Skinny for Winter

Over the hills and through the woods,

to grandmother's house we go.

The horse knows the way and carries the sleigh,

through the white and drifted snow.

 

Grandma's house, for me, is over the wide rivers and rolling hills of California. If you do the drive in the winter, as my sister and I just did, you will see the green tint of the Spanish oats and snow-capped mountains in the distance, the banks of fog send tendrils down into the valley, some rain might come down on your windshield through the narrow passes. And once you get to Grandma's house even the rain and the fog are usually left behind and all you can see is the blue ocean, the swaying palms, and the misty islands that turn purple in the late afternoon.

My grandma lives in Santa Barbara. This view is from her back door.

Because the Pacific waters are home to all sorts of amazing seafood, the California valleys grow fresh produce all year round, and the cities are home to an incredibly diverse number of appetites and cuisines, a place like Santa Barbara can be an amazing place to eat.

Or so I'm told.

Because MY grandma greets us at the front door with frozen Trader Joe's eclairs.

Her husband eats with one hand holding a salt shaker. 

The two appliances used most in their kitchen are the toaster oven and the microwave.

Their cupboards in the garage are stocked with canned beans, condiments, and Pepsi, in preparation for the next earthquake/alien invasion/World War.

There are an abundance of reasons for the odd ideas about food that inhabit my grandparents' house, and they range from the health concerns of old age and delicate hearts, to paranoia from two childhoods broken by WWII, to extreme orneriness.

The lack of real butter and sugar can be traced to the health issues. The beans in the cupboard, the sardines on the counter, the rye bread in the freezer, the substitution of turkey bacon, and the love of the hot and sour soup made by the Chinese restaurant down the street which is almost certainly not pork-free can be traced back to an uneasy relationship with Europe, Judaism, and the events of their childhoods. The addiction to salt, the complete absence of olive oil in their house, and the insistence on stirring rice while it cooks, well, that's just being odd. All of it together? Insanity.

It's too difficult to keep track of the ever-changing food regulation, preferences, and quirks to ever really successfully navigate the household, but over the years we have managed to acquire a series of techniques that make dinner at grandma's a slightly less terrible culinary experience.

Like never, ever be in time for Friday night dinner. Because somehow my grandparents got the idea that on the day of rest, on God's day, thou must eat salty boiled chicken. With mushy carrots.

But, it's true, I am rather snobby when it comes to food. So, to illustrate the very real, terrifying meals that have inspired my family's resistance against the food at grandma's, let me share a recipe that is the pride and joy of my grandmother's husband - a recipe he often insists on making for guests and family.

Thrice-Baked Salmon (with rice)
Go down to the pier early in the morning to get an extremely fresh, beautifully pink-orange salmon caught just a few hours before. Or buy some frozen salmon at Trader Joe's.
Half an hour before dinner, take the fish out of the fridge, and put it in the microwave for a few minutes, "just to heat it up."
Once it's warmed through (read: cooked), layer the fish with mayonnaise- about half an inch thick.
Put the fish in the toaster oven for a few more minutes - about five. This will turn the layer of mayonnaise into a sticky, crusty mess on top of the fish.
Now start the rice- put about a cup of rice into two cups of boiling water. Add a lot of salt.
Put the fish in the oven at a low temperature to "keep it warm" until dinner time.
Stir the rice constantly. You want it to be, as my father puts it, "crunchy on the inside, mushy on the outside."
After twenty minutes or so of stirring, once the water has been used up, take the rice off the stove and the fish out of the oven.
Serve.

So now, when we visit, we insist on making dinner at least once, and going out at least once. And because trips are usually just a couple of days, that usually works out just fine.

But I'm a granddaughter, and that means that I often am given instructions regarding mealtimes, because I can't be entirely trusted on my own. I might sneak in some olive oil, or leave out some salt, or try to make an entire meal out of vegetables. (Once I visited with my cousin, at the time a vegetarian, and we had quite a challenge explaining to my grandparents that "vegetarian" was not, in fact, synonymous with "kosher," and even turkey-bacon wasn't really an acceptable alternative.)

So my sister and I decided we'd make a chicken dish with tomatoes, and a large salad, and that should be enough for dinner. We ran into a farmer's market downtown, and got a lot of wonderful things for our salad.

My grandmother enjoyed it too.

