A fresh perspective on growing and drying healing herbs

June 15, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Today’s piece is by Aubrey Hodapp, 21, a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (my alma mater), where all students spend part of the years working at co-op jobs.

As the new spring quarter begins there is much growing to be done both on the Antioch Farm and in the classroom. Looking back on my Antioch Farm co-op, last spring, I realize how much I have grown as a person and as a student interested in herbal medicine for one’s well-being.

While working on the farm, I learned about the basic methods of organic farming and sustainable agriculture. After three months, I was given the opportunity, much to my delight, to be the community herb dryer on campus. My job is to harvest and dry herbs that are grown on the farm and deliver them to the dining halls where students can have access to locally grown, organic herbal tea.

During my most recent co-op last winter with a local herbalist, I was able to study the medicinal properties of herbs and learn about the various methods of preparing herbal remedies. I also learned about herbal remedies during my Global Seminar in Health class where my final project focused on making herbal medicine.

The medicinal and culinary herbs grown on the Antioch Farm include spearmint, peppermint, catnip, dandelion, echinacea, valerian, stinging nettle, yarrow, thyme, oregano, raspberry leaf, comfrey, and wormwood. Most of these medicinal herbs are useful for aiding the nervous, digestive or immune systems of the body.

Many herbs have medicinal value

Here is a list of some selected herbs and their medicinal properties:

  • Spearmint and peppermint are digestive aids and help relieve stress.
  • Dandelion helps eliminate toxins from the body.
  • Stinging nettle relieves allergies and builds healthy blood due to its high iron content.
  • Catnip helps to relieve pain and stress and acts as a mild sedative.
  • Echinacea helps to build a healthy immune system.

  • Comfrey and wormwood are especially useful for animals so it is helpful to have them growing on the farm if the sheep encounter ailments.

As a student and lover of nature, I am especially interested in herbal medicine because it benefits both the body and Earth. Using herbal remedies, such as teas, tinctures, infusions, and topical herbal treatments, is a great way to help heal your body and avoid the harsh chemicals found in many commercial products. And as long as we make sure to replenish what we take from Earth, a mutual respect and balance is maintained.

With spring continuing to flourish on the Antioch Farm, I look forward to a new quarter of growing as a student, and assisting the Antioch community with its herbal healing needs.

Editor’s note: This recipe came from National Public Radio, which posted it as part of a story about the soaring cost of pine nuts, which are the nuts traditionally used in pesto. I’ve tried this recipe, and it was delicious. The basil flavor is so strong that it was hard to tell the difference between this and tradition pine nut pesto.

 

Fair Food Network: Building a healthier food system (and strawberry rhubarb pie, too)

June 8, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Oran Hesterman is my new hero.

Hesterman, president and CEO of Fair Food Network wants to fix our broken food system, and his organization is achieving remarkable success.

A national nonprofit based in Ann Arbor, Mich., the Fair Food Network recently received a grant of more than $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The money will be matched with private funds to provide $10.4 million to expand the Fair Food Network’s signature program, Double-Up Food Bucks. More about that in a minute.

Hesterman, 63, had an organic sprout farm in his younger days, then got a doctorate in soil agronomy, taught at Michigan State University and worked on food policy issues at the Kellogg Foundation before starting the Fair Food Network in 2009.

A broken system

In his book, Fair Food (Public Affairs, 2011), Hesterman notes that our food system developed to provide the country with abundant food at low cost. That’s undeniably good. But along the way, the system developed some unintended consequences, which are just as undeniably not good. These include:

  • Declining food quality: who can deny that a garden-grown tomato beats one you buy in the supermarket?
  • Compromised food safety: How often do we hear about food recalls on the nightly news?
  • Animal welfare concerns: Factory-farmed chickens spend their whole lives in crates where they don’t have room to take a step or flap their wings.
  • Water pollution: Chemicals from synthetic fertilizers and herbicides are turning up in the water supply.
  • Loss of farmland: Estimates are that the U.S. is losing almost 3,000 acres a day of productive land.
  • Diet-related illness: Heavily processed foods lead to increases in obesity, diabetes, food allergies and other problems.
  • Worker exploitation: Many large farms and processing plants rely on migrant workers, who earn very little, are given substandard housing and often are exposed to toxic pesticides and insecticides.

