Peas = Peace?

As mentioned in the previous entry, I'm a total foodie. I love cooking for friends and family but it's a relatively new hobby. I've 'cooked' since I was a student but have only started honing my skills in the last few years or so. Student food was relatively simple - toad in the hole, pasta bakes and the ingenious one tray roasts which, I'll be honest, could probably have scraped a C+ in home economics, but not much else. I didn't realise garlic, salt and pepper could change a chicken so much until Nigella draped herself across my television screen. Nowadays I'm pretty confident in the kitchen and can hold my own in a tarragon vs oregano conversation but I will happily profess that I've still got a long way to go before I can call myself a master-chef.

My love of food comes from my entire family. My dad has been known to hotfoot it down to Chinatown in the middle of the night in his younger days to slurp up a bowl of noodles and my mother looks like she's won the lottery several times over every time she cracks a new recipe. My brother just has fun eating the products of everyone's labour... However, the primary reason I love food (I think) is because I find food = peace. And here, dear ones, is why.

I have grown up in a noisy, emotionally charged family who all lack a sense of tact and see no reason to hold back criticism even though taking it themselves is impossible so you may be forgiven for thinking that I mean peace as silence. In some ways I do but silence is normally the added bonus. The peace I mean is a truce.

Throughout my youth I was involved in countless shouting matches with both my parents and even now, they pull the, 'I'm-not-having-a-go-at-you-because-I-enjoy-it' card, adding a pinch of, 'I-know-I-said-I-wouldn't-mention-it-again-but-I've-got-to-say-something...' along the way but everything always seemed to come together peacefully at the dinner table as if someone had stationed a white flag above the centrepiece of steaming dishes. Dad would spoon things on to my plate - normally things with a lot of sauce that I would otherwise decorate the table mats pebble-dash style with and Mum would push the near empty bowl of broth towards me at the end of the meal telling me to drink it. Ed would eye the last piece of meat sat in the centre of its serving dish and put on a show of humble gratefulness when we all said he could and should finish it. Criticism would be forgotten and instead reassurances that the toyu pork had enough chilli in or that the stuffed tofu was tasty would take precedance.

Even when my parents had one of their huge arguements resulting in radio silence on both sides of for weeks, if we kids were at home, dinner was always served around the table. A swift jerk of the head from Mum towards the lounge where Dad can normally be found, lost in a programme about extreme fishing or silently committing how to build a set of collapsible, rotating shelves out of old floorboards, cotton wool and belly button fluff to memory, is the signal for one of us to alert him to the fact that dinner was ready and he should come and play happy families. It wasn't the most natural of circumstances but everyone always seemed to be quiet, and more importantly, happier when we were all eating together.

I cook now for Si, but I cook to show him I love him and want to take care of him and eventually, our family. I often grumble because he doesn't eat fish and he tells me to cook it for myself and he'll have something else but it's not something I'm happy doing. I don't want to be one of those families with three different meals on the go because it's disjointed and doesn't signify togetherness. I hope that I can distance myself from my family's method of using food as some form of truce and place more emphasis on the connection to love and happiness. So I hope that with further blog entries that I will share particular recipes or meals that conjour fantastic memories of love and laughter not just for me, but for anyone who reads this.

And for one girl, peas definitely don't equal peace. I can't stand the bloody things.