Christmas Cooking

It's that time of year again when I find myself alone in the kitchen with recipes taped up  here and there of all the special foods that my long gone Mom passed along to me.  It's a heavy responsibility to try to keep up all the traditional food practices all by myself. I say this because my own sister and daughter are non-cooks for complicated reasons. So they're no help. Here's an example:  my sister sent me a text of an actual cake that she baked herself.  It was only the kind that takes a cake mix and one or two other ingredients but it was the first time EVER in her 57 years that she produced a cake all by herself.  See what I mean?  And, to be brief, my daughter considers her kitchen to be a rarely used portion of her house.

I am no longer permitted to host holiday meals. Apparently, my usual sunny disposition goes awry at such times and I turn into an overwrought militaristic director of who should sit where, what can be touched and not touched by grandchildren, grammar correcting monster (insert the b-word here just like my family members do). Thanksgiving is held elsewhere and the family sees my decorated house for about 20 minutes sometime or another in the month of December. And, mind you, my decorations and lights go up the day after Thanksgiving so there's plenty of time to come over and sit around admiring my festive creations.

So even though I'm no longer a holiday hostess, I am still obliged to bring certain traditional dishes to wherever the holiday meals will be served. Dressing, gravy, pies, sugar cookies are the usual requests. And they're all supposed to taste just like my Mom's.  Sadly, Mom didn't write down her recipes for these menu items.  She simply talked about how to make them while I was standing alongside her in the kitchen acting as sous chef. Chop this, slice that, boil this, roll this out, use just this brand of whatever.  I confess that many of those years spent at her side were years of daydreaming youth when I didn't really listen to much of what she said at all.

Now that Mom is longer with us, it is up to me to provide these "easy" meal additions.  So I am left literally wracking my old brain for mental visions of the two of us in her kitchen preparing those meals.  Since my memory is fuzzy about just about everything now that I'm no longer 28, the visions are blurred and lack much reason and order.  Hence, the recipes taped to my counters and kitchen cabinets.  I'm constantly on the lookout for recipes that seem to reproduce my Mom's tricks. Magazines, little seen cousins, and quiet meditation all work together to magically help me come up with the ways and means to keep the family food traditions alive.

And guess what.  I have come close.  Just close.  I get kudos for my pies and I think that's because Mom was not too good at pies.  Crust making made her nervous while I'm not bothered by that activity.  Aside from good pies, nothing else is a replica of her culinary creations.  But all the plates at the table are so loaded down with holiday food that there is little reason for the diners to notice that the traditional foods that my Mom made taste any different. But I know they do. And let me be so unpolitically correct as to say, "Merry Christmas" to all of you.