Sky

Or, "When comfort food [literally, mother flavors] didn't come from my mother."

I don't think it will surprise any of y'all when I say that my relationship to my mothers has been... complicated.

I didn't learn to cook from my biological mother. I didn't meet her until a few years ago. We get along mostly well, but she won't acknowledge me as her son, only as a daughter, so conversations can go from pleasant to miserable pretty fast. She certainly never taught me to cook, though she cooks pretty well, from the one visit we've had. Her cooking style has a lot of Hispanic influences because of the part of Oklahoma she lives in and because of her cultural studies.

I didn't learn to cook from my adoptive mother. She did all the cooking in our home growing up, but in addition to the abuse, she never really understood how to teach anyone anything. Her approach to teaching was to tell me to do something without a lot of detail, possibly show it to me once, have me try, and then stop me halfway through so she could just do it herself. I think my adoptive father taught me how to make spaghetti once. Perhaps because of the abuse, or because she was a so-so cook, food from my childhood mostly doesn't hit that "comfort food" spot for me. The exceptions to that rule are fried chicken from fast food places and groceries, packaged mac-and-cheese, and Sonny's BBQ, none of which are exactly "mother's home cooking". Additionally, to the extent to which I grew up with cooking traditions, those traditions are old, classic Southern food. It's not really healthy, and once you've eaten it, you're left with a heavy, greasy feeling. I've heard from afar that Southern food has developed a lot in the last few years and begun to incorporate interesting new flavors. I've even listened to a Taste of the Past episode on Heritage Radio Network about Vietnamese influences on new Southern cuisine (heritageradionetwork.org/podcast/seeking-the-south/). But that's all happened while I've been away from the South and Southern cooking. When I visited the South recently and ate at a local-food-focused restaurant, the food was barely recognizable to me. So while I think the developments in Southern cuisine are cool and interesting, it's never become comfort food.

I didn't learn to cook from my mother-in-law. For one thing, I met her well after I had already learned to cook. For another, her style of cooking is very plain and very English, and only sometimes to my tastes. She does share recipes, though, and she makes a lot of effort to test simple recipes that Rabbit can eat, so our cooking relationship is actually very pleasant. Our relationship in general is pleasant - she recognizes me as her son-in-law and Rabbit as her child, and when I was recovering from surgery, she came and took care of me and cooked for us. We talk to her every week.

I learned to cook in college from a discount Thai cookbook I got at Borders, back when they still existed. (www.amazon.com/Thai-Essence-Cooking-Judy-Bastyra/dp/0681923776). This despite having never tried any curry at all until high school! I didn't even like spicy food until high school, come to think. There was a Thai grocery right by the food store, and I would go there and get huge bags of jasmine rice (and then have to hurriedly return them when they turned out to be full of rice weevils) and all the other pantry ingredients I needed. They didn't sell anything fresh, though - that was up to the American grocery's limited stock. I could only find shallots sometimes, and got so excited when I did. I would despair over how hard it was to find those tiny, flaming-hot Thai chilis, to the point of having dreams about going to the store to discover them in stock, and learned rapidly to freeze them so they would keep. Finding makrut lime leaves (which I only knew then by a more racist name) was an exceedingly rare treat - usually I had to substitute with lime juice. I used packaged paste sometimes - Thai Kitchen came out with their curry paste around then, and it's pretty much perfect - but other times I would get out my heavy mortar and pestle and grind it all from scratch. There was a good while when I could make a curry from premade paste without even looking at the recipe book. We'd hold curry parties in the dorms, where people could pay me a few bucks to compensate for the ingredients and get a steaming hot bowl of curry. And since I could make it from scratch, I could make it all to my own tastes... which at the time meant lots of meat and no vegetables at all, other than bamboo shoots (which I found I liked), potatoes, and sometimes carrots. I'm not sure I ever really got to the heart of Thai cooking, though. These days I hardly ever make Thai food at all (when I do, it's with that book or the blog hot-thai-kitchen.com/), no less because Rabbit can't handle onions or shallots or garlic or too much coconut milk or more than the tiniest bit of spice... but also because I found another cooking love that's taken up my base ingredients slots.

