Initial Inspiration

When I was 16 years old I decided I would become a vegetarian. My mom told me she was not going to cook a bunch of weird food, so I made a pot of lentils and that is what I ate for a week. Things have gotten better since then.

Inspiration can come from so many places. Sometimes I can just look at my pie shelf full of cookbooks and remember a recipe idea, or sometimes it is seeing an ingredient at the farmers market that invokes a dish. I remained a vegetarian from the age of 16 until I was pregnant at 29, very occasionally eating crab or shrimp, and this was due to realization of the actuality of meat, and that just did not inspire me at all. In Biology class a friend and I had hatched chicks for our project, and her family had a family farm, mostly horses but some poultry. All summer we went north and visited the chicks and named them. In the fall her grandfather slaughtered them and she showed them to me in the freezer.

My first cookbook in college was the wonderful "The Vegetarian Epicure" by Anna Thomas. It extolled the delights of vegetarianism with amazing recipes, some of which I still use thirty five years later. It was also a brand of vegetarianism laden with cheese, lots of fats, so was not really healthy for every day cooking. Still, the mood of the book set my cooking style, and I was young and poor and pretty thin so at that point it really did not matter that I ate cheese and cream. In Iowa, where I went to college, I even joined a co-op for the raw unpasteurized milk with the cream on top. What I wanted most in the world when I was 18 was a good set of cookware and I lusted after Le Cruset, French enameled cast iron.

Back then I made cakes without a mixer, beating by hand, experiment after fun cooking experiment. I moved to Lexington, Massachusetts to live with my family again for a while to save for my wedding. I traded in my big van and bought a car and worked at a local bank in the charming little town of Concord, absolutely delightful. I made treats for my family and collected my beloved Le Cruset and other kitchen items from a shop in Concord. That Christmas I made for my family my first plum pudding and because it had meat, I did not partake but took a lot of pleasure in my parents and sisters enjoyment of it.

There was an incredible Chinese restaurant in town where we went to lunch from the bank, superior quality food that in itself inspired. There was also a great health food store in town that I enjoyed that had unique ingredients and whole grains. How exciting! I bought a cast iron grinder to make my own flour. I envisioned myself as a pioneer farm wife, an Amish woman, an independent thinker who could survive anywhere by shear force of my cooking skills. I admired the strong woman of literature but at the time I was traditional and really subserviant in my own life. I had the outlet of books and dreams, but I was getting ready to get married "because that is what you do next."