Extremely cool coincidence via gifted cookbooks

Last week, a new friend of mine, J, brought me a gorgeous bag of birthday goodies. Seriously, gorgeous, and also really thoughtful. Included was a cookbook she'd long loved and cooked from but didn't use enough anymore; instead of holding on to it, she wanted to pass it to me.

Written by Najmieh Batmanglij, it's a Persian cookbook called Food of Life, and this gifted copy is the original from 1986. As I thumbed through it, some of the pages splattered and all of them soft from use, an old recipe fell out. Jotted on a scratch piece of legal pad paper now stiff with age (a funny juxtaposition to those supple cookbook pages), it's for paella (not Persian) and is roughly sketched; arrows, underlines, circled words all remind J what she would and wouldn't want to include and do.

I was, and still am, incredibly touched by such a generous, personal gift. I asked J if she wanted the paella recipe back but she said "No, keep it with the book." Old recipes, hand-written, are treasures, and I plan to carefully tape the yellow paper into the front cover of Food of Life. They've been paired for a while now, and I see no reason to separate them.

Fast forward a few days, and another dear friend, M (who is Iranian), brings me a heavy, wrapped gift. "There's something small tucked inside*," she said, as I proceeded to tell her about the "amazing Persian cookbook" J had given me and how I intended to use the book and the barberries M gave me few months back to finally make Zereshk Polo, or jeweled rice, a favorite dish of mine.

M laughed and said, "Well now you have two amazing Persian cookbooks and can definitely make the rice."

Later, I opened her present and found it to be the 25th anniversary copy of, wait for it, Food of Life. Now subtitled Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, this updated version is heftier and contains more photographs. It also includes updated language and recipes which I find fascinating. 

For example, what was in 1986 called Eggplant Kookoo is now, in 2016, written as Eggplant Kuku. The new recipe includes fewer eggs, less garlic, more and different spices, and a yogurt garnish. Where the generic eggplant was originally called for, Batmanglij now suggests using Chinese or Italian eggplant.

Brain Kookoo has been omitted completely, and an option for Zucchini Kuku has been added. I'll be making the latter for dinner tonight. 

Food is such a fascinating lens through which to observe societies, regions, evolving tastes and culinary trends. An individual's recipes, especially those from a person considered an expert on a given cuisine, are a hyper-personal way of studying the same things.

I think of the way I was taught to make gumbo and cranberry sauce, for example, and how I've morphed those teachings into my own ways of crafting those dishes. I don't make my mom's or grandmother's recipes exactly, but the tastes are resonant and the inspiration clear. 

Having these two versions of Food of Life, and having received them at the same time, is like a crash course in one woman's cooking life: eggplant kookoo as a young woman, eggplant kuku twenty-five years later with decades of experience and changing ingredients and a shifting palate influencing the outcome.

I'm thrilled to have these books and will share with you each time I cook from them, adding wear and splats and notes of my own to the pages as I go.

*That little something tucked inside? A packet of saffron! WOW!

40 in forty (2.5): eat and eat well

My 40 in forty posts are reaching their endpoint. Saturday is the big day, and I simply couldn't feel more festive. I have a few nuggets left to write about, but this evening, as I sit on a comfy couch, my feet propped on an ottoman and a sleepy Nutmeg unrolled beside me, I want to talk more about food and the eating of it.

He's been trolling the 'hood for hours. Now, it's rest time. 

I've already written about the importance of eating real and also about knowing several recipes well enough that you can throw them together with almost no thought. Tonight is more of a personal musing; it's about the primal need to and pleasure that can be derived from eating well. 

As y'all probably know eighty times over by now, I grew up in Louisiana. I was born in Georgia, shortly after moved to Alabama, and then, when I was five, we settled in Lake Charles, a mid-sized town in Louisiana's southwest corner. This was a fortunate move for many reasons but perhaps most of all because it meant living just a couple miles from Mom's parents, Nanny and Papa. 

If you read Em-i-lis with any regularity, you know all about Nanny. About her megawatt smile and about her grace. About the thousands of cheesecakes she baked for Papa's restaurant while he had it and also those she made for my dad's birthday, until she got too old to do so. About her giving me my first cookbook and teaching me so many things; about cooking but also, and more importantly, about life and dignity and kindness and generosity. 

