Staying on Top of the Weight Issue

A couple of you have sidled up to me and asked sotto voce “How do you keep your weight so, ah, normal, when you’re eating all this delicious stuff you put on your blog?” I usually mumble something about wearing black or being mindful. The truth is that the first two months of the blog, I gained. And gained enough to make me nervous. Having lived most of my life feeling, if not always looking, chubby, I took the gain of five pounds, hefting me over 140 (at 5’4”), seriously. Having foresworn “dieting” many years ago, I knew that I needed to construct some long-term guidelines for myself that might help stabilize the gain and possibly encourage a loss. Since July, between 10 and 12 pounds have come off very very slowly with many ups and downs. But steadily down. No one will ever call me thin (and I don’t aspire to that description anyway) but I now feel back in my normal range. So here are the principles I’ve been using since that fateful day in July. Perhaps one or two of them will strike you as helpful.

Exercise portion control.

Use smaller plates (10-inches in diameter). Your eye and brain perceive a full plate of food and you feel full eating less. It’s a perception thing.

For lunch, I have a favorite green bowl. I can eat whatever I want, as long as it fits in the green bowl.
Cut back on pre-eating (snacking or having a glass of wine) before dinner.
Serve plates in the kitchen. I tend to nibble when serving bowls sit in front of me.

Pay attention to what you’re eating and drinking.
Eat more fruits and vegetables.
Eat less protein, starches, and fats. But don’t eliminate anything entirely. Our bodies want it all.
Eat desserts, enjoying every bite, for special occasions.
Drink less wine. I have been in the habit of drinking a glass or two of wine nearly every night. I’m trying to drink every other night instead.
Eat more slowly, at least 20 chews per bite. I find this very difficult but worth trying.

Exercise regularly.
I go to Curves about three times a week. It’s a 30-minute workout for women with a circuit of machines, running platforms, music and little mind games to stave off boredom.
I also walk six miles a week using a computer program that virtually walks you across the United States. I walk my miles, wherever I am, and log onto http://exercise.lbl.gov to record them. I have now walked 1609.1 miles and find myself in Kansas. You need to have a pedometer.

I hesitate to mention one more thing that I do: I usually don’t eat breakfast. This practice is idiosyncratic to me and would make nutritionists, dietitians and probably some of you blanch. I have nothing against breakfast. In fact, I love breakfast foods and often eat them for dinner. But I am rarely hungry for breakfast, so why eat? If I’m hungry, I eat. Simple as that.

There are weeks when we are eating out a lot, traveling, cooking dinner parties, or vacationing with friends. The principles don’t exactly go out the window, but they get modified to fit the current reality. And that is how it should be. It is wonderful to eat delicious food without worrying too much about the consequences. Once I’ve returned home, I reinstitute the principles. And that feels good too.

A couple of books have been really helpful in educating me about eating and weight:
David Kessler, The End of Overeating and
Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

Tuesday Pancakes

Remember my children’s “Oh, Mom, not again,” upon hearing that cheese soufflé was on the dinner menu? (November 25, 2009 blog) Tuesday Pancakes was an entirely different story. Their response was most often “Yippee!” Maybe it was the strangeness and allure of having breakfast for dinner. Maybe it was the way the fat and batter puffed up magically in the hot oven. Maybe it was the powdered sugar and jam accompaniments. I don’t know, but the enthusiasm was genuine.

A few months ago, my former husband was clearing out some papers from his house in Chapel Hill and ran across some of my old cooking notes, recipe clippings, and a 1976 kids’ cookbook by The Youth Publications of The Saturday Evening Post called Holiday Cookbook. He bundled them up and shipped them to me in California. Flipping through the splattered and raggedy cookbook, I spotted the recipe for Tuesday Pancakes. I thanked him for sending me the box and told him of my discovery. He responded, “Could I have a copy of it?” Franz and Ben (the children, now 38 and 35) echoed his response, with smiles and a far-away look in their eyes, clearly remembering the wonder and the taste of them.