That love is Japanese food. Now, for various reasons, in part because of my adoptive parents' having previously lived in Japan and in part because of the surge in popularity manga and anime had right around this time, I became very interested in Japanese culture and started learning Japanese. Because of my interests, for my birthday one year, we went to a high-end Japanese restaurant that specialized in shabu-shabu and sukiyaki. The waitress there, who was Japanese, was so excited that I could speak any that she insisted on staying by our table and explaining everything about the food to us. Normally, I would have eschewed every vegetable in the hotpot, but I couldn't say no to her eager encouragement. It would crush her if I refused a single bite. So I gamely swished even spinach around in the hotpot and dipped it in the ponzu, and ate it... without even gagging. You have to understand, at this time in my life, not gagging was extraordinary. Unless a vegetable was one of the very few I had learned to eat, or covered in a strongly flavored sauce like curry, I couldn't eat it. I would gag and feel the urge to vomit. For this reason, I had a lot of nutritional deficiencies. Japanese food unlocked vegetables for me.

I started my cooking with a Japanese cookbook from the same discount section as the Thai cookbook. The Japanese one wasn't quite as good as the Thai one, though, and I don't own it anymore, so I can't link. Then, at some point, I began following Makiko Itoh's now-mostly-defunct blogs Just Hungry (justhungry.com/) and Just Bento (justbento.com/). I bought some bento boxes online and began making bento lunches to eat every day. Over time, the basics started to build up for me. I learned how to make miso soup and fried rice. Miso soup is probably the dish I'd most call comfort food, these days. The now-defunct Japanese Food Report (www.japanesefoodreport.com/) and still-very-active Just One Cookbook (justonecookbook.com/) also entered my repertoire. I adapted a lot of the recipes over to what I had available at the local farmer's market and co-op. I was also getting a lot of influence from my college town's booming vegetarian, Krishna and hipster cuisines, plus my roommate's vegetarian cooking. I learned how to sear tofu to get it to come out right, and what recipes could be easily turned vegetarian. I tried different ways of cooking so many vegetables, to the point where I could learn to eat nearly all of them. At some point I also picked up the Japanese vegan cuisine book Kansha (www.amazon.com/dp/B007EED3VI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect), which I still have, but don't cook out of often, because Elizabeth Andoh is a fussy cook who'd like you to take hours to do anything so that it's Proper. Her translation of the concepts of five colors, five preparation styles, and one-ingredient-entire-meal (like making five dishes out of a single daikon) have both broadened my scope and... caused me to get a little too caught up in anxiety-inducing high-effort obsession with Doing Things Right. At one point, Just Hungry left a recommendation for the cookbook Tsukemono, which I keep around to this day as an all-inclusive pickling guide (www.amazon.com/Quick-Easy-Tsukemono-Japanese-Pickling/dp/488996181X).

During law school, I took a trip to Japan. I got to enjoy the food there quite thoroughly, though my success at cooking while I was there was... not successful. And sometime well after I got back, I finally learned to like fish. Yes, fish, that center of Japanese cuisine, had always stayed off my radar, even on a trip all the way to Japan. I grew up around fish - Florida's fishing culture is pretty endemic to the Southern cuisine there, and I have many memories of trips to the fish market. But fish made me nauseated to smell or eat. I couldn't stand it. But then one day after college, Rabbit, who also didn't like fish, went to a bachelor party where everyone went fishing. They had caught a king mackerel and hadn't the faintest idea how to cook it. I had a copy of Washoku (another Elizabeth Andoh book: www.amazon.com/dp/B007DFV2PW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect) and managed to find their shioyaki (salt-grilled) fish recipe, one of the few recipes in that book that wasn't fussy and slow. We shioyaki'd the fish and it tasted... delicious. We, the fish-loathing pair, were absolutely astounded.

My vegetable cooking expanded even further during a year or so of flirtation with CSA deliveries. Every week, I'd get a pile of vegetables I had no idea how to cook or even like, and I'd roast and pickle and stir-fry my way into something delicious or at least edible. I even managed to make okra I could eat, a monumental success, given that okra had previously caused me to go straight past gagging into full-on regurgitation.

So, even to nowadays, I cook a mixture of Japanese food, hipster vegetarian, and the occasional Americana. I can eat vegetables and even fish. I dip into Just One Cookbook and Kyou no Ryouri (www4.nhk.or.jp/kyounoryouri/) for online recipes, and even ordered an issue of Kyou no Ryouri magazine last year - oh, speaking of that, it's time for my April order! I even made a complete osechi set for New Year's, a dream that sprung from that high-end restaurant back in the day. My dream once (if) the farmer's market begins is to do a whirlwind of weekly miso recipes using each seasonal vegetable as it comes out.

If you'd like a basic guide on Japanese cooking fundamentals, Just Hungry did a pretty good one a few years back: justhungry.com/announcing-japanese-cooking-101-fundamentals-washoku. I'm also quite happy to dig up this or that if you have anything you'd like to learn to cook.