But she wouldn't let us get chicken at the grocery store. Even though I needed raw chicken for the recipe I had in mind, even though it only made enough for four people, she was repeatedly insistent that we use up the old chicken in the fridge. I'm her granddaughter: I can't argue with her for very long without giving her the impression that I'm ungrateful, immature, and spoiled. And I thought, well, we can probably do something with leftover chicken - it can't be that bad.

So we went back to the house, and I started getting everything out. As I was rummaging through the vegetable drawers for things to use up, either in the salad or the chicken, my grandmother was rummaging through the freezer. She handed me a box of Trader Joe's chicken taquitos and said, "If you'd like to heat these up with dinner, they'd be wonderfully crunchy." Grandma wants taquitos for dinner, all right. I can deal. Let me just send a desperate text to my sister so that she can help me run some damage control with dinner.

Then I found the leftover chicken.

My sister came into the kitchen to find me staring at the pre-cooked chicken - undoubtedly from Friday night (this was Tuesday) - that I had to somehow incorporate into dinner.

 Our first question, "what was all that brown on the outside?" was answered by another look at the bag.

They'd gotten BBQ chicken. I was supposed to cook with a 5-day-old, dry, pre-cooked, BBQ chicken. So we answered our second question, "WTF?" by deciding to peel it.

Our dinner strategy went from "make a nice chicken and tomato dish" to "let's try to cover up any taste or evidence of this nasty chicken." We started putting everything we could find into the pan.

 I'd list everything we added, but really, you aren't ever going to want to recreate this.

In the middle of it all, my grandfather came in to the kitchen to pour himself some whiskey after a long day's work. He stood near the stove, which gave my sister a minor anxiety attack, and told us all about how his doctors had told him to abstain from alcohol completely. Which he interpreted as "drink in moderation." And then he told us that, if we needed it for dinner, the vodka was in the freezer on the left-hand side- "because it doesn't freeze, you know." And with that, he went off to doze in front of the television with my grandmother. 

It came time to deal with the requested taquitos, and after looking at the box for a few minutes, I realized that regardless of what I or Trader Joe thought about serving sizes, I had no idea how many taquitos these crazy people wanted to eat.
I went into the study and asked my grandmother how many taquitos she wanted me to heat up.
"What are those?" asked my grandfather.
"TA-QUI-TOS!" my grandmother helpfully contributed.
"What?"
"You know what they are... those little rolls."
"Oh yes."
"Just make all of them- we can always reheat them later!"

Luckily my beautiful, talented sister had been pouring us whiskey during my absence.

The chicken dish seemed to be adequately un-chickeny, but upon tasting it, it also seemed to be incredibly bland. We added some spices and herbs, but it wasn't really doing the trick. And really, the taste buds in this house have only one setting: salt.

We wanted to add some parmesan, and after about five minutes of searching the fridge and cabinets, we found one lonely jar of dried cheese flakes. Or whatever you call it. It did the trick.

We argued for awhile over what to call the chicken thing - it had to have a name, otherwise it would be obvious we had just made it up on the spot and we might lose our cooking privileges. Chicken Parmesan already existed, it didn't have enough tomato for the original chicken-tomato dish, so we went with something vague: Chicken Italiano.

 

Grandma was not entirely convinced.

But she sat down.

Unfortunately she was the only one sitting down. My grandmother is Jewish, and while absolutely no Jewish rules exist around the idea that once the matriarch sits down, everyone sits down, that doesn't mean that there isn't precedence for bitching about it.

So while she was loudly explaining that she was sitting down at the dinner table and was all ready to eat even though no one else was joining her, I was in the kitchen with my grandfather. He'd offered us some red wine, which we gladly accepted (apparently moderate drinking in this house means two drinks a day). But then I'd heard the microwave door open, and, as evidenced by the fish recipe, that usually means trouble.

He was busy spooning some fake, yellowish dijon mustard into a small jar (for the taquitoes, I later discovered) and told me he was just warming up the wine.

Because it had been in the refrigerator. And red wine isn't supposed to be chilled. So he responsibly poured an amount of it into a microwave-safe dish, and "warmed" (cooked) it for a few minutes in the microwave. Yes, minutes.

 And as we sat down, with our hot glass of Israeli wine, our BBQ Chicken Italiano, the plate of chicken taquitos (now with mustard, and continually referred to as "rolls"), and the big, lovely salad my sister had made, he said to my sister and I, "it really is a different experience, isn't it?"

And as our grandmother passive-aggressively guilt tripped us with taquitos ("I don't know why you heated them up if you aren't going to EAT any!") we had to agree.

~

And then my sister found the fish salad in the fridge, covered by a shower cap.