Personal food heritage?

 Because I needed something mindless to watch, a few episodes of Top Chef found their way to my TV. There's something soothing about watching strangers prepare odd food, sometimes succeeding and often failing miserably.  Truly mindless.

In one episode the bossy hosts demanded that the contestants cook something from their "personal food heritage." This might be easy if you were raised in a house that had a heritage, like Italian or Southern or African or Russian. Even if you barely had such a heritage, one could probably come up with a reasonable facsimile, like a modern-day borscht or some fancy and weird take on Mississippi fried chicken. 

But this assignment made me wonder what I would cook if I had to come up with something from my "heritage."  There wasn't any heritage when I was a kid. There was barely anything resembling any sort of cuisine, let alone something that spoke of my parents' roots. Tuna-noodle casserole or hot-dog-canned-bean casserole don't really call to mind  recipes handed down generation to generation. Gray ground beef fried up and thickened with flour and water served over boiled russet potatoes isn't in any version of "Joy of Cooking."  So what would I prepare in this situation?

Honestly, I couldn't think of anything. My Mom was a pretty bad cook, but she did make good fried chicken, but it wasn't part of our heritage, it was just something she made that tasted good. She made good pies, but again, that's not a "family recipe" sort of thing. No one waxed poetic while eating a slice of apple pie.  We just ate it and were happy to have pie for dessert. My Dad grew up on a farm, a real honest-to-dirt farm, so his cooking skills stopped at eggs fried in bacon grease. 

This made me wonder what my kids would pick as a "family heritage recipe."  They had an Italian grandmother, so that would help guide the needle to an ethnic food choice. My cooking was good but it wasn't ethnic at all.  There are a few things I made when they were growing up that they actually liked, but to riff on flambeed chicken with almonds seems sad and definitely not Top Chef fare. 

In the end, the contestants all made something that had meaning to them, like deconstructed spaghetti and meatballs or a hearty soup with cabbage and cod. My dish would have to be a remake of a Swanson's frozen pot pie, one of the only things I remember getting excited about as a kid. We only got to have them a couple of times a year, when our parents went out to dinner by themselves and left us home alone. They were terrible, of course, but the idea of frozen food was so luxurious that we were all overjoyed at the prospect of eating what everyone else in America was eating on a Saturday night.  Swanson's pot pies and Swanson's TV dinners, with the four little compartments of food: main course, veggie, mashed potatoes and a teeny nub of dessert: now that was incredibly fine dining!  

Reading a great book.....

 ... and I know it's been a while but since only three people read this, just accept my absence as part of real life.

"Fire Weather" by John Vaillant. I cannot impart how amazing and suspenseful and frightening this book is.  (Bad grammar there.) All of us who live in California, especially NorCal, know the terror of fire season.  Almost everyone I know as a friend has had to evacuate more than once in the past seven years and some of us have seen the fires from a block away from where we live.  I personally know five people who lost their homes in the Tubbs fire of 2017 and I am acquainted with many more who lost homes in the fires of 2018 - 2020.  Just go to the Cal Fire website and look at "incidents" for those years and the statistics are staggering.

The book "Fire Weather" is a comprehensive look at the fire in Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016, before our onslaught of local fires began in 2017.  The first 50 pages or so document the creation of Fort McMurray as a mining town and the chemicals and products mined there. But once the author begins to document the fire there in May 2016, the book takes off like a blast furnace. 

I sometimes get bored with non-fiction because of the incredible amount of details that don't resonate with me. But not here. Reading this had my heart pounding because it's an hour by hour look at this fire that began small (as most fires do) and within a couple of hours turned historically extraordinary. The descriptions of the fire's ferociousness and the immediacy of its horrible path of destruction are written so clearly that you feel like you are there. This is the best documentation of fire that I have read.

You know a book is getting to you when you take to your computer to find out more and get led down a rabbit hole about the subject you are chasing. Today was a stormy day, no need to go outside, so finding those videos about fires in the last seven or eight years, reading the transcripts of firefighters who experienced fire storms so bizarre and unprecedented, seeing footage from people trying to escape with fire all around them, listening to the trauma, five years later, of families who were convinced they would die in their cars as they tried to flee......it was all incredibly intense and frightening.

There is no way I could read this book if it wasn't a stormy, rainy day. In fire season this book would be the monster under the bed, coming out to burn everything to the ground. Vaillant's vivid written pictures of neighborhoods being consumed by fire, houses gone in less than 3 minutes from roof to basement, the often heroic but useless actions of firemen trying to save their own homes, their own neighborhoods, their own city, all of it is gripping, terrifying and profoundly tearful and moving.

Put this on your library list, or buy it if you are lucky to be a book buyer. Read it, pass it on, think about it. It is powerfully written and it is important in the study of climate change and our increasingly heated planet.  It should make you think about the precariousness of life, about personal safety and the power of weather and what we are doing about the new century of fire.