Meat and Potatoes

It is no secret that I am not much of a cook. There are a few recipes I have practiced enough to reliably pull out for company, but cooking brings me no pleasure. Given the opportunity I would simply blend my calories into sludge and drink it over an hour while doing things I prefer like reading or knitting. So it was something of an event when I went to buy a new kitchen appliance.

The occasion was prompted by the fact Tucson had three days of rain which constitutes its entire winter season. The change in weather brought on the sudden desire to have soup. This is an unusual craving as I am not a huge fan of soup. Growing up my mother would make something called garbage soup. This meant that she would dump all the leftovers in the fridge into a pot, make a soup out of it and serve it for dinner. We were a family of five with hearty appetites. I figured that if there were leftovers in the fridge, they were in there for a reason. We either didn’t like it or we were tired of it. It was pretty rare that Mom made something that I flat out didn’t like but garbage soup was on that list. I never knew what lay in the murky brown liquid. Would it be hamburger, pasta, beans, or God forbid, peas? The remains of a tomato carcass might float to the top looking suspiciously like something the cat vomited. It smelled savory but not in an identifiable way that one knows Italian versus Indian. One spoonful and I would taste cumin from the taco meat and rosemary from the roast. My taste buds demanded strict segregation of these flavors and a boycott ensued.

So soup was not my usual pick. It was also unusual that I knew what I wanted for dinner ahead of its imminent arrival. It is hard to come up with a meal I want to consume in ten hours when I haven’t even finished my morning tea. Still My Man and I look at each other over breakfast and ask, “So what should we have for dinner tonight?” Inevitably we return to one of three things: salad with tuna, pasta or go out to dinner and let someone else wash the dishes. Since he does the cooking, my most common answer is “I don’t care,” perhaps the most painful answer that anyone can offer.

It is only now, in retrospect, with the burden of feeding both myself and others at times, that I have sympathy for Mom. I would come in from whatever sports practice I just finished, track, cross country, or skiing depending on the season, drop my backpack and immediately sit down for dinner. “I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?” was the first thing out of my mouth. It had to be her least favorite greeting.

Inevitably whatever it was smelled delicious and by and large, I ate with enthusiasm which was likely propelled by the aforementioned sports practice. Dinner was a sacred time for our family. It was eaten at the table with proper manners. During dinner, we were not allowed to answer the communal phone hanging in the kitchen and we often lingered afterwards as we shared the day’s events. The evening meal was something to look forward to and Mom’s efforts were a key component of it. She would frequently ask what we wanted for dinner and too often our response would be “I don’t care.” In truth we did care but didn’t know it. We were just lulled into apathy because it was reliably delicious. Because of this I would guess that she didn’t dread cooking as much as having to choose day in and day out what to feed her family as well as the many stray friends who were also brought to the table.

One of Mom’s many skills was how to stretch her budget and use all of her resources. She was attuned to what was in the pantry and freezer at all times. I, on the other hand, do not have a clue what is in my kitchen and each meal is like starting from scratch. I try to keep my freezer completely empty because once something goes in there, I have forgotten about it forever. However, I knew My Man, a paleontologist and avid hunter, had many packages of mystery meat sitting in the freezer from past hunting trips. I accused him of attempting to turn moose, caribou and bison remains into ice age fossils. He had done his best to grill the meat into burnt offerings but what was left was clearly labeled as stew meat and not amenable to flames. I would make stew.

“What is stew?” he asked me while stirring blueberries into his yogurt that rainy morning.

I described it as a thick soup with meat and potatoes. He nodded. “Brava. This will do.” I sensed his expectations were appropriately low.

Although my brothers and I were never permitted to be fussy eaters, I always thought Mom was a good cook. It was never exotic, just satisfying: chicken and broccoli, enchiladas, lasagna. What we ate seemed varied and interesting until I left home. Then I realized what we ate was mostly ground meat. Spaghetti with meat sauce, Swedish meatballs, meatloaf, tacos, hamburgers. Our diet was not the limit of her imagination, just the outer limit of Dad’s palate.

