On Fish, Cooking and Company

For this blog, I try and find recipes which are influenced by the seasons, either by making food which celebrates holidays or local produce / products which you can only have at certain times of the year. In a healthy way, when I cook food which connects me to the hum and buzz of the world at large, I feel a sense of cohesion and togetherness with people, wordlessly. It does not take a genius to see why I, a person who has felt so different from so many people for years because of the things which have happened to me, would crave the solace of ritual and shared experiences.. I have, probably out of sheer determination and a modicum of spite, found connection to the world in many ways, much to the embarrassment of some who suggested I would not ever feel at home in myself again, and I have used food, traditional and not so much, to remind myself of my own membership to the communities I have always valued and felt valued by. When I ask somebody about their red sauce recipe, I am connecting with them over family tradition, when I share a recipe, I am cultivating my community and when I ask somebody for advice on a dish, I am opening a door. I intend on focusing my blog, at least until this is over, on recipes which create community, celebrate resourcefulness and respect the season, ecumenical and not. As I have written before, in my faith I abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent and purposefully tried to find an innovative recipe which would feel like an event, rather than a chore. Since I could not find on the vastness of the internet what I was looking for I combined several recipes with such success I deserve a Corona virus savy “air high five”. This dish is my idea of perfect marriage between fish tacos and chicken lettuce wraps. The flavors of the fish are bright, the crema is slightly decadent (even though it uses light sour cream), and the doubled up lettuce wraps serve as the perfect healthy vehicle for the protein which is the highlight of the meal. You screama, I screama, we all screama, it’s healthish creama! It’s Lent, we’re eating fish, and the world goes on…

About Normalcy and the craving for connectedness

With everything which has happened recently so many of the events which we schedule our days around, even daily events like buying a cup of tea or breakfast sandwich, have been interrupted or put on a brief pause. For many of us, we grew up in families where people connected over dinner and as grownups we have enjoyed sharing meals or beverages as part of the social routine of our lives. For those who did not have shared family tables but craved coexistence, it is something they cultivated in their own lives, on their own terms. Sometimes dinner in my house growing up was calm, sometimes it included arguments about politics which ended in tears, sometimes it was filled with laughter, sometimes it included mandatory group singing and often, because it is my family,, it was an unusual but special combination of all of these things. I used to wonder why my friends where always interested in staying for dinner, but in hindsight I don’t.

As a grownup, for many of us, “normal” included being present in public and sometimes in private where the main dish served was company and fellowship. Probably as homages to past family memories, I enjoy cooking more when it is for others and I enjoy eating more in the company of people who I value. When I was younger and working as a social worker, my friend Dayo and I would take shared trips to the grocery store and cook dinner together. We both valued the shared experience of making and experiencing food, and I treasure the memories of our meals, uncomplicated by things which sometimes complicate things between men and women like sex, or lies or ego. He introduced me to pigs feet and I shared his love of crockpots; he washed the dishes and I said thanks. At this point in our lives, these shared meals where we talked about the loves in our lives (or lackthereofs) were our normal, as young people in a city with no family to eat Sunday dinner with.

The concept of “normal” has not always been such a healthy thing to aspire to be, but our lives all have rhythms and cadences and this international crisis has interrupted what we do, where we go and who we get to see. My “Normal abnormal” now is not what my “normal abnormal” looked like last year at this time or at other times in the past, but today I am trying to ground myself in the things which are still the same. The light of the sun, the lengthening days, the blooming forsythia, the returning geese and the lilt of children’s laughter are still the same, and I am probably in good company by celebrating the things which we can always count as constants. In the beautiful area I live,I have been looking towards the signs of the natural world to reaffirm me in ways which the ancients also felt. In this moment I feel a kinship with these people who created celebrations which marked the times of the calendar which they followed, not on an app, but by tracking the movement of the sun, moon and stars.