The page from the cookbook reveals that the Tuesday refers to Shrove Tuesday. I must admit that when I was making Tuesday Pancakes for my family back in the 80s, I didn’t pay the slightest attention to that fact. For me it was simply an easy way to feed my family and could have just as easily been called Monday Pancakes or Wednesday Pancakes.

Now that I am a member of First Congregational Church of Berkeley (FCCB), I have considerably more insight into Shrove Tuesday. It is the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. It is also known as Marti Gras or, in translation, Fat Tuesday. FCCB hosts an annual pancake supper. Pancakes became the custom on Fat Tuesday because they use fat, sugar, and eggs, three luxuries which one might give up for Lent. A blowout dinner in which you stuff yourself with the soon-to-be-forbidden foodstuffs seems entirely appropriate the night before you begin your fast. The celebrating at the FCCB includes, besides the supper, a parade with adults and kids around the room and then outside to bury the Alleluia banner which is dug up on Easter. For Lent, no one is allowed to say “Alleluia.” There is no Lenten rule at FCCB about fat, sugar, and eggs, I’m relieved to say.

Below you’ll find the recipe for Tuesday Pancakes which the Kunst family ate without paying one bit of attention to the liturgical calendar. They can be eaten any day of the year but on Tuesday, February 16, 2010, you will have the chance to celebrate Shrove Tuesday with pancakes and with whatever kind of carrying-on you desire. And who’s to stop you from trying them on February 18 or 20?

Tuesday Pancakes

You can have this pancake on the table in 30 minutes.












3 tablespoons butter
½ cup flour
½ cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
2 eggs, beaten
¼ cup sifted powdered sugar
Lemon juice, optional
Orange marmalade or other preserves, optional

1. Preheat oven to 425°F.
2. Beat together the flour, milk, salt, nutmeg, and eggs. Don’t worry about the lumps.
3. Melt butter in a 10-inch oven-proof skillet.
4. Pour the mixture into the very hot skillet.
5. Bake in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until the pancake has puffed up.
6. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with sifted powdered sugar. Serve immediately before the pancake deflates.
7. At the table, encourage your table mates to squeeze lemon over the top and/or spread with marmalade or other preserves, if desired.

Makes 1 pancake. It will serve more than 1, but less than 3.
For 3 people, make 2 pancakes. Double the recipe and use two pans or skillets. Can bake at the same time.
For 4 people, make 3 pancakes. Triple the recipe and use two pans or skillets. Bake in two batches.

Adapted from Youth Publications/The Saturday Evening Post Company’s Holiday Cookbook. Text by Peg Rogers.

The photo shows Blueberry Preserves. Just excellent.

Two Special Birthday Dinners

January 24, 2010 was an evening that required an especially nice dinner. Katherine, my partner of twenty years, was born on January 25, 1955 and was turning 55 this year. We had invited her cousin and his wife, our dear friends Trip and Rivka, to join us for dinner.

I wanted to fix something special that would warm us up from head to toe. I chose the following: spare ribs in a delicious wine-ladened sauce cooked in the oven for hours in one of my favorite Bram pots. Wasabi mashed potatoes which are so good it is hard not to poke your finger into the serving bowl for one more bite. Caramelized carrot salad which I made ahead and served at room temperature. A salad course of beautiful greens enriched with slices of avocado and my Papaya Seed Dressing. Home-made Apple Crisp for dessert, although a Persimmon Pudding or a Lemon Mousse would do just as nicely. We drank a gorgeous 2007 Bourgueil Avis de Vin Fort from Catherine et Pierre Breton. You can find the recipes for three of these dishes below.

The dinner party was a big success, Katherine loved the food and felt properly celebrated. As we were walking a few days later and talking more about the party, I remembered a special birthday dinner that my mom fixed for me sometime in the 1950s, perhaps in 1955 (I would have been 12), and was struck by how similar it was to the one I had prepared for Katherine. Is there a place in our brains where we store “Special Birthday Dinners”?

