Food, Family and Memory

There is a difference between jam and preserves.  Jam is sweet fruit you spread on toast.  Preserves are a frozen moment in time—a piece of summer that you can carry with you the rest of the year:  high grass, long naps, warm evenings, your front porch… 

My neighbor Mary Wellington makes preserves.

Mary is a farmer.  And not only a single-family farmer--a single farmer.  She works three acres of very diverse orchards of Glenn Annie canyon all by herself, on which she grows over fifty varieties of fruit. 

Her preserves were so treasured and ubiquitous at local farmer’s markets that many people came to call her “The Jam Lady.” Her Blenheim Apricot jam is intoxicating.  Her Blood Orange marmalade is insane.  The red raspberry is well… indescribable.  But Mary Wellington preserves more than fruit.

If you wander up Glen Annie you will find a two story clapboard farmhouse peeking out from behind the persimmon tree.  Mary will greet you with her typical burst of enthusiasm and a clap of her hands.  She will launch into an impromptu tour of her orchard and its latest bounty:  You will flit from tree to tree sampling God’s offerings in a feast of the senses that is literally Edenic.  (I know I get religious about food—but I was raised that way.)   Taste the Santa Rosas… Smell the outside of this blood orange… Look at the color on these apricots... Oh don’t mind the bruise—just taste it.

For those of you that have children, I am sure you (like me) spend your Saturday’s and Sunday’s at the park or gym, watching children, small and large, playing with balls. Basketballs, soccer balls, footballs, baseballs, and lacrosse balls. Three boys, 3-6 games (depending on Isaac’s travel basketball schedule), spent at the park and gym.

Oh, and then there is the weekly team snack. I have tried to outlaw it, or outlaw certain snack items, but I am often met with the evil eye and that look of “is she crazy or just stupid”. I simply do not understand how so many of these parents think that a bag of pre-packaged chips, a plastic bottle containing colored liquid,  or a sandwich filled cookie equates to something they would want their child to put in their body after they just did something wonderful for their body!?

I have learned to keep my mouth shut and instead, hopefully teach by doing. For Levi’s last football game, I was snack mom. Tea cakes have become our latest and greatest and we can’t decide if they are a muffin, a cake, or a cupcake. Really doesn’t matter what they are – they are delicious.

With mini orange and chocolate chip tea cakes in hand, fruit kebabs, and water, not only were the parents “ooing and aahing”, but the kids were asking for seconds. Sometimes with kids it is all about the presentation, and having fruit on a stick was a sure fire winner.

As any good Cajun cook will tell you, "First you make a roux." But what, you might ask, is a roux?.

Even with the proliferation over the last couple of decades of Cajun chefs, Cajun restaurants and Cajun cookbooks, blackened this and blackened that (what ever that means); most non- Cajun aficionados of South Louisiana’s cuisine can’t explain a roux either.

But I was in luck Sunday when an actual real life Cajun from Kraemer Louisiana, my best pal Keith, showed up at my kitchen door in Silver Lake. "I heard ya'll needed some help with a roux."

As my fellow Louisianaian explains, the gumbo starts with the cast iron skillet, not the roux. If you don’t have a thick skillet the heat won’t distribute properly and the roux will be either over or under cooked. With that in mind, I turn the fire on high and pour one cup of canola oil in the skillet along with one piece of bacon. The bacon adds a subtle flavor and also serves somewhat like a canary in a coal mine. If the bacon cooks too fast the fire’s too hot (I said kinda like a canary in a coal mine).