Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself...
Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself...
I was blessed to have been born in one of the most magical cities in all the world, New Orleans. As if The Creator of all things wasn’t amazing enough, I also grew up in the land known for being the birthplace of Taco Tuesday, Los Angeles. Needless to say, food is a big deal in my world. It’s more than just sustenance, food is a downright occasion with my people. In New Orleans, food is so much a part of the culture, it permeates pretty much everything that one does. It’s hard to tell what’s more of an occasion there, food preparation or food consumption.
Growing up in my household, dinner time was always party time. I always tell people that I learned how to cook the same way I learned how to dance, from following my father around the kitchen on Sundays. He always taught me that the most important ingredient in any dish is pure love. Good vibes were most important to my dad in the kitchen. I guess that’s where my emotional attachment to food comes from. Some of my fondest memories growing up were in the kitchen, or the really fun part- the eating.
It goes without saying that Thanksgiving is the Superbowl of family gatherings for me. It is the culmination of all cooking skills acquired of the past year and years before. It is the time when all the cooks in my family bring out the big guns. My mother was raised in a religion where pork wasn’t allowed, so my dad always made sure to take care of her by preparing a ham, a turkey, and a beef roast (See what I mean? Big guns!). Then there is, of course, the traditional sides. You get your 3 different forms of potatoes, candied yams, baked mac and cheese (one of my all-time all the time favorite things to make and to eat). But my favorite, on both the “prep” and “eat” ends of the food enjoyment spectrum, was Mommy’s stuffed bell peppers.
It does bear mentioning that my household growing up was, in many contexts, not traditional. In one particular instance, there was the fact that my mother was not the family cook by a longshot. The things she made were usually very cheap and very simple. After all, she was a working parent with two kids, which was much more difficult when we were younger because we’re two years apart. But she had a few recipes that she kept up her sleeve for special occasions (usually on Thanksgiving and Christmas), and my favorite was her stuffed bell peppers.
Of course, we’d be up at the crack of dawn (literally out of bed before the sun came up) cooking on Thanksgiving. My job was always to help Mommy gut the bell peppers for her to stuff with the most incredible bolognese ever. She would even sometimes put chopped shrimp in it when she wanted to get fancy on us. We would halve fresh bell peppers and boil them for about 10 minutes in a huge pot of salted water (the salt was just to make the water boil more quickly). Mommy always said to put enough so that every pepper got submerged in the water. Just before that would be my job, to gut the bell peppers for stuffing. I would take a small knife and scrape out the white rind and seeds. Then we would lay them down on a baking sheet and that’s when the magic happened.
We would scoop about a ladle full of the bolognese into each pepper and top with bread crumbs and shredded cheese to bind. When I was little, Mommy explained that it kept the meat sauce from running away in the oven. Then we would throw them in the oven on 375 until the cheese got brown, which usually took about 15 minutes. And then the torturous part of the process would come, the part where I had to wait to eat one until dinner time.
Now that I’m over the age of 30 and have been cooking for myself for half my life, I’ve found a bit of a disenchantment with the start-to-finish process of food that I’m excited to get back in my life. I’m excited to share something I love so much with people. I’ll share recipes, anecdotes, sentiments, basically my heart in food form. It’s so easy to buy some frozen something we can throw in the microwave and forget that food is a cause for celebration, an expression of culture, and if you’re lucky, an expression of love. More so than bringing that to others, I want to get that back for myself. ------- Brandy will be sharing her love affair with food with MommyGyver readers weekly.