Most of the readers of Read the Spirit are probably fortunate enough to have the means to overcome many of these problems. We live in houses with spacious yards where we can grow vegetables or participate in a community garden or CSA (community-supported agriculture). We have well-stocked supermarkets in our communities, and we can choose to shop Whole Foods or farmers’ markets and to buy organic produce and cage-free eggs. For us, it may seem that the food system is functioning just fine.

Low-income city residents, however, face enormous challenges in overcoming the broken food system. Even if they could afford to eat healthier, they often don’t have access to healthy foods. There are few, if any supermarkets near them, and many rely on corner convenience stores for most of their food.

Double-Up Food Bucks: a win-win-win

These are the people Hesterman set out to help with Double-Up Food Bucks.

The program enables families on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), generally known as “food stamps,” to double their purchasing power for fresh produce.

The program started at a handful of farmers’ markets in the Detroit area in the fall of 2009 and has spread to 150 markets across the state. Hesterman recently piloted it in four southeast Michigan grocery stores and hopes to get it into more stores soon.

Here’s how it works:

At the market, SNAP card holders can redeem up to $20 from their SNAP cards for gold tokens to spend on produce. When they do, they get an equal amount in silver tokens, which can be exchanged for Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables.

Hesterman says the program is a win-win-win.

“The low-income families bring home healthier food. They put more dollars into the pockets of farmers, especially local farmers. And they keep those dollars in the community,” he said.

In less than six years the program has helped more than 300,000 low-income families and more than 1,000 Michigan farmers.

Fair Food Network has or is developing programs in New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah. Including two employees hired recently, the organization has a staff of 15. “We’re small but mighty,” said Hesterman.

This is important stuff. Read Hesterman’s book, which also offers suggestions about steps you can take personally to help fix the system (buy local!) and ways you can help change our food institutions and shift public policy in the right direction.

If you don’t have the time to get deeply involved, you can send the Fair Food Network a donation – their address is 205 E. Washington St., Suite B, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 – and know that you’ve supported something really worthwhile.

Here’s a recipe for a strawberry rhubarb pie that makes good use of fresh produce. Both fruits are plentiful right now. The recipe comes from Linda Hundt’s wonderful Sweetie-licious Pies.

 

A global quest for the culture of—turnips

June 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment

When it was her turn to host our regular canasta game, my friend Jan served a wonderful turnip and leek soup, the recipe for which I offer you this week.

There was something about being served turnips, in any form, that struck me as odd.

I love vegetables, but I have never cooked with turnips. I’ve hardly ever eaten a turnip, except when we visited a family in Scotland and were served a plate of “neeps and tatties”–turnips and potatoes mashed together.

It occurred to me that turnip is simply not a Jewish thing. My grandmothers didn’t cook with them. My friends–with notable adventurous exceptions like Jan–don’t serve them. I can’t recall being served turnips by a kosher caterer, even though kosher foodies have become much more adventurous in the past 10 years or so.

I went to my bookshelf, where I have eight specifically Jewish cookbooks, and looked for “turnip” in the indexes. One suggested adding a turnip to the broth when cooking chicken soup. That was it!

The only other mention of turnip in the Jewish books was a recipe for pickled turnip in a book of Syrian Jewish recipes called A Fistful of Lentils. Pickled turnips are ubiquitous in Middle Eastern cooking; you often see a piece of one, usually neon pink due to the beet juice it’s pickled in, used as a garnish in Middle Eastern restaurants. To me that hardly counts as an useful recipe. My daughter, who has some trendy, newer Jewish cookbooks, found all of one recipe, for turnip salad with sour cream – which doesn’t sound at all appealing to me.

So I thought I’d look up more information about these common but strange-to-me veggies.

Turnip? Rutabaga? Swede?

Alas I didn’t get any satisfactory answers as to why turnips are not a Jewish thing. They were known in the ancient Middle East, and they grow well in northern climes, where most of what we think of as “Jewish food” developed. They’re easy to grow and inexpensive, considered a staple, not a gourmet treat.

