Musings

All the major news outlets agree – America has entered a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. With Thanksgiving just around the corner families are trying to decide with whom they should celebrate the holiday and how to make lemonade out of their lemons. It isn’t easy to have a positive outlook with so much bad news hitting us every day, but there are peoplewho manage to do just that. They find the “silver lining and the half full glass”.  It is so very hard to do that now, but I can recall another difficult time when I was very sad and anxious, but eventually managed to find a way to view my glass as half full. It was when Steven got his first wheelchair.

Although the wheelchair definitely made our day-to-day life easier, it was a symbol of his growing disability. It caused the old emotional wound that started with Steven’s diagnosis of MS to reopen, and so once again I had to confront my fears about disability and our future, my sadness and my pain, and Steven had to confront his as well.

Shortly after I took a few days of respite and went to the beach where I wrote a poem that is included in my book: “It Doesn’t Have to be This Hard”. Here is an excerpt:

While at the beach sitting on the sand and soaking up the warm rays of the sun, alone with my thoughts and feeling, I wrote a poem that was inspired by of all things, a beach chair. The poem erupted out of my brain in only a few minutes, and poured onto the writing pad that was propped up against my thighs. It was a very dark poem, reflecting all the painful emotions the purchase of the wheelchair engendered. It expressed my fears and my anger. It was the visible representation of the pain that I held inside. It was a poem written by a woman who definitely saw her glass as half empty.  The sun was shining. I was enjoying a respite, and I decided to try and think about Steven’s need for the wheelchair in a different way. I ripped up the first poem and began again. The poem that came from my inner core the second time around was more upbeat. It looked at the doors that the wheelchair opened for Steven and me, not the ones that it had closed.

It sits there at the crest of the beach, on the rise just before the sand dips towards the water’s edge.  A lone beach chair,
seemingly abandoned.

It’s a jaunty chair with a yellow striped canvas seat and sailboats floating on its blue and yellow back support.

It lists just a bit to the left, almost rakishly, as it nestles in  the sand, surveying the sea.

It is a chair made just for sitting, and sitting on the sand at that. It has no legs to get in the way of stretching out, relaxing, and letting the sun seep into your bones and warm your soul.

It is so unlike another chair I know, a black chair with wheels, a chair that does not survey the vastness of the ocean with a jaunty air, but rather a chair that defines a narrower kingdom.

And yet, I think this other chair is a happier chair than the one that sits and stares out to sea, for it is a chair with wheels that take the place of legs no longer able to propel their owner forth.

This other chair is not made for sitting and looking at the world. It is a chair built for exploring, for meeting life face to face and tasting of its spirit.

Perhaps this chair should have a seat of yellow and white stripes, and a back support adorned with sailboats.

A far better statement of its adventurous and joyous possibilities.

Nothing had changed in the hour between the time I wrote the first poem and the time I wrote the second one, nothing except my attitude. And yet that was everything.

When our daughter was 8 or so we began a tradition of picking strawberries at Butler’s Orchard, a commercial farm that allowed city slickers like us to get our hands dirty. Since there was no limit on how many strawberries we were allowed to pick, we just kept going until the pain in our knees told us it was time to stop. It is amazing how many strawberries you can pick in a couple of hours. I remember one year we came home with 28 pounds of berries, obviously far more than we could eat. We gifted multiple jars of the jam we made that afternoon to friends and drank a few too many daiquiris as we cooked. That year I ate so many strawberries I broke out in hives.

Using several quarts of the remaining berries we made a large batch of strawberry sherbet. The recipe we found called for double freezing, so we started it the day we went picking and finished it the following day, and had it for dessert that night. We made so much it lasted throughout the winter and  into the spring when the process started all over again. We wowed friends with it when they came for dinner in the middle of the winter.

I stopped making the sherbet as Darryn lost interest in going with mom and dad to pick the berries.  Of course I could have bought fresh ones at our local farmers market or bought frozen ones, but I never did. It seemed sacrilegious to divorce the making of the sherbet from the picking of the berries.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I began thinking about making the sherbet again a couple of weeks ago. I hesitated because it has both sugar and corn syrup in it, but I managed to get past the guilt by telling myself I would only be eating a little at a time. I’m glad I did because it tasted just as good as it did 40+ years ago. As with Proust’s madeleine the first spoonful brought back pleasant memories from long ago –   the sweet taste of just picked strawberries and their aroma in the air.  CLICK HERE TO SEE THE RECIPE

I’ve been wondering about this for a while and apparently I am not the only one because when I went online I found lots of articles. This is a summary of what I learned.

