Day 3: The Joy of (not) Cooking

Strange. I’ve been to the grocery store once with Will and once with Camille, and still we have nothing to eat in the house. With William, it was a preparation expedition, before Camille’s arrival. What shall we put in our cart that best represents American food? Better question, what do you get when turn a 13-year-old loose in a grocery store? Pop-tarts, box macaroni and cheese, make yer own pizza, corn dogs, oreos. (Double-stuffs, of course.) Hmmmm. Aren’t French people known for haut cuisine? The only aspect of “high” in this cart is the sodium and the sugar content. Remember I told you how hosting an exchange student has a way of showing up the cracks in your family? Here’s a big one.

My second grocery run was with Camille alone, when Will had a music lesson. Perfect little chunk of time for an educational foray into American gourmet. At the Food Lion. Aisle by aisle it goes like this: Camille pushing the cart, me talking, pointing, pulling items off the shelves, making conversation. What do you like to eat? What are your favorites? Who does the cooking at your house? What do you have on a typical night for dinner? He tells me there is no such thing as ‘typical’ at his house. At least I think I understand him to say that. No wonder you feel at home, kid. We come away with strawberry soda, Nesquik, more mac n’ cheese (he loves it!) brownie mix (2 boxes) and a large vat of le Nutella. Growing boy, n’est ce pas?

With these, the only trips to grocery this month thus far, the American children in the house are elated. “Banana flavored TWINKIES??! Yippeee, where did THESE come from?!” But like the sheer boy adrenaline we see at the pool or the back yard, it quickly burns away. Apparently Bill and Sophie, left behind on my recent trip to DC with the boys, were so hungry that they “almost starved.” Sophie went to work at job #2 one day so emaciated from skipping meals she had to radio down to job #1 (a pool snack bar) and ask if someone could bring her some food. She told them she hadn’t eaten in “days.” Ok great. I have a beggar for a daughter.

When I got home the cupboard was indeed shockingly bare, and I suddenly realized this: I have not been to a grocery store since July 1. The fridge? If it weren’t for the juice spills inside it and the few lonely condiment containers, I would think the installation guys just left, it looks so empty and new. I checked my receipts when it started to dawn on me that there really is no food in the house. Yep. C’est vrai. My most recent trip was the one described above with Camille, when clearly we missed the aisle marked “food staples.” That was almost two weeks ago! So here we are on July 11th, family home and all that, three meals (supposedly) per day. Not happening. We’ve dipped well below our pretty common shortages of coffee, cat food, filters, TP–stuff nobody bothers to tell me about. This time around, we’re out of milk, bread and any form of bread product including crackers (is that a bread product??), eggs, all forms and types of cheese, all fruit save two spongy apples and a wizened kiwi. One fine delicacy as a starving grad student years ago was a “wish sandwich”: a jar of peanut butter, a spoon, and a wish to $#@! you had some bread to go with it.

Keep in mind I’ve made a VERY last minute trip to NC for family 4th of July fun (As in, at noon on Wednesday when I received the texted invitation we were decidedly not going and by the time I pulled the boys out of the pool at 4 o’clock that afternoon it was to go home and “Pack, quick! We’re going to visit cousins!”) So there went that trip to the grocery store. To be perfectly honest, some of the decision to travel was food-related. Free food, ready to eat. I scooped up all the fresh produce in the house rather than leave it to go bad in the hands of folks who like their pizza hot and their plates paper and their TV loud. Then we were home 24 hours before re-loading for a planned trip to Washington, DC, where it’s easy to purchase food someone else cooked if you have money to burn. I’m serious. Those Smithsonian museum “cafes”? It would have been cheaper and probably more nutritious to take a few dollars out of my pocket and light them on fire. I really never have paid $11 for a hot dog before. It was a combo. Upside: Got to experience lunch on the Washington Mall with all the locals at Le Food Truck, feeling quite satisfied I’d introduced Camille to an American institution–until I realized they are all selling international food!

You would think they could cook, my “home alone” two. NO sympathy, right? Get up sooner. Bill is now eating Gluten free (healthy) and dairy free (healthy), doesn’t think he can eat beans, and doesn’t like pasta (hungry). Sophie’s not too keen on meat and won’t eat sandwiches, so between the two of them they’ve licked the platter clean and are pointed in the direction of the place I left when I skipped town: food free. I never liked to cook anyway, I just like the idea of it. It is, after all, a cornerstone of what it means to be a home. Load-bearing wall, so to speak. What it means to be a family. In a family, the food is so much more than a nourishment of the body. Such is the wisdom of a step-mother, hard won: they only hate you till dinner time. Plus it’s one of the few things, along with money, that they will still take from you as teenagers. Hugs? Kisses? Help? Guidance? Advice? Bah! These are all meals half-eaten and turned down in favor of the feast of autonomy.  My kids always did push away from the table too soon. So I notice it more now that they are older, busier, and blowing through here like it is a connecting train station: how often I return to the kitchen, to the cooking or what little I know of it, to feed them. To fatten them up for the long journey ahead. I could have been Mrs. Claus: “Eat, Papa, eeeeeat. Whoever heard of a skinny Santa?”