Wikipedia says there is evidence that the turnip was domesticated before the 15th century BCE, and was grown in India at this time for its oil-bearing seeds. It was well known in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Turnips are often confused with, and can usually be interchanged with, rutabagas, which are larger and have yellower flesh. Trust the British to confuse things. In the south of England, the larger, yellow vegetables are called swedes, possibly because they developed in Scandinavia as a cross between turnip and cabbage. But in Scotland, Ireland and northern England (and parts of Canada), the white root veggies are called swedes and the yellow ones are called turnips.

In Britain and Ireland, where pumpkins were unknown until a few hundred years ago, jack o’lanterns were made from turnips; at Halloween, the large turnips (what we in the U.S. would call rutabagas) would be hollowed out and carved with a face, then carried around with a candle inside. Fans of the wonderful PBS series Call the Midwife saw this on an episode a few weeks ago.

The greens are good too!

In the United States, turnips are harvested in the fall and can be stored over the winter. Turnip greens are harvested and eaten year round, often cooked with a ham hock or piece of fat pork meat; the juice produced in the stewing process is known as pot liquor.

Here are some other uses of turnip in various food cultures:

In Turkey, turnips are used to flavor şalgam, a juice made from purple carrots and spices served ice cold.

In Japan, pickled turnips are sometimes stir fried with salt or soy sauce. Turnip greens are included in the ritual of the Festival of Seven Herbs.

In the Tyrolean Alps of Austria, raw shredded turnip is served in a chilled remoulade as a winter salad.

Turnips are used in variety of dishes in the Punjab and Kashmir regions of India and Pakistan.

In Iran, boiled turnip-roots with salt are a common household remedy for cough and cold.

The turnip may be the only vegetable with its own historic marker. The plaque, on Main Road in Westport, Mass., celebrates the return of farmers Aiden and Elihu Macomber from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition with seeds from a turnip exhibited there. The seeds did well, and “Macomber Turnips” are still grown in New England.

Aunt Frances on marketing and braised red cabbage

May 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment

From the editor: Today’s guest blog is by Nancy Schwartz, a marketing pro who works with contagious passion and refreshing practicality to help nonprofit organizations connect with their people – donors, volunteers, and other key supporters – and inspire them to action. A renowned coach, speaker and consultant, Nancy also publishes the popular blog, Getting Attention.org. I relied on her expert advice many times when I was a nonprofit communicator and I continue to read her terrific blog.

I grew close to my wondrous Great Aunt Frances over the years I lived a few blocks from her in NYC.

Aunt Frances was a warm, loving, down-to-earth lady who’d had many life adventures and was a fantastic cook.

Her stories of life as a girl in the Bronx—where her mother stored the live fish, bought to make gefilte fish each Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath), in the bathtub overnight—were memorable. So were those she shared from her life as a young teen,, briefly-working young woman, and long-term mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. On top of that, she forced her delectable homemade cookies on me on every visit, as only a Jewish grandmother can. Who could resist?

Aunt Frances passed away at the age of 107½, and I’ll miss her greatly. But she’s left me – and so many others – with so much.

Relationships are the key

Here are three relationship-building skills I learned from Aunt Frances. You can use these to strengthen your congregation, non-profit organization or business.

1) As different as we are from one another, we also share a lot in common. Marketing success is about strong relationships, which grow from finding that commonality and nourishing it.

Aunt Frances had incredible people skills, which nurtured her huge network of friends and family. When I broke up with my long-time, live-in boyfriend years ago, she empathized as I expected. Then she launched into the story of her older sister Jean’s breakup experience, which motivated Jean to hitchhike cross-country (in the 1920s!) and, subsequently, to a career in hat design and a satisfying marriage!

She didn’t tell me there would be an upside to what felt like a disaster at the moment (I couldn’t have heard it right then) but she “got” what I was feeling, showed me the upside through this fantastic family story.

You share much with the other people in your organization. And you can, by bringing your full self (i.e. your humanity) to your organization, find that point of connection and nourish it. It’s the best way to grow a tight relationship with the people whose help you need to move your organization’s mission forward.

Keep it real

2) Stay real to keep connecting. Fake is always discovered, erodes trust and makes people flee…for good.

Aunt Frances turned down the typical old-lady role of super sweet, which would have sent me right out the door. Instead, she stayed who she was, authentic.

That meant, for example, that we had a special deal that we could complain to each other about things we felt shy complaining about to others. And that when one of us shared a personal challenge, the other frequently had one to share as well, so we felt like equals. And felt great trust.