Here is what my mom cooked at my request: a pot roast simmered in a large oval enamel pan in the oven with peeled potatoes and carrots. The potatoes were browned and the outside developed a skin which would ever-so-slightly resist my teeth’s efforts to get to the creamy inside. The carrots were so orange, soft and delicious, it was hard to believe that they were the same vegetable she tucked in my school lunches. When the meat had cooked until it was falling apart into succulent shreds, she would remove everything but the juices from the pan. She’d mix up a combination of water and flour in a small metal container with a lid which she would shake up and down vigorously until the mixture was well-blended. She stirred the flour mixture into the juices and simmered them until they thickened into gravy. There may have been a salad, most likely iceberg lettuce, carrots, celery perhaps, and Italian bottled dressing. I don’t remember the dessert but it could have been a boxed yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I loved this dinner, especially the meat, potatoes, and gravy. Look in a 1950s edition of Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book for a close approximation. It was a real birthday treat.

She was cooking her dinner for me in Toledo, Ohio in the 50s and was influenced by middle class habits and customs of that time and by availability of ingredients. It was expected that she would cook; it was her responsibility. Within that context, she made cooking decisions based on her resources, the time she had to spend in the kitchen, and her desire to please her family. Let me give you a couple of examples:
1. My family never cooked with wine; she would have added water, not wine or stock, to her pot roast.  Nor did they drink wine on a regular basis. Hard liquor before and coffee with dinner. That was their custom. Wine was an extravagance.
2. When it came to salad greens, she had one choice. Iceberg lettuce.
3. Bottled salad dressings seemed to us to be a great improvement over everyone having to eat the same one.  They also saved time in a period when efficiency was highly valued.
4. Box cakes were fashionable in the 50s and stayed that way well into the time I was learning to cook. Because dessert was pretty much a nightly requirement, boxed cakes, instant puddings, and the like were seen as very helpful.

That I prefer wine to coffee with dinner, love the variety of the greens, make my own salad dressings and most of our desserts is the result of my living in the Bay area in this particular moment where great ingredients are readily available and the desire to eat healthy food is shared with a large swath of the community. I choose to spend time in the kitchen because I love to cook. Unlike my mom, efficiency doesn't matter all that much to me and thankfully, desserts are not an everyday necessity.

Finally, I imagine my mom and me standing side by side in a kitchen, straddling the span of time that separates us, each fixing birthday dinners. We share so many of the same values. We are both willing to spend time and effort in the kitchen. We both want the food to look beautiful on the plate. We both want the food to be cooked with an abundance of love. And most of all, we both want the dinner to be delicious and special for our birthday girls. Thanks, Mom.

I Love to Cook

I really do love to cook. I miss it when restaurant engagements get in the way. This week we are eating out five nights out of seven. Most weeks we eat out once or twice at the most. So you can imagine my delight that finally Monday to Wednesday I get to cook. Yippee! I am both pleased and excited. Don’t get me wrong, I love eating food I might not otherwise fix for myself, like deep-fried squash blossoms. I love having more time to work on my to-do list or to—shock—sit still for a moment. But if given a choice, I would much rather cook than eat out. I love both the process (the preparation) and the product (eating what I have prepared).

I love the creativity involved in cooking. I love creating a menu where the colors, textures and flavors work well with each other. I love imagining what the plate will look like with the food on it. I love choosing the dinner plate that best sets off the food. I love thinking about the best wine to go with the food.

I like being in control of the process: from deciding what I want to eat that evening, to buying the ingredients and preparing the food. If I’m hungry for steak, I can choose to fix it.

I love using up leftovers in imaginative ways, looking for recipes that use the little bits and pieces of fruits and veggies we all have in our fridges.

I love the challenge of cooking: figuring out the timing and the work flow. When do I need to start the preparation in order to get dinner on the table at 7:00? What is the most efficient and easy way to get the task accomplished? What can be made ahead? How can all the dishes come to the table at the same time?