Monsieur Le Gourmand, he likes to be fed so long as it is meat. Lots of meat. And pasta. Lesson #357 of the things I am trying to teach him is how to cook your own pasta. Surprisingly, the kid that can put away four tacos and two heaping plates of spaghetti is not that into what he is not that into. And like a more polished older teen might, he is not willing to try. I have not seen him eat a vegetable since he stepped off the plane, though salad and a second veggie choice are on our dinner table almost every evening. And in the innocent egoism of younger children, if he doesn’t like something, even if you’ve fixed it for him, he doesn’t mince words or make an attempt to choke it down. He may not even try it. (Did he just stick out his tongue at my table? Vraiment?) This far making the “non” list: fruit smoothies, sandwiches, Jello, cold pasta (like in a summer salad), salad period, eggs of any kind. Let me just say this: if you’re not going to eat an omelet or a bowl of cereal–at our house? In the summer? Then you have just eliminated two of our three go-to-dinners. What is it you think? That the steak-frites grow on trees?

Take-out food is another challenge encore. Like other families, this treat often turns necessity in times like these, when the activity level prevents even grocery shopping, never mind cooking. Pas de probleme, we’ll just go get subs at Subway. Uh oh. Sandwiches. Here is Camille’s response, standing in line at Subway looking up at the backlit board at all the choices: (He shaking his head) “I very don’t like. Non! I very VERY don’t like! I het it.” What? How can you “hate” Subway? Okay then. So much for the daily special. He’s so rude he’s almost cute! On this particular day, I decided to call his bluff. This was on our return from North Carolina, screaming up 301 and thinking through dinner options, as it was about that time of day and I knew what the larder had looked like when we left three days ago. Now there really, REALLY wouldn’t be any food in the house, never mind dinner waiting. I het it! So my ever-scheming wheels are turning. We could take a picnic to the park, one of the many destinations on our bucket list for the boy. Kill two birds with Three Lakes. I like it. Will is game, text Bill to meet us, we’re on. Then, standing there at the sandwich counter at the sub shop and Camille making no pretense about his preferences. I’ve just driven four hours straight from another state and I am turning it around for one more fun thing, and this kid is going to dig in his heels at cold cuts? I don’t think so! We step around him, start to order and I can see out the corner of my parent-colored glasses, the ever-so-subtle shift from consternation to consideration: “Could zey, euu, Jennifer, could zey put zeese on a crepe?” Sure! You like a sandwich wrap? Parfait! Yes, sure–whatever, kid. This is America. Zey can do whatever you like. In the end he eats more than the three of us put together.

Here’s another development in the world of madness and malnutrition: Ellie informs me, by text on the Tuesday after we get back, that she has tomorrow afternoon off and could come home for a little bit if “someone” could come get her. When she left for camp six weeks ago it was more like “Don’t call, Mom. I’ll call you.” Now here she is, texting and asking if I want her to come home, anointing me with that word “someone.” What?! What is this? Do I have a random hour in the middle of the day between library work and entertaining boys to drive out to boonie-ville and pick up college/camp girl? Absolument! Of course I will come pick her up! Would she, eu, mind one wafer-thin trip to zee store? Ellie’s coming home! Ellie’s coming home! Did I say I don’t like to cook? I LOVE to cook, point me the way to the kitchen. What are we having?

From famine to feast: on the 11th day of the exchange, my true love gave to me: a full family dinner, complete with add-on friends. When the plans finalize it is just like you see in the movies, when they have incoming wounded and have to sweep off all surfaces so as to have somewhere to lay the bodies. It is like that coming in with six bursting bags of groceries from BJS and a watermelon. “Clear the decks, she’s coming through!!” For the first time since Memorial Day weekend, the dining table is cleared of papers, projects, a NO HOPE jigsaw puzzle (5000 pc) and the weekly trappings no one had time for, and it is set with real plates and glasses and even some candles, because I can already see by the time I get this food on the table it’s going to be dark. And it is. Outside it is dark but inside the candlelight glows. The kitchen temps have soared to 85 – 90 degrees from having the oven on over an hour, and there’s not a spare square inch of counter to be had. In the middle of all that I open the bottom drawer of the oven to discover that the kangaroo mouse I saved from certain death has moved uptown. Lazarus lives! He has relocated from behind the fridge I was dreading to pull out to clean the mess he made back there, especially if that included a dead him, and he is now happily installed in a muffin tin in my oven drawer. “Oh, hello Lazarus,” I say, looking back at the two beady eyes looking at me. My, that’s a lot of cotton or paper batting or–what is all that?  Lucky mouse. Picked a good night to be a Burk. Norman Rockwell, eat your heart out. I’m going to show this boy the real American family!

Alors, the American meal: meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans. For dessert: Jello pudding. All fixed by my idea of family: Camille, seated at the kitchen table in only a bathing suit, peeling the potatoes and asking in French how “we” are going to cook these, making small talk about cuisine, while Sophie and the relatively new beau make the pudding dessert. The first word in “family dinner,” people, is not “dinner.” The fridge, empty after so many days, is so packed and bloated stuff keeps falling out of it and the kitchen looks like someone triaged a train wreck on my counters, but the meal is served and the conversation and banter continue till it is time to take Ellie back. Around my table the candles glow as we listen to her funny stories about camp life. She works the kitchen and so has the opposite problem of thinning numbers. This is the full week, where she is putting up food for 24 tables each night: 240 kids! We are only seven Chez Burk, but for the happiness and contentment I feel, it may as well number in the stars.

Camille takes seconds, then thirds, on the meatloaf, then the potatoes, which he concedes he “very like.” So that’s a relief. Me too, French boy. I very like it, too.