Dad always came across as the easy going one in the family. He was cheerful and rarely complained. I always thought he was one to try anything; however, being the guy that would join you on a rollercoaster or a double black diamond ski slope is not the same as being willing to try a new cuisine. I knew he was not a fan of Chinese food but what I didn’t understand growing up is that no one pushed him to try something new because Mom had long given up on this battle. It would be years later while living next to them in Sedona that I would develop a much fuller grasp of my father’s diet or lack thereof. Up close and aware of the options the world presented, I watched Dad always order the same thing: steak and potatoes. And always, always medium rare. Go to some fancy restaurant serving African, French or South American cuisine and he would always find his way back to steak and potatoes. It seemed odd to me.

“Why do you do this?” I asked once in a Greek restaurant.

“I don’t know what those things are,” he said pointing to moussaka or dolmades. Instead of asking, he simply looked for what was familiar. So while he didn’t like Chinese food, he also did not want Korean BBQ or Vietnamese Pho or Thai or Indian or sushi. It wasn’t like I was asking him to try fried cockroaches. It’s Arizona. It’s rare we eat anything more daring than tacos.

I understood him better the more I traveled. In Italy My Man does all the ordering. I don’t even bother to open a menu. Even if I find something vaguely familiar like lasagna or spaghetti, he will wave me off. There will be something else he wants me to try. It will be unpronounceable. When it comes to the table, it will be unrecognizable. Sometimes it doesn’t come cooked. And I will think, yes, steak and potatoes would be good about now.

“Stew works better in a slow cooker,” I told my man while I buttered my toast. Honestly, I had no idea. That is just what I had heard. I did not admit that I had never made stew nor used a slow cooker but in my head there were remote echoes that a slow cooker was a good way to make stew.

My Man nodded again finishing his breakfast, “Then we should get one.” As if my cooking skills could be solved so easily.

I figured I would go to Target to pick a cheap slow cooker the next day but that night he drove us to Williams Sonoma which is the only place My Man knows where to shop for kitchen things. Considering both of our cooking interest and skills, it seemed like overkill but I hated to correct him.

We went directly to the slow cookers and more specifically, things that looked like slow cookers. My last memory of a slow cooker is from about 1990. It was a squat little pot with a glass lid and one simple dial. It was typically burnt orange and decorated with some floral print so it blended in with the curtains. Since no one I know uses a slow cooker anymore, let me update this image for you. Like many Americans, it has gained a few pounds in the last 30 years. It is now the size of a miniature pony and requires a degree in computer science to operate. It looks like NASA was in charge of the aesthetics.

We wrangled three of them off the shelf to inspect closer. Of our options one looked like it was built to feed a Morman family. Given I was cooking for two, this seemed unreasonably large. The second one, the Instapot, looked like R2D2 went goth with its matte black color, round body and dome head. Like its multitalented Star Wars counterpart, it, too, could do anything from simmer to pressure cook to sauté to steam to sous-vide to air fry and, of course, make yogurt or cakes. Yogurt?! That was just getting carried away. The third was a bit more standard sized but weighed more than I do. Built with a cast iron insert, this bad boy was made for the urban cowboy who envisioned cooking over a campfire but didn’t know how to start one. Each device had no less than 12 buttons. I looked at the tags. Considering the cost and my intention to use it exactly once, it might have been just as cost effective to fly to Paris for a dinner of beef bourguignon.

Overwhelmed with the options we turned to the salesclerk. This fine woman looked to be about 55 with two tone orange and yellow hair and bedazzled thick black framed glasses. The lines in her face had been filled with foundation thick enough to resurface the road. This was Cool Grandma but there was nothing about her that said she spent time making soup or cookies. I wanted the pleasantly plump grandma with short grey hair that wore little spectacles and smelled like cloves. I needed an elder to validate that I was smarter than this digital monster.