What is a Trend?

According to Vocabulary.com a trend simply reflects what seems to be going around at any given time. Trends have staying power because they are connected to bigger ideas, such as healthy eating (whole grains, unsaturated fats); concerns over the environment (global warming), technology (personal privacy), and economics (income inequality).

Fads on the other hand are a flash in the pan, think cronuts that apparently came and went without my even noticing. Multicolored foods and sprinkles according to my sources are on the way out although I am sure I saw a very multicolor sprinkled donut in a TV commercial recently, which goes to show there is not a science to these predictions

How Do Trends Get Started?

It used to be that food trends began with a chef creating a new recipe that captured the attention of other chefs and the professional food media. It might have used an ingredient that no one had tried before or used a familiar one in a new way. It originated in a top notch restaurant and appealed to diners as something new and delicious. It created a buzz there, but took quite a while to make its way to the food pages of newspapers and on the menus of local restaurants. When the ingredients show up on supermarket shelves we can all agree it’s a new trend.

Some trends still start at the highest level of the culinary world, but more and more of them come from the bottom up. Technology and social media now play a huge role in the creation of trends.

The Story of Kale

Kale is a great example of a vegetable that has been around for years but no one ate it. It was used on catering platters and salad bars and thrown away at the end of the event. Who  would ever have thought it would become synonymous with healthy eating? Production of kale is way up as is its inclusion on restaurant menus. Today kale is used as a substitute for romaine in Caesar Salads. Kale chips are advertised as a healthy snack. Even McDonalds puts kale in its salads. .

But how did this happen? How did the buzz get started? Oberon Sinclair a PR professional known for helping to create trends is considered the queen of kale. Sinclair is one of the few people who actually likes kale so she went on a crusade to get others to like it too. She popularized the curly green by using her considerable PR skills and contacts. She put messages about its nutritional value on chalk boards all around New York City and asked upscale restaurants to put it on their menus. And so the buzz started. Bon Appetit magazine declared that 2012 was the year of Kale. Trends of course don’t last forever. Sale of kale is going down now, while sale of chard is on the uptick . I hear that watercress is the most nutritious vegetable there is. Will there ever be a “year of watercress”. We will have to wait and see.

The Story of Avocado Toast    Avocado toast comes to us via Australia and a chef named Bill Granger who opened a small cafe in a Sydney suburb.in 1993. His lease said the cafe could only be opened from 7 AM to 4 PM, so Granger put avocado toast on his breakfast menu. Putting toppings on breakfast toast is commonplace in Australia. He said he’d always eaten it, and didn’t think there was anything special about it.

Another Aussie, Chloe Osborne, who is now the consulting chef at New York’s Cafe Gitane, first tasted avocado toast when her family visited friends in Queensland in the mid seventies. Osborne is credited with beginning the buzz about avocado toast in America where she put it on the restaurent’s menu in the early 2000s. Other restaurants followed suit and introduced their own versions of avocado toast. The foodie press picked it up and the internet spread it (no pun i ntended) far and wide.

Back in Australia Bill Granger opened more restaurants and continued serving avocado toast. He now has restaurants world wide, and yes , they all serve avocado toast.

A curious aside – Go to your browser and enter “Aztec name for avocados” you’ll be surprised by what you learn.

So What are the New Health and Faood Trends for 2021

There are many predictions on the web, but no consensus among the folks who research and write about such things. Here are a few that sound like they may actually come true.

1. Plant-based meat and pea protein
2. Movement away from single use plastic bags and containers
3. Low alcohol beverages (millenials are trying to cut down on their intake)
4. Intermittent fasting (check out the New England Journal of Medicine)
5. Lasagna, so says the Wall Street Journal
6. Sumac, so says me. I’ve been seeing it in recipes quite a lot recently.

Regardless of what will happen across America – what will be the trends in your kitchen?

I often play music when I cook. I play jazz when I am upbeat. I sing along with the Beatles even though I can’t carry a tune, and I am calmed by the sound of a Native American flute. I often listen to it when I am down and out.

Cooking is so much more than a means to a meal for me. I’ve come to realize that it is my anchor during turbulent times. I have suffered twice from major depression. During those times I stayed in bed for most of the day, only getting up for bathroom breaks. Putting the blanket over my head was one way I tried to lock out the world. I couldn’t think straight and found it almost impossible to make decisions.

Despite this we always ate well. It was as if planning and cooking dinner was another type of medication that worked to reorder the chemistry in my brain.
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