Cooking with Katie

It was only our second day as Cap Corps Volunteers. All day long the rest of the CCVs had been very chatty and socialable, laughing and talking as they got to know each other. I on the other hand was my usual awkward self and had very little to say at this introductory phase of things. After a day of this, it was getting late. I was sitting at the kitchen table listening to the girls talk, and heard something rumble: it was my belly. It was dinner time. Without knowing what our weekly stipend would be and with the cupboards bare, I figured I’d have to go out and get something cheap and solid. I got up and said my first sentence of the day:

“I’m going to go buy a potato.”

The look on the girls’ faces quickly told me that that was the last thing they expected to hear.

Look at how happy potatoes make them!

Coming from an Irish family, my tastes in food are pretty simple: dinner is composed of something dead with potatoes sitting next to it. (The ladies of the house at one point tried to argue that broccoli had once been alive and hence counted as “something dead.” What a cruel sense of humor they have…) Strictly speaking, my mother isn’t Irish but she always had a good meal of meat and potatoes ready for her family. We had roasts and boiled dinners and steak and baked potatoes...It didn’t get any better than Mama Moreshead’s cooking.

When we finally had our weekly food stipend, the CCVs broke into pairs to cook the meals each week. For the rest of the year, Katie and I would be responsible for Tuesday dinners. We made an awesome team. Katie would take care of the vegetables (which are foreign entities to me) while I prepped the meat. Our dinners were hearty and so simple that I could go for a run and Katie fall asleep while it cooked. We made a great team, but there was no doubt about it: Ms. Cavazzini came from a different culture than I.

In the course of our first month in the Red House, it became evident that Katie had a unique but predictable diet. Every morning her day would begin with a glass of Tropicana pure squeezed orange juice (no pulp, calcium if you feel like it) and a Shaklee shake. The joy of the Shaklee shakes was that they were gluten free and since Katie lives a breadless life, that was quite convenient. However the baking industry need not fear: I more than made up for it with my half a loaf of bread a day.

I suspect this is what Mrs. Pinterest looks like before she
posts her recipes online.

Then there was Katie’s fascination with Pinterest. I don’t know who Mrs. Pinterest is, but I did notice that her recipes always seemed to be more complicated than my mama’s. To her credit, the one recipe we did use tasted delicious.

And of course, there was the Italian factor. When Katie first moved into the Red House, she brought with her four giant freezer bags of homemade sauce her mother had made. Mrs. Cavazzini’s sauce was delicious! Our first dinner at the Red House, we boiled up a pot of pasta (gluten-free and gluten-full), thawed out the sauce (which wasn't as simple as you'd think since the frozen sauce was bigger than the pot) and had spaghetti and meatballs. It was a good meal. Little did we realize that those bags of sauce were more than kind house warming gifts: they were rations. Just as in my world, there was no dinner without a dead animal, so too in Katie’s world sauce was not edible if it came from a jar.

Prego was anathema.

Just like Mama's

And so Tuesday after Tuesday came and went. We made meats and potatoes of all sorts and varieties. This particular Tuesday we were sitting in the office at 3:00 and realized we had no plans for dinner. I poked my head up out of the cubicle and said “What about meatloaf?” We hadn’t done meatloaf in the Red House before, so why not? Katie agreed and offered to look up a recipe for meatloaf on Pinterest but I asked if it would be okay if we used my mama’s recipe. Mrs. Pinterest’s food was good and all, but there was something homey about Mama’s meatloaf. In fact, she’d originally gotten it from my grandmother who instructed that the ingredients be mixed by “squeezing the *@!# out of it.” Talk about home. Katie agreed.

We got to the store and started looking for ingredients. Katie offered to get instant mashed potatoes so we didn’t have to take the time to boil potatoes. I cringed. Instant mashed potatoes? They're not potatoes. I explained to Katie that instant mashed were for me what jarred sauce was to her. I thought she'd understand and she did. Well, almost...right up until the point when I started pulling meatloaf ingredients off the shelf. “Eggs, check. Gluten free bread crumbs, check. Prego, ch –“

“Wait, what?”

Sauce. In a jar. Enemy
#1 in the Italian neighborhood.

“Prego! My mama’s recipe calls for Prego.”

“You just said not to get instant mashed potatoes because it was your version of jarred sauce and now you’re getting jarred sauce?!”

“But it’s not my mother’s meatloaf without Prego.”

“We’ll use tomato sauce. I’m pretty sure that’s how my mother does it.”

“I don’t trust it. I’m just going to stick with Prego.”

And so the great meatloaf contest began: Katie with her pan of Prego-less meatloaf and me with my mama’s meatloaf. We worked intensely that night, you could feel it in the air. Katie trying to thicken her meatloaf up with more gluten free bread crumbs (whatever those are made of) and me squeezing the *@%# out of mine according to my grandmother’s recipe.

6:30 came. Dinner went out. The two meatloaves were presented.

We don't actually know who won the contest. Both of us refused to eat the other’s meatloaf: Katie didn’t want to contaminate her stomach with sauce from a jar and I refused to countenance as meatloaf that which deviated from my mama’s recipe (I don't care what Mrs. Pinterest says...) And so we sat across the table, smiling smugly to ourselves as we ate our meatloaf. Oh the taste of home, how good it was…

Katie and I made a great team in the kitchen. To use a CYFM expression, our gifts filled each other’s gaps. Katie suggested things for dinner that would never have crossed my mind. When I was ready to have mashed potatoes for the fourth week in a row, Katie would suggest we roast them (and she was good at that.) When I was ready to skip vegetables entirely for the meal, Katie chimed in quickly and made sure something nutritious found its way on the table. The way the schedule falls, this week was probably the last meal we cooked together. It was a cultural exchange, but it was a great year. Thanks for everything Katie!