What Sparks Your Cooking Inspiration?

food, longing, language, and mothers

We are in the library one rainy evening making conversation with Ana, our lovely and patient Portuguese teacher. The talk turns to food. The next thing I know, I am trying in my rudimentary Portuguese, to describe how delightful it was to sit at a little beach bar in Foz do Arelho last June and tuck into a bowl of garlicky amêijoas, washed down with uma imperial, a 20 centiliter glass of local beer.

The next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about clams. So that night for dinner, we had Linguini Vongole. There are countless recipes for this Italian classic, which was one of my mother’s signature dishes. The one I used comes from Polpo, a Venetian cookbook (of sorts) by Russell Norman.

“Your pan will be a steaming mini masterpiece,” he promises at the end of the recipe.

For as long as I can remember, cooking has been a creative force in my life. Thanks to the emergence of the Internet, I realize I am not unique in this regard. I think it was Amanda Hesser, founder of Food52, who says she wakes up each day thinking about what she will cook for dinner. That’s how I roll.

When I suffer from insomnia, instead of counting sheep, I plan menus. It’s a little tougher now that I have disciplined myself to keep my phone far away from my bedroom (I begrudgingly admit that I sleep much better). But I have 146 147 cookbooks in my Kindle library (most purchased for $1.99), so inspiration remains nearby. Shout out to eatyourbooks.com for helping me keep track of my trove of recipes, both print and digital.

Dinner inspired by the book, My Lisbon

Each day, I wait for the culinary muse to strike the way some writers say they wait for ideas to come flowing in.

Sometimes it comes from a book I am reading or a recipe I see or a Proustian memory; other times from seasonal produce I have on hand and also the weather. Or, there’s something I’m longing for — comfort, an exotic place, a vacation vibe — and I use cooking to satisfy that need.

As I write this, we are having our first really warm spell in the Pacific Northwest and I am envisioning a Summer in Provence Friday night spread. I have some fava beans, morels, and rosé on hand and I just bought a sourdough baguette at a newish neighborhood bakery I’ve been meaning to check out.

Inspired by Chez Panisse Vegetables (one of my Kindle cookbooks), I’ll sauté those morels with shallots and cream and make a salad with the favas and some mint, salami, and pecorino. Maybe if we’re lucky tonight, we’ll see the Aurora Borealis. Maybe you will too.

Summer sunset, Mosier, Oregon 2021

A few years ago, I ordered Polpo so that it would be waiting for me when I got home from our annual vacation at the Columbia River Gorge. It was a sweltering August and the wildfires were raging. Trying to stay cool, I fantasized about eating Prosciutto, Mint, and Fig Crostini, washed down with an Aperol Spritz. This was the beginning of my spritz obsession.

When I learned the news of Norman’s death last November, I was freezing my ass off in Michigan. As a tribute, I ordered his book, Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, and it was waiting for me when I got home. In the Winter section, there is a recipe for Venetian Pasta and Bean soup. It’s one of the last things I cooked before chemo squelched my culinary endeavors. While slogging through three dreary months of treatment, I was glad I’d had the foresight to stash some of that soup in the freezer. For a little while, I wasn’t a beleaguered cancer patient, I was in a trattoria in Italy eating cucina povera.

Since it’s Mothers Day in the US, it feels appropriate to acknowledge the outsized role my mother played in nurturing, not just my love of cooking, but also the idea that cooking can be transportive.

My mom was a food adventurer before that was an Instagrammable thing or the stuff of streamable celebrity travel shows. She got caught up in the Jackie Kennedy obsession with all things French in the early 1960’s, became an accomplished Italian cook, and then dove into experimenting with exotic flavors in the 1970s. I talked a little bit about her explorations and how food has changed in my lifetime here. Each year, on the anniversary of her death, I make one of her signature dishes. Linguini Vongole has been on the menu a number of times.

Food sensibilities and language are imprinted on us when we are young, and often this comes from our mothers and grandmothers.

Inspired by my mother and Marcel Proust, I make these sweet potatoes every Thanksgiving. The more marshmallows, the better.

Without these primal imprints, how do we make something stick?

Though I was a gifted language-learner in my youth, I’m finding learning Portuguese to be far more difficult than I anticipated, exacerbated by my age and my chemo-addled brain.

Instead of Proust to guide me, my cluttered mind wants to make connections to things I already know — this is how you say shoes in Spanish; this is how you pronounce help in Spanish; this is where the adjective goes in French.

Thank goodness for the indelible memory of those clams on the beach in Foz do Arelho.

The next time I see Ana, I will tell her about the Macarrāo com Amêijoas I cooked. And then maybe I’ll talk about eating Carne de Porco à Alentejana, at a little outdoor restaurant in Lisbon that specializes in food from the Alentejo region of Portugal and then going to the Alentejo and being mesmerized by the storks, or cegonhas, we saw nesting in trees along the roads.

Memories aren’t just portals to the past, they can be windows to the future.

**A wink and a nod to

Jennifer Silva Redmond

, whose descriptions of diving for rock scallops (sometimes naked) in Baja California encouraged me to go to the store, fully clothed, to procure some bivalves. Check out her book, Honeymoon at Sea, for more of her adventures in the Sea of Cortez.

UPDATE: Friday night began with a spritz and ended with the Aurora Borealis. I’ll have plenty to talk about in Portuguese class.

One of the Best Things I’ll Be Eating Soon

The first Portuguese cookbook I ever bought (hardcover, not Kindle) was

David Leite

’s The New Portuguese Cooking. He has a version of the classic Alentejan-Style Pork with Clams that I haven’t yet tried, but plan to soon, especially since I have a batch of Portuguese red pepper paste leftover from another Portuguese culinary flight of fancy.

Here’s David’s recipe.

The next dispatch of Slice of Midlife will be coming to you from Portugal!

Até já!