Anyway, I grew up eating Nanny's food, and Mom's too until she went on cooking strike after making our school lunches daily for fourteen years (I'd have probably struck too). I remember her ancient aluminum pots and pans, battered but functional, seasoned perfectly with years of beans and spaghetti gravy and vegetable soup and smothered okra and roasts cooked in them.

I remember the way the chopped onions in her green beans always looked like leg-less jellyfish. They were totally translucent but never fell apart. It's a wonder really, to cook something so long but have it stay intact. I suspect it's because Nanny knew that often, a long, slow cook is better than a fast, roiling one. She never seemed rushed; I envy that.

I remember the worn, brown plastic bowl, the one with both handle and spout, both abraded from years of use, in which she'd toss the most delicious green salads. Mine never taste quite like hers did. My aunt Renee makes the next best; it's almost just like Nanny's.

I remember Sunday lunches at her and Papa's house. Always spaghetti and gravy and roast, French bread, green salad, Lipton iced tea, a hinged silver cheese bowl full of grated Parmesan, and probably a pie. I remember eating it all with such gusto, Papa with his napkin tucked into his collar, demanding more cheese and happily trading my bread crusts for his bready innards. It was the sweetest deal.

What ties all of these memories together is the happiness and utter pleasure of a good meal shared around a table.

Sometime during my senior year of college, as one roommate started substituting lettuce leaves for sandwich bread and subtly, but not subtly enough, excusing herself to the bathroom after every meal, I lost my way on the food-as-pleasure path. 

The road became more grown over the next year, dark and winding and impossible to navigate. I only wanted to be thin. And so I was. Food was an obstacle and a threat, and I crossed my arms against its beckon with such unbreachable strength. I shooed away hunger with long runs and skim milk. With a chorus of "gosh, you're so slim. You look great!" and bags of baby carrots which, ironically, are whittled from real carrots in the same way I was whittling myself from a real woman.

It likely goes without saying that sometime after my years in New York, which were very fun and very thin and very hard, I woke up. And for whatever it's worth, which is very little except if we're tallying votes in the Eat Real column, I'm pretty much the same size I was when it took strenuous denial to get there. 

Now, I eagerly anticipate each and every meal. I consider breakfast, lunch and dinner to be three daily opportunities for deep pleasure. It deeply offends me to waste one of these chances, either because I eat out and the meal sucks or because I'm flying through the day and am forced to cobble something together. My reaction to either is sincere pissed-off'ness, and really, that response feels wholly appropriate. 

It's hard to articulate the eye-closing, shoulders-dropping, soul-brightening response to a bite of ethereal coconut cream pie, the perfect meatball and saucy noodles, the first great summer peach, a giant chomp into a juicy sandwich. 

Last night, I was lucky to have a babysitter for a few hours. I quickly stuffed some artichokes, put them on to steam, and literally raced out to my back yard. I straddled a big bag of mulch and got busy. Sweaty, dirty, happy as get-out, and, as I'm wont to be out there, distracted.

The water steamed away, the pot scalded, the sitter suggested I check, I got there just in time. More water, more steaming, more mulching and then happy-tired me served up the 'chokes. Tom and I each plucked a first leaf from the globe, turned it over so our bottom teeth could scrape off both stuffing and that tiny, miraculous mound of artichoke at the leaf's base, pulled gently and sighed deeply. 

Sublime. And the heart with lemon butter? I can't. Were there twenty hearts inside.

The pleasure is hard to articulate because it's elemental. So basic the original experience precedes memory but the sensations remain and are, if you're lucky, sharpened over time.

In New York, even as I denied myself this pleasure, I hoped for it for others. I delighted in saving recipes I wasn't likely to make, enjoyed cooking for others, and going out to fabulous meals. 

I once went on a date with a lovely man who said "I only eat because I have to." I knew I'd never go out with him again, and I didn't. The whole food-as-fuel-only mentality suggests to me that said person has a lacking joie de vivre. And even when I'd lost some sense, I hadn't lost my joie. 