Organizations, like individuals, have good and bad moments. Sharing those tough moments is a point of connection. If you make a mistake or error, share it (or some of it) rather than trying to hide it. Transparency builds trust. On the other hand, hiding or faking it never works, and when the truth surfaces, your supporters’ trust will be much weakened. Stay real!

It’s better to give…

3) Giving, rather than taking, is what relationship building is all about. Make sure your people (supporters, colleagues, family and friends) feel like they’re the ones getting the most from your relationship.

When I spoke with Aunt Frances to wish her a happy 107th birthday, I told her how much our friendship and love has always meant to me, and thanked her for being such a wonderful light in my life – steady, bright and warm. Then she, amazed at my statement, told me how how silly I was, how she had always marveled at my loyalty and persistent friendship despite the difference in our ages, and thanked me.

We both felt we got the best deal from the relationship, that we got far more than we gave.

Later that day, as I was polishing an annual fund campaign for a client, I realized that’s exactly the feeling you want to inspire in your supporters – that they get a lot from supporting you, whether it be with time, effort and/or money. Like the satisfaction I feel after doing my monthly stint at the local food pantry, or my husband, Sean, and daughter, Charlotte, feel after their weekly shift at the youth garden, where they grow and harvest vegetables for another food bank. Sean loves my garden at home, as an observer. But the youth garden experience has spurred his interest in hands-on gardening and kick-started his skills. He can’t wait to go every week! That’s exactly the response you want to create for your supporters.

Giving, rather than taking, is what relationship building is all about. The more you give your people (in experience, satisfaction, appreciation, skills or otherwise), the more likely they are to feel like they’re getting the great deal and will be back for more.

Take it from Aunt Frances! I’ll never forget her.

Celebrate Shavuot with a vegetable and goat cheese tart

May 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Next Sunday and Monday will be the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a term not heard much outside the Jewish community. In English you may see reference to the Feast of Weeks, because it takes place 49 days (a week of weeks) after Passover. It roughly coincides with the Christian observance of Pentecost, the 50th day after Easter, which usually occurs around the same time as Passover.

Shavuot is supremely important: It celebrates the giving of the Law (Torah)–the first five books of the Bible–to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. Yet it’s probably the least observed of all the Jewish holy days.

My theory is that this is because there are no fun home-based holiday customs for Shavuot. No decorating and eating in a little hut, like for Sukkot; no candles and gifts, like for Chanukah; no costumes and noisemakers like for Purim; no big family seder like for Passover.

A cerebral celebration

The customs we do have are rather cerebral. We read the Book of Ruth from the Bible because the story it tells takes place at this time of year – and also possibly because Ruth, probably the best known Jewish convert of all time, accepted the authority of the Torah as her own when she told her mother-in-law, “Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.”

We also spend the first evening of the holiday (before the first day) studying the Torah, sometimes all night. My synagogue has hour-long study sessions, led by clergy and lay members, starting at around 7 p.m. and continuing – with numerous breaks for food, of course – until 5 a.m., when the few hardy souls still remaining hold an early morning service and then go home to sleep it off.

This is well and good, but it’s not something for children to get excited about or a reason to plan a cross-country trip to be with family.

By far the single most observed Shavuot custom, at least among Jews descended from the communities of eastern and central Europe, is eating dairy foods. Why? No one knows!

Some say the custom comes from the Bible, because dairy foods symbolize the “land flowing with milk and honey” that the Israelites were promised.

Dairy is easier when you can’t cook

Some say it’s because the Israelites received the Torah on the Sabbath; once they knew the Law, they were no longer permitted to cook on the Sabbath. They couldn’t slaughter and roast an animal, but they had to eat. The solution? Dairy!

There’s also a mystical reason using gematria, a technique that combines the numerical and literal meanings of Hebrew characters. The Hebrew word for milk is chalav. Add up the numerical value of chet, lamed and mem, the three Hebrew letters that spell the word, and you get 40 – the number of days Moses was on the mountain receiving the Torah!

And we’re told the Torah has 70 facets. Add up the numeric value of the letters that spell the Hebrew word for cheese – g’vina – and you get – ta daaah! – 70.

Another sage discovered that the initials of the four Hebrew words in Numbers 28:26 that describe the meal offering for Shavuot spell mei chalav, from milk.