I also like the challenge of dealing with food preferences, allergies, kids’ likes and dislikes, what’s available in my market and in season, the amount of time and money I have to spend, etc. I have to think really hard when someone can’t eat sugar, wheat, dairy products, eggs, or red meat. Coming up with a great dinner is exhilarating when faced with constraints—and there are always some constraints.

I love trying new recipes, cuisines, techniques, and exotic ingredients. Early on in my cooking history, the part of me that loved learning got engaged and found in cooking a new and endlessly fascinating activity.

Mindful Cooking at FCCB

I love being in the kitchen, quiet and alone, slicing carrots. Cooking as meditation. It knits me up. Being in the present moment—particularly important when the task involves sharp knives. Years ago I taught a Meditative Cooking class at First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Fourteen of us gathered in the church kitchen and cooked dinner quietly. Only whispered questions about recipes were allowed. A hush would come over the kitchen. It was really quite marvelous.I love eating good food and cooking for myself is the least expensive way to get it. For a long time when I was much younger, I couldn’t afford to go out to dinner very often and there was no choice but to cook. I figured that as long as I had to cook, I might as well have some fun with it and make it interesting. I still value the economy of cooking at home.

I wanted my kids to grow up to appreciate home-cooked meals and good food. I must say they didn’t always share my definition of “good” and would end up eating cereal. But they have grown to be both good cooks and adventurous eaters.

I like cooking for small dinner parties and sharing good food with friends and family. I especially love the conversations that happen around a dinner table at home. I think home-cooked food nurtures these conversations.

I love eating by myself or with Katherine. I really care about what food I put on my plate and in my mouth. I want my dinners to be interesting, beautiful, colorful, and delicious. Sometimes complicated, sometimes simple. Both just fine.

What about you?

Eating from the Garden

I’ve just returned from two weeks of vacation. We spent the first week on Lake Michigan at the cottage of two dear friends. Lots of cooking, blueberry picking, my first experience in a kayak, and the chance to watch glorious sunsets and storms across the lake, sometimes at the same time. We shopped at farm stands for corn, purchased eggs from a 13-year-old future farmer, Joseph Marsh, and went to the Montague Michigan Farmers Market. I overheard a vendor mentioning that a customer had complained to her about finding a worm in his corn. She wanted to ask him if he preferred to find a worm or to get cancer. She said, “I know the choice I would make.” Maybe a different kind of farming is seeping into the mid-west or maybe it’s always been there on family farms. Whichever it is, I’m pleased.

I spent the second week with my brother, George, and sister, Barbara, in Athens, Ohio. After our mother died in July 2008, Barb suggested that we three sibs have a reunion every year. Last fall we gathered in Chicago. And now here we were in southern Ohio on George’s land. He bought this property in the early 1970s and has, over the years, refurbished two structures, a dilapidated old farm house and a converted chicken coop/shed. He and his wife Louise (who was away traveling in Malaysia with her sister) raised their three kids in the ever-expanding coop/shed which is now a four bedroom house. George and Louise have created a lush garden adjacent to the deck on the back of the house. Windows on two sides of the house overlook this verdant and thriving vegetable and fruit producing site. I was in heaven.

The first night my brother fed us Chicken Enchiladas. He explained that the chicken came from a farm down the road and the tomatoes that went into the sauce were in the garden that morning, along with our side dish of green beans. He had picked raspberries for dessert with a choice of raspberry sorbet or chocolate ice cream. My sister and I, weary from our travels, could not have been more satisfied.

The next morning, he gave us a tour of the garden and the rest of his land. By lunch time, I could no longer contain myself. I had to pick some veggies. I roasted some golden cherry tomatoes (you’ll find the recipe in the July 27 blog) and pulled some beets. I got them roasting below the tomatoes and cooked the well-washed and shredded beet greens until they were soft. The tomatoes and beet greens were lunch, along with some cheese and crackers, perfectly delicious, but just a hint of what was to come.















