Editor’s Note: Here are Refuge Farm the left-overs are gone. Home-made apple pie and the best cream cheese pie topped with cranberry sauce bit the dust before bedtime last night. I got up this morning prepared to deal with the great issues of the day, and Marlow bright back some particular insight on tase and aging. So, back to Presidential visits tomorrow, as the working week begins to grind us all- together!

– Vic

November 30 2020

Food Memories

Coastal Empire

The afterglow of last Thursday’s fabulous meal at a neighbor’s house on St Simon’s Island has lasted for several days. Thus buzzed-out did my mind hazily recall various foods I didn’t care for as a kid but now crave if not now love. I guess the scarcity of these foods during the pandemic’s early panic-hoarding stages caused me to think of and hunt down these foods during the ensuing months.

My childhood food gag list included:

Beans
Beets
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Spinach
Peas
Brussels sprouts
Asparagus
Green peppers
Rhubarb
Rice pudding
Fish — growing up landlocked in the Midwest meant frozen fish sticks or canned tuna fish and salmon packed on its own disgusting oil. Red Lobster restaurants and cheap overnight delivery of fresh fish wouldn’t come to town for 30 years.
Stinky cheeses — if they weren’t pale orange, they were on the list.
Hot, sour or spicy sauces

My mom was an objectively awful cook and ruined me on many things. First of all, she did not keep spices or herbs in the house. She did not understand seasoning or the use of meat fats and sauces whatsoever. If my dad was charcoal grilling on the weekends, we had a reprieve. He would use various seasonings that he brought back with him from his travels across the US. His results were medium rare all the way. But that was about it. We children were close to total food ambivalence.

Mom boiled all of our veggies — mostly frozen ones — either undercooking them so they were like gacky-tasting, thick, mini plant stalks or overcooking them until they were limp tasteless nothings. Her idea of baked pork chops was 15 minutes longer and at a higher than recommended temperature than necessary until they were like wooden planks.

Some of my pickier, younger siblings lived in fear of our nightly dinners and took measures to slyly remove the offending dinner sides for later surreptitious deposit in the downstairs toilet.

In search of more satisfying sustenance, I happened one early summer night at the age of 13 to buy a slice of Italian pizza. Whatever was happening at that humble pie parlor required further investigation, so I bought an entire pepperoni pie and took it home. Thus awed and inspired, Mom-cooked ones appeared on the menu bespoiled with herbless tomato sauce, American Cheese and thinly sliced hot dogs or bologna atop a cardboard crust.

I could go on and on, but I have made you shiver and shudder enough.

A college year abroad during the 60s studying in France began my conversion and salvation. Spices, herbs, pork & duck pâté, sweet butter, home delivered unpasteurized fresh milk in cream top bottles — an inch plus of cream in them used for sauce-making, cooking and baking, the unending varieties of hard and soft to runny cheeses, fresh caught seafood to include oddities like eels and those found on fruits de mer shellfish platters, snails and horse meat (their French names — escargot & cheval — made them sound delectable) and not least of all crepes, galettes and humble baked goods like croissants and baguettes.

In my early 20s California avocados made the list, since Mexican varieties hadn’t yet crossed the border. They were bland and so hard dogs used them as chew toys. Then, Hass versions took them off the list during the 90s

Field fresh vegetables from the valley since the 1970s at the Milk Pail Market in Mountain View California

Further on during the late 70s in northern California came my introduction to year-round, field-fresh vegetables, various sea salts and the many mysterious pleasures of the dark world of chocolates.

A fruits de mer platter

US Navy travel introduced me to cultures and cuisines where maligned vegetables and ignored or lesser fruits were flame grilled to perfection using oils and spices. Who knew that mushrooms came in all sorts of varieties, tastes and preparations. And then came the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of ‘shrooms of the forest – maitakes, chanterelles and morels, oh my.

Things like anchovy pastes, olives, capers, mustards, smoked fish, fresh-off-the-boat shrimp sandwiches on sour dough bread (yes, Point Loma Seafoods in San Diego still makes the best) beguiled me in the 80s.

Who knew that cauliflower soup and cauliflower flour pizza crust in the 21st century would become not a thing but my things? I was not becoming a food liberal or progressive — but a revolution was taking place in my mouth.

“When this child was a child, it gagged on spinach, on peas,
on rice pudding
And especially on boiled cauliflower
And now eats all of it and not just because it has to”

Now, I love just about everything.

A few gag list items remain like haggis and those dead-squirrel smelling, Brussel Sprout, little, green balls of death.

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