I loved to watch my mother cook. In my mind, Etta Marie Patrick was the best cook ever. Everything tasted delicious from her sweet coconut cookies with pink sprinkles to her spicy jalapeño stuffed peppers. But my favorite dish to eat and watch her make was what I like to call Time Soup. The way she prepared it reminded me of how time passes. The vegetables were the minutes. Some vegetables were cut in a slow and precise way. With those slow chops, I would watch the minutes drop off the clock ever so slowly. Or she would chop some vegetables very quickly and I would watch the minutes drop off the clock in the blink of an eye. Whenever she added the fat to the broth, I thought about seconds. She would either squeeze it slowly or allow the juices to slowly trickle in the soup pot or she would grasp it tightly so that the fat would pour into the soup pot. The seconds would either slowly creep into a single second or slip into a minute like there were fifteen seconds per minute not sixty. The noodles added to the overflowing soup pot were the hours. As I watched her dump the pasta into boiling water, the pasta would either fall in strand by strand or fall in the boiling water in bunches. The minutes would either link together one by one to form a perfect hour or they would throw themselves together and become an hour in no time. As I watched her stir the soup pot full of soup, my mother would stir it in two ways. She would stir it ever so slowly so that the hours, minutes, and seconds would steep into a long day or she would stir it quickly that the hours, minutes and seconds would be halved and the day seemed short. But both methods yielded a delicious soup. Along with the soup, she would serve a salad that she had lovingly made while the soup was simmering. Before the soup was served, she would dress the salad, which I called Time Salad because her dressing the salad reminded me of a week. Sometimes she would let the dressing pour out slowly into the salad, making a very long week or she would forcefully squeeze the dressing to make the week go by faster. At long last, it was time to eat. I called the ritual the yearlong feast because it was like a combination of the metaphorical seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks that would form twelve months. I ate slowly whenever I wanted to savor the taste and my year would be a stroll in the park; slow and easy going. When I was really hungry, I would eat quickly, making the year flash before my very eyes. As I stare at the empty bowl and plate, I realize just how blessed I am. Even after my mother passes on, I will inherit her Time Soup and Time Salad recipes. They cannot be found in any recipe book and they taught me the importance of time. Whether the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months go by quickly or slowly, they all add up to one amazing year. It all depends on how much flavor in love goes into each year.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 21:51:17 +0000
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