I haven’t really been cooking lately. My hands lie idle, folded open on my lap in front of late night cheap TV or one over my mouth and other beneath my elbow, as I tend to do when I am in deep waters. Ferdinand likes food that doesn’t touch. I make a hamburger with a side of buttered potatoes and a side of string beans, or a breaded chicken cutlet w/sauced pasta and a side of broccoli. I have been serving cookies that come in a packages that I bought when I was in France last week. And popcorn.
But it is different, cooking for your boy.
And one day I’ll get used to it and past it and I’ll get caught up in work and cook until I drop into bed without more than a moment between me and sleep when my head hits the pillow.
On the way back from my walk with my friend Mary I shoved myself over to the farm stand set up on the corner on a Saturday and bought every vegetable I could carry. Beets with the greens attached, sandy carrots, red potatoes, onions, parsnips, string beans, kabucha squash and I came home and cooked. Vegetable soup with a soffritto of leeks, shallot, onion, garlic, fresh thyme, and parsley, then finely chopped seeded tomato, a bit of finely chopped cabbage, some of everything else I bought, water to cover, a spill of olive oil, rough grey salt from Brittany, and a grind of pepper. Ferdinand ate with pastina. I imagined it spooned over a crusty slab of bread that had been rubbed ever so lightly with a clove of raw garlic and drizzled with the new olive oil being pressed at this very moment in the hills outside of Florence and shavings of a Parmigiano Reggiano.