From the perspective of the world I don’t have the “normal” life of many of the people I am close to in my age group and I have not, let’s be honest, had what could be considered a “normal life.” In my past (before the past decade or so), it hadn’t always bothered me to have an atypical journey or unusual experiences, because it meant I had interesting stories to tell, had more compassion for people whose suffering I was better equipped to understand because of my path, and my journey meant I knew people I value from many walks of life. The reality is, there is no such thing as normal; statistically speaking, there’s such a thing as average. We all ache to belong, but aspiring to be average is not something I was raised to want. Average women don’t make waves, which makes swimming with them easy, but not nearly as exciting as swimming with women who Rock the boat by aspiring to be their best in whatever way the universe destined them to be. There were experiences I did not talk about because they were so anomalous I felt people would have a hard time seeing me fairly, but I did not ever think my complicated history would be an impediment to having a life colored by love and connectedness. Part of this had to do with my connection to my real friends of my childhood who did not ever see me as bad, too complicated, or damaged, part of it had to do with my faith, and part of it had to do with my stubborn conviction I would be happy regardless. In truth, I always wanted something akin to traditional happiness on a traditional timeframe because of some of the earlier upheaval of my life. For good or bad, I have had to adjust what my happiness can look like when the dust clears. Unfortunately, there was a time when my past, misrepresented, did impact my present and my choices, but I have managed, as I navigated a mess I did not create, to create some normalcy for myself. My ability to have the “normal life” I was anticipating was circumvented, but I survived. What is normal for me now might not resemble what is typically considered “normal” in the lives of the people I teach Pilates to or the people who read this blog, but I want them to know this does not mean we don’t have things in common, don’t value some of the same things or even have not suffered the same kinds of losses. We’re connected by shared passions - for movement, for family, for justice, for sustainable living and for some of us, for food. Real “grown people thinking” about life means excepting everybody has things they don’t talk about and sometimes those secrets are the most special things about them. People are entitled to their private pain and being grown means respecting people when there are certain chapters of their lives they want kept private. My real healing has come from understanding while the losses I have felt are not the losses of others, the experience of loss and the subsequent pain are shared parts of the human condition.

With this shutdown, I have to admit is has been harder to not to dwell on wishing my life had more of the “normal” rhythms other people’s lives do. For somebody who can be so shy, more time spent in solitude is surprisingly not what I welcome. Navigating conversations, even before this shutdown, even with people I love and value, has at times been hard because there are questions people want to ask me but don’t or things people say which hit a nerve they did not even know was still raw. Before Corona virus, I had established some certainties in my life, and I built my days around who I knew I would see, what I knew I would do, and not surprisingly, what I would cook. The past few days has been a process of working through what my normal will be until this whole thing is over, and today I woke up feeling better than I have. In truth I would work at the studio I work at unpaid if I had to and would care for the children I care for without a paycheck. I know, for all I have gone through, I should be independently wealthy and be able to do whatever I want with my time, even if this is helping people I care about by cleaning yoga mats. We are all survivors who, in this crisis, are surviving. The comfort I have found, surprisingly, is in my past experiences of isolation and disconnection and the fact I survived. We can survive this, together in spirit, distanced in body. What I have learned is we can survive everything we tell ourselves is survivable and if you can, keep talking, keep moving, and keep cooking food which brings you nourishment for the soul and spirit. Remember life is not simply about surviving but thriving, and find some joy in your day and some time to plan for future joy when we’re unfettered for real. I invite you to connect with the people you can over the food you eat and the food you share, during this time and beyond. Maybe we cannot share our meals, but we can share our recipes. Perhaps we miss the ease of eating lunch together, but soon, we can again. We can connect in our mutual need for actual foodstuffs in a spirit of community and not take more than we need from store shelves or dairy cases. In this way, in this disciplining of our anxieties, we are all ensuring a shared (but socially distanced) table where all are filled and needs are met. What if about this time, we can tell our grandchildren, “and after this, it became normal to share, to be kind, to consider the aging and infirm and it was from this time forward, normal to do small things with great love”? It would be f$&@ing awesome, and it is, actually, very possibly, the only way it can be…

Ingredients

5-6 fillets (lb) of flaky white fish - I used Tillapie

tsp of cumin

tsp of paprika

0.25 ground red pepper

sprinkling of salt

0.25 powdered garlic

tsp of coriander

head of romaine lettuce

0.25 cup of diced cilantro

3 tbls of fat free mayonnaise

2 tbls of light sour cream