a meat and potatoes kind of girl

I am not a meat and potatoes kind of girl – anyone who knows me will tell you I spend half my current life vegan and the other half trying to be and feeling guilty for falling off the vagon – nor am I a lover of all things lentil. In my previous incarnation as an unencumbered woman, i.e. pre-motherhood sans toddler barnacled to my hip, I considered myself a bit of a gourmet and was known for throwing lavish dinner parties that took hours, if not days, of preparation. I thought not only of the food – my banquets were themed – but also of the decor, the invite, the flowers, the seating arrangements, the wine pairings. Okay, everything I said in the previous sentence is a lie. I only ever threw such a banquet once, but that’s how I like to remember my previous incarnation and, memory being a malleable creature, I hope to one day believe I was once named Nigella and will no longer need to add this corollary.

Back to my point, which is this: My larder used to be stocked with Malden salt, saffron, cheese that left the lingering scent of the gym locker room in my nostrils but tasted like orgasm (literally), chillies, limes, cashew nuts, olives, anchovies, capers and caper-berries, various chutneys, pickles and preserves and enough spice to curry every lamb in the Karoo.

I used to think that my mother, a superb cook if a bit meat and potatoes, not very adventurous in spite of her collection of cookbooks. These ranged from a series of thin volumes on Asian cuisine (Japan to Cambodia) to shabby well-thumbed Jewish Women’s Guild recipe books on how to cook for Passover, which is pretty impressive when you consider she was cooking in an era before the idea of celebrity chef was even concieved.  As children our dinners, when mom cooked, were stews, soups, roast chicken, fish and chips etc, pretty bog standard stuff, pretty much what my granny served up at her house. When our nanny cooked, they were the more yukky boil-in-a-bay I&J fish in sauce type meals, but that’s another story entirely.

Now, when I look at the contents of my fridge, I wonder if perhaps my mother had a previous culinary incarnation before my brother and I came along? Perhaps my grandmother was dining on oysters and champagne back in the day, and while that’s probably unlikely since she came from the WW2 ration generation,  once DSTV came along she spent a minimum of eight hours a day watching the cooking channel in her Easy Boy while snacking on Nik Naks. She became a kind of celluloid gourmet, if you will. And, while you might struggle to find deeper meaning in how she chose to pass her days, I think it was an act of mourning. I think, like me, when confronted with the under-developed palettes of her offspring, my grandmother struggled to let go of her aspirations to gourmet and turned first to alcohol, then to TV for consolation.

As I write, I’m sipping a glass of the organic chardonnay I snuck into my shopping basket at Woolies the other day, and while I don’t plan a full slide into alcoholism like my granny, it certainly makes it easier to face the fish fingers and mash leftovers on my daughter’s plate I’ll be eating for dinner.