Of course everyone familiar with gematria and similar tricks knows one can “prove” just about anything this way. But it’s always fun.

For us, Shavuot is a good time to get together with friends for a potluck lunch. The weather is usually nice, and we have lots of fruits and veggies to cook with in addition to cheese and milk.

Here’s a recipe for a rustic vegetable tart with goat cheese that works well as a main dish or as an appetizer. It’s good hot or at room temperature so it makes a great potluck dish.

A new look at classics, including striped bass with curry

May 11, 2015 by Leave a Comment

I’m always tickled when someone I knew “when” makes good.

These days, the famous people I knew when they were nobodies are not so much my own former neighbors or high school and college friends but young adults my kids knew growing up–like Max and Eli Sussman who went to school and summer camp with them.

Now the Sussmans are celebrity chefs with a great PR agent. Seems like every week their proud parents, lawyer Marc Sussman and artist Lynne Avadenka, are posting yet another article or blog about the boys (which is how I’ll always think of them even though they are now 32 and 30).

They’ve just published a new cookbook–their fourth–called Classic Recipes for Modern People. They describe it as “a collection of culinary favorites reimagined.”

I caught up with the Sussman brothers a few weeks ago when they were home for Passover from New York, where they live and work.

Both recently left chef jobs at trendy New York restaurants to open their own eatery later this year. The Mediterranean-style restaurant will feature homemade pita, non-traditional dips such as beet hummus and lentil pistachio dip, anchovy fattoush salad and other dishes still in the development stage.

Though they didn’t grow up dreaming of restaurant careers, the brothers have been interested in cooking since they were kids.

Talented kids

Their parents discovered their talent during a family vacation in Cape Cod when the brothers were 12 and 10. “They were not being cooperative, whining about food and about what was for dinner,” said Marc, “and Lynne just said, ‘We’re leaving!’”

The parents went out for several hours. When they returned, they found a gourmet fish dinner awaiting them.

Eli was the front-of-the-house man, greeting his parents with a napkin over his arm, handing them a hand-written menu and escorting them to their table. Max supervised the food prep. To this day, Eli wonders how he knew what to do.

Their first experience cooking together professionally was at Camp Tavor in Three Rivers, Michigan, where they were campers for many summers.

Max, then 21, was working on an American studies degree at University of Michigan and Eli,19, was studying international relations at Michigan State University. They were supposed to be counselors at Tavor that year but the cook threw his back out and they took over the kitchen.

Discovering haute cuisine

Through college, both brothers worked at restaurants. When Max took a job at Eve in Ann Arbor, his first experience with haute cuisine, he realized cooking could be a career and not just a hobby.

Max returned to Eve (which is, sadly, now closed) after he graduated, working his way up from line cook to chef de cuisine before moving to New York.

After a stint at The Breslin, he went to Roberta’s, helping it grow from a grungy neighborhood pizzeria to an innovative new-cuisine hot spot. The New York Times awarded Roberta’s two stars, and Max was nominated for a James Beard Award, won a Zagat NYC award and was named one of Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30.” Most recently he was executive chef at The Cleveland for a year.

Eli moved to Los Angeles after college and worked in advertising, but after five years he decided to return to cooking, At Max’s suggestion he moved to New York and got a job as prep cook at Mile End Deli. Within a few years he was executive chef, running two restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Eli was a James Beard Awards semifinalist for Rising Star Chef of the Year and was one of Zagat New York’s “30 under 30.”

The Sussmans’ first cookbook, Freshman in the Kitchen, was published in 2008 while they were still in college.

“The point was to talk to an audience who had even less experience than us. They wanted to cook but didn’t know anything about it,” said Max.

That was followed in 2012 and 2013 with This is a Cookbook: Recipes for Real Life, aimed at young adults looking to up their cooking game, and Best Cookbook Ever, a collection of new recipes suitable for dinner parties, potlucks and cooking to impress a date or a spouse.

All kinds of classics

The new book features classic dishes that the brothers have, in their own words, reinvented, rejiggered, reordered and recreated. It includes childhood classics, “TV dinner classics” such as new takes on potpies and meatloaf, French cuisine classics, and more.

The brothers want their recipes to be fantastic but say they don’t aim for perfection. “I don’t want to think anything is perfect,” said Max. “There’s always a way to improve a dish.”