For dinner, I made a Summer Squash Casserole (adding some shredded salami) from my brother’s Joy of Cooking. My 1997 edition calls it Summer Squash Gratin, a little more highfalutin’ a name I suppose. Same dish. You’ll find the recipe below. Then a Beet Salad with Creamy Horseradish Dressing, also from his Joy of Cooking, and more roasted cherry tomatoes. My sister baked a splendid Rhubarb Cake for dessert. All the produce for the dinner came from the garden. Amazing.

By the next morning, I had come up with a possible menu for that evening. After a strenuous day that included yoga, a Mexican lunch, naps and a tour of the Snowville Creamery, we gathered to put our dinner together. Nathan, the youngest of George’s three, joined us and seemed to enjoy both the food and the conversation. We made Lentil Salad with Curry Spices and Yogurt from Field of Greens, Herbed Carrot Salad and Two Reds Salad (given below) both from Flatbreads and Flavors. George and Barb peeled and seeded a rimmed baking sheet full of broiled Italian peppers to which we added roasted onions and a bit of fennel, of our own devising. And finally we had more raspberries with whipped cream from the Creamery we had visited in the afternoon. Totally delicious and brilliantly colorful. Everything except the yogurt and the lentils from the garden.

Just look at the colors. Aren't they spectacular? I think I had already eaten some of the dark green peppers.

The last night we went out for dinner in town to a great place called Zoe’s. All of us ate meat in one form or another for our main course. It’s not that any of us was tired of vegetables or eating a primarily vegetarian diet. Far from it. In fact, I was sorry that I didn’t have a chance to use the chard, new potatoes, more tomatoes, and the still baby eggplants. But I am an omnivore. I appreciate and want diversity in my diet, even as I hold on to Michael Pollan’s wise counsel from In Defense of Food “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Mostly plants. But not wholly plants. There you go.

Julie and Julia

We just saw Julie and Julia, the much talked about movie, based on My Life in France by Julia Child's great nephew and Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. Both are wonderful books in and of themselves. I knew that Meryl Streep would be just great as Julia and she was. I didn't know how much I would love and admire the way Nora Ephron put the two books together. She did a brilliant job of showing the parallels between the two without being ham-handed, so to speak. And I was once again filled with a huge amount of admiration for Julie Powell: cooking all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a stupendous accomplishment.

I acquired Mastering the Art, my first serious cookbook, on August 20, 1967, my first wedding anniversary, from my then husband Rick Kunst. Over the years I made many different recipes from this cookbook: seven soups, three sauces, pie dough (multiple times), five quiches, three gratins, two souffles, crepes, a turnover, scallops, five chicken, a duck, six beef, a lamb, five pork, seventeen vegetables, four composed salads, and three desserts. One of the desserts was Tarte au Citron et Aux Amandes (Lemon and Almond Tart) which I made in trying out for an assistant pastry chef position at Chez Panisse in 1974. I delivered my tart to the restaurant one morning and never heard from them again. I guess they didn't like it. So I've cooked 66 recipes from Mastering the Art, some multiple times--and it seems like a lot from one book. But that is 458 shy of what Julie Powell cooked. Quite amazing. Just think of it. By all means, see the film. I'd love to hear what you think if it.

Making Dessert

You may have noticed that desserts have been missing from all the menus so far.

Time to remedy that situation. Remember when I mentioned in the very first blog (In the Beginning) that my cousins and I had made a disastrous chocolate cake? For a good long period of time, my luck with desserts didn’t improve very much. Especially with cakes. I now know that baking in general and making cakes in particular involves a chemical reaction. It requires just the right interaction between the ingredients in the cake and the oven. If you are working with a bad recipe, even following it exactly, or a faulty oven, you’re doomed. As time went along I could make a pretty good Thanksgiving pie, a perfectly fine baked custard, and decent fudge brownies. Cakes still eluded me. When pushed, I would buy dessert for a dinner party rather than risk disaster.





















