Stories

ImageA few lines in a recent “Quick Takes” column at Inside Higher Ed were enough to make me put down the faux-croissant I’d just purchased at my school’s café and seek out the full story in The Boston Globe: the most popular class at Harvard right now is “Science of the Physical Universe 27.”

It has another name as well—“Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science”—and it “uses the culinary arts as a way to explore phases of matter, electrostatics, and other scientific concepts” (Devra First, “Harvard Uses Top Chefs to Spice Up Science,” Nov. 2, 2010). One interesting fact about this course is that it isn’t your mother’s or your home ec class: it has a guest list of top chefs. Another interesting fact is that 700 students tried to sign up for the fall semester’s offering.

Seven hundred! That’s the total enrollment at some small formerly-known-as-liberal-arts-colleges. I began to think about the potential here: Why stop at physics? Why not use food to teach film and literature? Perhaps this is just what the flailing liberal arts need.

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pie-in-the-face

I don’t know another food that seems to inspire stronger emotion—passion, even
—than that most humble of desserts, pie. — Joyce Maynard, "Labor Day"

I’ve been thinking about pie a lot lately. It’s only now, as I’m preparing to leave the college where I’ve taught for the last 15 years, that it occurs to me how many works I’ve taught that have included pie. In the early years of my women’s film class, I used a clip in which Snow White sings about her prince while crafting the perfect pie for the seven little men that she lives with. Pie can be a metaphor for comfort, for domesticity, for nurturing and for accomplishment.

Those very suggestions are what also make pie such a successful weapon in the arsenal of slapstick: to be attacked with a pie, otherwise a symbol of warm inclusiveness, is to be shamed, reduced (just ask the British Prime Minister’s pie thrower his intention).

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arugula_pizza_009.jpgI grew up eating my fair share of great Chicago pizza. My family made the drive from St. Paul to Chicago a few times each year to visit all the relatives living there. Laden with spicy Italian sausage and creamy cheese that stretched in long strings as I pulled the slice away from my mouth, I thought Chicago pizza was the best food in the world.

With that in mind, I feel a little silly calling this concoction of mine a pizza. It’s nothing like the Chicago pizza I grew up on. But it is on a flat piece of dough with several ingredients piled on top along with mozzarella cheese.

Arugula on my pizza was only a thought after I’d prepared an Arugula Salad for this week’s newspaper column. I had a small amount of the green ingredients left from the salad — arugula, spinach and tiny fresh green peas. Along with a few other little odds and ends from my refrigerator, I decided to create a pizza.

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roseanne-pointing1.jpgCan you believe it? I ended up on the nut farm! OK, no wise comments. I’m talking about a real nut farm in Hawaii, where my five kids and five grandkids can ramble around, work up an appetite (I don’t have to work at it), and then enjoy some of the luscious macadamia nut cookies that I’ll be making for them on Mother’s Day. (I know that’s backward — they should be making them for me.)

Mac nuts are the best — pearly and buttery, with just the right texture and so easy to crunch. Everybody loves them. Of course, that includes the wild pigs that have grudgingly agreed to let Granny (that’s me, I still can’t believe it), the kids and their pals share the place with them and the wild turkeys.

The gorgeous greenery, the ocean in the distance, the sound of the rain that keeps it all lush and fragrant: It’s a sweet slice of heaven, and I hope everyone can find their own little slice of that, wherever they are.

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shellingpeasI’m writing this ode to summertime while being serenaded by lovely summer music – an orchestral enchantment of a summer thunderstorm. We’ve been dry down here in Dixie and every little drop is a blessing. Fill our cups please!

Peas, purple hulls to be exact, sunflowers, peaches, butter and snap beans – all coming in with gusto from our farms and gardens. Mimi’s favorite thing is to shell peas, and after a myriad of places, we finally tracked down unshelled peas for her pleasure and leisure.

“So many places sell them shelled... I just want to sit and shell peas all day.” Mimi.

The nerve of us buying shelled peas – that would be robbing our grandmother of a blessing! Shell away Mimi…shell away! My grandmother’s delight I count a richest gain, for all I have to do is eat the peas. For there again is a favorite pastime of our matriarch – cooking peas. Alas, I shall resign my attempts and glory in the pot liquor of Mimi’s peas.

“I eat my peas with honey; I’ve done so all my life… I eat my peas with honey, so that they stay on my knife!” another Mimi-ism.

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