And I have found a joie to be real important for enjoying life. Which is sort of the point because life can be awfully tough. 

I learned a lot of this from Louisiana, from my parents, from Nanny. From her pies and Sunday lunches, from my parents' zest for life and because Louisiana throws a party for any and all reasons. There, eating is a celebration: of family, of life, of death, of coming together. Any given meal is a chance to revel in culinary bliss, be it the simplest plate of scrambled eggs or an icy platter of just-shucked oysters, a fresh glass of milk punch or a gumbo that's been cooking for hours.

Eat, drink, and be merry! 

40 in four(ty): pals and nicknames and symbols

Well, damn. 40 in forty has quickly turned into 40 in four. Good thing I'm excited about it. 

I really don't have much in the way of wisdom left to share. But I have, as my birthday and party approach, been thinking about friendships and the many incredible people I'm lucky enough to call dear pals. About what it means to know and to be known. About how it feels to make our ways, both alone and together, through this thing called life.

About the nicknames we bestow to special people and the inside jokes we share over the years. About the importance of safe relationships in which you can ugly cry one minute and laugh hysterically the next; in which you can whisper to each other that your children approached asshole status earlier and also send each other photographs of and brag notes about those devil-angels later.

Yesterday, while one of my besties, C, and I were rearranging what furniture I do have (she grooves on that sort of thing which is one reason I love her), I received a mailing tube from Poland. I do not know anyone in Poland but I spied a fleur-de-lis stamp on the outside of the package and squealed a bit just as C said, "I bet it's a present." 

Friends, I did not think surprise gifts could get much cooler than the personalized knife of two weeks back, but the Polish treat is right on par with the blade from Japan. 

It is a LASER-ENGRAVED rolling pin, people. Peppered with FLEURS-DE-LIS. It wallpapers your cookies (or fondant or whatever) with fleurs! Say what?

Today after finally finishing a project I've been working on for the kids' school, I scurried to the kitchen and made some shortbread dough. As an aside, this is the only shortbread you should ever make. It is Ming Tsai's recipe, and it is off the hook. I sub vanilla bean paste for the vanilla bean innards. Same diff. If you have time, make the cookies several days in advance because they improve with age. Do NOT skimp on the salt.

Ok, anyway, back to the pin. Beyond the fact that it's just ridiculously cool and pretty, it is also exceedingly me, and that's what I love most about it. Amy, one of my dearest college besties, knows me inside and out, and she knew this was perfect and that I would adore it. Today on the phone, amidst my enthused goings-on, she said, "I mean, I looked on the woman's website and saw one WITH YOUR SYMBOL." 

Indeed. Why not have a symbol? You don't have to go all Prince about it, but rather, you can think about a symbol (or image if you prefer) as a nickname you give yourself.

I have always been an enormous fan of nicknames and feel quite happy when others start calling me something that seems to roll of their tongues without their even thinking.

In college, my best guy friend, Mike, and also my roommate, Rosemary, called me Emmy. Amy called me Ems (and still does), and I called her Ames (still do). My senior year boyfriend called me Emil. He's the only one to ever coin that one, and in many ways, that seems fitting. He was special and so was the name. Most everyone else called me Nichols (maiden name). 

My mom always called me Rascal, and now, most people call me Em. 

seriously. how gorgeous are those cookies?!

My inability to completely let go of Nichols is the reason I took it back as part of my last name after briefly letting it go post-marriage. I realized that it was too tightly wound to the core of my identity to not use. Adding it back was like welcoming home a long-lost (in this case short-lost) friend. 

And now I have my beloved fleur-de-lis which is a state symbol of both Louisiana and Florence (where I grew up/my parents still live; where my sister lives) and also this blog and me. 

Forget about it with my kids. I call each of them at least a half-dozen different names including Doodle, Peaches, Onk and Bug.

Do you have an image that people connect with you? Something that makes people think, "Oh, that is SO her!" What about a nickname? Do you have one? More? What are your favorites? Have you ever been nicknamed something you hated?

I find that nicknames breed a greater familiarity and a whole lot of warmth. The world is nicer with those things in it. Go forth with symbols and nicknames and good friends!