Two people have changed my relationship to desserts. Our friends, Francis and Xochitl, moved to the Bay area from Mexico shortly after we moved here from North Carolina. Xochitl suggested that we start a dinner party club, the only requirement being that the host or hostess had to make everything from scratch. I said that I thought that would be interesting but I couldn’t guarantee I would make dessert. Well, I never heard the end of it. Whenever we invited them for dinner, she would pointedly offer to “make the dessert.”

Finally I said to myself, “Enough. I cook a lot of really good food. Why not desserts?” Coaxed into action, I set to work finding reliable recipes and practicing so that the next time they came to dinner I could offer them something home made. I can’t remember the first one I made for them, but let me tell you it was received with a great deal of laughter and enthusiastic praise.















My daughter-in-law Michelle Polzine has also been instrumental in this process. She is the award-winning and magical pastry chef at Range in San Francisco. Prior to my enlightenment, I would ask her to bring the dessert for every family meal figuring that she knew what she was doing and I didn’t so she should provide dessert. At some point I said to myself, “Enough. It’s not fair to ask someone who makes desserts for a living to make them for every family occasion. Give her a break.”

And so the learning process continued. I found more great recipes, including a couple of cakes. I practiced. I fed (and still feed) my favorites to my dessert-loving friend Sam to see how he responds. Over the years I have built up a pretty good repertoire of choices that are delicious, pretty and relatively simple. Best of all, with some confidence, I now serve desserts to Michelle.

Dinner Parties and Elegant Home Cooking

I love having people over to dinner or lunch. I probably have little eating parties about once a week, often for my friend Sam when our spouses are out of town and regularly for four or six of us. Once the number gets bigger than six, I move into a different mind set that is more like catering than having folks over for dinner. I prefer small.

When I started out, I would spend days getting ready for a graduate student dinner party, finding just the right menu of things that we could afford on my tiny University of California at Berkeley secretary salary and my husband’s graduate student stipend. I wanted to wow and dazzle our friends. But mostly I befuddled them. Aspic, who cares about aspic, even though it took me days of preparation. I wanted effusive compliments for my efforts and invitations to come to their houses for dinner. I got neither—or at least not as many as I wanted.

I had set up a situation in which our friends were intimidated and scared to reciprocate. Who wants that? With a thunk on the side of my head, I realized that I could cook a nice borscht (Coop Low Cost Cookbook) or lentil soup (Pellaprat’s Modern French Culinary Art) with fresh bread, a crisp salad, a brownie (Better Homes and Gardens) for dessert and everyone, including me, had a better time. And so my version of elegant home cooking was born.

















On Thursday, dear friends, Rivka and her daughter, Aden, drove up to Sonoma for lunch. We had mushroom pâté (see below) with slices of bread; spicy cauliflower soup (modified from The Art of Simple Food); beet, goat cheese and watercress salad; strawberries and store-bought oatmeal cookies (Whole Foods). It was really tasty and definitely not intimidating. Elegant home cooking. I made the soup and the pâté the day before and did the rest in the morning. It was fun to cook for them, to share a meal, to celebrate Aden’s graduation from Brown, to walk with Rivka to my favorite store on the plaza, Bram. Keeping it easy and enjoying myself.

Traveling, Cooking, and Eating

Four years into my marriage, we moved to Taipei, Taiwan for my husband to study Chinese at the Stanford Program at Taida University. Because we were so very Berkeley, we decided that we would shop and cook for ourselves rather than hire an amah. This was a pretty radical decision in 1970. So I learned to count in Chinese. I learned the names of vegetables. I shopped nearly every day at our neighborhood market. I bought a couple of pirated Chinese cookbooks. I took some cooking classes. In the course of the year I learned a huge amount about Chinese food but the shopping also brought me into the community. Neighborhood grannies would peek in my shopping basket to see what I had bought, ask how much I had paid for my cabbage and offer suggestions on how to prepare it.
















When we moved to Kyoto, Japan with our month-old baby, Franz, I did pretty much the same thing. Counting. A couple of cookbooks. Daily shopping. Asking questions of neighbors. And cooking a lot of Japanese food. I also taught Western cooking to some women in my neighborhood, as shown in the photo. They reciprocated by teaching me Japanese cooking. Just great for me.

