version of home cooking. What will my children remember eating years from now? What flavors, textures, combinations will come back to them when they're busying about their own kitchens? Will the food I give them now, in these years, be something they remember with fondness or horror? Will they romanticize their childhood home cooked meals, or remember them accurately? Does it matter?

I believe it does matter. Food is a key component to our existence. When I think of cornbread, I think of Mom's cast iron skillet, sizzling with butter. When I think of Christmas, I can see Mom bustling around the kitchen, wearing bells at her ears, singing carols and baking cookies. Food is the thread that holds us together in deep, unknown ways - ways that surprise us, comfort us, carry us through. Ask anyone, and everyone can tell you a food story. It might be happy or sad, exciting, tragic, or dull. But it's their story, rooted in sustenance.

To wrap up a bit of the story, I ended up fixing spaghetti for tonight's home cooking contribution. It's the first thing I started cooking from scratch. Many years, I even spend two days sweating in the kitchen to churn out quart after quart of home made marinara sauce for the pantry. It's become my comfortable, known, flavorful home cooked meal. I skipped the hash browns that accompanied my childhood spaghetti - like always -but if I'd had potatoes I might have made them just tonight, as an homage to being a kid.

I guess this really isn't so much about Mom as it is about me. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised. I was expecting something more focused on the past, not this sort of wandering through to the present.