Transcendence of a Good Meal

I love food. I love eating. I love tasting new things, usually. I love the process of thinking about what to cook. I miss my taste buds. This is the worst part of chemo, I think. The exhaustion, I can take. The intermittent nausea, I can take. The headaches and body aches, like someone took a baseball bat to my torso, I can take. But not tasting food – is awful. I’ve had my third round of chemo and this has been the worst impact for me right now. I want to eat. I want to eat the house, actually. I’m hopped up on steroids, so having no taste buds is just cruel. I love whipping up something tasty. But now it’s starting to feel like work. No matter what I cook, it’s like eating the wall – flat and gray.

I got up this morning to get my son Sam off to school. He’s 15 and has started high school this year. He is a young man who likes food, but is not wild about trying new things. Although being brought up in New Orleans, he’s probably more adventurous than a lot of kids his age from other parts of the country. He loves crawfish and oysters (even raw oysters). He thinks cheese grits are the bomb – so at least I feel like I’ve done my part in raising him, even though he won’t eat anything green that I can think of.

After getting him dropped off I realized I needed to come up with something to eat – to feed my body and soul. I decided to make one of my new favorites while I’ve been on this cancer journey. A Mexican style Eggs Benedict – toasted English muffin with shredded sharp cheddar cheese and some salsa verde, topped with a couple of gorgeous farmhouse eggs, poached to perfection. Truthfully I get more pleasure from this concoction than most. There’s something about eggs that manage to breakthrough the dull, lifeless thing that my tongue has become. It was pretty good, but I do miss tasting all of the subtle nuances of poached eggs, especially really good poached eggs. And I make a pretty good poached egg. I’ve been perfecting my technique over these last few months. A touch of white vinegar in the boiling, salted water is one trick. Also swirling the water with a spoon to create a little eddy when gently dropping in the eggs. These are simple things.

I only have one more infusion and before I know it, I’ll be past this nasty affair. But right now, right now.... it’s just miserable. I drove to Whole Foods yesterday to look for something to make for dinner. I felt lost in the store, mainly because my mask kept fogging up my glasses and I couldn’t see clearly. I guess that’s what I’ve been feeling these last few weeks, fuzzy and unclear. There’s this haze that surrounds everything and it won’t go away. I want the fog to lift so I can be pulled back into the action of things.

Like most women, I haven’t had a healthy relationship with food. I’ve either hoarded it and eaten too much, as a coping mechanism. Or I’ve been convinced that something wasn’t good for me, so better not eat than to get fat. Truthfully I’ve always been more of a glutton, so I’ve not really bought into the fad diets and stopped eating. It’s against my natural DNA. I love food and I love eating. I’d rather be overweight than to stop eating the things I love. I know there’s a balance in this and you can actually do both, so I’m still working on this. A good meal can be transcendent. And it’s not about it being super fancy or ostentatious. It’s about the food being cooked with love and heart.

Many years ago I lived in rural Appalachia in Hyden, Kentucky where I taught adults reading and writing as a part of a literacy program organized by the Frontier Nursing Service. I had a 70 year old student, Cinda, who wanted to learn to read better so she could read the Bible to her gran-babies. I began tutoring her. One day she invited me to come over to learn to make apple butter from scratch.

That day we spent cooking apple butter was amazing. Her husband, Raleigh came in and told tales of being chased by a rattlesnake after he’d stepped on one accidentally when pulling up pole beans in the yard. The steaming hot house smelled of sweet apples and butter and cinnamon, despite the cooler temperatures outside. It was fall, if I recall. The process took all day. First we had to peel and core buckets of apples – and I mean tons of apples. Then we chunked them up and put them into huge pots with lots of sugar and spices, cooking them down. It took hours. Nowadays most people would use a slow cooker and walk away. But with Cinda, it just took time. And we had it.

We’d talk and read and sing songs. We’d sip sweet tea on her porch, cooling off as the leaves had begun to fall with a hint of autumn in the crisp air. We’d go back and stir the pots and keep things moving along, for hours and hours. It was magic time. Cinda would pull out her photo albums and we’d look at pictures of her children and grandchildren, whom I’d never met. They’d moved from the area so she didn’t get to see them too often. Raleigh would come in later and share some stories of his time during WWII, which were a stark contrast to goings on in the kitchen. He’d seen some hard things. He’d lived some hard things too. But then he’d look at Cinda and he’d return to himself, surrounded by the smells of apple butter cooking. That’s the power of food and I’ll never take it for granted.