So I’m going to jump ahead to the near present.

In 2003 I caught the travel bug. It started with the Middle East and went on to Spain and Morroco, southern France, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and Greece, Malawi, back to South Africa, Spain, Sweden on and on. And most recently Italy, Iran, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. An amazing opportunity to see the world and to delve into cultures so different from my own.

Before going on trips, I educate myself about the new place by doing three things: I buy cookbooks (from my favorite used bookstore), read them, and cook some of the special dishes of the region. Good cookbooks tell me so much about the agriculture, immigration patterns and influences, the climate, and the traditions of the country. And then I get to eat their food. Smell it. Taste it. I literally ingest the culture of the new place before I take a step outside this country. When I finally get there, I can look for the dishes I want to try and delight in seeing how closely my dishes approximate the “real” thing.

In the beginning

Some folks ask me if I have always loved to cook. The answer is a resounding no. As a young girl, I once made a disastrous chocolate cake with my cousins, but other than the occasional banana salad, I was neither interested nor particularly welcome in my mother’s kitchen. I did set the table.

My mother cooked serviceable dinners, pretty much the same conventional fare every week. Well-cooked pork chops, hamburger patties, french fries and green beans from the freezer, a salad, and ice cream. She had some specialties, like Beef Stroganoff, which were reserved for company. And on Sundays after church we would occasionally have a wonderful pot roast with carrots and potatoes or chicken and dumplings, both of which I adored. But mostly it was plain and simple mid-western food. And I took no part in preparing it.

So what happened?

• A move to Berkeley, California in 1966. Newly married to a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, I moved from northwestern Ohio to the Bay area just in time for the action. Which for me included food as well as anti-war and anti-establishment.

• The Shattuck Avenue Coop at the corner of Shattuck and Cedar, where Andronico’s currently resides, was a place of wonder for this mid-western lass. Full of exotic fruits and vegetables and people, the store offered a dazzling assortment of food products and wines from around the world. I studiously picked up all the free printed recipes and bought the Coop Lowcost Cookbook, to supplement the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook I had received as a wedding present.

• Our friends Nick and Sarah were passionate and adventurous cooks and eaters. He was a Scot and cooked up “scurlly,” an oatmeal and onion combination, which we washed down with wine or Green Death, so called because of its green can and lethal effect.

• Cookbooks started showing up under the Christmas tree and in birthday boxes. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first and was quickly followed by Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook and New York Times Menus Cookbook.

• Gardening and food columns in the Good Times, an alternative East Bay newspaper in the 60s. Jeanie Darlington wrote about gardening in Grow Your Own. Marrakesh Lil, among others, wrote a great food column whose recipes I held onto for years. I lost them about 19 years ago but just recently my former husband found them and sent them to me.

• Occasional dinners out at places in San Francisco and Berkeley, such as The Pot Luck on San Pablo Avenue, opened my eyes to the amazing combinations of flavors and exotic ingredients you could put in your mouth. “Blew my mind” as we would say.

• A chance to grow and eat really fresh produce came about as an indirect result of the People’s Park controversy in 1969. The university turned a field at the corner of Buchanan and Jackson into garden plots and offered them to residents of Albany Village where we were living. We signed up. Oh my god, fresh green beans, basil for pesto, and tomatoes.

• I was cooking all the time. Nearly every day. Hard to imagine now, isn’t it? Learning so much. Gazpacho from Craig. Salmon cheeks and Finnan Haddie from Spengers Fish Store, chuck roasts from the Coop, and fresh crab for special occasions.

I was really lucky to have such a perfect coming together of supportive elements: cookbooks, friends and a husband who liked to cook and eat, a good grocery store, and time. I made a whole bunch of mistakes. The above photo from 1967 is an example: too much time butterflying shrimp for a dish that was bland and dull. Oh well, I said to myself, I never claimed to be perfect. And there are lots more dinners ahead of me. It's still the case.