Food evokes memories of loved ones, special times

Food — we all have our memories around the table. I was invited to submit a recipe with its story for a cookbook anthology coming out this summer. This is to be more than a collection of recipes — it is what the recipe means expressed through a variety of creative form.

I wrote an essay on “Terry's Thanksgiving Stuffing.” It may be St. Patrick's Day this week, but my mind's been living in November. That recipe, perfected by my husband, has taken a fifty year journey from Spokane to Alaska to Minnesota to Priest River — and traveled through three generations.

I was flooded with reminiscences. Which led to memories of other foods. Going back to childhood I used to get in the cold unfinished stairwell and open the tins of my mother's Christmas fudge. The array! Chocolate and peanut butter and jello divinity. She hadn't yet discovered the prized Norwegian fudge.

I had to rearrange the pieces so no one would notice how many were gone. Fudge is still a favorite.

We had Friday night popcorn with the lights out, watching Rawhide on television. My preacher dad ever the cowboy at heart.

In adulthood there was the New Year's Eve in Alaska when a friend brought two boxes of fresh crab off the fishing boat he was working in the Bering Sea. Also in Alaska our Japanese exchange student, Ken Uehara, teaching us to make fried rice. I remember he used Kokuho Rose. I could never consider it now — out of loyalty to my niece and her husband — who grow rice in Chico, California for Calrose.

How can I forget cutting wood in autumn at Priest Lake for our fireplace in Spokane, and our young family stopping by mom's in Priest River for her fried chicken on the way home. She didn't usually have time for much cooking, but she had a few stellar dishes she could whip up.

In that same trailer park along Highway 57 with her neighbor, also living alone, I got us outside when I was visiting one 4th of July for a picnic under the jack pine. Just a little card table, and some barbequed ribs from the grocery story with a couple of sides I made. Bubbles supplied the corn on the cob. They were in their late eighties and I loved that they had a party beneath the pine.

It must have been our daughter Tamara's twelfth birthday when I baked the cherry chip cake, and she got to make the first slice. She cut herself a quarter of the cake!

Living on my parent's friends' ranch near Sun Valley, Idaho there was nothing like rounding up cattle and breaking for Ival's pot of ham and beans out in the sage.

It really is true, the memories food evokes. More than sustenance it's time and place and family. It may pass unnoticed at the moment, but later — when there's time for remembering — the food, the togetherness, take on a meaning that feeds the soul.