Max says he hopes this recipe for striped bass with red curry, from the “Worldwide Classics” section of the book, will act as an intro to cooking Thai food at home.

 

 

My mom’s dynamite spaghetti sauce

May 3, 2015 by 2 Comments

MY MOM,  who died in 1984, wasn’t  much of a cook, so don’t look for this to be a nostalgic column about my mother’s wonderful homemade dishes.

I blame some of this on the fact that her own mother died when she was 6 and she didn’t have a mom role model growing up. But her father remarried when she was 12, to a nice woman with whom she got along well and called “Mama.” My grandma was a great cook, and 12 is prime time for girls to start taking an interest in cooking. So I can only conclude that my mom just wasn’t that interested.

I learned character, not cooking

While I didn’t learn lots of cooking tips and recipes at my mother’s knee, I did gain a lot of important character traits from her. Among those are:

Inclusiveness – My mom never disparaged people who were “different” from her, and made sure her children behaved the same way. She would not countenance racial or ethnic slurs, which were very common in the 1950s and 1960s, even among educated people. Although we lived in an all-white neighborhood – the integrated neighborhoods my parents would have preferred were beyond their budget – she made sure we attended multi-ethnic summer camps.

Progressiveness – My parents were staunch liberals and imparted the same values to my siblings and me. Mom was proud that she voted for Henry Wallace, the hopeless Progressive Party candidate, in the 1948 presidential election.

She was morally offended when government failed to help the most downtrodden segments of society or supported any form of censorship; the McCarthy era must have been very difficult for her. She was a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

She never crossed a picket line – except in 1972, when there was a long teacher’s strike in Philadelphia. She had qualified as a teacher late in life, after her children left home, and she felt the children had a stronger case than the teachers so she returned to substitute teaching before the strike was settled. (After that, she didn’t get many calls to sub.)

Curiosity – Mom was super-intelligent. She skipped at least one grade in elementary school and graduated from high school at 16. She liked to learn about lots of different things. She was always reading – not books so much as newspapers and magazines, including Life and Time and the Reader’s Digest. She wouldn’t just breeze through an issue, she’d read it cover-to-cover, absorbing every article. She imparted the same love of reading and curiosity about the world to me and my siblings.

Thrift – Born in 1921 in Poland and brought to Brooklyn at the age of two months, my mother was poor even before the Depression hit. She grew up learning how to make a little go a long way, and her children learned to be frugal as well.

Long before paper towel manufacturers created half-sized sheets, she’d slice a roll in half down to the cardboard tube so that we would use less. She taught us to save gift wrap and ribbons to reuse – but she’s the only person I know who washed and reused plastic wrap, something at which I draw the line. She clipped coupons religiously, something I do as well, though these days there are rarely any worth clipping.

Mom was one of the first people in Philadelphia to buy those coupon books (ours was called the Metro Passbook, similar to the Entertainment book), and we rarely went to a restaurant for which she didn’t have a coupon. She would have loved Groupon!

Forthrightness – My mom had strong opinions and never hesitated to let anyone know what they were. My friends and family say I am the same. In my earlier years I was often far too outspoken for my own good. I like to think I’ve learned some discretion and tact since then.

Keen hearing – My mom could be in another room, hear something someone would mutter under their breath and pipe up with a response. My husband tells me I’m just as bad.

How to fold pillowcases  – There’s only one correct way to fold pillowcases, and that’s to fold the short edge in half, then fold it lengthwise in half, and then again in threes. That’s it, end of discussion.

Even if Mom wasn’t a great cook, she fed her family well. We always had meat or chicken (or, rarely, fish), potatoes (or pasta or rice) and a vegetable (canned or frozen, never fresh) at every meal. We drank three glasses of milk every day, just like all the child-rearing experts said we should.

A dynamite spaghetti sauce

The best thing Mom cooked was meat sauce for spaghetti. This was back in the day when you couldn’t get decent sauce in a jar. All of us kids loved it. She always made enough for two meals.

I tinkered with the recipe a bit, substituting fresh garlic for the garlic powder Mom always used and diced tomatoes for tomato puree, which is hard to find these days. And olive oil wasn’t trendy; she used plain old vegetable oil. Times have changed, but this meat sauce is still better than anything you can get from Prego or Ragu.