“What can you tell us about these?” I asked giving her lots of room to rant or rave as she pleased.

Grandma put on her glasses and searched for the attached tag. “Well, um, it says here, it is an Instapot ….” She moved onto the next one. “Well, this one has a cast iron.”

Grandma had absolutely nothing to add to this conversation beyond “Do you like black or silver?” as if this were the pressing issue.

Without consideration for cost, My Man encouraged me to get whichever one I wanted. I thought about how Mom would have reacted if she had been offered such a choice years ago. I doubt she ever had the pleasure of purchasing something without Dad, always the practical engineer, calculating the cost per use. Equally economical she would likely walk away reassuring herself that she could simmer, sauté, fry and bake just fine already. The reality was that she would never use most of these cooking options as they reached far beyond our normal menu.

“I have no idea what I would do with an air fryer or Instapot,” I admitted. Instead of lighting up with the possibility of new and creative dishes, I balked. There in Williams Sonoma I had my conversion. I became my father with his reluctance to try new things.

“Oh, let me show you some cookbooks!”

Indeed, she brought me a cookbook that showed me how to make cookies in an air fryer which made her a very modern Grandma but it told me nothing about how to make stew in a slow cooker. Besides while I do not cook, I do not lack for cookbooks. I have an aspirational collection. It is not aspirational as in I will learn to cook French cuisine. They are the type of cookbooks that promise easy and fast. Healthy is another common theme. When I do bother to cook, it is usually vegetarian because I don’t like touching raw meat. My cooking involves tofu and nut butters and leaves you praying salvation comes in the form of dessert.

“Birdseed,” was Dad’s assessment of my efforts after tasting my peanut butter balls packed with flax and oats.

Dad’s dietary choices did not improve after he got cancer. A once reliable eater he became erratic, sending Mom to the store for one thing then once she got home, he would decide it didn’t sound good anymore. Every day we would ask what he wanted to eat. “I don’t care,” was the response before he conjured up something from the remote past that he remembered liking. She catered to his every whim whipping up apple sauce or banana bread only to have him eat two bites and declare himself full. I, too, joined this doomed parade making rice crispy treats and smoothies as if by finding the right food, we might save him. Each tray was delivered to his easy chair in vain. By the time chemo did its job, he was down to Snickers and broth.

“Nothing tastes good,” he would say, never really complaining as much as grieving the loss of something that once brought him so much pleasure.

I settled on the cast iron version because it did not require an app to run and headed home. Not surprisingly I didn’t crack the spine of any of my cookbooks. I didn’t figure bison stew would be found in 50 Vegetarian Delights. I found a random one on the internet that looked how I wanted it to taste. While I am an avid reader and have a lively imagination, I refuse to try any recipe that does not have a picture attached. I want to have visual evidence of what it aspires to be. How did I become my father afraid of what might emerge from the kitchen?

After two trips to the grocery store because I am not any more prepared to cook than I am to do plumbing, I put everything into the crock pot. I stood by and watched it for all four hours coming to the conclusion that this is quite possibly the most boring possible way to cook. I didn’t even stir anything. It was deeply satisfying to have My Man come home and think that I had spent all day on it so it was a win all around.

It was a story book evening with the rain coming down outside and the house warm and smelling heavenly. We sat down to dinner and I scooped My Man a big bowl and waited anxiously for the review. To my great surprise, he not only liked it but raved about it from the first bite. “This is the best thing I have eaten in America,” he said while going back for seconds. These are the satisfying effects of setting a low bar for my cooking.

I tried my stew full of bison and potatoes. I have to admit, it was good. The meat was tender and the vegetables were cooked but not mushy. The gravy was rich. It was like something Mom would have made. As the rain and mist outside shrouded the world from view, I could pretend it was a different time and place where my father would have finished a whole bowl and said once again, “Delicious.”