|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
April 6, 1998 Susan B. Markisz "I am not Julia Child" The other day I got religion. Not the traditional "I believe in God" type. The kind you have to own up to when your kids get ahold of some family truth that exposes you to the reality of life as you know it. I haven't achieved a perfect balance of my two careers: motherhood and photojournalism. These days, we eat more than our share of takeout and our refrigerator is full of homemade chicken soup and spaghetti sauce... courtesy of my mother-in-law, who thinks I am a candidate for sainthood (well, not really!), except when it comes to cooking for her son and grandchildren. She's right about that, of course. A few years ago, when it occurred to me one day that I was "in" for 3 meals a day times 365 meals a year for the rest of my life, it suddenly felt like prison sentence. I stopped cooking. B.C. (before children, that is), every Wednesday, I collected and experimented with Pierre Franey's "60 Minute Gourmet" recipes from the New York Times Wednesday Living Section. I didn't have to buy his book because I had all his columns. As they began to yellow and disintegrate from age and use, copyright infringement notwithstanding, I xeroxed them and put them in a binder. My envious supply of cookbooks ranging from Maida Heatter's chocolate goodies to Bombauers' The Joy of Cooking, Zeranska's "The Art of Polish Cooking" and my all-time favorite "The Well Fed Bridegroom" by Margaret Williams, once bibles of basic culinary education, at least in my kitchen, lay dormant on the shelves. I gave up ethnic meals like Ukranian Chicken, Roladen and Pierogies for such things as salad pizza and moo shoo pork from our local takeout. Ah, but I digress. The other day, I was working at home, while doing some dishes (one of the advantages of a home office); you can be achieve domestic perfection and do business at the same time. Sort of. Ok, the dishes...up to my elbows in water, I heard the phone ring and went into the office (which doubles as my bedroom) to answer it, leaving the water running for what I thought would be a moment. Twenty minutes later, when my daughter walked in the door from school, I heard sudden screams of "Mom, quick, water everywhere..." And there was. ...Water cascading over the sink, into the cabinets underneath the sink, into adjacent cabinets, onto the floor, just barely escaping a "coastal flood warning." Beach towels come in handy on these occasions. For the next two hours, we mopped, emptied all of the kitchen cabinets. While I washed, my daughter dried pots and pans that had become dusty with disuse. "Oooh," she said, when she saw the shiny copper bottoms of my 22 year old wedding gifts. "Oh, mom, I've never seen this one," she said. I wondered what kind of message I'd sent to my thirteen year old daughter when she said, referring to my abundant collection of cookware: "Hey mom, you know what we ought to do with these? We ought to give them to someone who could use them." Hey, I never claimed I was Julia Child. But I am getting a hearing aid. Now, what's for dinner? Susan B. Markisz April 6, 1998
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Susan
Markisz
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Contributor
since 1998
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Behind
the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism |
